Mike Minutes Mastermind 07/27/2023

What's up, August Nation? Hope you're doing super well. Sorry it's a little bit late today during the Mastermind. As I posted in the Facebook group, I am doing a turnaround out in Alabama, and so so far, not so great because I skunked out on interviews today. So I really got to pick it up tomorrow. One thing I would say, if I noticed tonight when I posted the ad up again, is putting in the careers link, the careers page link, and then telling people that they can watch what other other team members say about working at Augusta. The two applicants I got tonight have been pretty good. So just a kind of a word there.

About that. There's like, I think 20 or 30 on there now of team members at Augusta Nation talking about working there. So definitely put that to use. We put it right at the top of the careers page now. Testimonials. And yeah, based on what I saw from today to like yesterday when I posted late last night, I got several this morning. Got five interviews, Three of them. Wait, was it. Two of them didn't show up. One of them was late. One of them had not enough experience, and the other one didn't have wanted health benefits. There you have it. I skunked out. Very humbling. Not good. So I've got to pick it up tomorrow. Gotta get at least one employee. Hoping for two, but gotta get one. But I did notice that night you're not using that. Definitely recommend that. All right, let's jump into questions. Oh, I got posts in the Facebook group. One second.

Give me one second. Let me just refresh this and put this into Facebook so I don't forget.

Copy.

We spoke.

Okay.

Sorry. Slow Internet has been the bane of my existence the past 24 hours. Turns out the place I was doing my interviews didn't have any Verizon cell service. Therefore, I can't do my hotspot. Like, what in the world? So I couldn't call or text my applicants right before showing. They supposed to show up like an hour before. It was horrible. All right, we're live. Let's go. Present Share Screen.

Chad Williams, Valparaiso, Indiana. I'm in the process of changing my mowing routes in Super. I will need to delete all the future jobs and add the new ones. I know this is a good time to switch to Copilot. It's possible. It's a tutorial on how to do so feel free to look up Copilot the calendar. I talked about it in the roundtable and then I posted it on the Facebook group. In terms of when you can switch over.

You'Re gonna have to wait a little bit longer to switch over. If you want Command center answering your phone. Command center will not be ready for anyone to switch over.

Until October. So October 1st is when if you want to switch over, you can. I might be able to push that sooner into September, but I have to get up one from. I just came for training. They're going to get onboarded in starting in September 1st and then I potentially will open it up after that. So feel free to look at the roundtable or that chart and walk through the timetable of when you can switch over.

Yeah, I like. Super. Once you grow past 15,000amonth in revenue, it's falling apart, honestly, especially the invoicing and yeah, it's. It's a joke. Even today when I was working out here in Alabama, it's just horrible. It's a joke. So I, I apologize for that.

And yeah, and they didn't. They. They were actually. They actually want to integrate with copilot. They've already requested that they do that. They don't have any problem with Copilot. They just don't work well as a CRM. Honestly. They have really pivoted towards being more of a work.

I like a manage project management tool. So yeah, they honestly just cut their. All their dev, all their support. Everything got cut last year.

Anyways. Jojo Moore Cherry Hill, New Jersey we are finally getting our. Our density down where we can park the truck and do multiple properties at once. Obviously the most efficient way is to mow edge blow same time. So they are working on multiple properties at the same time. How do we work that? Counting hours for PVP and tracking purposes. In case I'm not clear, we basically clock in and out of one of two properties then just close the other when we are done and take the average. Is that the right way to do it or something? There's something better in terms of actually calculating P for P.

It doesn't matter. Great. Because they're completing revenue. It doesn't matter. Tracking. There is. I have no. I have not seen any software do this, do this very well. And honestly I don't know if CR Copilot will be able to. It's very difficult to do this without just making a manual process every single time. So it has to be a manual process. You have to. You have to take that time and divide it out. So for now I would just say treat it that way. Like treat the. You'd be able to tell if like those three or Four properties combined were way over budget hours and then you'd probably assess them more as a combined unit. I know it's not the perfect answer, but there's just from a tracking perspective, there's no way to do it automatically. It's going to be a manual process of adjusting them or tracking them separately, which is like you said, if you're doing all the edging and then all the blowing, etc. Very difficult.

Dylan works from Boise. Have you ever looked into marketing on Craigslist for customers? Last year I'll. That's all I did. I built up 15 million customers in three months. Was super effective, but never got around to updating my ad. So wondering if you guys have anything. We don't have any specific ads for Craigslist. I do know in some markets has worked well especially for yourself like Dylan and others that are younger people are going in there and they're looking for kind of a cheaper person. And especially in your first year and price is something that you're going to be really competitive on. Like the location I'm at right now, you know, for example, in a year and a half got 300 mowing customers. Well now turn. We don't have any of. We're just taking OTP mowing. That's it. And we're cutting out a whole bunch of jobs and we're raising prices. Great. Fantastic.

The trouble that we have here is we have scaled our infrastructure and our assets to basically be able to.

Have double the amount of revenue that's currently taking place. So either what happens in this time is either a, you have to grow and expand into the assets that you've purchased and the debt that you have because you've bought all this stuff or two, you optimize for what you have and then you sell off assets that you don't need. Right. And I don't mind me saying it's like maybe we don't need two big shop days. Right. Maybe we don't need six, five trucks. Maybe we only need three. Right. Because we know that at three we can do 45, 50,000amonth in revenue and then we can. We were now raising all the prices. They command center was raising everyone's price by $7 and 12 if they're under $40, 40, $40 weekly cut, it was $7 weekly, $12 BI weekly. If their price is above $40 per cut for weekly and we were charging them $10 and $15 weekly and BI weekly effectively increase across the board for 240 or so the customers they'd already raised recently on 60 of them. So if you are in that place where you're trying to scale up and getting all the customers, great, using Craigslist, that's your market. Is someone going on the craziness? You're going to be that tier buyer. Your first year might be something you want to look at. There are definitely markets where I've seen Craigslist be the go to place for homeowners like Google would be almost. Just keep in mind if you let that scale and then you mapped your assets to it, if you ever come down off of that, you're going to have this big gap. And remember all of your profits are sitting between where your current capacity is or current revenue is at and where your at your highest capacity is at. And so just be careful of that. And so this is kind of what we are dealing with here in the current turnaround. Altar Moore, Oklahoma do you keep our past coaching scorecards somewhere in a drive so we can view them from previous months? If you have a if you've sent your scorecard into your coach, they will attach it to the visit or the coaching call and the notes they have for that coaching call, they will attach that as a picture.

Yes.

Kevin South, Mississippi Is the ice bath Chill pods a fad or can does really help with brain health, recovery and health? It just depends who you talk to.

I think if I if you take a cold shower, you know, a lot of people swear by it. I'll take cold showers occasionally. Definitely get your blood pumping, get your adrenaline going. Definitely as a switch to go from, you know, have you know, sleeping and then they have a cold shower like really hard. I think it'd be equivalent of kind of like having a cup of coffee, but just depends. You talk to, you know, the ice bath, whole thing. I don't know, things like this kind of come go like saunas and then people do chirotherapy, people do meditation. Like it kind of comes and goes right?

Same thing with like certain types of drugs that become mainstream, like super popular. And then like 10 years go by it's like oh, like that's causing all sorts of side effects and all the rest of it. So.

Dustin and champagne is part of the reason for doing some of the traveling condo testing systems, everything in Bellingham cc, the gym shop, etc. I remember this being a suggestion as I looked into a second location. Leave for a week or two and let the GM run things as kind of a trial. Oh no, definitely not. I honestly can stay connected pretty much. I'd say 80% of what I am in person, I do when I'm gone. And so it's kind of this year. It's pretty much built that way. Almost like if you look at my schedule, most of my schedule is zoom calls in the evening with the, like late at night with the dev team. And then like those are usually the ones that are.

Overseas. And then, you know, early morning I'll do phone calls sometimes that I don't want to take at the office if it's like some sensitive, something sensitive and then just a bunch of zoom calls. So like I can kind of do them wherever. It's like today I did zoom calls while between interviews like that. So it's definitely not like I'm trying to test the gym or anything. Like the gym, for example, I go there less than 30 minutes a week on Tuesdays. Lindsay's awesome. She's in the office. Heather, there's another Heather, Sierra. They're all awesome.

And then the Bellingham shop. Lee is the kind of regional manager. Corey is the general manager. Same thing with my locations in North Carolina. Whenever you do that, you're going to have lower margins, right? So you're going to have a lower margin in take home distributions. Whenever you start getting to the point where you literally are not needed and things actually improve when you're gone. And it takes a long, long time to get there. I think.

People forget just how long it takes to get there. I would say this is probably my first year where I could confidently say those things all run well and get better without me being there. And it's been nine years or almost. We're coming up on 10 years of Augusta being in, in, in operation. It's like everyone's trying to do it so fast, honestly. And even I look at locations like everyone that submitted for the.

Turnaround, almost every single one was in, was in the past 12 months has grown massively. Massively. Not a single one.

Let me think there might have been one that had not grown by like at least 30 to 50% in the past 12 months. And so when I look at that, I think about my first few years. Like I thought I was growing pretty quickly, but my goodness, there's some people that are laughing. My first three years in their first year, which is great. Just don't expect it to be like a breeze. It's gonna be really, really hard to extend. Expand your, your asset capacity is going to cost a lot of money. To expand your labor capacity high enough when you're growing that fast is going to lead to waste. It's also going to lead to you stretching yourself as a leader, like massively. And that was the biggest thing I saw on the people that submitted for turnarounds, like the struggle with management, the struggle with people. And every single one of those people have grown massively in the past 12 to 18 months. And so.

I think most people would die for the life they would have in 10 years if they could see into the future of what 10 years does.

For what they're giving up now. And.

Most people will never get to that 10 year picture because they give up in years one through three. Especially even four and five can be tough.

But I just consistently see that all the time. And I truly believe, like, I would get, I would have gave up in years four and five. Like, I want to do a lot. I didn't have anything else. I had to prove everyone wrong in one sense because I had given up on medical school and people thought I was an idiot for doing that. So I had to go make Augusta lawn care work. And you know, I think in, in a lot of situations.

I thought about from two angles. One, did I stick with it because I didn't have much to lose. Like, I didn't have. Have to provide for anyone. But a secondary.

That.

I wonder if we quit.

Even more pressure.

Family. And if you have a spouse and kids especially this is supportive. And then a year goes by, a year and a half goes by, two years go by and it's like you're growing a bunch, but you're stressed out, you're working a lot and there's not a lot of distributions in terms of profitability. I can totally see how much pressure and stress that would create in excess of what even I felt. The pressure I was, was I have nothing else I can do but have. I have to go down that, Like, I have to, I have to do this, have to become successful at this thing.

And technically I, I could have done, you know, I had lots of options. I could have gone back to school, I could have switched industries. I could have done something else. But I promise you, I would never have thought five years ago that I'd be doing what I'm doing now.

Right?

Like.

Software and all this other stuff. The first five years. Hell, well, I just lost. I dropped out there for a second. Hell, like literally hell no frauds working like crazy, mostly in the field. Incredible pain.

Painful man, keeps cutting out. Sorry. But the, but the evidence of success has ramped up, right? Like, like finally we're getting somewhere here. And so I think Most people would, will give up in the first five years. And if they would just, just realize that spending the next five years on that same thing is going to lead to much greater returns than going and spending five more years on something else. And so I just really, really believe that. And so when I ask, when people talk to me now, they're like, well, what are you in the next 10 years? I'm like, well, if you use that same logic, logic. And that is that the first five years I saw very little amounts of trajectory towards growth or success. And in the next five years I see a much rising. Why in the world would I stop doing that? Why would I go after the next shiny thing.

When like the same thing will likely happen as it compounds next five years and five years after that? And that's why you look at companies like Panda Express. The owner, him and his wife own every single Panda Express. They're not franchised. They own every single one.

They have owned that business for like 35 years.

And the vast majority of all their successes in the past 10 years, as they begin to get a lot of leverage in debt and really grow and scale it up.

But they just serve rice and chicken like it's not fancy, but just doing over and over and over and over again over the course of time. And then all of a sudden, all of that experience and all of that compounded return of, of capital as you invest back in this, invest back into this, and then you start to release back off of that and you have some leverage. That's when you start to like, oh, like this makes sense. And that's why I think this is in every single pasty of life, whether it be relationships, education, like when I was in, in school and like, I thought I was gonna become a doctor, right? So like the same passion and like whatever I have for like technology now and lawn care and stuff, it was all about like science and things. So I would study which professors and which people in the lab for the best. And I always wanted to have the. I chose my professors based upon who is the best in the lab because I want, I love the lab. Like, I was, I could spend hours in the lab. And so I had a lot of research on multiple sclerosis and all sorts of stuff. The lab was where I wanted to be at and I felt like I could do something there.

And so I looked at who was the best and it was consistent of people that.

Could throw themselves into something for days, weeks and years and obsess over it and not get bogged down with the fact that 90% of the time, if you look back, is a waste. The 10% is incremental progress to something that, in time, starts to compound. And.

So I just think we'll give up way too soon. Including myself. I still have nights where I'm, like, nervous. Last night I was nervous because I don't sleep very much. I've said this before. Like, when I'm laying in bed, I get really nervous about stuff I'm still nervous about, like, this. This truck thing that happened in North Carolina because, like, the lawsuit's not finalized. Like, who knows what that's going to be?

There's all sorts of question marks, right? We're restructuring. Restructure command center. Not restructure, but, like, put things in place. So that way, by end of 2024, like, so a year and a half, I can really have Liz be more or less my executive assistant. Not like a personal assistant, like an executive assistant, which is like, when I want to hire five people in an apartment, like, hey, go, please do that. Like, there's a new initiative. Like, I have someone I can just turn to. There's a whole lot of stress around that. I hate having to redo leadership in any org because there's an element of risk that comes into play with that. And there's a shifting of culture when you change a leader.

So there's always stresses, right? And, you know, then you start thinking, like, oh, man, like, this one truck, it getting, you know, damaged like this. And someone. What if someone got killed? And then I would have been sued millions of dollars instead of what I'm now. And.

You know, I don't know what that is, by the way. So if you're wondering, just FYI, but, like, that'll keep you up at night. And.

Yes, growth and expansion, becoming bigger is fun and exciting. But just remember, like, it opens yourself up a lot more liability and a lot more ways that you could be hurt. And so don't romanticize it too much. Just come to grips with the fact, like, hey, this is what I have today. This is what I have in my hands. I'm going to stick to it and keep working on it and keep refining it. I'm not going to get distracted. There is not a single thing in my brain right now that I'm trying to start anything new. This is, like, I know exactly what I should be doing, and I should be focusing on the next several years, and that is keep growing Augusta, keep refining the systems and build it with technology. That's it. There's no new thing. There's nothing going to be added. There's no big thing that I'm going to. I'm just going to keep doing the same thing and all the steps I've been taking over the past five years, I just need to keep doing the exact same thing.

And for most people, especially entrepreneurial, that's very hard place to get to because we constantly like new things.

But when you look back and you see the trajectory of doing the same thing over and over and just how repeatable that success is, you start to fall in love with that process instead of falling in love with the new shiny thing, which is extremely alluring, especially as you start your. Your entrepreneurial journey. So. All right. That was all I got for today. All right, everyone, have a fantastic day. I hope I sleep better tonight and we'll see you tomorrow. Or Saturday. I might do Saturday because tomorrow I have to find an employee. I have. Let's see here.

Let'S see here, let's see here. I'll share my thing. Share. Where's my share? Share present. All right, this is what I got for tomorrow. I got. I haven't looked at indeed for the past little bit. Can I share my window? I'll share my whole window. Okay. There's anything private, just pretend like it wasn't here. Okay?

Okay.

Last.

Sorry.

Anyways. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. I have seven offered 1, 2, 3, 4 have confirmed. Now I'm going to check my indeed and see if people. More people have confirmed. Are you going to do more turnarounds within August in the future? I would hope so. We can kind of make economical sense of it by using it on the media side. But it is extremely helpful for me to get in and see exactly how people are using the systems and where they're falling apart. Every single person that I am planning on doing turnarounds has not been their coaching calls. That is not good. One really good way statistically to stay out of having turnaround to do your coaching calls. Just saying. So.

Look, I'm not even going to bring it up on to these people necessarily, but everyone should be taking notes of who I am doing these to turnarounds on and doing different. Like see. See what you can do differently? See what got them there? Right. It's not necessarily bad. Like where I'm at now, that grew massively, extremely fast. Literally doing what I did in year three, they aren't. They're doing like that this year. 50 plus revenue in month and revenue like I didn't even touch that until year three or four when I got started. So kudos, but there's a lot of stress that comes with that. Leadership assets required.

But you know, coaching calls have been done for six months and the one that was, was 911 status to it to a coach.

The metrics on the board haven't been filled out since March or April. Right. And so I do know that in stage three you're going to have some waste. So I talk about when you grow from 200,000 to 500,000, you're going to have some waste because you've got to get through it quickly. But.

There'S a difference of growth and control versus growth that was strained and then leading to a crash. And so.

I am going to do more turnarounds. That would be the goal. And I hope that as I do them, you all are taking notes. I'm doing this mostly for all, all of us to have documented. I, my goal is this.

So I did the starting thing in South Park. So anyone starting, there's your 30 day roadmap. Okay. To get basically to two people like a GM and an employee or you and an employee laid it out for 30 days.

You do massive amounts of action, lots of down, you know, times when you're down, you gotta keep going, you gotta try whatever it is, you gotta keep pounding the pavement. You got to do it, you got to do whatever it takes. Now I'm showing locations that are in that middle, like stage three and four. The ones that have grown a lot, they've done exactly I did the first 30 days, but they started to go off. And I want to show what, what is needed to correct it. And I want it to be where I can do these. And it almost becomes painful to all of you to see this exact same thing over and over and over and over and over again of where the failures are. It's way easier to identify issues.

Businesses than your own 100. There's some fat. Oh, what's it called? There's some study around this. I forget what it's called. Where basically you can see problems in everyone else's life, business, etc. And take it apart and give them great advice. When it comes to your own business, your own relationship, your own physical health, whatever, you just fell apart. And my hope is that you see this enough now you start seeing and you guys know how it should be going, you know how the system should be followed, you know how coaching calls should go, you know what the stages of growth are and what the recommendations are in every single one and I hope that it. It prevents you from making the same mistakes as you go into these stages of growth or you're tempted to go at a certain rate of speed that potentially could lead to failure.

So that is the goal. So I think if I can do these, you know, get five or 10 of these over the next couple years that I do, and we put these all together, that it should be undeniable what works, and it should be. Do you see it from the outside and know exactly what someone should be doing? You don't need me to say it. You don't even need a code. You know exactly what to say, what you should be doing.

So that's what we're doing. All right, guys, have a fantastic day. We'll see you soon. Bye. From Alabama. It's very hot here. Way too hot. 98 degrees day with a bunch of humidity. Not fun trying to hire people like you guys want to go out and mow at this? Not fun either.