Mike Minutes Mastermind 07/21/2023

Hey, everyone, hope you're doing super good. Let me go ahead and get this set up inside of Facebook. I'm just going to do some announcements, quite a few, actually, and then we will hop into a couple questions.

All right.

Add that to that playlist. One second.

Boom, save. All right, couple announcements. First one.

All it says on my list is Jaden's message. Let me just pull this up. Okay, so.

Just to everyone on the same page, slight change to command center's process regarding tickets and accepted services.

And so basically it is if someone changes their.

Their recurrence of mowing, we're not going to create a ticket for you. We're just going to simply make the change and put an office note. There's been. We've done it more in the past based upon, like, how important is this? Like, is it tomorrow? Whatever. We're just gonna make a standard across the board. So give us some time to train everyone at command center. But if someone changes recurrence, we're not going to make a ticket for you if you're using service autopilot. If it's a call note, you're probably in super right now because that's an automated process we don't have control over.

The next thing is if someone's.

If an estimate is one over the phone. We're also not going to create another ticket for you because you're already getting an email saying this estimate has been accepted. So what we will do, we will mark it as accepted and. And then we'll make an office note.

Stating that the estimate is accepted. Otherwise you're getting double. And so I know some people like it, but other people hate it. So we're just going to standardize it. And that is when estimate gets accepted. You are not going to get a ticket if they call in like, yep, I have. I want to accept this estimate. We mark it as accepted, and then we will make an office note saying that the estimate has been accepted. So a lot of the confusion will be wiped out. When at copilot, we can make what exactly we want, which in my opinion is we have call notes, we have customer notes, and we have office notes. So all of that to say, because call notes, I'm a big fan of making that an automated process. Like, so that way every call we can determine what you want to see and then you can determine if it's important or not. Very easily so. But all that say right now, if someone changes their recurrence or if they change, if they accept an estimate, we are not going to Make a ticket, we are going to make an office note and then if the estimate is accepted, you would get notified to be able to schedule the job, etc. All right, that was the first thing on my announcements. Second thing on announcements, make sure you edit, make edits to your website portal. There are quite a few locations right now that are especially the ones that have warm season grasses that are actually getting crazy busy right now. So they're the ones that need a limit leads, etc. Estimates. Make sure you go to the portal on the dashboard that says edit your web page. And from there you can add a banner that specifically tells customers like, hey, we're not accepting certain services. We're only allowing these certain types of estimates. And then actually when you do that, we will then change your lead request form to only have certain types of estimates or certain types of services. So it'll weed out like 60, 70, 80% of wasted time of people calling command center and either A, being refused or B, they submit the form. And then because it's like, okay, hey, it's mowing, or they want an in person estimate. Like we just process it. You're able to filter those out from ever getting to us. So you don't have to have to pay for someone to answer the phone or take an estimate request form that you're not even going to want. So highly recommend if you're limiting leads to make sure it's on the website with that banner and we have like four or five different variations. Like you can do it based upon, you know, labor shortage, you can do it based upon just overbooked. Like we have different banners you can put on there and then also changing what that request form actually looks like. So highly recommend you do that if you're trying to limit leads instead of just telling command center. Because if you just tell command center, they're still going to like get the customer's information and everything. And then they're like, oh, sorry, we aren't doing this right now. Or they're going to just simply schedule it because they see the lead request forms there. Um, and you, you don't even want that lead. So try to do it at the top of the funnel to prevent extra cost. So hope that makes sense.

In August we're going to be trying, we're going to do a slight test and like slowly roll it out. In August we will try to be putting AI at the top of the call log. What that means is like right now it is for like after hours if a call gets through or is. Mr. Somehow it would go to the AI. We're still training it, still improving it, but our goal is to put on above Command center because what it can do really well right now is leads, like new leads. It can do about 30 to 40% faster than someone at command center simply because it can get that data and then put it into a spreadsheet in a matter of a second, versus someone else having to type it out, et cetera. So it's going to save like 30 to 40% cost of over the phone estimates, for example. And so it saves dramatically more than that. But now the actual measuring of the property still has to be done. But 30 to 40% is still the savings that we're seeing. So.

What it's going to do, though, is if it's something that is not a lead and that initial, like, what can I help you do? It's not like I want an estimate or I want a quote or I need my mowing done or it determines its lead. If it doesn't do that, it's simply going to say, okay, let me go ahead and get you to get forward you to the department that can help you do that and immediately can come to command center and they can help them. We think that's going to help with a lot of the issues we currently have, which is customers get frustrated by the fact that there isn't any, like, there's no way to escalate it. There's no way to, like, I need this done now. I got to talk to somebody immediately. There's no way to get through max right now. Just a matter of like, well, we'll get back to you as soon as possible. I'm going to go ahead and escalate this. But there is no way to actually break through to command center and get like, you know, something like a refund or something. They're super mad or whatever. So by putting at the top, what we can do is be able to service 30, 40% of the calls, which is leads, and then only the other ones get through the command center. So it should lead to a lot of savings in terms of just amount of time that is required. And it's gonna be super helpful for us as we go into August because command center is going to need to retrain everyone on copilot. And so we have a whole lot of time that we're gonna have to spend retraining everyone here. And so we're gearing up for that. So it's gonna give us time to do that while also saving time of just minutes on the phone. And so this is the first step, the AI part that will actually, I believe, save people quite a few minutes on the phone. The next big thing I'm like, eyeing is late next spring, and that is being able to replace having to do estimate creation. It usually only takes two to four minutes per estimate to create it and, like, put the numbers together, use the estimate calculator, all the. All the rest of it. But in copilot, once we have price matrices and then we're able to make it useful on a mobile device, we should be able to replace that completely. And yes, it'll take you an extra 30 seconds maybe to make the estimate on your phone, but you're already typing that up. So replacing the typing now with more of a dropdown and menus for your pricing is what will allow us to eliminate that completely. And currently that's about 25 to 30% of everyone's bill at command center. So my hope is that by this time next year, everyone has switched over and we're able to completely move away from that. So that would be super helpful.

Cool. What else we got? That's all for announcements. All right, let's jump into question. See here. Questions, questions, questions.

It won't pop in here. Will there be any support staff, command center on site for conference in October to help again like there was in January? We will see. It's gonna be a little bit harder with us being virtual in terms of, like, computers and things like that, but we will figure something out if at the very worst it is you bringing your own computer, like, bring your own device.

But we will figure that out. We have lots of meetings about conference coming up. We really are focused on transition. We got trained, you know, 30, 40, 50 people at command center over to Copilot right now. So that's our focus. But we do have meetings coming up here in August for.

Conference stuff. So that'll be definitely a topic. And we will try to do our best to make something happen. It will probably be a bring your own device situation since we are traveling with the whole team. All right, let's see what we got here. Two questions. First one.

Devin from Red Deer, thoughts on Hermosi's EBITDA scaling? I do not have thoughts on that. Number two, Brian Connor from Augusta, Georgia. What percentage of the ERC tax judge we saved for tax purposes will be taxed on the actual credit, or will the amount be reduced from our expenses that we have to write off the current year in which we receive the funds? Great question. You will not be taxed on the balance. If you have other expenses, it's going to be treated as other income, right? So if you have a loss on paper of $80,000 and you get a, you know, $100,000 credit, you're not paying 100,000. You're not going to pay tax on 100,000. It's going to be considered as other income against the negative 80,000. So consider it like other income, essentially. And then whatever that amount becomes at the bottom of your P and L will become the amount that you pay tax on the end of the year. So I would recommend keeping 40% of it set aside for taxes. If you're profitable in your business. If you're not profitable in your business or you're doing expansion or you're buying equipment, or you could do a bunch of.

1031 or not 1031. I always say that.

The.

The write off of all the equipment at the end of the year. If you can do that, then, then you won't even have to pay any taxes on it. Just tree the other income. But I highly recommend using it for buying equipment, trucks, stuff that you can write off in this calendar year so you don't, don't have to pay any tax on. That's why last year I did the four new locations in North Carolina. Cause I had a good chunk of money from that. Number two. We are currently thinking about adding a dedicated training role at our Augusta location for next spring rush. We have had a couple of experienced team members that we think could be a good candidate. We currently have a handful of team members that would need some dedicated training if we were to send them solo or with another less experienced team member.

We plan on growing the Augusta location by at least one full truck and will and will be onboarding new team members next year. Would you recommend doing this? If so, what would your compensation, budget, hour requirements and expectations look like? Our thinking beyond this behind this is that I'm super busy with estimates. Jeremy is busy with keeping our equipment and trucks and production scheduling client employee needs. And we do not have a good return on money when asking our team to do training. What is Bellingham going to do for training? I like this. I also like the idea of having someone dedicated to doing something like weeding or like initial mows. Right. So all of these ideas are good. It's a matter of churn. So for example, if you get someone as the trainer and you like designated them, it's like, this is what we're going to do and they leave and that gets thrown out the window really fast because now you're in the middle of spring rush, you don't have a trainer, and you're going to do exactly what you're doing now, which is default to, okay, experienced team members. Who are they and who can I put in their truck? And I'm going to use the trainer bonus inside of P4P to compensate them. And so either a, you have someone who's been with you for a very long time, you know they're not going anywhere and you do something like a trainer designated trainer, that's fine. Just make sure that their standards are your standards. Because if everyone's going to be trained based upon their standards, you better make sure that's exactly what you're looking for. The same thing goes for like why I would really like to have a dedicated weeding person, for example, at Bellingham, because that's where we get a lot of yellow slips. It's great. That's exactly what we should be doing. The problem is like you hire that person in the middle of beginning of spring, they last for two, three months, then they leave. And now you don't have notes on any of these customers properties of like specific things that this one person knew. So you have to be very careful about that. I'm not saying you shouldn't do it, you should, like in the perfect world you do. But make sure you get like job notes, et cetera, for something like that for the trainer, I would just make sure that everyone knows the trainer document, for example. So if that person leaves that there's redundancy and you can have more experienced guys still serve as the trainer. And I would recommend, you know, maybe you take a, a team meeting and you go over the packet and the checklist for a trainer and a trainee and what that looks like so that in the event that that trainer leaves, you do have people that know how that works, what it's supposed to look like, et cetera.

And then in terms of bonus like, like what you're paying them, I would just use the trainer bonus. And if you want to increase that, you can. And if you want to, on P4P, you could lock in the trainer bonus. Instead of making a manual adjustment to P4P, you could make it a manual adjustment to their pay payroll bonus, which basically would lock in a four dollar or whatever you're paying for trainer bonus per hour increase to their base pay. Essentially that's what you're doing. So if you want to guarantee it, you could do that as an incentive for them.

But it's just, again, if you're going to do that, just realize they're going to be slower at training than if you just make that manual adjustment against their P4P. And they're incentivized still by speed or more so, I should say. All right, everyone, have a fantastic weekend. Happy Friday, and we'll see you guys next week. Take care.