Mike Minutes Mastermind 08/10/2022

Good morning, Augusta Nation. Hope you're all doing super well. Let's go ahead and jump in. Got a couple announcements. First things first, it happened this morning, but it happened a couple times last week, too. And that is if you, if you have a problem with your phone line, contact command center directly. Don't put on the Facebook group, because if you put in the Facebook group, you're literally going to have 50 to 60 owners call command center in the next minute. And that's costing you money and it's costing everyone else money, and it's wasting time. Contact directly to someone at command center if you, if you feel like you can't get a hold of them via phone, obviously help. GustAlongerServices.com is there. If you're doing full service and you have someone on connecteam, text them directly. Just deal with one person. Because, like, for example, this morning, immediately we get tons of calls from owners testing their phone line and they all work. And so a lot of times it's like out of service, someone's phone line, their SIM card isn't working, whatever it might be. But just realize that like the one this morning, the phone work phone worked fine when 50 people called it. So just be careful when you put that up there. You, you potentially are getting, asking for 50 phone calls. So that's going to cost you money. So please don't do that. I don't want you to be paying for 50 people from, from Augusta Nation be calling your number. Just contact command center directly. They'll figure it out. We had, we have had one problem this year and there's a Canadian issue up in the way that they do their numbers and things. So we were able to fix it up with Burnaby. But again, one on one, contact directly to command center. Figure it out. Don't have 50 people calling your number because if you're wrong and those numbers come through and those phone calls come through, you're getting charged for them all. So just my recommendation, you can put it on Facebook if you want, but it's just kind of a waste of money. And it's a bunch of weird phone calls at Command center. Like, oh, I was just testing a phone number. So anyway, that is my recommendation. Okay, first things, let's actually jump to a little bit of kind of education. Okay. Capacity.

Liz talked to me a little about this and so I wanted to go over it. And that is, you know, you know, the typical question in a lot of Facebook groups is like, how many launch can I get done in a day? Oh, you guys are not connected to my. Here. One second. Give me a second, guys. I got my AirPods back. I can make this audio better for you.

Everyone always asks, you know, how many loans should I be getting done in a day? And everyone's like, well it's about how much are you charging and what's your budget hours and all the rest of it. So I want to give really, really clear expectations of what I think capacity should be in a day, okay. For an estimator as well as for someone out in the field. Okay. And if you're an owner operator, you're going to be the guy out in the field and then probably estimates in the evening or some period of time throughout the day or however you do that, okay? I expect someone to be able to do 20 drive by estimates in a day, okay? If you're doing drive by estimates, literally you're driving by it and putting in notes. If you cannot get that, there's two problems. One, you have way, you're spread out way too much. You're serving way too large of an area, okay. Secondarily, your template is probably not dialed in to where you can copy and paste, make a couple little adjustments and send it off. Okay. There's the whole reason why we do the way we do in terms of the estimates at command center is so you can copy paste done. Okay. I have to see it, don't have to send it out because I want you to get 20. If I can get you from 15 to 20, the amount of estimates that you can get done in a, in a month and the revenue that your, your location can do without increasing overhead is so dramatically higher, it's insane. If you're able to get an extra five estimates done a day just by tightening up your routes of estimates like bringing your service area in and just making sure your template is dialed in and it's quick edits, getting five extra estimates done a day, two of the two days a week, let's say you do estimates, that's 10 a week, that's 40 in a month. That is at a 50% close ratio. 20 new jobs per month that you're going to get with zero extra cost. Okay? So we talk about the efficiency and the capacity of mowing and landscaping all the time. But you have to remember that doing estimates is a function with the business that also needs to be efficient. If you're not doing 20 drive by estimates in a day, something is wrong. Okay, like, well, I'm only doing five or six and that's like a full Day, you're doing something massively wrong. You need to go on a coaching call with Lee and figure out what's wrong. Either you're driving way too much or you are. Your template is not dialed in. Okay. That's drive by estimates. 20 drive by estimates. If you are doing scheduled estimates, which means you have a time frame, one hour time frame, you should be able to get at least eight of those done a day. If your whole day is estimates, you should be able to eight schedule estimates in a day. What typically is going to happen is you're going to have about five to six schedule estimates and four or five or six drive bys. That would be considered a full day in my mind as well. Because in my mind a drive by should, in terms of like calendar time is kind of like half a budget hour. That's kind of how I look at it. Right. That's why I think you should be able to get 20 of those done in a day. If you're just driving around all the time. And because the more, the more estimates you get, addresses you have to stop at throughout the day, the more efficient you theoretically be because they're going to be tighter. Okay.

So your efficiency kind of is, is somewhat logarithmic. Like in that is you get more efficient the more you have because you are inside of a certain area. So either if you have three, let's say you have three, right. You're still driving the entire perimeter. Whereas if you have eight, you're still driving the exact same time. You're just stopping at more stops. So capacity talk about all the time for projects and for mowing and all the rest of it. But for estimates, I truly believe you should be able to 18 to 20 drive by estimates in a day. And you should be able to 8 to 10 scheduled estimates in a day. And you're usually going to have some sort of hybrid of that. And if that means four or five scheduled and eight to ten drive bys, that's a full day. A full day is not for drive by estimates. I am seeing this on some people's schedule right now. It's like, what are you doing tomorrow? I'm doing estimates. Okay, great. You have four drive bys. What are you doing for the other seven hours? Because that's in a full day. Okay, okay. So that is drive bys and scheduled estimates. Okay, let's go to what we usually talk about a lot more often. But let me just cement this for anyone that might be new. Okay. And that is for capacity when it comes to mowing you should be able to get six to seven budget hours of mowing done per day per employee out in the field. So if you're on the field as the owner operator, or if you are a manager that's out in the field, you should go get six to eight budget hours of mowing per day. During the dormant season, that can go up to 10 or 11. So let's just be really conservative. You should be able to get 6 to 7 at least when it comes to scheduling. Okay? If the grass is dormant, not growing very fast, our guys can consistently do 9, 10 budget hours of mowing pretty simply. But to be conservative, 6 to 7. The reason I'm saying this is I'm seeing people with four jobs and three budget hours worth of mowing and saying that they're busy for the day. You are not busy for the day. And if you are, if that's filling your whole schedule, either budget hours are way off or B, you're way too spread out. You're like serving way too far away. Okay? I would literally only give a couple weeks, like three to four weeks where I would say it's permissible to have that kind of a very, very bad budget hour schedule because you're just getting started the location and you're going to be really spread out. Okay? But when, if you're mowing all day long, you should be getting six to seven budget hours done a day. If that's not happening, get on a coaching call with Lee. He's going to diagnose the issue. But I can almost guarantee you your budget hours are miscalculated or you have massive drive time because you're way too spread out. Okay? And the only time, the only time I would see that as permissible is in the first couple months of starting a location when you're literally ramping up your first 20 or 30 customers.

Projects. 8 to 9 budget hours per day is a full day's worth of work on projects. Consistently seeing people with three and four budget hours worth of of weeding and bush trimming or whatever, and that's a full day's worth of work. You will never make money. Never. It has a full day's worth of work, okay? And so when you look at the budget hours for the week.

We were talking with Zooper the other day trying to figure out if they can program a thing for us that basically what we use in team up, where you see your budget hours on the Sunday or like side of the week, basically your budget hours capacity, and then how many have, how many budget hours you have scheduled for projects and how much you have for recurring work. I want to, hopefully they can do that for us end of the year, next year, because that is the way to schedule. And when you look at the capacity for project based work, you should be able to easily do eight to nine budget hours a day. Again, if you can't and that's not happening consistently, you're miscalculating budget hours on projects. You might need to go into some of those contracts, if they are contracts for a year, for example, and redo them and reprice them. If it's project based work like property cleanups, and you're consistently not getting 8, 9 budget hours done a day, there's a really good chance you're miscalculating your estimates. Okay. And that's going to happen occasionally. But if it's happening consistently, there's a good chance you are miscalculating and looking at jobs incorrectly. Okay. I highly recommend your budget hours be accurate. Okay. I'd rather your pricing be something that you change. If you're trying to scale up and like, I'm just trying to close 80, 90% of my jobs to scale up. Got it. If you want to make your pricing different, that's easy, that's fine. I would recommend changing that. But don't make your budget hours incorrect. Don't be like, oh, well, this is a 10 hour job. I want the job, I'm going to make it eight. I would not recommend doing that. Or let's be more extreme because I see that happen occasionally, especially if you're slow. That happens sometimes. But if you're like, it's 10 hours, I'm gonna do it for four because I just want the job. I got, I got to get rolling here. I would recommend not doing that. I would recommend keeping your prices lower. But be accurate on budget hours, because I want to get in that habit of being accurate on budget hours. I want your employees in your first couple to see that the budget hours are accurate. Okay. Because that's what they're watching. If they lose confidence in budget hours, P4P is going to be a downhill spiral.

And if you're not hitting like for mowing or projects, definitely mowing. If you're not hitting six to seven budget hours per day as a full day's worth of work for mowing, there are a bazillion videos on YouTube about how to be more efficient when you mow. Okay. I've made a couple about which direction to trim, where to park your truck, you know, how to spool your line, all that stuff. I've made some. There's a ton of other ones probably better than mine. Watch some of those. Spend an hour doing that. You'll probably save three hours worth of wasted time over the next couple weeks, so cool. All right, let's jump into some questions. Got some here, and then I got some in the form as well.

Sometimes when doing an estimate and people have said their last guy stopped answering the phone, I always bet them 20 that my team will answer the phone. While we are sitting here talking, no one has been willing to take me up on the bet. That's a good one, actually. I like that idea.

And I would definitely keep you in the loop if I ever thought there's a chance that we're missing. Call it Command, which we were for a few weeks in spring rush. We were. But, like, you know, you can confidently say that. Can you put out the question? That's actually a really good thing. I like that.

I have to think about this one. That's a good.

I just have to be careful with that, right? Because, like, someone calls, for example, like, 501, and command center calls. Closes at 5, for example. Something like that could be weird.

And then especially on Saturdays, for example, we have less staff at Command center, so occasionally the phone lines will completely fill up. So let me think about this, though, because this is. This is something I would like to have, I think, as a guarantee or something like an outlandish guarantee. Right. The question is, can we actually deliver on it? And I think we could, because even if someone has to be on hold for a minute, we could. We. You'd have a real person on the line. So let me think about that one. That's a. That's a good idea. Can you put out the questionnaire thingy for masterminds? The data for it is the same on every single one. So let me see who this is real quick. Give me a second.

Yeah. So the form link is the same every single day, literally. If I was you, I would save it in, like, your notes, your Notes app or something. And if you ever have a question, just go in there, tap on it, leave the question there. Good. Good call. But, yeah, it's the same link every single day.

Yeah, very good. Sweet. All right, let's go ahead and pull up some questions that came in.

What? Oh, they made the button. Share, share screen. There it is. Okay.

Whoa. A bunch of them just came in right now. There's only a couple. All right, Dustin, first one up. Will there be done View ads for aeration this fall and is there a time frame when they'll be ready? We typically don't do a lot of.

One click estimate emails or done P ads for like very specific services. But let me make a note here, potentially in September we could get that done. The one that's going to go out this week is for one click estimate emails for project based work. And so if not today, tomorrow I should probably have that up for everyone on Zooper and Service Autopilot. And that is the one click estimate for kind of like get your, get your summer projects done before fall. What was the tagline, Zach?

Don't fall behind on your summer projects. Very good. Very creative. Okay, let's see, next one up.

What do you do when you start to feel like you're doing the same thing over and over? I don't know the actual words to say, but I don't think it's burnout. But seems like I'm doing. All I'm doing is mowing every day. Yeah. So first of all, I think what you can try to do if your goal here is to be more happy and satisfied in life, is realize that this is not a bad thing. Right. Because guess what? When you right now you feel like you're doing mowing all day long, one day it's gonna. What's gonna happen if you grow your business to a certain size is you're gonna feel like all you're doing is hiring and firing and dealing with HR issues all day long. So it just, you're progressing. Right. And so this is why most people will shift different industries. Because if you feel like you're stuck in a rut, quote unquote, or doing the same thing every day, one way to really quickly fix that is switch industries, go do something else. Oh, I'm gonna do fence painting now. Oh, I'm gonna go like cleaning out gutters. Oh, okay. Okay. Like, like they just, just constantly change their ad services or change industries or change businesses completely every couple years. Cause they can't handle the fact that you're probably gonna have two to three years of doing the same thing before that shifts to another thing that you do on a daily basis. Right.

Like if you do anything 365 times.

It'S gonna feel very repetitive. But it's only one year of your life. Right. So if you do the same thing the next year, yeah, it's gonna seem super repetitive after you've done it 250 times. But it's still, still only one year. So maybe next year, when you get a couple employees, it's a different. A different thing that you're doing every single day. And so that when you systematize and you simplify, that's. This is the feeling that you get. This is the why most people will add complexity to their business simply for the sake of feeling like they're not doing the same thing over and over and over again. Okay? This is why someone would get frustrated working at McDonald's, because they flip the burger at the same time, they put the pickles on the same way, they do the fries the same way, same amount of time. Every single time, it gets boring, okay? So they go do their own thing and realize that, like, the systems are built there so that the business can be efficient and profitable and that going after the next shiny thing typically isn't the most profitable thing to do. It is doing the same thing over and over and over. As the business grows, what you do over and over and over is going to slowly evolve and change, and in one year, two years actually change dramatically. But if you break up that massive change over the course of six or 700 days, it doesn't seem like a massive difference. That's why people like, oh, man, I just feel like I'm doing the same thing every day. It's like, look, if you go back, if you go fast forward two years, the change in your business, dramatic. But if you cut those, that dramatic change up over the course of six or 700 days, it doesn't seem like it's ever going anywhere. Seems like you're just stuck in this rut all the time. But in reality, if you look forward a year or two, the massive changes that are happening are only evident when you look at these two singular data points. But when you put in six or seven hundred days in between now, all of a sudden it seems like you're just doing the same monotonous thing every single day. And that is not a bad thing, okay? You've got to stick with that for five to 10 years, in my opinion, to build a business. That's your financial pillar, that if you want to go play, if you want to go to real estate, if you want to go start a restaurant, if you want to go start some other thing, you want to start more locations, you can. But you have the financial pillar of five to 10 years of doing the boring work. And doing the boring work means I've now got the system down where I can literally do it my sleep. I understand why simplification is so important, and I'm not allured by the next shiny service, the next shiny thing, the next shiny business opportunity, the next shiny whatever it is. And so do not feel like this is a negative thing. Doing. Feeling like you're doing the same thing every single day is a good thing because you probably simplified your services. Now it's a matter of how do you scale that. And my opinion on, you know, adding, adding challenge to your day is how do you scale the system? Because when you ultimately you take any system and you try to scale it, it's going to break, okay? Even if it's really simplified, even if it's really systematized, if you start scaling it, it will eventually break at some size, right? You have one location dialed in, doing 6, 700,000. Like man, this is great. But I feel like I'm doing the same thing every day. Okay, go, go start two or three or more of those and you'll find all of a sudden where, where there's, there's more stuff for you just chew on. Okay, well you do that for three or four years and like, well now all I do is just kind of like take fires when they come in. But like it's the same thing every day. We'll go start 15 of those, right? Like so, so it's just a matter of scale scaling the system. But I would not look at this as a negative thing. Just realize that most people will never get to a million dollar business and you know, in say 10 years from starting because at some period in that 10 years, over the course of those 3,000 plus days, they somehow get distracted with something else.

I should know this, but when you are calculating max metrics, do you take the total labor revenue and divide that by their wages would have been at base to get their score.

Or do you divide it by their wages at performance pay? Example.

617 Revenue divided by base with. Oh, I see what you're saying. No, it's total wages. When we're looking at what percentage of, of revenue goes out the door towards wages, that is a function of actual money going out the door. So that would include their like final paycheck, right? It just, you know, look on your P and L. Look in your P and L. That's the number you're using, right? You're not looking at that number as an efficiency metric. You're looking that as like a financial metric. The efficiency metric is more about like.

Budget hours divided by clock hours. That's going to give you an efficiency metric. But when you're looking at a financial metric, we're looking at the actual, you know, paid out wages to the employee is something we still want to keep track of because that's going to help us really decide on things like non revenue producing employees, etc. Hope that made sense.

Score would be. Oh, you're talking about the score. Okay. It's base paid. It's base pay, Nick. Yeah. Okay, so what you I was talking about was something different. You're talking about the score inside of P4P, which is 100. You're correct. The clocked hours multiplied by the base pay rate is the what is used in the score metric. What you're talking about right there. Yeah, exactly. So you know, total gross revenue divided by base wages for the day. That is how the score is calculated. You are correct. Because if you didn't do this, it would be the same number every single time. If you were manipulating the base wages to P4P, it'd just be the same score every single day. Right. Because that is the variable, the score. You want the score to be the variable. You do not want the base wages to be the variable. That's why you got to fix that number.

That got into math way too fast. Sorry.

Kyle, when you stopped, when you stepped out of daily operations, what did you do on a daily basis? Can you explain the transition between Liz and Lee taking over and what your days looked like when you stepped out of the local shop?

Okay, so let me think a little bit because I still go there once a week, right? It's only for like 20 or 30 minutes, but I still am there. So it's. I'm definitely out of daily operations. I would say what it looked like on a daily basis when I stepped out. Number one, you have to cut yourself out of all fires. Right? So customer issues. It's very hard because most of the time, as with me, you were the one that like would respond to customer reviews, like negative reviews, emails that were really bad. You jump in like we are inherent firefighters. If you're at two and three years into the business, at three and four and five years in the business though, and you're starting to let go of those things, you got to realize there's me days where like you see something, you know you can fix it and you don't, you know, you can do it faster and better and whatever, and you don't touch it.

In terms of what I do on a daily basis, I was going and fighting something else. Right? So again.

Most of us will find something to do and if we don't have something hard to work on. We'll mess up stuff in our own business, we'll add more services just because, like, well, I don't have enough to do. Like kind of back to the last question that just came in is actually a really good follow up is like, well, if I don't feel like there's a lot, if I feel like I'm doing the same thing, I should go start a new service. And that will help me like stay preoccupied and I'll like get more equipment and I'll have to figure out more systems and I'll have to like train the guys differently. And so we'll do that when in reality what we should be doing is let the system work, push it off to someone else and then go find something else to tackle, right? Whether that be a second location, whether that be like for myself, it was franchising, right? So when I, when I knew I wanted to franchise, that was like the definite, like, all right, you cannot be at local operations. And so now I walk in the morning. Me, I don't know. I don't know about the customers, don't know about the projects, don't have a clue about the estimates. And that's a good thing. But it's very difficult. That murky time in between, that's the hardest part and is when you're handing it off and you're still kind of involved, right? Like, you still know about bad customers, you still know about jobs that go south, you still occasionally will show up to a job when it goes really bad and customers complaining. That is a really weird time. And that's why I'm a big believer in like build it, get a GM and then leave the thing alone, okay? And that means that sometimes things are going to crash and burn, right?

The, the amount of latitude I give the GMs is that of an owner. Because one, I don't have the time to be micromanaging them anyways. But then two is.

Like, there's going to be failures, right? A gm, someone, when you walk away from the operations is going to make mistakes and you've got to be fine with that. But you need to go figure out what you're going to go tackle. Like go do something hard that you can get your time away from them. Because any time spent with them, like you spend too much time with a gm, they start to relegate, right? So, you know, I don't want to spend a lot of time with a GM because then I become the problem fixer when that's their job, right? And then they start to doubt their own decision making process because they're like, well, I got to run this by Mike. It's like, no, no. Your job is to make these decisions. And so if I ever step in at all, it's going to make them question their own position on things. So I sit here very much of a backseat approach once I step out of daily operations. Right. So like if Marcus wants to burn the Bellingham location down, down to the ground, you know, like that one day that's going to happen. Not to the Bellingham shop, because I'm there occasionally, but like that's going to happen. You got to realize when you step out of our operations that people are going to make mistakes and people might do less than what you think is the their efficiency, whatever it might be. But you got to figure out something else to go work on and be that is hard for you to preoccupy you from jumping in and wanting to help out. So there's a balance. There's a massive balance in that. Because you also don't want them to feel unsupported, that you're like completely disconnected. But more importantly, being too involved with mid level managers, in my opinion is a massive detractor from them being able to reach their full potential. And some people might not have the potential and will fizzle out and die, and that's whatever. But you're going to demotivate great employees. If you're like, hey, just every time you want to think about buying something, run it by me. If you think about hiring someone, you know, I just me run their resume by me. So if you're gonna step out of daily operations, let it go. Go find something else to go sink your teeth into and be distracted with. Can you explain the transition between Liz and Lee taking over and what your day looked like when you stepped out of the local shop? I think I kind of did that. What my day looked like. I was working on the franchise at that point. And that's what you know, still to this day is right.

This may be a dumb question, but here we go. Is it possible have a weekly or monthly checklist on what the franchise owner should be pushing for each month? I find myself chasing squirrels often. It's always helpful to get myself back on what I need to be focused on to move my business forward. Sales, marketing, hiring. The problem with this is I kind of give the very high level into stages of growth. Literally, if you took the stages of growth and you read it every single day for whatever stage you were in, that's what I'd be recommending you do. Now, the reason I can't give everyone a broad checklist is because it looks so different in terms of what your KPIs, your main focus should be at different sizes of your company. That's why the stages of growth exist. Because in my opinion, those five stages of growth are five completely different business types. Right? Someone running a solo operation is like, it's a completely different business. Like it's not even lawn care and landscaping. When you have a million plus business, okay, it becomes hr. That's all it is. Okay, so.

Those are five different, very distinct businesses then. Like, if I could have everyone read the five stages of growth every single day and just read that one stage that they're in and just focus on the things I would do that. Plus, that's why the coaching calls exist with Lee, because he's going to give you context. Okay? You're in that stage. Great. Are we going to go to the next stage this spring? Are we going to wait? Are we going to wait the next couple of years and stack away cash? He's going to give all the very, very minute details based upon your personalized.

Situation. Because what recommendations I would put in that checklist completely hinge on a lot of different factors. Like, do you have management experience? Do you have capital? Do you want to grow? Are you stressed out of your mind? So the checklist looks different for every single stage of growth. And then inside of each stage of growth, the recommendations look different based upon your personalized situation. All right, so for everyone, I would be reading that, that stage of growth for yourself, it's one to two pages max. That would be 100% my, my 30,000 foot view. And then the coaching calls are, all right, let's zero in and see. Okay. Do you have the capital to keep growing? Do you have the desire to keep growing? Are you burnt out? Do you have enough employees? Do you have enough management to get five employees next month? That's a big thing to ask of a manager. So that's what the coaching calls are really for is the very fine in details of the macro thesis of what the five stages of growth are.

Do franchisees already have tickets to this year's landscapes or do we need to buy those still? You do not need to buy those. Includes two. Everyone's gonna get two every. Every January, the 500 fee covers two tickets and that includes all of Thursday, Friday and Saturday. And if you want to buy more than two, then you can buy a regular ticket from Landscape for the Landscape summit and then just come bring your team member or whatever. They can come to the Thursday Augusta Lawn care thing for free as well as the dinner that I'm trying to plan that Wednesday night so includes two. You don't have to do anything beyond that.

Unless you're getting three. You bring a third person, you don't have to worry about anything. I will have a form come out in probably October that will I will need everyone to sign up for just so we have numbers for dinners and meals, etc, because I'm planning trying to plan a Wednesday dinner as well as obviously Thursday lunch for just us at a destination.

Cool. All right. I think that's all. You'll have a fantastic day. Happy Thursday. Well, Wednesday I'll see you tomorrow, which is Thursday. Take care of. Oh, by the way, the vlogs. Remember, the vlogs are one week behind. Okay? So like today I think it probably shows. Like the gravel wings on Mount Vernon, they already moved in. Like the fence is going up today. Just remember, everything that is in the vlog is a week behind. Okay? So if I'm saying stuff here like this is not following up with the vlogs. The vlogs are not. Did not happen yesterday. They happened a week ago. Okay? So just be clear on that. Take care, everyone.