Mike Minutes Mastermind 07/01/2024

And we're live. Welcome back, everybody. Last week we had the Memphis meetup. It was fantastic. I just sent over the project for the media team, hoping that all the files came over.

Okay.

I brought the camera from here with the microphones and everything, so we should have pretty decent recordings of everything for you all up by next week.

Yeah, good trip. I was gonna do Mike Minutes Masterminds on Thursday and Friday, but there was only one question, so I figured I'd just let it go. I figured most people were in transit, a great time, heard a bunch of owners, general managers, members of the leadership team speak, and I think it was really, really good. So as soon as those are updated on the academy, I will let you all know and get those recordings out to you by Wednesday. I'm gonna turn myself out a bit by Wednesday. This week we will have everyone's access to add the augustalights.com to their. On the their academy and on the dash chart on the dashboard website portal. So I'll let you know when everyone's up. So that way I just know everyone has access, which should be by Wednesday. Tim Furbone says thanks for everyone who came out and supported the event in Memphis, Tennessee this weekend. Had a blast.

Let's go.

In my talk, I actually showed three years ago the first Memphis meetup, which is actually Nashville. There's like seven people. So thank you, Kevin, Nick Daniels, Beck, the whole team. Kevin had one of his team members there that I only found out afterwards is one of his team members that was like running around serving people. Like, very aware of everybody. I don't even know his name, Kevin, but tell him he was definitely noticed and appreciated being very attentive to you and to all the speakers and to each of the owners, helping new things, etc.

So I noticed him and I was like, I don't.

I either don't know that person, a general manager or somebody, but they are super helpful. So shout out to everyone. That was so accommodating on the weekend. Just a great time to meet together after spring rush.

Let's get this party started. All right, let's jump into questions.

Got four. All right, let me pull this up.

Just a heads up.

There is a video coming out tomorrow that is going to be helpful for everyone that's kind of like probably, you know, above the first stage of wealth, so kind of past 500,000, it's actually what to do once you've passed the architect stage of business, which is 800,000 plus. So if you're kind of coming up to that Phase next year to kind of know what's on the horizon.

And I give 10 things that really.

Should be the focus of an owner at that size of business most time, because it could. It can be like, well, what do I focus on? Like, I have a general manager. I have some. You know, everything's going smoothly in terms of the office, in terms of the work getting done. Things are being handled.

So what should you be focused on.

To prevent catastrophic issues? So all of that is coming out tomorrow. I have a pretty good sized video training going on that. All right, first question is from Ken Lynn. I've got a numbers breakdown for you. I've been approached by a customer in an HOA, 140 homes, that is now on the board here. One second, Let me turn. My microphone is up correctly because I've not been at this.

Aha.

It is incorrect like this.

All right, check. Now we're in business, folks. Now we are business.

Okay.

Sorry about that.

Wants to know if I can make a deal to all the homes in their neighborhood. For reference, each house would take approximately 15 minutes. Mow, 10 minutes to trim, one budget hour to do flower bed maintenance, four budget hours to do fall cleanup, snow removal, three to four months. I've come up with this with my sales pitch. The HOA would receive a free or reduced cost on all common areas, including mowing and snowing, plowing of all the streets. $75 per resident per month. $900 annually equals $126,000 combined. Each resident can choose between these services and then you list all five out. Okay. Depending on what services each homeowner chooses, they may be underpaying or overpaying. I know there's a. There's a problem with doing entire HOAs because you have 140 bosses. So what are the pros and cons? Good and bad. I have my idea. You can either pick it apart or modify it to make it work. I like this. I really do. I think this would. The reason I would support this.

Ken, is because it's going to force you out of your current stage of business. Like, you will have to get an employee. Like, and so it's going to. For. It's a forcing function for you to like, figure that part out. Like we've talked about a couple weeks ago when you asked this question, like, what is your limited limitations or critiques? So, you know, 126,000 on top of your current hundred thousand would immediately put you at 250. Immediately putting you. You need an employee. And if you can do the Math on this where like one employee basically like 40 budgeted hours a week could be doing this. This HOA makes a lot of sense. So I like this idea, honestly, even if you don't make a ton on this, I, for you personally, Ken, I'd say, like, go for this and make this happen because it'll force you out of your current stage of business. And I think that's actually your biggest limitation, like we talked about a couple weeks ago. So congrats on that. Best of luck. Don't get your emotions wrapped up in it. It's a huge contract. And remember, I'm usually not, I'm not usually not supportive of having one client make up, you know, 50, 60, 70% of your revenue. But I'm only saying I give you the green light on this one because I know your, your current situation and I know that, like, I want you, I want to see you push and get past this current hurdle and this will force you to do that and there would be pain. This, that'll be a very painful contract. There'll be like, if you can't find your first employee, they drop out several times. You'll be like, stepping in, working crazy hours. But it's gonna be a forcing function because you can't do $250,000 in annual revenue by yourself, so.

Kyle Tarvin, there are quite a few new faces at the Memphis meetup this last weekend. Would it be feasible to post pictures of all the new franchise locations as they get pictures taken at the training? They. They are. I know we can already look at the directory, but it would be nice to get a real time update as new locations join. Oh, no, we can't do that because they don't. Until they come for training, we don't have their picture at, like, at training. So once they come for training, usually in a week or two, Lee updates the directory with their photo and their location, etc. On the redesign later this month that we're working on for the dashboard, we have a couple ideas in terms of how the directory could change, but to make it easier to find maps, etc. So we're looking at a few different options. But for now, it's like after they come for training, that's when the. Their pictures would go up.

So.

And it's usually after training that they kind of get on several WhatsApp groups get integrated. They feel more comfortable asking questions on the mastermind, which is good. That's totally, totally awesome. Diego from North Naples. Hey, Mike, what's the least amount of budget Hours of property should be scheduled for. I have several small cookie cutter houses that take us roughly 15 minutes each and it takes three to five minutes to drive between them. Is budgeting 20 minutes per property okay, or should 30 minutes be the minimum? I want to make sure I am above 80 budget $80 per budget hour. Those 10 minutes will make me raise prices or hold off for now. I also don't want to make it too hard to hit P4P things. Yeah. So really, again, your, your time on the job, your budget hours is dictated by your price. So if you're trying to shoot for $80 per budget hour and your minimum mowing price is $40, well, you're never going to have less than 30 minutes on a job. So your budget hours always dictated by your price and then you'd have minimum pricing. Right. So I'm not going to do for less than $40 a cut or I'm not going to do it. Oops, sorry, I'm not gonna do it for, you know, less than $50 or whatever your minimum is. That's what dictates your budget hours.

You always want your budget hours to be the thing that's dictated by price. And so in this case, if you're doing $80 per budget hour and if your minimum price is, say 40 bucks, your minimum budget hours is gonna be 0.5 on a job or 30 minutes. Mr. Anonymous, is there a plan to improve SEO for snow removal? For those that offer it, we rank number one for lawn care, but non existent, not existent for snow.

So what I would recommend is changing your banner. So for example, on your website right now, if it says lawn care and landscaping, I would ask, you know, send it to web@augusta lawncareservices.com and ask this. This will eventually get rolled up right to me in terms of this request and say, okay, I want to change it to lawn care and snow removal. That header title is like a huge SEO proponent. So I would focus on that. I would also make sure that you have it in your services list. I'd make sure you also add as a banner on your website during the snow season from like, you know, October to February or whatever it is, get that banner added because that banner is also being taken into the metadata. So the banner, your header. I would try to change your header for like lawn care and snow removal. And I would keep it that way. If you, if snow is a huge part of your business, like I'm talking like you do it for four or five months out of the year, I would Keep the header the same. If you change the header, it takes Google sometimes two to three months to really scan that and really make the change on SEO for a specific word. So, you know, be really, really diligent about this. Like, if you're only pushing snow once or twice a year, I. I don't recommend changing that away from lawn care landscaping if it only makes up 3,4% of your revenue. If it makes up 10,30% of your revenue percentage points, it's probably worth doing lawn care landscaping and snow removal or landscaping and snow removal or whatever you want to focus on. And the header, like that main header when you start scrolling. And then the web team will put that also in the header of your type of your, your homepage title. So feel free to request that if you would like. I don't recommend doing that if this is a small portion of your revenue, but if your winter track is snow remov, it's probably worth it if you're making up a huge chunk of your revenue from snow removal. So anything like that will eventually usually get trickled up to me in terms of changes to the site because we got to keep it consistent. Otherwise we lose on the overall branding. All right, I think that's it for today. Hope everyone made it back safely. It's a great trip again to Memphis. We'll have those recordings up hopefully by next week and we will stay in touch. Love you all. Take care.