Mike Minutes Mastermind 06/28/22

Hello, Augusta Nation. Hope you're all doing super well. Let's go ahead and kick things off. Today's mostly going to be Q and a. There's like 10 questions that came in on the form, so I'm going to go with those. However, before we do that, quick note. And that is about skipping mo's. For many of us, we are heading into the very warm season. Grass starts to become somewhat more dormant. And it's very, in my opinion, bad to allow the employees, the frontline staff, to make a decision as to whether or not a job should be skipped. We are seeing this at Command center on several accounts. And that is the employees will just be like, doesn't need mode. And then they skip the job. Doesn't need mode, skip the job. Highly recommend you don't do that because those same customers are the ones calling, saying they came, they drove up to the property and then they left. They didn't do anything. So in my opinion, it should be a matter of if you're charging per cut, you're going to come and you're going to cut the lawn on a schedule and, and the customer can change the schedule whenever they want and that's fine, but you're not going to just skip the jobs. Highly recommend you don't allow the frontline staff do that. And you train them to. If it's on your schedule, you mow the grass. And it's just amazing because a lot of times some clients, they know that your grass isn't growing, but they want the edged and everything blown off and it looking really nice. Cause there's stripes in their lawn. That's all they want. So just keep that in mind. And it's also better for the fact that on P4P and profitability, them driving way out to a property and then just skipping it and going to another property, it just wastes time. On P4P, it's not good for their, their paycheck. And then you're just, you know, kicking your, yourself in the, in the foot too about profitability. So I highly recommend if they're on weekly, if they're on bi weekly, whatever it is, stick to that schedule unless they tell you otherwise. If they call in and they're trying to cancel, we're trying to get them to commit to a different schedule. So for example, if they're on weekly, like, hey, it's not growing very much, can I go ahead and just cancel services? And then I'll start it up, back up, start back up again when it needs it. What we're trying to do is first. The first drop sale is can I get them on bi weekly service? That's why I'm a big fan of having bi weekly services as an option in your mowing price from the get go. Even if you know they're going to choose weekly is so that if they ever try to cancel when the grass is dormant, we try to drop, sell them into bi weekly. And then secondarily, if they still don't want that, then I'm trying to get them to have a start date in the future instead of just having them indefinitely pause services or cancel until they give us a call. I'd much rather tell them, hey, why don't we go ahead and pause your services for July and August and we'll go ahead and get you started in September. Because if we come back and it's like late in September and the grass is really tall, then we have to charge you extra because it's an overgrown charge. So that's kind of how you want to do it if you're talking to a customer or something like that. But how when someone calls into command center, we're trying to drop some, drop, drop, sell them into bi weekly, say, okay, it's not growing very much. Why don't we, why don't we go ahead and put your schedule to bi weekly. That way the lawn still looks good, everything looks, is kept up, up to par. But obviously the grass isn't growing very much. Try to sell them into bi weekly. If that doesn't work, then we're trying to sell them into a specific start time like two months from now or a month from now. While we come back and get you on the schedule, we'll restart your services at this date. And then the occasional customer's gonna be like, no, I want to call you when I need it. And then we're going to make it clear that, hey, look, that's fine, but just remember that if we come back to your property and it's overgrown at all, if we might have to do a new bid, if it's, you know, two months from now that you start services up again. So that's the projection that you want to do. And I highly recommend, do not let your frontline staff make the call as to whether or not a job needs to be serviced. If a customer comes out and says, hey, I don't want service today, we usually give them one freebie or like one warning. And that is, hey, just so you know, you gotta give us 24 hour heads up. Otherwise we charge you we're gonna let today slide. We're gonna put you on bi weekly services for the summer since the grass isn't growing very much at your property. But in the future, just so you know, if you cancel like that, we do have to charge you the full price. It's not fair to the guys on P4P. It's not fair to you as the company that has already scheduled and everything and moved everything around and they just come out and tell the guys to leave. So we usually let them slide, let it slide the first time. Second, so that we can notify them. Even if you put it in the estimate fine print, people just don't read it. They don't remember, and they're just inclined to walk out and tell the guys to leave. So we usually let them have let it slide one time. We don't want to lose a customer over that at the beginning. But usually after the first time, letting them know they stopped doing that. So. All right, let's go ahead and jump into the Q and A.

Sorry, I'm a bit stuffed up because of allergies. Oh, there's 11 responses now. Okay, I have not read any of these. Let's just go ahead and work our way through them. Make sure you all can see this. Okay, let me zoom in a bit. All right, first one's from Kevin. If you were going to continually, if you were going to continually put $1,000 a month into a compound interest fund, which fund would you choose? Honestly, if I wanted to never look at it and have it have like low risk, decent reward, a little bit of dividends, I'd probably put in a vt, the Vanguard Total World Index. VTI is another one. You could put it into something like the Vanguard S&P501. But I personally do feel like the, the stock market in the US is somewhat inflated and still has room to go down. But that's just my personal opinion. I feel like a lot of.

South American stocks, et cetera, have a lot of more opportunity. So. But again, I don't want to think about that. And if you're going into a net index fund, you just want broad diversification. I would recommend VT or VTI has a really, really low expense rate because every index is going to come with some sort of expense. So if you invest with like ark, for example, which is Cathie Wood's fund for the innovation, they're literally taking, don't quote me on this, I think it's 0.75%, which is literally like five times as much as what VT takes, which is like 0.03 or something like that. So you want a really low cost index fund. Because these index funds, the reason they take that little marginal cost is they have to constantly redistribute money between companies and rebalance the portfolio of the index. So another quick tip is if you've had a bunch of losses in companies right now, you can realize those losses. So where you can take them on capital gain losses in the future in your tax returns, but then buy index funds that have the exact same companies inside of them. So I can talk more about that in the future if that's of interest to you. But if you're right now, because the market's so low, if you have losses, you can sell and then buy an index fund which is considered different. Completely different star instrument and you don't have to what's called the wash rule. So typically you gotta wait 30 days before you can rebuy a stock. Otherwise you don't get to realize the losses on the stock when you sell it at a low. So if I sell Apple today at 120. Cause I'm down on it. Well, if it goes to in three days. If it goes down to 110, I can't buy it again and then expect to claim the loss. Cause I bought at 150, goes from 150, 120. I'm like, oh, I can sell. I'll get this loss is great. Three days later I buy at 110. I do not get to claim that loss from 150 to 120. Okay. Because it's called the wash rule. So you can avoid the wash rule by buying an index fund that has the same companies in it. So recently because the stock market has come down and I started buying in kind of like January, February, March. It still has come down though. So I sold out basically everything and then bought other index funds that hold the same companies. But I'm able to take all those losses on my tax return, which is great. How much do you guys pay someone, an outside person who is not on payroll to come maintenance the equipment and trucks? Yeah, great question. If you can. This is really, really hard to find a mobile mechanic. That is really good. We found someone because it was actually my cousin who was getting started with their trucking company and he did, he does a mobile mechanic. So I would recommend like type in mobile mechanic your city name. See if someone shows up, it is worth their weight and goal. If they show up at your property versus you have to take stuff into the shop, downtime is decreased, et cetera. Just finding a good one is sometimes difficult. Someone that's reliable and you're okay with them being after hours in your property. Things like that. When a customer submits an estimate on our website, where does the lead information go? I did a test submit my submit on my website thinking I would get an email or something just asking. It goes to command center. You can change this though. If you would like the lead to come to you, you can absolutely do that just in your automations. Just email help @augusta longer services.com if you want to make changes to that. But they're automatically going to command center and from there they determine whether they set you up for an estimate or do a drive by or whatever it might be. Oh well, it was a long team. Okay, here we go. Or a long question. I have a really good team of six. Let me show you guys and see this. Okay, good. Before I start reading, I have a really good team of six in the field. Overall. We don't have any issues with no call, no shows or anything like that. I have one employee that is severely arthritic. Many days of the week he cannot start at our normal start time because he is severely inflamed. Usually after a couple hours he will come in and get some work done. There are some days he cannot work at all. This makes scheduling jobs very difficult because customers expect us on certain days and I have to shift the work for the whole team to make it work. He usually gets about 20 budget hours per week done which is quite lower than what I expect the team to get, about 30 to 32 budget hours each. This employee does great work and is reliable. He's been with me for four plus years. I don't know how to deal with this with his schedule. I thought about a modified schedule like 10am to 7pm or having him part time from 11 to 5. This impacts the team culture because I have another employee who calls in sick about once every other week. I have no problem with being sick, but it is usually one day randomly where he complains of basically being tired. I want to have a super efficient and motivated team, but I'm struggling with how to deal with these issues. Well, what would you suggest? Yeah, so the big thing here is having a double standard. That is the biggest issue you're going to have with comes to culture. If you allow one person to do it and not other people, that can get very, very slippery very, very quickly. I would recommend, like you mentioned here, creating a schedule that's going to work for him.

And if it's a matter of the mornings being really bad with his arthritis, arthritis, this might work. The 7 to 10 to 7. If he's only been working about 20 hours though, I think this probably is the better schedule. 11 to 5. And what I would recommend just doing and telling like, hey, I want to make this work and I'm willing to literally push off your work schedule like the time you start and reduce your but your hours every single week to say like 25 or 30 hours. But I have to have you show up at a scheduled time because like it's impossible to schedule with you. And just be willing to say like I'm willing to work at the start time, the end time, how many hours you work. But I need to have, I need to have guaranteed scheduled time. This is the big thing like with Command center when it comes to our scheduling. Uh, same thing with us is like we're relatively flexible because we were open so many hours. But we have to have a governed, like we have to know when you're showing up, we have to know when you are clocking in so we can maintain coverage at Command center for you. It's making sure you get the jobs done and you can schedule enough work for them to stay busy. It's almost impossible to run an efficient schedule when you are incompetent in people showing up or they just show up late or they can't come in and all this other stuff. Right. So I would really have an honest conversation, try to figure out what is going to work best for him and then look, whatever schedule we create when we leave this meeting, I need you to stick to it. And so whether that is you're coming in and you don't feel well, like I need you to come in and if I'm accommodating you as much as I possibly can by doing 11 to 5, for example, potentially you could do something like with weeding services where you know, it's a kind of an average number of budget hours per week and you can kind of put them on something like that that doesn't necessarily need as much scheduling. Potentially that's a difficult one though. But I would definitely be looking for that as well. Like shop maintenance, weeding. What other services could that individual potentially do that is not as time sensitive like a project or no mowing on a certain day, etc. Just an idea. Oh wow, here we go. Another question. So when you were talking about these real estate deals, I feel like it isn't easy as you are explaining. Okay, I get that. I actually really hate that when people talk about real estate and stuff and it, they make it sound really simple and it's not that easy, so. Good question. Between the money put down and the monthly payment, I feel like as the owner of a business that is attempting to grow, my financials will need to be much stronger to even have a bank or credit union give me a look. Can you maybe explain or go into greater detail on what our finances will need to look like in order for us to get, to even get approved for these loans? Also let me talk about that one first because it looks like a different question. Okay. So in terms of getting approved, the big advantage that you're going to have if you don't have, have never done real estate before is that you're going to be able to do an FHA loan. All right. This is a loan program that is subsidized by the government for banks to give money to first time home buyers at a very, very discounted rate in terms of the percentage as well as the, the down payment is usually 5, 6, 7% up to 10%. So the thing is, if you can get to a house for 5%, you basically have 20x leverage. Okay, so what I mean by that is if I can put $1 down in real estate and get $20 worth of an asset, that is like literally the, the best thing you should be doing besides your business. Now. The best point you're making here, I think it's Connor, sorry Dustin. Is the fact that you got to focus on your business first. If your business needs $5,000, it's much better spent on the business and getting $5,000 will become literally 10,000 next year. You can double the money a lot faster, but you just can't use leverage like you can with real estate. So I know I just kind of like roll off my tongue like, oh, like the money down the down payment and that's not good. So 5% down on say a $300,000 deal, you are looking at 15 to $16,000 payment with closing costs, stuff like that. You want, you want to have 20 grand. So that would be what I would recommend putting money aside as the business gets past that hyper growth stage. If you're growing more than 50% year over year, you should not be thinking about real estate. You shouldn't be thinking about trying to do the deal I talked about yesterday. You should be simply focusing on how do I make this business profitable? And that's going to be a matter of growth. Growth, Growth. And then you're probably going to get to a point like, okay, I'm going to do maybe 15 or 20% growth this year. 10. That's when you can start stacking some savings aside, setting aside money for that down payment of 5%. Okay, let's keep rolling. Also, when you were talking about the property, they had two lots, one in front of the other. You mentioned offering cash for the deal. Wouldn't we be better off spending the money on marketing, opening another, another location other than just saving 100 to $100,000 if we are getting 10x return on that money with 20% profit over time, you, you would be running a million dollar business with the flexibility of moving and not being locked down on a property. I also feel that this would be better short term and long term. But I might be overlooking something. You are 100% right. The thing is this, you can't. So two things. First of all, you can't get a loan on blank land. So the one that you're mentioning is from last week, not the one from yesterday, the one from yesterday has a house on it. So it's easy to get financing when it comes to blank land. If you don't plan to build on it, it's very difficult to get financing. So blank land, you're typically going to get really high interest rates, usually a 24 month term, like two years. You're not going to get 30 year mortgages on a blank piece of land. So you typically have to buy with cash. Otherwise financing will lock up the deal anyways. So in terms of this part, this is really important.

Is, this is what I talked about yesterday is I do not want to lock up $200,000 in a blank piece of land if there's not other things I can do with the money. Okay, so, so when it comes to buying just a blank piece of land like that first one that I looked at a week and a half or so ago with you all is I'm looking at the return of my investment of saving rent, right. So if I'm saving on that property, I was going to say about 14,000, $15,000 a year. I was paying $100,000 down. I would make, I'd be my return on is about 14 or 15% for which is not great compared to a business. However.

I'm at the point where I'm not putting every dollar back into my business. Right. The businesses I've been doing lawn care, landing for eight, nine, 10 years now. And so the cash that I have available that Is my savings. A 15% return on my excess cash is really, really good. Now that being said, when an opportunity comes along to buy out a location like just recently came up, that's the first thing I want to do is buy out a location because my return on that's going to be better. But you're 100% right. When you have 10, $15,000, I don't want you to spend that money on a real estate deal. You're going to tie up all your capital. If that 15,000 would be spent on marketing, you literally could double or triple the size of the business in a year or two. And that would have much greater impact on your net worth and your income potential, your cash flow than buying a piece of real estate. When it comes to real estate, what I would look at is build a business to where it is no longer growing 50 plus percent year over year, where it's growing, maybe, maybe it's 6, 700,000 a year, maybe it's doing 15, 10% growth. That's when you're going to start seeing good profits. That's when you start stacking money aside for a real estate deal. And typically I believe the best real estate deal will be that first one with an FHA loan, 5, 6, 10% down and then being able to do some sort of arbitrage like we talked about yesterday, to cover the mortgage basically rent free for your business as well as build X, start building equity with a leverage of 10x or 20x you can get in real estate. So I'm not a huge fan of buying real estate right now, but over the next 3, 612 months we're going to see some good deals. And so I think it's a matter of getting ready for those deals and being educated and realizing that there's never a time when real estate, real estate generally moves relatively slowly. When it's going up super fast like it has the past year, I, I avoid it because it's gonna pop. But typically real estate is much slower. You're not going to triple your money tomorrow, you're not gonna triple your money next year. It's very infrequent that that happens. That is not a sustainable market. So I'm looking for a double over the next 10 or 15 years in my real estate. Whereas with my business I can get a double every year on my return on my investment. So Destin, you're completely thinking about it correctly. Think about it though, from this perspective is do I want, if I have, you know, 50 grand sitting in a bank account Do I want it sitting in a Bank account making 0.05% or would I rather it if I went and bought land for cash, making say 15% return because I'm saving on that rent or being able to put that money towards an actual real estate deal is it's actually an investment and I'm able to actually get cash flow from it, like we talked about yesterday, by doing something with an Airbnb, renting out the property, using the half of it as a shop space, et cetera. So I really believe that what I talked about yesterday is a great way to step into real estate without having a big cash burden. Besides the initial payment, you're going to have to put down payments. That 15, 20, 30 grand you might have to save up on the upfront is the part you're going to have to chip away at maybe the next couple of years, maybe you wait a couple of years till the business has grown because again, I much rather you focus on the business in terms of growth because that will spit out way more cash than, you know, a couple hundred dollars a month extra on rent, rental income. Like there's not a lot of money and cash flow being made on a property for the first few years. It usually takes me a year or two to stabilize a property and actually make it cash flow positive because I'm investing, I'm renovating it, improving it, making it look good, painting the lines, fixing the roof, painting it all this other garbage you don't stabilize on rents for usually the first year. So I'd much rather in that year put the money into my business. Double the size of my company from, you know, making 15, 20,000amonth in reven to 40, 50,000amonth in revenue. That's going to do much more fear and much more fear and much more fear and much more fear and much more fear and much more fear and much more fear and much more fear and much more fear and much more fear and much more fear and much more fear and much more.

Oh, I don't know what happened there. Sorry guys, give me one second. So my audio cut out. For some reason the audio has been cutting out on this. Sorry about that.

I got in my house for 3.5% FHA. Yeah, 3.5 is great. We have a first time home buyer. Does not, does that affect. Yeah, so sometimes you can get, you can get a second FHA loan. So talk to a loan officer. You can get a second FHA loan, but also you could get a conventional loan with less than 20% down. You're just going to have to pay property mortgage insurance. So you might get away with 10% down with a conventional loan, but but then paying property mortgage insurance. So again just talking to a banker, consistently talking to them. I always talk to my banker, I always send them my financials. Every quarter it takes me two minutes and that way when I want to pull a trigger like I did yesterday, put an offer in the same day because we're ready to go.

So even if you're not even going to buy, you haven't even done real estate before. If you're looking for your first deal, I'd still develop a relationship with a banker that does FHA loans. Like hey, somewhere in the next 24 months I'm going to buy a property. I want to keep in touch with you, give you my financials, make sure that I have a pre qualified for a certain amount and one day I'm going to pull the trigger. Most bankers will work with you.

Okay, this is a big one. Okay, let's talk about this. Evansville. Just want to say I love CC hands down. One thing I think we could work on or I need to clarify on when myself or CC were making calls last week about collecting for the engine. Oh yeah, for the engine. Yeah. I noticed some of the call notes were the customer stating fixed income will pay the first week of the month. And Summit Command center gave their this customer essentially net 30 by not pushing. I cannot confirm that but I'm not going. But I'm going off of the notes. Typically I have seen Eli or Jaden say like told the customer if they don't pay we would stop service or something of the ultimatum. Okay, so let me keep reading here in a second. However, this is because if they are being told it depends on which stage of the.

Automation they're in. Right. So if the customer is getting the initial like hey, you're overdue, we need you to call or we're just calling to let you know that's gonna be a very easy kind of low, low pressure phone call. If they're two weeks over to you, something like that, it's gonna be like hey, just calling you, checking in, etc. The one, the call that is the ones like if you don't pay we're sending you collections is the one that's substantially overdue. That's the automation that they're going to get that says like hey, this person's going to collections and literally they will be sent to collection within four days after that phone call. So it's probably Just the timing that you're hearing based upon when, how far they're overdue. Now if you are trying to collect like you were last week for the truck engine that you need, you needed the money, you would need to let command center know like, hey, I know that these people are not 45 days overdue and the automation telling you to like threaten them, but I need you to do that because I need to collect the cash. So if you wanted them to specifically do that, you would need to let them know if you're trying to do it prematurely and collect cash up front like we talked about last week. I can only thank CC for helping me out last week to collect half of the $18,000 in 40 hours. But at what point do we stop service or what point does Command center make that hard decision? The customer accepts payment terms. When they accept the estimate. The customer accepts. Yeah. Okay. So again, come back to what I was saying. I think if someone's two, three weeks overdue, we're not going to be pushing unless you tell us. Now the email that comes to command center that says basically threaten this person to go to collections is going to be, that's going to be when it's like if you don't pay me, we're sending to collections and it's much more forceful. So sorry, my mic went out. I'm just going through my computers monitor now. So I hope that made sense. Basically it's a matter. There's two different times. One is very casual, the other one is like you are going to collections and if you want us to push prior to that last call, we can, we just need to know otherwise we're going to accept something along the lines like I'm going to pay next week. It's like, okay, great, I'm basically just doing this to let you know. But if, if it's a matter of you want these are there like to push that up, you can now if you want to edit your automation to have the email sent sooner that says that you're going to collections, you can do that. Feel free on a coaching call with me. You can move those dates up if you want to get tighter on your collections. Absolutely. The beautiful thing about Zooper down the road is one, you collect your deposits up front. Two though what we're working on right now is where they cannot accept any estimate based if you want this in your settings, they can't accept any estimate without a card on file. So I'm really hoping that down the road this gets eliminated by someone that wants that Is there a way we can validate emails or phone numbers with SA or at least an added feature for Zooper? I have probably had four or five people give us fake or not proper info this year. Fake CC info, phone number, etc. And of course they have balances and we cannot connect with them. I've reached out to some of their landlords and knocked on doors but no luck yet. Yeah, unfortunately what usually happens is is fake emails. But a lot of times when they put the contact form in to your website for estimate request form, that's usually when they're giving fake stuff. The problem is if there's a drive by or over the phone estimate, we don't know that until usually the invoice because if it's over the phone they give us a fake email. We've accepted everything. But again over the phone you'd have a credit card on file. What's going to kill you is like when you actually send the estimate and then it's a fake, it's fake information. So to my knowledge there's not really a feature that is really good at determining whether or not email address is valid until it actually sends something. Because then once you send something then you can see if it's bounced, etc. And I really wish there was an automation. I don't know if we can do this in Super. I think we could down the road. I know there's not an essay and that is where a balanced email like let you know.

This is pretty common in things like payments but for emails it'd be cool like hey, if an estimate bounces because someone gave us a fake email, it'd be nice if we got an email back from the CRM saying like hey, this bounced instead of just only knowing that by three days later in the follow up process trying to figure out why they didn't get back to us. So this is definitely something next year with Zooper we could take a look at.

Just want to clarify my thought just in case you need some context. Essentially customers do not dictate payment terms by us. Not pushing it makes me think that they will continue to do that for us in the future or that they think they can just pay whenever they want. Sorry, this makes me mad. No, I 100% agree, 110% and it's a matter of when you allow a customer to pay without prepayment or a card on file. It's going to lead to this like it just is. And so it's a matter of honestly I think instead of me Trying to figure out how do we have a better collections thing. Just eliminate this. And this is with Zooper to where someone cannot accept an estimate without a card on file. This will solve this issue almost immediately. And Stripe can pre authorize those cards which means it knows if it's like it will not allow them to attach it if it is a.

A bad card, like a fake card, fake card number and stuff like that.

But in terms of your collections now in terms of the follow up, like if you're having commands or call them, you can absolutely adjust the terms and the dates how far overdue you want them to call. So again I just do this on a coaching call with Lee. Just know when you want those to be done and you can absolutely make them tighter. Like if you really wanted to collect and make people get like threaten them after 14 days you can. The thing is right now the automation is usually it's a month before service gets stopped and they're getting threatened. Stuff like that.

Can you talk about retirement and investing in your business? Like the market you have a video up but it's private. Also I enjoyed the video you did yesterday, but the property in my area are much expensive. A property sitting on acre down here is at least 800,000. How would you approach that? Okay, first of all with the acre 800,000, I think you're gonna have some opportunities for that to come down to 600,000 over the next 12 months. The next thing I would say is even at 600,000 5% down, you're still looking even if you a 3.5% FHA loan, you're still looking at like a good $20,000 before you can really look at that kind of real estate at 600 grand up front or the value of it. So that'd be my first thing. Wait for opportunities. Don't worry about real estate until you're ready to buy it. The reason I want to put on everyone's radar is first off some people are ready for it coming into next spring. The second thing is I feel like the first real estate deal I bought, I wish I would have made it like I did yesterday. And that is some some sort of house hacking way to get a renter as well as some sort of Airbnb as well as like a three purpose. Like when the typical home buyer is looking at the property I looked at yesterday, they aren't buying it for one reason because there's only one place to shower in a big house and another two bedroom, two bathrooms are half bathrooms. They didn't have showers. So I know immediately that there's functional obsolescence. It's called where a family that would typically have three to four kids could live in a house. Can't because there's one shower. I don't care about that as much because I'm going to use it for shop space as well as an Airbnb and be able to then rent out the house. Maybe the person has two kids. Right. So what you're looking for is a place where the value to the typical homeowner is, let's say 500k, but to you, it's worth 800k because you're doing all this other stuff there. That's where you can really get a good deal because you're able to buy the deal, make sense of the deal, pay the mortgage, and still make cash flow. So in terms of this one right here, I do not know how this video is gone. We can't find it anywhere. It's basically the last piece of the training that we do.

At initial training for all of you. And I just can't find it. I don't know where it's at. It says it's private, but we don't have it anywhere. When we start in the fall doing new training, I will make sure that gets recorded and put up for everybody. I apologize, but I have no idea what that video is. We racked our brains and everything. And everything. Okay, how far is too far for a shop space from a service area? I would typically say if you have to drive more than, like, if you look at the center point of your service area and, like, kind of took all your jobs, where's the center point? I don't want to be more than 10 minutes from that 15 max. Especially the larger your company grows, the more and more that weighs. And if you're doing it for price only, that's when it becomes like, hey, just get closer to your center point. Now, if you're doing it because of zoning, there's no land closer to the center. That's when you're probably a little more flexible on that. But if it's about price, like, oh, if I need to get further away from town, I can get cheaper. And it's not a matter of just finding the land. I would definitely rather pay up and get better location. I would rather, for the location, the one I did yesterday, I would be willing to pay $100,000 more if that location was six or seven minutes difference direction, driving time. Yeah, 100 grand easily. Just because it would every single day save five to 10 minutes going one direction and the back. So that's 20 minutes per day per person. Well now when you have five, 10 employees, that starts to add up after 20 days in a month. My family owns 35 acres that is up by a lake that we service. However, it would be in the northernmost part of our territory. We service about 13 to 15 accounts up at the lake, but the vast majority of our accounts are about 20 to 25 minute drive from this property. We currently run out of my house, but are quickly running out of room. We currently are about 10 to 15 minutes from my, from any customer we service. Okay, so you're adding about five to 10 minutes drive because you're already 10 to 15 minutes, you're going to 10 to 25. My parents are the full owners of property and they are basically begging me to use the ground for the business. I just feel that it's very out of the way. That would also make my guys drive an additional 10 minutes into work each day. They all average about 10 to 15 minutes drive to the garage. Now this one I would probably do because it looks like you're getting this for free. Free speaks volumes. If you're able to get this for free or very, very discounted, I'd probably be all over this and just look at it as a matter of like, hey, I'm gonna do this for two or three years. And then in two or three years I'll be out of hyper growth, I'll have cash aside and I'll buy my own property. Because ultimately the reason you get into real estate is to build equity. So even if you got this property for free, I'd still want you to buy something down the road so you can build equity. But right now I think the dollars spent on the business are going to have a better return. And so if they're able to give it for free or just like they're begging you to be there, I'd probably take them up on it. And if it averages, you know, an extra five or ten minutes drive time for everyone, you know, I would compensate that by making it a little bit nicer for the guys. Maybe you have a little bit of a, a break space for them. You put a bench out for them like underneath a tree, or you give them some water and Gatorade or whatever it might be. I try to make it a little bit nicer for them for being in that spot. But most employees would rather be at a different location than your house anyways. Honestly.

If 90% of your revenue comes from recurring work and 10% from projects from projects with EFEES. Then how can we compensate for CC costs? 10% of projects with E fees is nowhere enough to cover the cost. Thank you so much. Yes, this is a great question. The bottom line is when you have recurring work, you are paying for the upfront cost of command because of them setting up the service, all the rest of it. But the thing is you don't have to, you shouldn't have to do that in the future very much assuming that they're not a customer that calls every single invoice if their customer has low maintenance. The beautiful thing about recurring workers is there's upfront cost of setting them up at command center. They call over the phone, get them on the file, usually call one more time to confirm something or about their first invoice or whatever it might be. But after that there's nothing. So the thing with recurring work is like, it's almost like an annuity. It's like a bond. You've got to pay for it up front and then it returns over time and it's smaller returns. Whereas with E fees and projects you're paying for, you're getting a bunch of money immediately and you're getting an E fee to cover cost of command center IM immediately. But when it comes to recurring work, you're kind of taking the short term hit of getting them set up and everything at command center or any admin you doing estimates, whatever it might be. But if it's recurring, you're getting that for in perpetuity. So it's a short term hit you're going to take for the long term game of having a recurring customer instead of a project based job. And in my opinion, the reason I charge an E fee is because if they're only going to be a customer once, I don't want to invest anything into them in terms of command center and admin costs. So you're 100% right. If you're growing a ton of recurring revenue, you're going to have more leaner profits up front as you grow because you're eating the cost of what would otherwise be E fees on projects. That being said, next year I shouldn't have to pay anything for the customers that I get this year because I send them an email, I get started and we just roll. That's why it's so important to get rid of customers that are recurring that call every single week, every single service, every single invoice because then they're really chewing into command center costs and we will let you know when there's customers that it's like, hey look, they might be nice and everything, but literally call and talk to us for 15 minutes every single time we can't get them off the phone. We're going to let you know because that you're 100% right. You don't have issues to cover them. So very important why you should be also kind of cultivating and weeding out customers is the ones that talk to you every service call command center all of the time. You just got to eventually let them go because you don't have to cover your butt. You want the the ultimate goal is a whole bunch of recurring where they never call command center, they have a card on file, you never have to talk to them. And there's no cost of admin because everything is automated and you don't have to pay any initial. There is no E fee that need to collect because they're on recurring. That's the goal. The problem with that is as you scale that there's, you know, you're eating that initial cost.

Do this drought and looming recession. I'm getting a lot of customers that want to switch to bi weekly and then cancel because they don't like the 50% increase. I was considering offering a simple service like a mo and go where I would continue to service their property, but it doesn't take as long. Then they feel like they're not paying more either. What is your take on this approach? I'm not a huge fan of changing biweekly off of 50% the increase because there's certain amount of fixed costs of having a customer back to what we were just talking about with Vlad and that is they do call. There is admin costs. They do call in occasionally and even just switching service. If they're the type of customer that switches service from weekly to bi weekly or cancels for two months out of the year, they're a less valuable customer.

And so I'm more inclined to be like, look, I'm going to focus on the customers that don't change their schedule or they're happy and just fine with switching to bi weekly and really focusing on them. Now some people will not charge a bi weekly upcharge. It's like, look, we're just going to charge $50 per cut if that's weekly, if that's bi weekly. And then they just govern the months of the year that they require weekly. Okay? So they say, hey look, you have to be weekly March through June, but then July, August, you can switch to bi weekly if you want. It's just a cut price that's fine, I'm okay with that. The problem is your revenue is going to die still when people switch to biweekly. The nice thing about having the 50% bump is when people go to biweekly even though your budget hours will slip because there's less work to do your revenue will stay a little bit more consistent and that's what I'm looking for and how I want to sell the biweekly services as a monthly budget item they're spending less even though there's it's a higher cost per service so.

That'S it. All right sorry bit of a long one today but got through all the questions over the weekend and everything like that so hope you all have a great rest of your day. Sorry I lose my voice all choked up with gotta love these allergies. Alright guys have a great day. Take care.