Mike Minutes Mastermind 08/07/2023

Hey everybody. Hope you will Happy Monday. Let's go get started. Just turn off this to.

Facebook real quick.

Started. Really have too much in the way of announcements. As of today, Max is on top of all the calls. Like we mentioned last week, we'll be refining that over the next couple days is a better user experience. So that way if the customer has a difficult problem, it can now hand it off to command center and they handle it for the customer. So that should be good. We will continue to iterate it over the next few days, especially make sure that his verbiage is correct. And then during outside of office hours he talks differently to the customer, knowing that.

He cannot pass it off if there's a complaint or a billing issue or something like that. That.

All right, let's see here. We got.

Six questions. Okay, let's get started.

All right.

This question is from Garrett, Glendale, Colorado. I'm going through and listening to Google Services calls and as far as I can tell, every time Max answers the phone after hours it comes from gls. It never ends up in Zooper as a client and there is no record of a phone call Super. The GLS uses a call forward number. So then Max takes down that number, sends a text to it, but because it actually the client's number, we never. So yeah, that's not it. We do not use the phone number that's calling in to send them a text message. We ask the customer for the actual phone number. And if you're listening to it for the weekend, it wouldn't be until today when command center gets in is actually able to get that those tickets that is entered into super down the road next year is when we want to integrate with co pilot to be where it would be immediate and that information would be transferred over. Right now it's not the case. If this is correct, it sounds like the easiest solution to change Google Services to not be 24 hours. That being said, I just restarted global service in July. We had 21 legitimate leads in two weeks for mowing and weed control. I believe it is partly due to being 24 hours and getting higher lead flow. All that to say, I understand that this may not be possible now, but is there a way to Max ask for a phone number? It sounds like he'd get around us. Yeah. So he does ask for the phone number and asks if it. If he can text that number. We do not use the incoming phone number as a way to text the client and ask for the email. And if. If they do not give us that information, we we call them and so that's sometimes also a delay. You won't see it in zooper until we have that information from Command center and then we will put it in there. So again, that is a manual process right now down the road, once we can integrate with Copilot, that would be immediate and it would be all inside of your CRM as soon as you get the call. But like if you got a call yesterday after hours today, once Command center is able to get in and go get through all the backlog of tickets from the weekend, they would enter in the data, set up this estimate if needs be, send the estimate if needs be, call the customer as well.

Should we be from Forrest, should we be actively paying attention to the Facebook Group feed? Currently I watch all your public videos and Mastermind videos. I'm not big on the whole social media thing or computers. Reason for asking is I don't want to miss out on any important date updates you talk about or address. I would highly recommend being part of the Facebook Group feed, whether it be if you watch the Mastermind videos, you won't miss any important updates or like changes that are coming down the pipe. But being part of the group is important because if you ask a question after six months of being completely MIA in the group, you've lost a lot of context from other members, right? So like I generally know all the people that are active in the Facebook group. I know what they're going through kind of in the back of my head. I know how many employees, I know the size of their businesses. And so when you ask questions, even on the Mastermind, I will have way better answers. If you've been active in the Facebook group and people that give you advice, even that are have been more experienced than they're on, the Franchise Advisory Council, your coaches, et cetera, will be able to give better advice based upon you just being actively involved on the Facebook group. So I do recommend it. But at the very least, if you can watch the Mastermind videos every day, you'll be caught up in terms of like updates and things like that.

This is from nobody. How are awards being calculated this year since conference in October, we always do the same way and I think from the exact moment that we make the call on the awards, it's year, it's 12 months, right? So if we're like looking at revenues and I'm ordering them, I have to order all the awards, I think.

Mid September. So we just literally run a report from that day 12 months back. So that's what we did last year too. Same thing. I had to order them. It wasn't the end of the year. It was like I think I forget November 15th or December 1st, whatever. And then it ran 12 months. So that's how the actual numbers are being calculated. Travis Clayton from North Carolina is there. Is having a business enough of an excuse to get out of jury duty? It's myself another guy so I can't miss many days of work. Yeah, you can absolutely try to this every state's so different. Every county's different. Like I get out of jury D pretty much all the time by saying I'm either out of out of the state. I have a scheduled appointment with multiple employees.

How many employees depend on me being there and would have to shut down the office etc. So like you can kind of like you know, blow it up if you really need to. So you could say you're a business owner, all of your employees depend on you being at the office in on the job site and you have scheduled appointments that require in person attendance. So you can try just. It so varies like I can't say whether or not it's going to work because it varies so much by state. Some states like you could be doing whatever and they're still going to want you to come in but I've been able to get around it like five or six times.

Nick Davidson from Hudsonville in Michigan. Securing a fertilizer and pesticide license is a tall order. We are required to spend two years in school or work with another license company is to get our hands on one. Consequently we end up outsourcing a chunk of our revenue, tens of thousands of dollars in fact to third party vendors. Even when our loyal mowing customers ask us directly for these services. Here's a thought. What if Augusta could obtain a global license for the state and let franchisees let like ours operate underneath it. Even if it means a slight uptick in our franchise fees it keep more business in house potentially positioning us as one of the top providers nationwide. It's a win win. Keeping our operations streamlined and more profits in our pocket. Just like in real estate where operate under the umbrella of a broker. This would allow would have Augusta acting as our broker for fertilizer and pesticide services. With each franchise resembling the role of a realtor. It's a tried and true model that brings immense value to our operations. Is this even possible? Thanks for your consideration. The problem, only problem I see with this is there is no global license. There's a license for the state but that would require us opening up 50 license, like 50 states licenses, getting someone trained in every single one, and then maintaining it. And then like, so for example, if I have someone do that and spend the time to pass all their tests, do all of all the things.

And that person leaves, guess what, we're all in a really bad spot. So if I do it, for example, what. Well, am I going to spend weeks and weeks getting state licenses for every single state and going through all the hoops and all the rest of it and the extra cost? Then it's a matter of like, well, is, is everyone in the franchise willing to spend an extra 3 to 400amonth to be able to get this, or even, Even if it's 100 bucks to have someone constantly being licensed, registered, insured in every single state. And then like, there's just a lot that goes into this. What I would recommend, this is my personal recommendation is when Your state has 3, 4, 5 locations, potentially you all should have like a WhatsApp group communicating at conference, for example, like, hey, let's set up a meeting conference, let's talk about who has the license already and let's go ahead and like create something and maybe you guys all just chip in 50 bucks a month to one of the franchisees that has the license for your state. That's going to be a lot easier to manage with 6, 7, 8 locations in your state or versus us trying to manage 50 states and then we're all very susceptible to someone leaving states change all the time. And then you're also opening yourself up to liability from every location at Augusta versus you are opening yourself up to some sort of liability even if you have six, seven, eight locations underneath one license. Because if someone does something stupid, it could affect your operation. Right? So I feel like the liability would be too big because we have one rogue franchisee underneath our global account and do something stupid. When I say global, it could affect a lot more people. So I'm not, it's not. I'm opposed to this. If this ever made sense financially and everyone was on board with it, I'd probably go with it. But I do feel the more efficient way to do this right now is talking to four or five other.

Owner operator operators inside of your state and then talking to them in person at conference and figuring, okay, who's going to hold the license. And I'd recommend that you should be the biggest business. So that way you have the longest amount of time in business, you also use it the most and they have the most control over making sure that everything stays up to date, they have the most employees, etc. That'd be my recommendation. And so if I was any of you, I would be setting up WhatsApp groups with your people in your state. I'd be making sure you have an in person meeting at conference for dinner. And these are the type of things you want to cover.

And so I know they do that in several and but as you get 3, 4, 5 locations in your state, these are the type of things that you can get benefits by having other locations instead of you all having to get licenses. Yes, one person could do it, but currently I'm not about to try to do that for 50 states, both from a financial perspective for the entire franchise as well as just like the amount of time to just like stay on top of all that. It'd be a full time job and I just don't think we're all willing to pay that. It's not the most best use of funds across Augusta right now down the road that could change. If there's a thousand locations, I'm okay with like starting to think about okay, does is it worth, you know, a couple hundred thousand dollars a year? By the time you pay for people's training, people getting licensed, the registration, liability insurance, et cetera, across the whole board, then it starts to potentially make some sense. Kevin Bloomingdale As a solo model, my fee is twelve hundred dollars a month. When I buy into the growth model, my fee will go to 600 per month for a year. Is that correct? No, the 600 per month for a year is for new locations. The twelve hundred dollars will stay the same in terms of switching from solo into growth. So it's just kind of the decision like as when you join it as a solo operator.

The discounted fee, monthly fee is because you are a lower revenue amount and there's way less coaching required. There is only basic service at command center. Like full service at command center costs significantly more to train someone up because they're trained someone up on answering the phone right now. Three CRMs, which is a pain in the butt which we can improve on email automations like stuff like that. It's not as difficult as when you start having to require them to know how P4P system works and understand how to run it. QuickBooks, payroll, all those sort of things. They take weeks if not extra months on top of the regular training. And that's why there's extra cost involved with growth model as well as if you grow to a certain size because there's more coaching, more involved in the type of service we offer. Command center take way longer to train somebody. So we have a couple people in the office that are going to be taking accounting classes in college on the. In the winter, which will also be super helpful for those departments and streamline some things that we've struggled with in the past.

Cool. All right. Is that all we got? That's all we got. All right, everyone, have a fantastic Monday. See you guys tomorrow. Take care.