Mike Minutes Mastermind 08/02/2024

Hello, guestination. Let's get started.

Hope everyone's doing amazing. Happy Friday. Let's get rolling right into questions. Looks like we got five this morning.

Last day of training here for the new owners. About 20 people here this week.

Doing a new process today for graduating from Augusta Nation in the training. So that'll be fun. And this will be the first group that has their six weeks of zoom calls with their cohort with Nick, owner Success manager.

All right, let's get started. Oh, on that note, that whole idea of like getting those onboarding calls is was from the.

Surveys that were sent out a couple months ago, I guess probably three or four months ago now. And so I think it's a command center. We'll have a representative on there in addition to having.

Owner success manager on there. And so probably within the next couple weeks we'll probably get another survey. So lots of changes made based upon last.

Last survey. And so thank you to everyone that filled those out and you'll probably get another one in a few weeks.

Kyle Tarvin, do you have an idea on what customer acquisition cost would be for Christmas light customers if we were to run Google Ads? We've never tracked this before and I'm working our budget for ad spend for lights this year. Yeah, like from what I've seen because I also have not collected lots and lots of data. This the only data I have is like I think about five or six Christmas lights websites that we we built at home service web design.

You know, you're looking at anywhere between 100 to $200 that dramatically decreases for like a week or two of time when everyone wants it. So it's again extremely seasonal.

Fortunately it's outside of our regular mowing season, so that's why it's good for us. But it's extremely seasonal and so your customer acquisition cost is like going to dramatically be affected based upon like right after Thanksgiving. But again, I haven't not collected enough data to actually like know that for certain. But from what little data I have collected, that's what I've seen. So Joel from Lafayette, Colorado for holiday lights, I've heard to use a much lower revenue percentage for PVP because of the material cost. If CC handles our payroll, will they take care of updating the percentage for holiday lights job cards like they do with locations that use 40% mowing in the spring or is there something we have to adjust on our own? What you could do, Joel, is you could just adjust the for p hourly rate inside of copilot on the items and Services to be half. So I'd probably do Christmas lights similarly to treatments where half of it is considered labor revenue. So effectively, you'd be giving about 16% or so of labor to of revenue to the employees because you're giving basically half of the revenue considered for projects. So if you're charging $100 an hour, typically I would probably go into copilot and just change the P4P rate to $50 per hour. And then that way it come across over to P4P software already with the changes instead of having to make an additional rate every single time Christmas lights are involved. That'd be my recommendation. Same thing with, like chemical treatments in general. If you have the sync on with copilot, I would just change the P4P rate to be half of what you typically charge. So that way you don't even have to do an additional rate inside of copilot or inside of P4P. It just comes across at the correct amount because you've already made that adjustment inside of.

Co pilot. Good question. Very good question.

Jeff from Sandwich, Massachusetts. Hi, Mike. When you first implemented damage cases, how did that conversation go for you? I've always struggled with taking money from teammates, but I need to start. After a couple broken rear windows in trucks and a lost string trimmer, it's time to fully implement. By the way, if anyone is debating getting headache rack with ramp rack, I'd urge you to consider getting it. I've now almost paid for what it would have cost in glass replacement, not to mention inconvenience of dropping truck off and wasted time.

Yeah. So how did it go? We rolled it out with P4P.

The way, you know, I would recommend doing is not right after a big damage case because then everyone thinks you're targeting someone. I would probably do it unless you're firing someone over something, but typically you want to do it in a way. It's like, hey, guys, we don't want members of the team to go super fast and create a bunch of damage cases, yellow slips, callbacks, lost customers. And so to prevent that sort of bad behavior and rigging of the system, we're going to implement these systems. I recommend doing that when you roll out P4P, but if you haven't rolled it out at all, I would do it when there is lots of P4P being given out. And there is, because all the team members know who the high performers and low performers are, and they also know who is sloppy and who leaves stuff out and break stuff, et cetera. And so usually High performers like this being instituted, it's the low performers that'll have a problem with it. So if everyone is making good P4P and.

It'S not like an acute issue, like in terms of like the day after a massive damage case, I'd roll it out and I'd do it in a positive light for the high performers, which is like, we don't want this to impact profit sharing because are going on breaking a bunch of stuff. So trying to go fast.

Kyle Freeze from Bloomington, Illinois. What does your prep work for a team meeting look like? I'm struggling to get engagement and use the most of our time and I just find myself talking at them instead of having conversations. So I need to do a better job of building in questions for sure. How do you prep that to best get engagement? Good question. So for stand up meetings, so first off, I don't like sit down meetings for the morning. The guys are very tired. It's first thing in the morning. If you have a sit down meeting, it'll double the time of that meeting. And on PvP, it's gonna hurt them. So I like stand up meetings first off. Secondly, throughout the week when people bring stuff up to you, like yellow slips, safety issues, training protocol issues, instead of you being like, great, yes, I'll mention at the next meeting, just ask them to mention at the next meeting and then make note of who's gonna talk about it. So if someone comes in like, man, everyone's breaking the cords on the push mowers and they're doing, they're doing X, Y and Z wrong. Great. Okay, tomorrow morning I'm gonna call on you during the meeting. I want you to talk about that and talk about how that should be done and improved. So that way in the morning meeting, instead of you talking about how to do the chords correctly, you're like, hey, all right, Bill had a great point yesterday, wanted to bring up go for it and then he talks about the pull cords. So getting them to talk based upon their feedback instead of you harping on all the aspects is usually helpful. I do Recommend Having like 3 or 4 things tops per meeting and pounding through them quickly most of the time. The reason that things are lost in morning team meetings is because people drone on about stuff that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter to the team. Always just ask yourself, like, does how does this affect the team, not affect the business? Like how does affect the team, their paychecks? That's why PvP is good, because you can tie everything back to them being More efficient and making more money, reducing waste.

Reducing yellow slips and damage cases, and make it about their paycheck instead of the business, the team, whatever. Like, people are intrinsically going to be looking out for themselves. Just human nature. And so tie it always back to that. What's in it for them, why it's important for them and then getting to involve them. I would like, for example, if there's one person that does a lot of the equipment maintenance, like they bring up anything to do with the equipment. If there's another person that's doing training, like anything new with training, they're going to bring up. So if you get them talking, the more the better. Otherwise you literally have a bunch of guys just standing in a circle looking at the floor.

Mr. Anonymous, if someone on the solo model can't meet the timeframe cutoff for revenue and gets kicked out or dropped from Augusta, would you let them back in? If it took a few years to earn the money on their own, assuming they were complying with the franchise agreement as a solo, I would say yes. We've never done this because we've always made sure we work with them to make sure they can get in.

And yeah, so I would just say make sure you're talking to Nick and if you're like, well, I can't, then it's likely that if it takes 2, 3 years to get to above 20,000amonth in revenue and be able to afford it, it's either A, it might be a better option for you to stay solo if that's the kind of business you want to build, or B, if you wanted to take a couple of years, you could always come back assuming that you haven't done anything against the franchise agreement. That'd be fine, totally fine. It'd be a bit of a pain to switch brands and then switch them again, coming back, to be honest with you. So I would again just talk to owner success manager Nick. He will walk you through this and make sure you have the set up. If you literally. If you put the money on a credit card, for example, you're literally looking at like a. I think I did the math the other day. I think it was like 800 or $1100 monthly payment. And so your first year inside of the growth model, you get reduced fees. So usually it actually calibrates. So it gives you like an extra year and a half to pay for it because you get three free months, then you get 12 months of half off, which is less than the 1200 you're paying now. So we do that specifically for this also this reason, it basically gets you another year and a half, even if you have to put it on a credit card to pay for it over the course of while you have reduced fees. So if you're paying 1200 now, you're gonna be paying half that for the next 15 months with three months free too. So. So I would just consider that too. If you can literally put on a card, that would be like, worst case scenario, obviously, but it's probably gonna be cheaper in the long run than switching up brands and then switching back in a couple years. So, again, just talk to an owner, success manager. To my knowledge, no one's left Augusta because they aren't switching to growth. There's been one that stopped and they're planning to come back as a growth model down the road, but they're not in business right now, so.

Cool. I think that's all we got. All right, everyone. Nope, Wait, we got a question coming. If we need updates to the director and dashboard, should go. Should that go to Nick or Lee? Should. If we need updates. The directory? Yeah. So you just send it to media augustalongaservices.com Feel free to submit it there and they can get things changed on the dashboard.

Cool. All right, everyone, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your weekend. We'll stay in touch and. Yeah, I guess Monday. I'll see you. Love you all. Take care.

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