Mike Minutes Mastermind 06/21/2024

We're live. Sorry, I sent the message, text message out and then had to work on something like 20 minutes. So you probably got a message saying that we were live like 25 minutes ago. So sorry about that. Let's go ahead and jump in. The reason I was delayed there is I'll actually show you we are making great progress on the.

Lights page, augustalights.com I'm going to show you this. Just know that we are not done yet. We have several changes we still have to make.

I just want to show the progress that we're making and we are still shooting for next week to actually start adding the abilities for you to be able to add this website to your location. So we're still on track for next week but there are several changes still that need to be done. So let me just show you though kind of over. Please keep in mind we have a bunch of changes. We're still getting done on the form on.

Several aspects of the site still. But let me just show you kind of what we're working with. This part specifically the form. We got a lot of changes we got to make.

So this is kind of the look of it. We got the step one, step two, we're moving this part up a little bit. Step three, step four and step five.

So as we get more of our our crew actually up on Christmas lights, hanging them up etc. Which we are working on getting those set up for the media team. We will make these.

Pictures much more about Augusta people and our our actual uniforms, etc. But until then it's working pretty good. But we have lots of changes still to be made on this but certainly exciting. So it should be by next week like I said, when we will be able to have it on the dashboard for you to be able to add.

To your site. All right, cool. Present share screen.

Jump right into questions.

Yes. Like on that form for example, there'll be the option to have like price ranges to Pre qualify people, etc. Some other stuff. All right, we got three questions today. Devin from Red Deer, Alberta. Hey Mike, how much percentage of your locations do revenue outside mowing? I make way more money faster by applications. I notice. What about you? Yeah, so that's the beautiful thing about projects typically going to be able to get your money back really fast. So for example like the other day I was talking with Nick, we had raised price at the Bellingham shop. So he's like how much do we want to spend on marketing to be able to like fill the schedule? I'm like, well first off, we're making an extra 12, $15,000 a month in profit because of the price increases. Let's go ahead and spend 2 or 3,000 of that on marketing and fill a schedule with now very profitable work.

And so, secondly is this time of year projects, you can knock them out a lot. Like good weather, everything's nice and hot, there's no rain you're dealing with in most of our markets. I know that's not the case for everyone.

And so it's certainly usually the case that I say, hey, if you can get 5% of a project's revenue or less going towards marketing, good thing. So, for example, $5,000 job, I'm willing to spend 5% of that, which is like, what, $400 divided by 20, is that right? I messed this up yesterday. One second. Let me actually give you a number on a $5,000 job. Multiply that by 0.05.250. I made the same mistake yesterday. So on that one, I've been willing to spend $250 to get that, that lead and that customer. Customer acquisition cost for a $5,000 project. Now, 5% is pretty good. If you're in growth mode or if you're just trying to fill your schedule and your crews all hitting 33% labor revenue because they're all hitting above base pay, you might be willing to go up to 10% to fill the schedule with projects. The beautiful thing about projects is you do get your money back. You get to break even much faster. To break even point where you make up and recoup the cost of acquisition. Because for a mowing customer, if you get someone on for 50 bucks a week and you know you're making $10 in profit net on that, you know, it could literally take you, even if you have 60, $70 customer acquisition cost, it could take you six or seven weeks to, you know, two months billing cycle to actually recoup the cost of that customer acquisition versus the project. If you're putting jobs on next week, you could pay for the customer today, get a lead, accept the job, and by the end of next week, have recouped the money and made all the profit from that customer. That's why projects are so seductive, is because you can grow your revenue so fast.

And so the lifetime value of the customer might be the same for a mowing customer as compared to a project. It's like, but do you want to make that over the next three years mowing someone's lawn or just knock out a big project, clean up with mulch and installing rock and you get all that money in the next week, you will grow faster with the projects. And so it's not to say one's good or bad in terms of the percentage, most of my locations still have between 4 to and 60% of revenue coming from projects that are not mowing specifically because we use them so much. In terms of the winter, the off season and filling the schedules during the summer is like where they make all their money is those projects. So I'm certainly willing to spend more on a project customer in terms of acquisition because I get the money back so much faster. So it's way easier for cash flow in the short term. In the long term I need that recurring revenue like so it's like yes, I can recoup the money faster, but from a revenue perspective I want that solid cash flow year round. So from a collection standpoint though, getting your money back like money into the machine, money out of the machine is much faster cycle with projects.

Travis Cohen from Jonesboro thank you for the reframe the other day on dealing with difficult days. Just what I needed. What are your thoughts on the Remarkable? I've been eyeing them for some time and you're the only person I personally know that has one. Apple has similar apps that work with iPad and Apple Pencil. How is the Remarkable different? It's less different now. Apple has done a pretty good job of making the Apple Pencil pretty good. When I got it a couple years ago, I still didn't like writing on it. IPads. Most importantly though, the iPad does other stuff. It's crazy because the Remarkable cost you more than the iPad, but it doesn't do web browsing, it doesn't do other stuff. And so when I pick up that remarkable, I am locked in on taking notes, marking things up. You know, I'll sometimes send like a an annual report or like a PDF to there and start marking things up. It's very, very helpful for me just to stay focused versus like oh I can just go to Safari. Oh like I have a pop up. Oh I have a notification that doesn't happen on Remarkable. That's why I'd get one. But like, honestly I've been tempted very much in the past few months actually to get an iPad mostly because it's black and white screen. And so when I'm drawing up for you guys, you guys see blue and red and like different colors of my pencil or my marker but but I can't see that on my screen. It's still black and white. So there's pros and cons. But I would probably say now most people should probably just get an iPad. Like, from a value perspective, you have to pay like a two or three dollars per month subscription thing for Remarkable two, which is kind of weird. Their tips wear out. So, like, there's a lot of downsides now, but for me it's more of a concentration thing. Like, if I had an iPad that was connected to other apps, had mobile, had Internet access of any sort of.

It'd just be distracting. Like, I literally looked. Look at the remarkable. Like a wood of pen and paper.

I've heard you throw around some large numbers as far as Christmas lights for gusta long term, what gives you that confidence? Do you see it as a time of year when many of us will have our highest grossing months? October, November. I know it's early, but what are your feelings on the topic? I don't think we'll ever have our highest grossing months because as the location grows, I've just ran the numbers in terms of what size, how much revenue. Like, is a capacity limit for people doing Christmas lights based on the size of their lawn care landscaping business? Because if you're gonna do, you know, 50, $60,000 a month for those three or four months in revenue for Christmas light, you need several trucks, you need storage space. Like, you can't just, you know, run out of your garage and have 50, 60, 70 bins plus all your equipment for lawn care. And so I've kind of like based upon my numbers, where I think we'll be in terms of five years from now with locations and then the revenue, Like, I think this year the average revenue for people doing Christmas lights will probably be less than 25, 30,000. The average, yes. There'll be people that do almost 100,000, but I'm just saying, like, the average will probably be very low. I've just looked at like the revenues as we've added locations and as we have everyone intrinsically grows. Like, for example, this year you might do 20,000 in total value in revenue from your Christmas lights. And most that you won't make any money on because you're paying for labor and all the lights. Guess what? Next year you have the lights already. So now you might do 40 or 50,000, but you'll be like more than 50% profitable on it. And so I really believe it's a compounding effect with Christmas lights because you pay for the. Your cogs up front and then you keep the cogs. Like the cogs of buying the Christmas lights. You get to reuse them.

And so it's kind of like a tax service. And that is all the initial work is up front. So for example, when someone gets a new client, like home service CPA with Brad, the work on the very first initial tax return is like two to three times as much as the ones after that. So it's like once you get someone, you don't want to lose them because in the future, like, there's just so much you can actually, you make all your profits in future years. And so that's why some people have even like, they'll actually discount how many, like each year that people use Christmas lights because they make so much more net profit because they already have bought the lights and they've already like created the scheme for that house. And it's just so much easier to pop those lights back on every year. And so based upon my revenue projections, I think this year, like again, 15, $20,000 will be the average. It won't be a lot. Like, that's, that's what, like 20, 25, 30 houses. It's not going to be huge, but. And this year we won't feel the impacts of the revenue bump. It'll be next year once you've paid for the lights. And now all that revenue comes in, you grow it. And you don't have to pay for the lights for the first half of the revenue because you've already bought them this year. So I think it'll actually be our third year. I think this year there'll be proof of concept. I believe based upon what I'm seeing, about 40 to 50 people will do Christmas lights. In terms of locations, I think the average maybe 15 to 20,000 up in, in revenue. Like some people only get five or 10 houses. Those dip their toe in it. Great, awesome. Next year we're going to see all those owners be very profitable during the off season because they already have purchased the lights. And that's when I think in year three, we will get people to be okay, we're going all in. We're, we're going to make sure that we can actually keep our revenue the same for those three or four months of the year. And I believe that's possible. And so that's why, like in five years, I believe we can do based on projection, about 40 to 50 million dollars in revenue based upon location count growth. All of our locations is growing like, we're growing like last, like month over month, year over year. We're all growing, just our collective locations, by more than 28% last month, it was insane. I think it was like 34%, like existing location growth. And so if I just take those numbers and it won't be 35%, you know, forever. But if all our locations are growing, we're adding more locations and we all have more capacity to be able to, to take on that work during the winter, that's where I see those numbers and that's kind of how I come to those conclusions. But I don't think it'll be super realized for the next few years because understandably, and as I've, we've, we talked about like dipping your toe in this year, not a bad idea. You're not going to see the profits of it though, because you got to buy the lights this year. But even if you can just break even on it, but increase revenue, keep your crew busy, and then next year you have the lights to be able to then put them up and it's a straight money in your pocket because you've already purchased the lights, that's what everyone's gonna get excited about. So it just. And I believe that when it comes that two, three year marker will be dialed in on the website side where like leads will just be coming like, like a fire hose. Because there's just no one else that's national. Like we. It's so open. There's, there's way more competition in lawn care and landscaping online than Christmas lights. Because so many of the Christmas lights people, they're just using web lead lead agencies. And lead agencies don't do great at SEO. They do get ads and they drive traffic and they're optimized for traffic that it's already on the page. But they're not as optimized for SEO because they're transitory sites where you pay for them, you get the leads, and then they're usually paying per lead. And that's most the time where people go. It's like people who do lead gen for Christmas lights. And so I think in two to three years, we'll dial in the site enough to where pretty much anywhere in the US And Canada we will be able to rank for Christmas lights.

All right, everyone, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your Friday, an awesome weekend, and we will stay in touch. See you guys Monday. Take care.