Mike Minutes Mastermind 07/11/2024

And we're live. Hello Gustonation. I hope you're doing great. Let's go ahead and get things kicked off. First off, there will be an email later today. If not first thing in the morning. They'll go out some recent updates that we've talked about on the mic minutes, Mastermind, a couple big ones that will be included in that email. First off, I posted in the Facebook group to nominate yourself to be on the ballot for FAC Franchise Advisory Council.

Again, that's seven owners inside of Augusta Nation.

That are elected by all of you and so feel free to look at that post kind of describes what they do every year we.

We vote for this. There's been members of the FAC that have been on it from day one and they get revoted in each year. They are not obligated to continue their role. It's.

Another thing to put on their plate. So really do appreciate everyone that does put their name forward and is willing to take that on.

And there's definitely ebbs and flows of how much the FAC is needed. A couple months ago we were every single day for probably two weeks talking and then there'll be a few weeks where there's not much going on and that's not a bad thing. Everyone's busy. So yeah, if you'd like to put your name forward, fill out the form. This is not the vote portion. That'll happen next week over the weekend. If you would like to put your name forward, please.

Make sure to put your name on that Google form. And then I will make a ballot next week for everyone. Next week, Tuesday we will be having the Roundtable, quarterly roundtable. That'll be July 16th. It's going to be at 4pm Pacific Standard Time.

Which is 7pm Eastern Standard Time. That will also go out in the email. I'll also make sure you get text messages. I'll do a better job this this quarter than last quarter of making sure everyone got notified. So.

That'Ll be in the email I send out today and it'll also go out via text message. I'll remind leading up to it tomorrow and Monday for the Tuesday round table at again 4pm July 16. On Tuesday.

Being there live is always fun. We have a couple things we're going to be rolling out. I want to show it on there and looking forward to it.

All right, let's jump into questions. What do we got today? Open share Mike man smash mine Google form.

Got three. Let's kick it off. Coach Connor, have you figured out a good way to get automations working for day before service reminders, email or text unlock gate, dog poop removal etc specifically for dog poop removal. I'm getting kind of hammered on this right on this one right now of the right now I'm guessing it's one one of the guys not sorry, I'm getting hammered on this one right now of the guys not mowing backyards thinking that the emails are being sent to the customers and customers are just being disrespectful and refusing to pick it up. But I also do not know all the customers that have the tag because most jobs are sold over the phone and only find out when team members to leave a note. Really need to figure this out.

Okay, so I'm going to talk about the automation part, how you get the tag added like making sure they add a dispatcher's note so you can actually do your end of day find that and then add the tag.

That's that there's not a great way because we don't have a.

The ability right now to have a dispatched.

Status for an event. We are working on that and more closely to now is going to be the ability to add a tag from the dispatch board to bulk people. So you could just like for example you could email people the day before like when you're dispatching. That's gonna be the more immediate sort of way to use that. You can set it up where it's the day before. But again I don't really like using it because you might move jobs around. The same thing is true though, even when you dispatch, sometimes people don't get to their job at the end of the day and then that the notification has already gone out the day before. So there's pros and cons but it's not, it's not as easy it was having as when we had the dispatched status. So you could do it immediately but I'd say for now I would just do the day before realizing that occasionally you're going to move a job midday and someone's going to be like hey, why didn't you come? You said you're coming tomorrow.

So that's probably the best way unless it's very, very manual and that is you'd be looking for. Some people have put it in their titles like dog poop and then what they'll do is they will just scan the thing and send one or two emails out when they're dispatching. So sorry about that.

There's pros and cons of it. The pros are that you don't ever have it where someone's like, I didn't do the job because it wasn't dispatched me. I never saw it my thing because there's not the method the status of dispatch, but it's also a really nice status to have to trigger automations. So we have two ways we're going to do this. One is through tags that'll be more.

Closer now. So you can just select multiple things quickly send those out when you're dispatching and then down the road we have an idea to do the dispatch status as well without making it where it's required to see on the mobile device.

Next one up, Dustin from Bloomington. Wait, didn't Dustin just send it? Coach Hunter. Okay, got it. Dustin from Bloomington.

Kyle and I listened to Corey and Liz's interview and we had a couple takeaways along with some questions. All right. We were curious why Bellingham would raise prices to only pre existing customers and not all of them. What do you mean pre existing customers? We raise prices on everybody.

Across the board anyway. Yeah, we raised prices across the board. So.

What this might mean is.

In terms of like we did raise prices. I believe unless I'm out of loop, which is very possible, we reprise across the board on everyone. Unless they were like there they join in the past week or two. If we raise prices on everybody right up to the day of let's go.

If there's a filter that wasn't applied or something. And then we did raise prices on like initial. We raised prices in our hourly MO price like 80 to 90 per hour. And then we also.

Raised prices our instant pricing on our website and I think our minimum like it was across the board on everything. New customers and old customers.

Is this a recommendation that you would give out now after the fact that you still only lost 9% of customers after raising prices across the board. I just think in general we all just completely underestimate how sticky our services are. If you have a good brand, you show up. When you do a good service and you have credit cards on file, it's such a sticky service. No one wants a different you go find a different provider. It'd be different if they didn't know what Augusta was. You showed up in a rinky dink truck that wasn't painted, wasn't decal. They didn't have corporate behind. Like I. I get emails every single day from your customers. You guys never hear from me because I only I file them. But I get emails every single day because people can find how to contact me. People complaining, et cetera. And I, I've never responded and I've never even reached out to any of you as owners. Sometimes I'll forward them to you. But there's a level of.

Trust that comes with having the national brand because they know they can do that. They know they can go to go and complain to someone above. Like I got an email the other day from one of the customer on a $300 invoice.

There's a $300 invoice. And they, they wrote like it must have taken them at least an hour to write this email out. It was $300 invoice and.

The franchisee had come back to their property like two or three times to make it right and try to do them and like offer them free service stuff and like. And it was like very basic. So I take it all over with a massive grain of salt. I sometimes will forward it to you. Most of the time I don't even bother you guys with that. I know. Especially if I can see you have been trying to make the customer happy and I can see that. But there is a level of stickiness that comes with that because no one wants to go from that. If they made the purchase decision for Augusta, it's harder for them to go to Billy Bob down the street, even if he's a little cheaper. And you raised your prices because they're now used of having a card on file. They're used of. On automation. They're used of having people in uniforms on their property. Like they don't want the status drop. People are afraid of status drops. So if they're in a community, they hate the status drop of having like uniformed decal painted trucks showing up and then all of a sudden the next week it's like little Billy Bob and his push mower coming down the street. Now some customers don't care. The more price sensitive ones typically or they have like their grandson doing it, whatever. But most people don't want to have that. So when we raise prices, we raised on $12 per week for weekly and $18 for bi weekly. So on average about $15 per cut. Like literally a price increase of like 25 to 35%.

Raised our minimum, raised our all the new prices, etc. So yeah, it'll. It'll only reflect in July's P L because we do it in June. We still bill end of the month.

Anyways. I can't remember what Bellingham was at its peak with recurring customers. I think it was like 370. I think, I think it was in the high 300 range. If I remember right, based on the interview, it sounds like Corey took over with mid-70s. Do you have a rough breakdown for where you gained the mowing customers back? According to max metrics, you're sitting at 310. Gained customer back because the business under new management, door hangers, Facebook ads, Google Ads. Roughly what would you say your marketing spend was to go from 70 ish recurring to 310 over the course of three to four months? Yeah. So like basically, you know, all the growth has happened because of new management. And a good general manager will make a val location good and. And a bad general manager will make a good location bad.

And so I have seen the both of both worlds in the past two years anyways.

In terms of it was the first time we started marketing really at the Bellingham location significantly this past spring.

Really for probably five years, six years almost. So we just did done for you ads. We didn't do a ton of. We didn't do door hanger campaigns. I know that for certain. We didn't do every door direct mail. We just did Facebook and Google. We spent between $3,000 and $5,000. If I remember correctly from the P&LS. I just get the reports. Oh, just so you know, I'm not coming to the Bellingham shop anymore. So for those that didn't watch the interview, I'm not going there once a week anymore. So you know, when, when you do that, as an owner, I do recommend making sure the compensation of your general managers is impacted so the general manager gets more profit sharing. Because now I'm completely stepped back and removed from the business. I'm off the chat, like all that sort of thing. So. But yeah, basically we didn't spend a ton. I would say this. Even if we had spent zero on marketing, we probably would have got 60 to 70% of those customers simply because of the brand. And we've been around for 10 years now and we're pretty big in this area. I would say for residential, like people see our trucks all over the place, etc. So that's what's nice about growing. You get more trucks, you get more employees, you get people rolling around. It's easier to find employees because you have the brand. It's easier to get customers without having to market. So yeah, we just had to dig ourselves out of that massive hole. And to do that, we did have to put some marketing juice into it. And it was just all done for you ads. I would say 90% of our budget was spent on just Facebook and Google Ads and obviously Google local services.

But I think that if it was any door hangers or anything else that we did, it was like one off, like five arounds, nine arounds from the crew, stuff like that.

So like, if we can retain. If we can go into next spring, say we lose them over the winter, if we can go into next spring with say 270, 280 and then do that again next spring in terms of adding those new customers, then we'll be good. We have to go into growth mode just to kind of get back to where we were last year. And then if we can stay doing that next spring because Corey's an OG and a hardcore amazing person.

Then we'll crush it. So it just one. You can, you can destroy a location in a matter of a couple months. It can take a couple years to rebuild it. So it's taken us basically a year to get back, but now with prices being where they're at, I'm very confident that it'll be growing profitably again. So, Coach Connor, in regards to collections, I've looked at liens as we get more serious into the collections process. However, I'm finding out 50% of people who do not pay our renters. Yep, you nailed it. That's why in the done for you ads, I'm targeting homeowners.

The homeowner has nothing to do with the renter paying their personal bills. Do you go ahead and with the lean or do I just go to the house and hold up a sign letting the neighbors know they don't pay their bills and they're stealing from me type of way? Lol. You could put a lean stone the property. It's gonna make the landlord mad and they'll. They can go after the.

The renter.

I wouldn't do this too much, just the reputation side of things.

But again, usually we overblow the how much we, you know, your reputation, how much everyone talks, etc. If someone was like to go blast you, it's like, well then pay your bills. But going after a third party because of their renter.

I don't know.

If you do collections and you damage the credit of the renter, that actually impacts renters quite a bit. Because the way that you get good lease is you have a high credit score. As a landlord, I'm happy to rent to someone and let them pay an extra $100 or $200 less per month if they have a stellar credit score and they make good income. So like the best tenants get, get the deals. Not necessarily whoever's paying willing to pay the highest. Like as a landlord, I've had people come in and say, I'll pay $500 more per month. And then you check their credit score and their income, and income is meh at best. And their credit scores walked all over, they've gone bankrupt, they haven't paid credit cards, etc. So yeah.

Kyle Tarvin is 75% efficiency score the baseline every employee should be able to hit for mowing. I have one guy that's struggling to hit times on mowing and is hovering around 75% efficiency on mowing, but he regularly gets 80 to 110% on projects. This is more of a pricing situation. It can be around efficiency too. But like, usually this is a pricing thing. There's difference between projects and mowing. Granted, others get around 80 to 90% on mowing, so he should be able to hit those scores too. If he's at 75, other people are 80 to 90. I wouldn't say he's way behind. This can be someone that is just a little bit slower on mowing. Slower on mowing is going to hurt you more in your efficiency score compared to projects where you're not in and out of the truck as much. So it could be a little something. But at 75% efficiency, I'm not gonna beat someone up because usually they're right above base pay and it's up to them. Like if they want to push harder your know they'll make more money because they're now above base pay probably by a couple bucks per hour. So if they want to go up to 90 now, they'll make 5 or 6 or $7 more per hour above base pay. So that's up to them. Like, I would just let it, let them figure that out. As long as they're above base pay, I really don't care because it's costing me the same amount. We don't have dedicated project crews, so this guy needs to be efficient on mowing as well as projects. But I don't think that will happen without daily prodding by myself. Would you be looking at moving this guy out if he cannot hit times and mowing? Given my situation, I wouldn't be moving someone out at 75%, especially if on projects that are 80 to 110%. It could also just mean that your pricing for projects is significantly higher. And when you raise prices next time on mowing, this, this immediately would get adjusted. Like if you literally just said, okay, we're now going to raise prices on mowing, all of a sudden he'd be hitting 90% plus on mowing. So this could be just a pricing difference between what you're charging on projects and what you're charging on mowing. This typically does happen at the end of spring rush because people will raise prices on projects as they book themselves far out and then the mowing lags behind because they don't want to have to like peel the band aid off on existing customers so they just go after the new customers that are coming in on projects and they'll raise prices there first. It's very common.

Alright. Hey. All right. Fantastic again if you missed the first little bit of the video, watch it back for the announcements. I will send an email out later today if not first thing in the morning with a recap of the announcements from the past few weeks of the Mike Minutes Mastermind. Love you all and we'll see you tomorrow. Take care.