Mike Minutes Mastermind 08/13/2024

Hello everyone. Let's get started.

Feel free if you want to have questions down in the description there is the link to the form. I think there's only three questions today it looks like. So if you have a question, happy answer.

Alrighty, let's get started.

Anyone have any advice on rewarding or indeed hiring out at to weed out people? We put an ad up to hire and literally got 74 applicants in the first day.

Of rewording your indeed hiring. A lot of them are low quality and time consuming to weed through. Well first off, great problem to have. I would just get more stringent with the filters of your requirements. Also on indeed, Kevin, you can make it where when they click Apply they have deal breakers that they have to have to answer and then you can make it where it's like it won't even allow them to apply without them. So for example.

Excuse me, you can have questions like do you have a driver's license? And then make it a deal breaker to where if they say no, they will not be able to submit. Would you pass a drug? Would you pass a drug test? If it's it's not yes, then it's a deal breaker and it doesn't even come through or at least it screens and you can see the ones that have passed and who have not. So if you got 74 one day, I'd probably put four or five questions and make a few of them deal breakers. For example, you could put like I've done this before, like especially for engineering jobs. Well, when we put an engineering job up, for example, because you're talking about very high paying job, you get literally thousands of applications. And so what you can do is just do deal breakers of like do you have 10 years of experience in php and laravel backend code development? Like that's a deal breaker that will weed out 98% of people. So for, for, for you, you could do like do you have two years of commercial lawn experience? Do you have a pesticide license? Like you just list off a bunch of questions and then make some of them deal breakers that you could weed them out really quickly. So the driver's license one, the cell phone one. Like having a cell phone that they're able to use for work.

Having reliable transportation, having experience, whether you want them to be smokers or not, that's kind of up to you. If they can pass a drug test, if they have two references that are landscaping and lawn care related, these are the type of things you could just keep adding in there if you needed to usually two deal breaker questions will weed out, like 90 plus percent, because some people won't even answer them. And then I just skip them. It's like, look, if you're just like clicking a bunch of apply, apply, apply, apply, apply. It's a bunch of trash leads. Just by having the questions, you'll weed out probably 50% of people and then make some of them deal breakers so you can quickly weed them out. So first off, though, great problem to have. Great problem to have. And a lot of people are doing the Facebook post as well and then boosting it in their local area to a certain demographic in terms of age. That's working very well, too, as the economy gets weaker, you know. And even last month's jobs numbers were pretty pathetic. Big disappointment, Dwight. Last week, the stock market, in part, was pretty rocky.

The positive part is all of our numbers in terms of labor, will be better in terms of getting applicants. So, like, I still think we have a bit of time here where everyone's very numb to price increases because we're all just so used to inflation the past three or four years. So I really think people should be raising their prices, capitalizing the last four or five months of this year, increasing the prices. So that way, when the things swap to where people become more price sensitive. But then there's a ton of laborers in the market. You're set up with your prices at the right price at the right levels. So this stuff teeters back and forth.

We just haven't seen.

It flop for a very long time where there's just tons of applicants, and then people are more price sensitive. We probably haven't seen that realistically for.

15 to 16 years where people are way more price sensitive. But then we have tons of people applying because any chick people want a job at all costs, and they're willing to take less money than you're offering. So I don't think we'll ever necessarily get there. Like crazy bad, just because we are all now accustomed, the government just bailing us out if we ever get close to that and dropping interest rates really low. But it will teeter that direction, and it will seem out of balance compared to what we've seen the past 15 years. I fully anticipate that. And that's why, like, even at the Bellingham shop, like, we pushed price increases probably two or three months later than I wanted to. But I knew if we didn't do it now, we would have had to wait till next spring. And there's a good chance next spring it's gonna Be a little harder to raise prices than it is now, and it has been the past two years. And so pulling the band aid off now for pricing, I would recommend knowing that the hiring situation is going to be solved. It's just hard when you're in the moment. Like in 2021, 2022, you couldn't find anybody. And even in some markets now, depending where you live, it's just like, impossible to find applicants. But I would imagine, Kevin, for example, if you would have done the same exact ad two years ago, you would have got like five applicants and no one would have showed up to interviews. Right. So people are looking a lot more. I think this is going to only increase as we get more and more economic, you know, headwinds, and especially if the.

Federal Reserve.

Really puts the brakes on lowering interest rates. So looks like in September they'll probably do a price cut or a interest rate rate cut of like 0.25%. That's what I'm guessing. This is my, my guess. September. September. If they do some crazy, like, 0.5% or even like 0.75%, I'd be kind of concerned that they're doing it too quickly. And then we could run the risk of having inflation come back. But I don't think they're going to. They're going to allow us for some, some pain. Based on what Jerome Powell, head of.

The Federal Reserve, said, like, it seems like they're willing to have some pain, which is higher job losses.

Weaker economic data, but they want to crush inflation. To crush inflation, you have to have jobs, people losing their job, more people in the labor market, etc. So I fully anticipate that to happen based upon these comments last month.

And so we're starting to see that with this sort of behavior. So.

All right.

Three questions. You have one. Feel free to comment. In the description.

Cassandra Turner from Henderson, Kentucky. Sorry, I'm so stuffed up, everyone. I apologize. You know, it's hard to listen to someone their nose is plugged on an invoice. Is there any way to show the client's credit has been applied to the payment? For instance, there's a line that shows the sales tax. Can there be another line that shows the client's credit that used in another part of the client's payment method? Our invoices just have the total of the invoice. It doesn't say anything about the credit going towards the payment. And this has caused some confusion. Thanks, Mike. Reach out to atc. Cassandra. I know you can assign it automatically to an invoice, it's in your settings, how it's presented. You have a little bit of power over this. So reach out to air traffic control, whether it be on the WhatsApp chat or whether it be even booking a call with them. And they can walk you through the different settings that would. Because you can assign credits automatically. I know some people don't want to deal with credits and they're just setting to remove credits completely from the client portal. So some people just like to do away the credits completely. Some people like to assign it automatically to the next invoice. So feel free to check in with ATC Cassandra and they can kind of like hear what you want to see and then work with you on your settings.

Caleb Fuller from Londonberry, New Hampshire Something I learned this spring is that hiring as early as possible for the spring rush is necessary so you are not scrambling for employees after you're extremely overworked. In my market, where there is still snow on the ground or the ground is extremely soft due to melting snow, how do you train or keep employees busy when there's no work that can be done on clients properties is the only thing you can work on is organization and systems. I maintain and fix all my equipment. During winter you could set up things indoors. So for example, if you had a shop space where like okay, let's train on safety, let's train on pay for performance, let's train on edging and like some other tasks like that. How I usually like to do it is in so for example, in markets where there's snow and then all of a sudden it's gone and like within a week or two you're mowing. I like to basically try to do pre sales of property cleanups to my existing customers and basically say, hey, if you're willing to be on hold, kind of like on the waiting list, if you're willing to, we're going to give a discount and it's going to be like the first week that there's no snow on the ground. We'll be at your property. That week is the week that you're gonna do all your training. Because usually there's kind of a bit of a week or two before snow is melting to mowing grass. And in that week or two you could train your crew. If you have a list of customers that have signed up and are ready to roll, I would only pitch that to my existing customers. I'd give them some sort of a discount or some sort of scarcity so that they choose that week or two and are willing for me to be able to be there. A little premature. So even if there's like bits of snow in the beds and things like that, they're okay with it because they took they got the discount in order to be that person. And I'm going to use those properties to do do training if possible. So I'd try to use kind of a pre sale scarcity close get existing customers a discount in order to be able to use those customers as training kind of before the rush that happens a couple weeks after that once things warm up and the grass actually starts growing.

Travis from Jonesboro what's your opinion on networking groups such as BNI? I've been a member for almost 2 years. I probably spend 2 hours a week on it. 2k in total membership fees. So far both years I have made 15 plus or negative from referrals through BNI.

There are some of the higher profile people from our town in this group so I suppose that's worth something. To be seen at events and keep up with what's going on in the town lately feels like it's been a dream. My time drain on my time and energy, but everyone I talked to says I should definitely stay in thoughts. Thank you. There are some local BNI groups or networking groups I have seen that are good. The vast majority of are not great. Keep in mind the same way that you are going there to get leads, everyone else is there for leads. And so the bottom line is if someone has two hours a week to spend getting the leads, many times it means that their business model is somewhat broken if you're looking at a local market. Because if you spend two hours that's 100 hours a week. So 100 hours a week you made $15,000 and you spent $2,000. So my question is if you did a hundred hours a year of door hangers and you spent $2,000 on Facebook ads, which or Google Ads and determine your customer acquisition cost, would you have a better return than $15,000 per year? I happen to think so. $15,000 a year. Let's assume you have $1,500 per year per customer. So that'd be 10 customers that you need to get in a year doing a hundred hours. 100 hours of door hangers. That means one new customer every seven hours. And then that doesn't include spending $2,000 on ads. And if you've dialed in your cost per lead and you've actually been tracking on Google and Facebook, let's just say it's a little higher. Like $60 cost per lead, $100 customer acquisition cost. You're going get 20 just from that. Let's just say, let's be conservative. Let's do 10 or 15. 10 or 15 customers from the $2,000 in ad spend. And let's be conservative, you get a customer every four hours of door hangers. You get 25 customers from that spending 100 hours in the year. So this is why it's so important to know cost per lead when it comes to online ads and why it's so important to know how many door hangers do you need to put out and the time it takes to do that in order to be able to.

Get that return. Yeah, I know it's two hours per week. I'm times it by 50 for the year. So 100 hours per year. So 100 hours per year is what I'm comparing that to. Because you have two hours per week times like 50 in a year is what I'm assuming.

So again, to get more customers, you are going to spend time or you're going to spend money. And so if there's a networking event or something like this, I'm simply taking that dollar amount and saying, how many customers will I get from this? And then if I spent my time on this, what would there be? Now, the big unlock with time is the fact that 10 minutes of learning could potentially save you dozens of days or weeks or years of time. That's the unlock when it comes to networking and education in general is it's a huge arbitrage. And so my next question would be like, if we go to these, are you learning something? Now, if you're just learning about the town, probably not going to make you richer. If you are learning business skills, a business skill that takes five minutes to understand could save you five years, right? So that is like the highest leverage activity is always skills and like gaining education. So if that's not happening, then it's simply a matter of time and money being spent on marketing compared to your return on investment, which in this case is $15,000 a year. I personally, based upon two full years of experience, you doing that, I would probably say I'd rather spend that on door hangers. Your time 100 hours a year and then.

$2,000 on online ads. And then I would just put massive asterisks next to it. Education is the unlock to save like massive amounts of time. And so you say, well, I'm saving 100 hours a year by not going to this networking event. But if you went to that networking event and you Learned something in 30 minutes that could literally save your business two years.

It's worth a hundred hours a year because you literally just saved yourself, like, a hundred. You just had, like, 100x multiple on time. And so, you know, skills just can, like, make time go faster. It can allow you to skip levels in the game. And so education is by far why. This is why people will pay gazillions of dollars to talk to someone for, like, 30 minutes and ask them, like, one or two questions. And people like, you're insane. It's like, no, that one question just saved me 10 years. Like, what would you pay for 10 more years of life?

Because you weren't treading water at that level. So if you want to, like, skip levels of the game is like, how do you unlock those things? And it's simply like, gaining skills can either take time, or you can use money to unlock those skills from other people that have them already. And so that's, like, the one caveat I would say when it comes to things like networking events, conferences, books, all the rest of it, like, literally one sentence could save you years of your life of just, like, toiling away at that level. So. All right, everyone. I hope you have a fantastic Tuesday. I will see you tomorrow. That's all I got. Take care.