Mike Minutes Mastermind 07/12/2023

Nation over. Doing super well. I try to do this pretty quickly because I do have training. Again.

I apologize to everyone that I accidentally sent the Q1 recording for Roundtable instead of Q2 invite. I resent it. Last night you should all have an invite for the roundtable for next week. So sorry about that.

I sent it to half. Half the franchise, the correct one and half you guys got the wrong one. So if you did not get the invite last week for Q2's roundtable, which is coming up next week, you got it last night in your inbox. So I apologize for that. I basically cooked the wrong email template when I was sending it out to everyone. All right, let's go ahead and jump in.

Do some questions. Well, yeah. And at the. At the roundtable next week, I will announce the new Franchise Advisor Council. And.

You still have till the end of this week though to put those in if you have not submitted your ballot. Nick from Mary's Mill, did you coordinate with Patrick Lawn Pro going at specific time and then marketing to his clients during that time to switch to Copilot? If so, that's genius. Definitely did not do that. Someone else said the same similar thing. I'm assuming it's like our automations going out through Zapier. But no, we did not coordinate anything. It was really, really bad, actually. What happened? Their servers basically got shut down as a security violation because of the fact that he has a international team. And so it's a good thing that happened to them and not us because what I'm going to do is basically switch over all of our servers at Copilot because of that.

One second here. Yeah, so we have a lot of people around the country, around the world too, working on Copilot. So it's very scary that all of a sudden they just decided that they're going to move servers on him and they didn't listen to him being like, this is very normal and it's very strange. And they haven't like, they've been very uncommunicative. So we are going to move all of our stuff over to the aws. AWS is sort of the benchmark for the industry. Everyone's on it. So if we go down and it would be like Facebook and the likes are also going down because they're all running on aws. So we're going to switch over to that much larger servers by the end of July. So it was kind of a good, like warning to us, honestly. Max from Burnaby, would you raise prices across the board in September for mowing customers by $5 per weekly or would you wait until May, April or May next spring? I wouldn't raise now in July because I'm afraid it would would likely to a lot of people pausing service for summer. It really comes down to are you hitting capacity? Right? So if you're hitting one of your either.

Employee capacity or you're hitting your truck and equipment capacity, then I would be raising it honestly, regardless of the timing of the year. Now if you're confident that your capacity is not going to be over extended from now till September because like September starts to tick back up in your market, then I would probably wait till till September. It's a better time to raise prices in this in your market because the demand is goes back up. So I would probably wait till to September if I had to pick between July and September. I would also say though if you're hitting capacity is the determining factor of when to raise prices is more so than the timing of the year. Like we raised prices in the middle of June before, which is not a great time in our market to raise prices. But it's like if, if you can't get, if you can't get enough team members, you're at max capacity. Everyone's working crazy hours, you're booked out four weeks, your close ratio is still 40, 50% like you're going to raise prices. So that's what we've done before. So I would, I would look at more from a capacity standpoint. Max from burn B. Aside from one click estimates, do you have any suggestions for increasing lead flow at this time of year? Honestly.

I would say doing door hangers for project based work. So property cleanups and mulch installs and doing door hangers having a price, having two, maybe three different price ranges that you pick from as you go up to the house. And don't write on every single door hanger, it's a waste of time. Have a few that you have ready to go hang those up. That's a great recommendation especially to keep the crew busy if that's like a big concern of yours. If you sell a property cleanup and a mulch install to someone at their house, you might also get their mowing by the way too. And it's a 7, 800 job which is like the equivalent of getting almost someone's mowing for the entire year on like a bi weekly service. So I would definitely be doing that. Property cleanups and mulch installs. Low hanging fruit. Almost every house needs them. Kyle Tarvin Moore, Oklahoma I'm in talks with a well off family member to get a 10k loan to purchase a truck for the business. Currently details are 36 month term. They're open to longer or shorter terms. 2.5 fixed rate. I'm thinking this is a no brainer, especially since we need another vehicle. There's going to be a signed contract in place. I figured I would make payments on this out of my business account. Am I overlooking something?

I'm not a huge fan of doing like the loan thing with the family.

But if in terms of like the loan it looks great, yeah, 2.5. Right now I would be getting as much debt as I possibly get it. If someone offered me, I'd be getting as much debt as I possibly can at 2.5% right now.

So yeah, in terms of a loan. Great. You just gotta weigh out the fact that it's done with a family member and make sure that it's going to. You know, you ultimately have to ask yourself if this goes to zero, is. Is my family's. Is the relationship with the family or the. Or the loan more important? You gotta have a determining factor because just like planning for all outcomes which by the way the. Speaking of interest inflation came in really good this morning which is expected down under 5%. Again.

Very positive sign for the economy.

Max Harwood first question. Throughout spring we were averaging 100 budget hours per week. I have. I had three employees and helped as needed. With summer, things are trending towards 70 budget hours per week. I have one employee leaving at the end of July. Should I hold off on hiring and help more in the field or is there something else I should be spending my time on? Part of me feel like there's a natural ebb and flow to lawn care. I need to be okay when things are slower. Another part of me wants to ensure that I'm making the most out of each opportunity regardless of the season. Second question. Last year we grew 120% year over year. This is our second year with Augusta and we've only grown 20 to 30% year over year. We still spent on advertising this spring approximately $3,000 per month. Do you think I'm doing something wrong? Employees have been better this year and overall things have been smooth operationally. Lots of positive Google reviews, mostly recurring work. People seem to see our vans a lot. Not sure what the issue is. I could give a. Give more info and a different question if it is helpful. In my personal opinion, if you're spending $3,000 a month right now, I think that cannot be beat by Hiring someone to do door hangers, I just can't. I do not see any marketing platform that can beat this out.

And so what I would be saying in terms of, to answer your question, this is my thing. If you have 70 budget hours, you could fill your two employees them full time, no problem. That would be full time for two employees, then there'd be nothing for you to do. What I would potentially try doing is, because what you could also do is give them 25 to 30 budget hours a week and then you hop out and kind of work as well. That would work just fine. And I think once you get past 12, 16 months in your business.

Spending huge amounts of money on marketing in terms like ads, a lot of your leads, I bet you are coming from your one click estimate, emails, people seeing your trucks, referrals, people seeing these reviews online, etc.

And what I would say is right now in terms of like the slower season is I would test one week where you went out for 30 hours in the week and did door hangers for pro project based work, mulch and property cleanups and see if you can't close 30 budget hours a week worth of work to basically average back up to that hundred. Now you're not going to be on the field anymore. So let's just say 20. If you could close 20 budget hours a week, that's all you need. That is literally two cleanups. And like they're two accepted jobs from door hangers. And I just don't see a world I haven't seen any data points me to believe that if you did 30 hours worth of door hangers, you could not get two accepted projects that have a mulch install and a property cleanup. And so when you start breaking down the math of what you need per for in terms of budget hours per week to stay busy throughout these some like month or two of slower seasons. And for a lot of it's July and August when it gets really, really hot in some of our markets when we slow down in terms of of mowing, I just truly believe that time can be spent with either the owner or the manager spending 10, 15, 20, 30 budget 30 hours a week out in the field doing door hangers to fill that gap during that period of time.

And I, I think you're going to get mowing customers too. If you do the combo door hangers you're going to get some of those customers will actually convert into mowing because they're not happy with their service, etc. Devin Sheridan from Red Deer what's the best email address to use for personal accounts. I want one that stands out as professional and is the best. So CC can use my gusta and then I have a better one than Gmail. Any thoughts? I still personally think Gmail is the best. I don't have any. Or Gmail, Outlook, et cetera, like either Microsoft or Google. The reason is because their, their ability to be able to.

To work inside of a suite of products like Google. Gmail works right inside of Google Drive. It works like across the board in a lot of security perspectives. Um, there's like Superhuman. There's a few other email providers that are like paid services and most of it's around secure, around privacy. And honestly like I. There's nothing I do that like I think is so high, incredibly important that no one can see it or like that I'm doing anything criminal. So I think I would rather just stick with Gmail because it's universally accepted. It works well with Gmail or the G suite. And then if you're using, if you like Microsoft better and you don't like Google, you know, just use Outlook and Microsoft 365. That'd be my definite recommendation. Especially because these email providers come and go so fast. There are so many people that have built these on the. But it's extremely difficult to get someone to pay five, ten dollars a month for a service that is completely free and phenomenal in the terms of Gmail and Outlook. And yes, they're scraping all of your emails to be able to know exactly what to send you, give you in terms of ads. I could care less. So you know, if Mark Zuckerberg or any of these other guys want to see read my emails, go at it. There's just nothing I'm hiding and there's nothing so highly secure that I can't have anyone see it. So. All right everyone, I'm gonna go do training. I forgot to post this link in here. Give me one second and I'll have it done. Boom.

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

You might have seen also at Copilot we made some cool updates yesterday in terms of dispatcher notes and the ability to do indefinite recurring visits. So that way you no longer need to pause the visits for the off season and then restart them in the spring. You should just be able set up one time as well as the dispatcher notes you'll see on the dispatch board. It's very similar to what 737 Max has on theirs. So cool. All right guys, have a great day and we'll see you tomorrow.