Mike Minutes Mastermind 08/05/2024

All right. Hello, Guess the nation. Hope you're doing good. Happy Monday. Let's get started.

All right, quick announcement. I have.

Put together a few page document on.

Follow up call scripts as well as common objections. I'm having the media team kind of make it look nice and then we'll submit that on the dashboard. It's gonna look really good. As 12 different actual reasons to give a call back to someone instead of just being like, yeah, I'm just calling you to follow up week.

Of course you're trying to call follow up. Like you need a reason for the call and you need enough of them so you can keep calling.

And it not be weird when you're doing multiple follow up calls to an estimate. So that will be coming out soon.

Jump into questions. I think we got quite a few seven, seven questions. Let's rock and roll.

Presentation.

Travis from Jonesboro. I fully support open book management, transparency, giving employees the information they need to think like an owner. Is there any type of information in the business you wouldn't make a point of sharing? I don't have anything in mind. Just curious if there's anything you personally draw the line. We currently do open book management and I'm planning off site preparing a presentation to give you more transparency and encourage questions from the team.

Let me think, are there reasons not to share numbers?

Like I think everything to do with their job is important, right? They don't need to necessarily know like you know, the cost of setting up the LLC or like I wouldn't get in the nitty gritty details because they don't care. It's more a matter of like, would you, would I actually hide anything? Like if you're on PvP with frontline team members where everyone's making the same base pay, it's easy to share share numbers. If you have a whole bunch of different tiers of in H, it gets a little more difficult. Different departments, things like that. That's when usually you want to be careful because I don't like to share other people's pay structure or how much they're getting paid. Unless they want to divulge that personally to other people, they can. But what's nice about having pay for performance is everyone's at the same rate and so you can openly talk about certain numbers and they're like, okay, everyone's at 20 bucks an hour. Like you can just say that versus try to hide things.

So.

Yeah, like I guess like lawsuits you probably wouldn't want to bring up.

Just that way nothing gets, you know, they don't get dragged in anything like workers comp stuff you probably wouldn't want to mention like that. That's really all I can think of.

Yeah, it gets a little more tricky if people are at different rates. Like if everyone's at different rates, you gotta be a little more careful.

And you know, if you have different manager levels and then you have different like incentives for different people, that's where it can get a little bit tricky in terms of open book management. And usually I don't wouldn't in that case share numbers until we are really profitable and profit sharing was on the table. I wouldn't share as early on probably in that case. So.

Travis from Jonesboro, is there any plan to add specifically Christmas Light branded email templates to our Copilot accounts for estimates, estimate follow ups, invoices, etc.

There isn't. I would create one for yourself since you'll be sending out the estimates yourself.

Really? Like if you look at the email templates that we currently have for estimate emails, for example, it does show mostly mowing. You could just replace that with the Augusta logo.

But.

This will be solved.

I will make this as a project for the media team. I will then give me like a good solid week or two on this, Travis, because then you create them. Then we need to put them in Copilot behind the marketplace, put a password behind them and I can share them with everyone. But great point. So what we will do is we'll do number one, an estimate email.

Two, an invoice email. Although the invoice email looks exactly the same, I'm pretty sure it's like this is a logo. But we'll still have just the logos change and then three will be.

Just a regular. What's it called, a email signature email. Sig. That's your.

Okay, cool. We will work on that. Great point, great point. So for now, Travis, make it. You can make, you know, make your own template. I will work on this. I'll let you know when those are uploaded to Copilot and then you can download them with the password.

Kyle Tarvin the other day I asked about CAC for customer. Like customers you had mentioned it's anywhere between 100 and $200 is assuming a 10x10x multiple ROI on CAC. So each customer should in theory bring in 1,000 to $2,000 per year in lights or be okay having a lower ROI due to being off season service. And we're just trying to keep the crew busy and revenue consistent. So keep in mind you make all Your money with Christmas lights. Once you get the second, third, fourth year, et cetera, of the customer the first time, they're mostly covering the cost of goods sold, which is the lights themselves and then the labor for their first insult. It's those second, third years where you really make money because you don't have to buy the lights again. So in terms of return on investment, in terms of cac, it's slightly altered due to the fact that the service isn't the same when you do it. The second, third, fourth time. I'm asking because we have some customers that take less than 30 minutes to install and others another 30 minutes or less to remove, we are charging 3 to $400 for install and removal. If our CAC is, say, $150, that would be almost 40% of our revenue billed instead of 10% based on 10x ROI.

Yeah, so.

Oh, I see. You're saying you're getting. You're installing for 300 or $400. I'm assuming that doesn't include the actual lights. That's pretty cheap. If you're doing three to four hundred dollars for install and removal and storing the lights, that's pretty cheap.

If your cat could say 150. Yeah, like I wouldn't spend $150 on a customer that I'm only getting 3 to $400 on and maybe keep them once or twice. Like, you'd have to keep this customer for like five years to make it really, really good. Four or five years. So I think your pricing might be a little bit low or you're just doing very, very, like 30 minutes to install. These could be very, very small properties. So.

I don't know how many you've done, but in this scenario, would there be a viable model assuming we keep these customers for multiple years, or would we be forced to increase prices on installs to make the math work? After first year, the revenue is mostly profit. As the lights are set up already, would it be bad to start pricing more installs a little bit lower just to close the work? My thought process is that we need to fill up the schedule to capacity at all costs in the winter. Yeah, like your thought process is correct here. You want to fill your schedule. That's the most important thing. I think if you're doing $300 for an installation, you're really going to be pressed to make good margin on that. Even if you keep them for two or three years and what you don't want to happen is you keep them for one year and Then you lose money on them once you have the customer acquisition cost. So when I say the CAC is 100, $200, that's typically what you're going to pay per lead for a lot of leads. Lead companies inside of this industry.

150, someone will charge 100 plus ad.

Ad spend. So it's kind of varies, but that's what I've seen. Kind of 100 to $200 is what people charge per lead. And then customer acquisition cost if you run the ads yourself should be significantly lower, hopefully, especially if you run at the right time. If you run Christmas lights ads like literally like the week before and after Thanksgiving, you're probably gonna have much better CAC than 150.

Coach Connor, looking for the why on this situation. Why do I get comments about people wondering why their initial cost is more than what they were quoted for weekly mowing?

I even put total recorded man minutes on our invoice for command. So it's super straightforward to explain to the customer. Why do I get comments about people wondering why their initial cost is more than what they were quoted for initial mowing? I don't feel I should ever get a note or to do from command about the initial mowing price. I mean, if that's the case, what is the point of even explaining to the customer? Because if you don't want to get call notes, you can change this in your settings. But we like. So here was it reading? I mean, if that's the case, what is the point of even explaining to customers in the first place? On the initial call, I think it should be standard for common commands to explain that just because the grass height may not be overgrown, we also include edges, weeding, draft, whatever. So just because it's in the notes doesn't mean that they didn't explain it right. So the call notes are there to record everything that was said and discussed on the call and they're trained in terms of to answer the question, but then they're going to document that in the notes.

So even though it might say like the customer was wondering why, they will explain it to the customer, but they're going to document it there. So that way in the future, if the customer ever said, I never knew about this sort of thing and it's like, look, you called on this day and you asked specifically about this and we explained it to you.

So if there's a specific one co I almost called you Coach Connor. Connor, if there's a specific one person like you could send this to Liz. She can Actually like break this down for you if you want to submit it to her and show you like the call, et cetera. But yeah, keep in mind the call notes are being used as a way to document everything that's going on in the call.

But for reassurance sake, Connor, if you want to submit to Liz via the form on the dashboard and she will take a look at it for you because what they're trying to do is let the customer know exactly how the per minute per man price thing goes, explain why the first visit might be more however you have it in your estimate. But feel free to send it to Liz and she can take a look at with you. Follow up if someone emailing in as well saying if the lawn was overgrown and in their opinion it was not. I feel like taking the word if would be better and just straight up saying because we quote over the phone we aren't sure the conditions. So your first mo is a dollar for the end of story. Yes. You'll just want to change it in your estimate verbiage that would probably be if you want to change it there.

The bottom line is if you say your first MO is $1.50 per minute per man, people will be on a stop clock with you and if you do it shorter they will expect it cheaper. So usually by just saying if it's overgrown, most people immediately like oh we're fine and they move forward.

This is one of our larger complaints. So it is just frustrating why this could not be nailed down more than what it is. Looking for insight on my end as well as possibly a change at command center in terms of wording. Yeah. So basically the reason we don't say and I'm open flexible on this but so your first MO is $1.50 per minute per man. The problem with saying it's always going to be that way is people will then be on the clock and if you beat the time they are going to be unhappy. So you know.

From what I have heard from calls at command center, it's usually a matter of on your first visit it's going to be a $50 per minute for man. This is done. Since we are doing it over the phone, if it's overgrown there's going to be an upcharge and that's made clear.

So I know some people have put in their estimate where their first visit is just a set percentage higher than their first visit. That's fine if they wanted to do that. I just be careful about saying it's always going to be this Much, Connor. Because then people will clock you on your first visit and then literally your guys go, you know, do the job really well. And a job that was overbid because instant price or OTP was actually like on the good side. And now people are going to start questioning on your pricing and all this other stuff.

Again, Liz watches all of these. She will review exactly what was said here and follow up if it needs be.

Ken Lynn, you may have answered this before, so if you have, just a quick refresher would be appreciated. If there's pros and cons to having just one website for the company, for instance, the customer needs to put in their address anyways, so that would determine where it goes to. I was thinking about how you said that there's not much profit for Augusta on a solo operator model. We're pretty much paying, just paying what you're paying. I was thinking about this because if there's a way for the organization to save money and still charge the same amount, there might be more profit in it. Since solo operators are going out and getting their own work anyways. There might as well be one website just for solo operators. The customer selects their location and that's who it would go to. Just a thought. Okay, I see what you're saying. Just one website for everyone. Okay, great. So here's why we don't do that. There's a lot of reasons. There's like probably 10. Let me get the main ones. Number one.

This handcuffs you a lot to us and I want it to be where not every single leaf flows through our website, like my, like August longest dot com. The biggest thing though is you don't want to have the extra step of the customer having to select a location. You want to always be as frictionless as possible. And we get the most brand authority by having all the different locations all connected to the same Google account. And that's why like even this most recent.

Cohort that just came for training, almost 20 leads came in from them and they had. None of them were even open for business. Some of them were getting like multiple leads per like and they just got started like a week or two ago from their websites and they weren't even open like they had. None of them had command center calls yet to get set up. And so that's all because of the brand authority in terms of the domain. And so that's reinforced by having multiple locations.

And each of you being able to have independently like your brand authority in your local market. Having that slash with your territory name adds a huge amount of credibility to Google local listings or Google your Google business listing, especially if you have an address that correlates with that. That's why we always talk about like the verification of the address inside of that. Would it be cheaper for us? Yes, it's. It's expensive for us to manage 150 locations independently and I spend around $8,000 now a month to do it. But it's well worth it.

Anonymous satire.

Mike's face When Augusta Nation hits 999 locations. This is Ken Mercy. Okay. All right, let's go. Oh, wait, you actually have a picture. Oh, mercy. What's this? Share this tab. What in the world? Okay.

Well, we hit a thousand. It'd just be a matter. It's just a number. But it's more a matter of like, that's where I think the goal will be pretty close to being accomplished. It's gonna take a lot longer than people think, let me tell you that.

All right, I think that's all I got. I will follow up on this in terms of the lights email templates and then stay tuned for later this week. If not next week will be the follow up call scripts as well as common objections on the phone and how to handle those. And so it's pretty good. I think it'll be helpful. I know we've talked about a lot we talk about in training, but actually go over like 12 different reasons to call someone and then I think there's like six or seven common objections and how to respond. So that should be helpful. All right, everyone, have a fantastic Monday. We'll see you soon.