Mike Minutes Mastermind 07/10/2023

Hey, everyone. Hope you're doing super well. Let's go ahead and get things kicked off.

Pull these things up. If you did not get my invite, check your email. Invite everyone to next week's Mastermind or Roundtable.

Roundtable is a quarterly basis. We do a zoom call with everyone so we can see each other face to face. I'll have updates.

What we're working on. Sorry, I'm trying to get this while I'm talking on the AI side of things. Copilot stuff. Looking forward to conference. We'll do some updates on that and then we will jump into Q and A. And so I know with daily masterminds, the Q and A, sometimes a little bit thin, that's fine. But there's things you want to talk about more in person on the round tables or have questions about the announcements that I do make. You're more than welcome to ask them then. So that is going to be next week. This week we have franchisee training coming up the rest of this week.

But then next week we'll have the round table. So. All right, let's go ahead and jump in.

See what we got today. Present Share screen.

Right. Got six questions. Ken from Fenton, Michigan. I just received this email. I have never gotten a loan. Is this a good deal? Probably not. Unsolicited loan documents. Never a good deal. Really. Share this tab. This is probably this look. This is from Stripe. Yeah. So yeah, basically, if you look at this, you're basically paying 20%.

About 20% interest. So basically, it's like using a credit card. So I would not recommend using it if possible.

Marcus from Redmond, have you look into this simple IRA for small business. Just wondering your thoughts on that. Seems like pros. Tax savings attracts talent as benefit for employees. Easy to maintain and diversification opportunities. Cons Employer only contributions. Up to 3% of employees pay. No Roth contributions. Yeah, honestly, like the challenge you're gonna have with any of these benefits for like, things like this are a lot of frontline team members don't know what they are. They don't care and they don't use them. So even, you know, Marcus, like at the Bellingham shop, like, health insurance was a. Was a big cost that we were going to incur and only a couple people use it. And so it's going to be for your more tenured employees that are going to use things like healthcare, 401ks, et cetera. So this is not something I would be like super concerned about. You could set it up though, so you could have it as like A perk from an applicant standpoint, whether it be a 401k or an IRA, et cetera. But frontline team members are just rarely going to use it, to be perfectly honest. That's just. It just is what it is. We found this with health insurance, and that's why we offered the gym reimbursement program, because the vast majority of them use that instead of the health care benefits.

Nick from Marysville at the Mount Vernon location, where you're renting the house to a family, hosting an Airbnb and operating the Mount Vernon Augusta, have you ran into issues with neighbors reporting this activity to the city as that hindered in any operations at all? The reason I'm asking is so that I know whether it's worth the risk or not. In my air, there's very little space available for what we need. Small shop, large lot and space to dump debris. I've been searching for two and a half years and haven't found anything viable. And people hold on to real estate forever here. I think long term I will need to do something similar to you. Mount Vernon. I would just hate to take the risk and get it shut down quick. Have you had any encounter with the city over, and if so, why should they shut? Why did they shut you down over there? More accommodating. Yep, great question. So first and foremost, what's killing me there is I don't live at the property. If you live at the property, you're typically going to get much better terms. Again, we're talking about Washington State for everyone else that's out of state. Washington is pretty strict about our zoning restrictions and every single city is going to be different too. So that's what's killing me there. Because technically I'm not allowed to have employees there if I'm not living there. It is zoned for owner occupants with up to three employees. That's what it's zoned for. So when they found out I'm not living there, that's what got me in trouble. So they've been super flexible to like, work with me, and they're like, hey, you can have like the end of the year, just you got to move the business out of there. So it's been work. It's worked great for this for the past couple years. It'll work well until the end of this year, but we will probably move that spot end of this year and then you'll have a spot. Like, if we need to dump there, we potentially could because, like, that's the farm next door is like hauls all the clippings away for example. So yeah, we're looking but like after conference is probably when I'll take more of a look at it. But if we can dump there, it means that like we can probably actually get closer to our center of our territory and then go more towards a commercial facility that has like a roll up door or maybe like a kind of like a drive in area, stuff like that. Even if it's a little more expensive.

So we'll see. But yeah, technically you just got to watch the zoning. Ask the city, tell them what your plans are and if you are doing it you're going to usually get much better parameters. But if you're having like 10 employees, you're typically going to need commercially zoned real estate. The only way around this is if you're so rural that like no one even knows what's going on. And again, yes, you are running that risk. Right. Just no one cares if you're on 20 acres out in the middle of nowhere. But if you're close to the city, which is probably going to be likely because you're in a more metropolitan area. Yeah, it's going to be commercial land. And the whole idea of like no one, everyone holds on to real estate forever, just keep in mind that's only been for the past three years and that's will eventually change. The reason it feels like that and it's true is because everyone doesn't want to lose their real, their interest rates they currently have on their real estate. So if you sell right now you've got to go get debt at a two to three times your current interest rate. So no one is selling. You're right, that will eventually change. So just be careful saying forever because when interest rates come back down, guarantee you people will start selling again. Guarantee it. And that's what potentially could be like the, a catalyst like way more. Because right now the reason no one's buying, but the thing is no one's selling. So everything is like the, the inventory is so low that even though no one's willing and able to pay the prices with these interest rates they can keep charging like keep their, their prices as high simply due to the fact that like there's nothing to buy. And so that gets solved though if interest rates come down and they will, as interests come down, people will start to sell that will load up with the market and that's potential. What could lead to lead to in a really, really.

A softening of the pricing is when you get a whole bunch of People starting to sell their properties. So I don't think it's gonna be like in waves though because like inventory is so low. Everyone got such low interest rates, they don't want to lose their properties.

The, the asset now is the, is the debt. Dustin Bearning from Bloomington. What is command center default? When a customer calls into switch by to bi weekly or cancel this week's mo, are they going to mark that job as skipped and then change the next job to bi weekly price? Are they to send a ticket after marking job skipped or mark skipped and no ticket? I was talking with my GM and we have have seen all three approaches. Yeah. So the challenging part is sometimes.

Sometimes the, the customer makes it seem like they need you to know this sort of information and then you're gonna get a ticket. But typically the default is to skip the existing visit assuming it's within the 24 hours, go to the next visit, change it to the bi weekly price and then you don't really need to know about it. Now if the customer is saying like can you please let them know that X, Y and Z, then you're probably getting a ticket about it. But our default on this is skip the visit, change the next visit to the bi weekly price and not make a ticket for you. I know they were going over this last Thursday in the team meeting. So if there was discrepancies prior to that.

That'S probably why. That's probably, I'm assuming that's why they're probably going over in a team meeting.

But yeah, the big, the big thing is some customers make it sound like they, they need someone else to know and so someone at command center will be like, okay great, I'll let them know.

Like I'll let the crew know or something like that. So the default is skip this visit, change next week to buy weekly price and then we don't need to contact you. This is from Anonymous for instant quote Door hangers. When a customer emails us that picture, does CC set up an estimate and market accepted or do they just create a job?

That's a good question. I'm pretty sure we set up an estimate. I have to talk to Liz about this and Liz can chime in and just comment on this post in the group. But I'm 99% sure we do an estimate because like when I was in South Park, I know I saw estimates still. Yeah, I saw the estimates. So yes, they did estimates and then marked it complete and then they scheduled it from there because yeah, I literally just had this happen to me. So yeah, they do.

Logan Albers, Ground island do the monthly top line bonuses for GMs continue every year? Assuming the GM started the location, would you also change the monthly top line bonuses for GM that inherit a location?

Currently, I'm not really too keen on changing the top line bonuses if they inherit because if it's a larger location, it's going to require more skill in running it. So the base salary wouldn't change though. So the base salary wouldn't change, but those bonuses would stay intact. That's what I would default to.

Yeah, that's what I would default to. It just leave the bonuses in place at the same amount so you don't have to change that, but then keep the base pay base salary the same so that way that never changes. And then if someone does inherit a bigger location, it's very likely you're going to need to be able to offer more compensation because if it's already doing 50, 60,000amonth in revenue, you're not going to be able to have like a newbie working GM walk in the door and be able to run the thing. It's going to take more training, they're going to have to have more skills. It's going to be harder to find someone like that that can run that sort of locations. I just leave it in place and then leave the base salary the same as well. Which by the way, what he's referencing there is.

The videos I made on the weekend about.

General manager compensation packages.

Profit sharing, bonuses, etc. If you have any questions, definitely let us know. But I made two of them. One was the gm, one was for the starter role and both those are on the Facebook group. I also put them in the academy underneath other training, there's a part one and part two of the general manager compensation package stuff. All right guys, have a great rest of your day and happy Monday. We'll see you tomorrow. Take care.