Mike Minutes Mastermind 07/09/2024

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another Mike Mets mastermind. Get this party started. I have a little bit of education. I think I'll share at the end. I can share this screen. My remarkable.

Present.

Connect.

Okay, so I'll be at the end. Let's first go over some announcements. Then we'll jump into creating Q and A.

Really just one quick announcement. We are delaying the. I know I had said in July we'd have access everyone for your live kind of command center invoice. Be live throughout the whole month and you have login and access to that. We're going to delay that most because we need to focus right now all of our attention on getting everyone's Christmas lights website set up. So it's going to have all hands on DECA for that.

And then in August will be our focus. We'll be to be working on the. That I also negotiate with the software company that does that because it's extremely expensive to have hundreds of dashboards and graphs being pulled 24 7. So I'm working on that. And then we will focus on.

Yeah, July is really focusing on Augusta Lights, making sure that we have all set up and. And right now our turnaround time is about a week, week and a half. So that's good. I want to keep it that way throughout July. And then August will focus on that dashboard live for you to see your invoice in the different categories of command center live throughout the month.

And then September will be focused on getting everyone into showcase reviews. We've started putting a few locations in, but it'll be September when we get everyone in fully. That'll be kind of the focus.

I think that's all we got in the way of announcements.

And then we got like 22. I checked yesterday, 22 locations already set up for Christmas lights on your website. Let's go again from your dashboard you can get that set up. And if you would like your page set up for Christmas lights.

All right, let's do questions and then we'll do some edumacation present Share screen. Why do I have so many tabs open?

Okay, here we go. Boom.

Mr. Anonymous, you mentioned you give people slack if they are picking up the slack for the team staying late doing extra, etc. If someone typically picks up slack for others and they come came to you asking to change their start time to 45 minutes later than the normal start time, would you allow it? Part of me wants to stick at this to the set start time. However, this person has a key to the shop and they work by themselves. It's not like it really affects anyone. Only unless they don't get all their budget hours done for that day. Even then they are willing to stay later or work the weekends if needed. I figure every relationship is give and take. I give him a larger later start date. However, it's understood he needs to be very efficient on his jobs and he's. And he is the first one to be scheduled for the weekend. If someone does something doesn't get done, I'm leaning towards allowing it as I don't want to have to go through the rigmarole of hiring new guys this late in the season. Yeah, I'm okay with this. For team members in the field you'd be careful of is you. If you have everyone on equal playing field in terms of hierarchy and then you give one person an exception, that's like the one thing to be careful of in the scenario.

Typically when I'm talking about someone that's picking up slack, for example, they're like a leader in the company and showing up 45 minutes in terms of start. Like start times aren't even a thing for them. Typically.

As soon as someone just starts to show up when and needed, they know when the workload is higher, they show up earlier, they leave later, and when there's less work, they make sure they go home. So they're not costing the company money and it's. They finish their jobs early budget hours and they just pack up and they're. They're efficient. Um, that's type of person I'm pretty flexible on. It's like I don't have start time for my general managers. I expect them to be able to serve the team. And whether that be showing up 30 minutes before everyone else, whether it be showing staying later, like I just expect that on all fronts. And so typically for frontline team members and the ones doing the labor, what you want to be careful of if you do this because I would agree with you, I just do this. The reason I'm making this asterisk is if you have 15 people and everyone has to start at one time and you make an exception for one, it needs to be very clear as to why.

Because it is important to have start times when you have crews so everyone shows up at the same time. It's very difficult to juggle this person if they were working with other people. Now the big caveat that you added here is that they work by themselves and they crush it and they willing to work as long as possible as needed to get the jobs Done. But they work by themselves so it doesn't affect the other team members. I only, I only really care about bending the rules if it affects other team members. For high performers. So like if if someone's showing up late means the rest of the crew has to show up at that time, or like they get delayed or like everyone's waiting around for them, then I have a big problem with it. And typically it's not a matter of like who who picks up the slack for the team.

It's like who is there regardless. They know when them showing up 45 minutes is okay versus being like, I'm gonna show up 45 minutes early. Someone has is that flexible for the company. I'm usually much more flexible for them. So. Sounds like I would give you a pass on this. I just don't know how many team members you have. And it sounds like this person works completely autonomously from the team anyways. So I'd give it, yeah, like go for it. Just be very reason making these asterisks. I don't know who this is. I don't know how many. If you listen to this and you have like 15 team members out in the field working and you give one person exception, it should be pretty clear like to the rest of the team, like why? Because otherwise you can't have a whole bunch of varying start times dictated by every single team member out in the field when they're working together. Like they actually have to be in a truck together. So like if people are like literally working on the weekends, if the people are checking email on the weekends for me, if they're like super flexible for the company, I'm going to be more flexible with them. That's just generally how I've operated. Not necessarily saying it's right.

Mike Cooper from Athens, Tennessee. Can we get a template for Christmas lights business cards in the pro shop? Yeah, I have sent over to media team for like business card.

Anything to do with Christmas lights. So business card flyer, door hanger, yards, not yard sign flyer, door hanger, postcard and yeah, business card. So we'll get those up within the next few weeks. Also, I heard you say in the Mastermind yesterday that when a customer called command center, you would know it was a Christmas lights because it was different phone number. Negative. That is not true. Do you suggest that we get a separate number for Christmas lights? No, no, I did not say this. If I did, that was a massive slip up. No, I did. Definitely. There's no need to get a second phone number. We are training Max, as we speak on understanding what Christmas lights are, things like hanging lights, holiday lights.

The vernacular on Christmas lights, we're training him on it right now so he can understand what is the difference.

So yeah, there's no need to get a separate phone number. We're making it clear enough to where if someone calls in as soon as they wish to hear the word Augusta, they should be fine. So like, hey, this is Augusta Lawn care. They're like, oh, I thought this was Christmas lights. Like we're literally training Max on that exact thing. If someone says that. But usually people are just listening for the word Augusta and they're checking, you know, it's, it's a, it's okay. Like we're not seeing a lot of kickback on that. They hear the word Augusta and they're rocking and rolling. As long as we know how to answer that phone call and accept the lead, it's fine.

Number three, Dustin from Bloomington Champaign.

The question is in regards to Bloomington. First off, a quick update. All employees are hitting PPP even after adjusting back to 33%. Very good. And we are getting much fewer yellow slips. Thank you for your help on that. We also had one of our biggest profit months for June. After a full month of price increases and prices on projects being raised, profit at just over 17,000. Feels good to be in profit mode. Let's go baby. So my question is Bloomington sent out half the amount of estimates in June as compared to March, April and May, clearly coming out of spring rush. But we still have not spent anything hardly on marketing all year. Our close ratio is 52% which I believe in profit mode is a good percentage to be between 45 to 65%. We are currently booked out a little over two weeks with a one click going out this week. I feel much more comfortable at the three to four week range, especially this time of year. Would you recommend hanging door hangers or starting some marketing online? Or just leave things the way they are and trust that organic and one clicks will fill the schedule. Currently team of three are currently are getting 120 budget hours of recurring work done each week. So we are really only filling Kyle's schedule about 35, 25 to 30 budget hours a week and maybe an extra guy or 2.5to10budget hours on Fridays. Yeah, like I think it comes down to what are your leads. I would look at the leads that you had coming in right now, which is what you said it's half. So let's just say it's like 60 or 70 leads that came in, I look at those. Where are they coming from? Are they mowing? Are they projects? Right. I'd be like delineating between the two. And if most of your leads that are coming in are projects, I would really try to figure out your project marketing. So I'd take the done for you ads and I'd just simply change everything to be focused on projects so you can fill a schedule. Because right now it looks like you're trying to book yourself out. If booking yourself out is the objective, projects is the thing to be marketing. And if you haven't used the done for you ads and tracked your customer acquisition cost for projects, I would try doing that. Because if you could get leads, you're not going to probably get them for 30, 40 bucks for mowing. Like we, you know, spring rush, we have been, you might be paying 70, 80 or $100 customer acquisition cost for.

Projects, but that's fine because these projects, you're going to get that money right way back. And you're probably average ticket size of 1500 or $2000. Right. So like I said in the book, like if, if I'm doing projects, I'm willing to spend 5% of the project value upfront. And that assumes I never get that customer to buy from me again. So like their lifetime value is the value of, let's say $2,000. I'm willing to spend 100 bucks to get that lead. So I would definitely be testing that out right now. I know a lot of people haven't really made the full switch. And I know even in our market, like up until a couple weeks ago, we were getting tons of mowing. But I also know like we just had a heat wave. So like it's probably going to come to a screeching halt. We're going to have to switch into projects. So Nick, Corey, Tim, all those that are listening from my team will have to switch the ads to be focused more on projects than recurring mowing. You're gonna get that wave of people though, that also from a mowing perspective, they suddenly realize they don't want to be out in the 100 degree weather and then they actually switch over during that period of time. If you have warm season grasses, if you have cool season grasses like us, the grass stops growing. So you're gonna have to switch over to projects. Otherwise it's a rude awakening. The very harsh swish from spring rush to summer. So I would definitely recommend, if this is a concern and that's booking yourself out, is.

Start testing the projects when it Comes to your done for you ads and really figuring that out the same way that we figured it out for. For recurring work and for mowing, figure out what that number is and then that way you'll have more confidence as you go into the summer that you can scale that if you're getting. If you're Getting leads for 50, 60, $70 for project based work and the average tick on that's 1500 or $2000, you can scale that so highly recommend doing that. You simply use the exact same done for you ad. You could literally use the same campaign, duplicate it and then change the pictures and change the text to be focused more on projects. Like you could literally do that in 40 minutes, 30 to 40 minutes. You could take say you have 10 different variations of ads running, revolving or recurring duplicate the entire campaign, change out all the pictures or videos to be more project focused and then change all of the text to be more project focused and then you're off to the races. So.

Recommend. All right, quick educa education session here. Let's see here. This isn't. I did not actually prepare for this. This is just like me scribbling stuff down. So if you don't like scribbles, just check out for a second.

How can I make this easier for you to read? Boom. How do I take. Where is. There it is. Okay, if I make this wider? Aha. Very good.

Does that mess you up? There you go. Okay, that's better. Okay, I'll make it a little smaller.

Okay, that should be decent. Okay, cool. So.

What have we got here? Okay, so this is just me thinking the other day kind of in relation to what we had talked about the last couple masterminds about payments. Really payments comes down to two things in terms of. It's just like payment frequency and payment method.

So this is why I usually believe doing one of these at the same time is best. Unless you're at the beginning of the season. So for example, if you're requiring credit cards, do that.

And then later on change your method from monthly to weekly or weekly to daily or whatever it is. When you start changing too many of those things mid season, I do see a lot more churn. So this is just my thoughts here. So I made a short about this yesterday too. It's basically just a continuum of cash flow, which means, you know, obviously we collect payments. The best in terms of cash flow is going to be getting prepayment before the month even begins. Is this actually even working here? One second. This is not working. Why is this not Syncing up. You guys are not seeing what I'm writing. Oh, whatever. Okay, can you see this? No. Why is this not syncing? Ah, give me a second, guys. What you. I am seeing. You are not seeing. Okay, there we go. Does this have to be open?

What in the world? Okay, well, we're just gonna have to fly. Fly with this. Okay, here we go. I'll put this up there.

Now.

Now we're in business, folks. Okay, so yay.

You obviously be getting money before you even have to deploy any sort of cogs, cost of goods sold, such as your direct labor, your materials, et cetera. That's like the best, right? Right. Now the worst is that you collect at the end of the month and you allow for checks, right? So when we look at our payment frequency and then our payment method, those are the two biggest indicators on the continuum of cash flow. So end of month, okay, Method, I'm allowing check. That's probably the worst case. Now if you also, you could also add in terms, but I kind of consider that your payment frequency and there's like how long do you allow people to pay afterwards? Because like the worst thing for payment frequency is like end of month, you allow for checks and then you don't put any late fees on or penalties for like 90 days. That's probably the worst. And then it goes all the way back to the best, which is getting the money before. However, when you look at cash flow, sales friction, and then churn, each of these also have different levels of impact. So when it comes, the best thing about what we just talked about above here is cash flow, right? Bad is going to be end of month, like we talked about. Good, great is prepayment like number one, which we're talking about over here.

And then like from a sales friction perspective, it's the opposite. Like it's better to not have to ask for money before you do service. It's that adds a level of friction to say like, hey, I only just do need your credit card. I'm going to ding your credit card before you even show up for service. It's going to add some friction. And then from a churn perspective, same thing. Like, because simply increasing your payment cycles is going to increase your turn, right? So simply because especially during times when the grass isn't growing as much, you might get more paint, more services in and reduce churn simply because people don't remember your service and they don't remember until you actually hit their card. So in general, increasing churn will increase when you increase payment cycles but again, it's a trade off of cash flow versus churn. It's a trade off of cash flow versus sales friction. And so what really determines all of that is if you are in profit mode or if you're in growth mode. And so, for example, in profit mode, you don't want collections or bad debt. You don't care if people leave because you're at capacity. When it comes to growth mode, you want to reduce friction and maximize sales. So there's no right or wrong answer on all of the issues of like, should I acquire credit cards? Should I have daily or monthly or weekly, should I take prepayments? Like, there's no right answer. It's like it's a continuum. And it's like, what are you willing to trade off in these three key areas, which is cash flow, sales friction, and churn. And there's pros and cons. There's, you know, there's also other factors are down here, like industry or local competitor expectations. Like if no one else is doing prepayments in your area, it might be more difficult and it might actually increase your sales friction more than other areas simply because like, no one's used to it. Like in our market. No, like very, very few people do monthly, 12 month, year round contracts. But like places like Florida or Texas or some places in California, it's very, very popular because they have a growing season that's much more closer to 10 to 12 months versus 7 to 9 months in our more northern market. So, all right, that was your education for the day. All right everyone have a fantastic Tuesday, July 9th, and we will see you tomorrow. Take care.