Mike Minutes Mastermind 08/15/2024

Hello guest nation. Hope you're doing good. Let's get this thing kicked off. I did start this a little before the text messages went out because I have hard stop in 17 minutes.

So let's get things kicked off.

He got five questions. Let's jump in.

Some cool stuff we're working on, but I'm not quite yet ready to share it with everyone. Give me a couple more weeks. Really good stuff. I'm also do expect in the next couple weeks to be getting another survey from Nick the owner, success manager. Really appreciate everyone's feedback on those last quarter and I think we've made about six or seven changes based upon that. So I appreciate everyone's feedback and we will continue to do so. Let's jump in. Kyle Tarvin.

Any thoughts on Groupon marketing? Seems like people either love it or hate it. It's worth giving a shot. Like every market I've seen when it comes to Angie's List, Home Advisor, things like Groupon, Lonlov, all these other lead sources, I've seen some markets just absolutely crush. So it's not a bad idea to spend a little bit, try out a campaign and see what happens. Like up in our market, for example, Groupon is like obsolete. No one uses Groupon. I haven't heard anyone talk about Groupon in our like in my area for probably five or six years. But in some areas it probably crashes. So it's very very. All these lead sources are very, very organically local. So if you know in your market, tons of people are using that app or that lead source or like Andy's list is really popular. Try it out. You know, especially with angie's List and HomeAdvisor, we have the you save the 300 bucks, you can see it on the preferred vendors. Give that a shot and just see what happens. Not a bad, not a bad option. Modesto. Hey Mike, Considering expanding to Reno, Nevada, your thoughts on market potential and competition? Our GM is interested in relocating to Reno to lead new locations so he can be closer to family. Thanks in advance, Forest. Okay, so two things.

Unless your GM has worked with you for more than three years, I personally would not build the business around him. I have done this in the past and it has burned me in the past when I GM, that's six or 12 months, showing a lot of good promise and I'll build a whole location around them, et cetera. And I traditionally tend towards being that more that way. But it could put you in a really bad spot. So unless this gm, which I don't believe this person has been with you for more than six months for I would probably wait on a big relocation. Relocate locations that are outside of your state and you can't ever attend like be at are going to cause more stress if anything goes wrong. And then what it can do is put jeopardy on your location. So I know you already have two, which is a big step. The third one's another big step, especially if it's gonna be further away than what you're currently you're juggling between the two that are close.

I would probably rather actually partner with this GM. Even if you gave him like 10 or 20%, I would talk to say, Brian Connor about how he's done it with his partner Jeremy and how they're planning to do more locations in the future with that strategy. That might be a good talk to have because I would want this person to have skin in the game if they're going to be out of state and that far away. I would also say Reno is going to be a very different.

Climate than when you're at. And so I'd really look at. Is there actually like, is this shift going to have to go from maintenance and mowing to more maintenance and zero escape like weeds, etc. I talked to Abraham Moscaro down in El Paso, Texas. Similar. Not a lot of grass. They have to do really focus on more project stuff as well as like maintenance of the property. So trimming bushes, pulling the weeds. And a lot of their yards do not have grass. So it's very different market. I would definitely go there in person. I would check it out. I would make sure that your GM has some sort of skin in the game. And I would probably, if that's. If you're gonna do a jump that far away where you can't be there within a matter of an hour, I would probably partner up with them in some way, shape or form. So for example, I might give them instead of 35% profit sharing, I only give them 25% but then I give them 10% of equity or something like that. And I want at least 10% equity probably to give them any sort of like they want to wake up and actually do it. I don't usually like doing equity, but if you're going to give it to someone that you haven't worked with for three plus years and is so far away that you can't get there, it would be definitely be something to consider.

So.

Devin from Red Deer. Hey Mike. Me and my employer currently work 15 hours a week. We mow Tuesday through Thursday and have no job on schedule. About 10k a month. What should we do to get more work right now? Hey Mike, me and my employer currently work 15 hours a week and we mow Tuesday to Thursday and have no job. Oh, I think you mean employee. Got it. Okay.

Really recommend booking a coaching call. Like this is when the rule of 100 sounds like to be the most effective. If you're only doing 15 hours a week, Tuesday through Thursday, that's five hours a day. That's not much. So you should be doing another four hours each of those days with door hangers, door knocking, yard signs, et cetera, posting on Facebook groups, cold calling direct messaging people in your database about the service, doing cold estimates, and then on Monday, Friday and Saturday the same thing. So the difference between having 15 hours now and having 40 hours in a matter of three weeks is literally three to four weeks of high execution against the rule of 100. And I would probably push you to more like the rule of 200 or 300 because you have a lot of time. And I would also say you probably don't need an employee for only 15 hours a week. With two of you, that's 30 budget hours a week. I would probably, for the sake of profitability, cut that person out, work the full 30 budget hours yourself and then work another 15 to 20 hours of door knocking, yard signs, door hangers, etc. To then scale back to that employee. Or, or if you're like, hey, they're really, really good, okay, great, then we need to go into growth mode. We need to get door hangers out. We need to grow. So please, please, please book a coaching call. This is a matter of being off the rails in three months versus doubling the business. So please, Devin, book, book a coaching call. Even book it with Nick, Nick Reed.

Matt from Salem, Oregon. Yesterday you mentioned connecting with other owners who have similar life philosophy or business goals. I like the idea. How do we find like minded owners? Are we going to have a personality profile that's or something similar? I'm not opposed to doing this. Especially like if you guys wanted to share between yourselves.

This is, this is why I see traditionally it takes, it's kind of like weird. Once you're solidified in the community, it usually takes like three years. And that is like you've come to three, two or three conferences, you come two or three meetups, you've gotten to several different WhatsApp groups.

You get to feel like, okay, franchise advisor, Council coaching, who do I call? You've gotten used to the roundtables and you have, you know, five to 10 people that you really lean on. It just takes time of meeting people in person most the time. I would also say just look at the Facebook group, like PC people who are engaged, See who's asking questions, see who's giving away, giving away advice that is super valuable. And then just, you know, ask me, hey, you know, hop on a call for 15, 20 minutes and then just chat and then you'll probably know, okay, is this aligned, is this person relatively aligned with me? Because like, even if they want to build a bigger business, if their life philosophies are similar to you, the decision that they make, you're not going to have a filter. The problem I find the reason I like to have someone that kind of generally I agree with their life philosophy is because then I don't bring it to this random filter. And that's what if you can not have the filter and listen to someone who has completely different opposing ideas from you. Awesome. Like that's actually the best way to do it. But if you have, you know, problems filtering out people's information based upon their life philosophy, then it's like, great, then just find someone who has a similar life philosophy. So you don't have a filter because most of the time like if the teacher has the answer that the student needs, it means that the student doesn't know the answer. Like they need to be willing enough to have the answer enter their orbit. And so if you're closing everything off simply because of the way someone portrays themselves publicly or their views on things or whatever, ideally we get rid of that. That's a much harder conversation to be perfectly honest with you. And so it's like, then just find someone who you do align with philosophy wise in terms of life and then you won't have the filter. But ideally in the perfect world you would just not have filters. You would be like, let's judge this based upon the numbers, let's judge based upon their performance. And let me just like see like execute blindly based upon the track record, right? So even yesterday we were talking about the Franchise Advisor Council. Like.

I was talking like a few years ago, I think there was two.

Two owners inside of our destination doing over seven figures. And you know, for the retreat next year there's probably between 10 to 15.

Different locations, maybe more, might be 18, there's a lot more. And I believe in like, you know, even two or three years, it'll probably be 30 to 40. And so it's just a matter of.

You know, finding Those people and then realizing that you could be. You could be gone to training with someone that is at zero. But if they're. If they have the skills to be able to grow to 3 million, multiple locations, etc. Being alongside them is really, really valuable. It is usually more valuable to be alongside someone than just hearing from above. Hearing from above is good, but the problem is usually it's very hard to take what someone says that has already done, like, passed the test and.

Them have empathy for what you're going through. It's just very difficult. It just really is because you just forget about the pain that you went through. It's just the honest truth. Like, you, once you've crossed a certain level, you forget about the pain that you went through, and you can only talk about in hindsight. And so sometimes going along through it with someone else is super valuable. So, like, you know, if I was an owner shadow destination, I'd be looking for, okay, let's look. Let's get some people that are like, I kind of started out with, like, they're my cohort, right? So that's why we're like, doing better at getting cohorts to six weeks after training, being together on a call, I'd be getting a few of them. Then I'll be getting several people that have, like, built the size of business that I kind of am wanting to get to. Then I'd probably be making some friends with people have, like, life philosophies similar to me. I'd be making friends in connection with all of them and just providing as much value to them as possible. So if they have trouble and they're close to me, I'd be like, okay, here, I'll borrow my truck, borrow my mower. I'll be just trying to produce value to those four to six people as much as possible. So that way, when I have a skill deficiency and they have the skill I need, they're willing to just give it to me, like, boom, save six months. And so that's, you know, why, why communities exist. And that's what I think I would be doing is like, probably two, two and two. I'd be pretty. For a year or two, I'd just be like, what can I do for you? And I'd be asking the question is usually a mistake. Usually it's a matter of, like, being aware enough to actually figure out what you can do for them and then just doing it blindly for them and then building up enough goodwill to win. Like, you need a, a specific skill and they have it they'll just plop it on your desk. So, Ricardo Alexandria, I'm having a hard time with Google and Facebook ads because they keep saying I'm violating community guidelines, getting suspended. Some ads won't even run. Google Ads and Facebook ads are currently suspended. And I appealed. What should I do to fix and prevent this in the future? The ads I run are both in the dump for you and Evergroup videos. Yeah, I saw this like over and over the other day on two accounts and other two accounts it works just fine. So I don't know, keep appealing. I would also say I have seen before the one that has the canva where it says like your city or state, take out the text, get it through in canva. Take out the text, get it passed through submission and then put the ad, add the text and change the create. Edit the creative. See if that's the issue. Because I have a feeling some of them it is that it's somehow flagging it. I don't know if it's a certain word on there, like if it was attention maybe.

But try that, Ricardo. Like take out the text, submit again and go for it. It's just weird because it seems more of an account issue because you have Google and Facebook. Usually it's just Facebook I've ever seen that happen with. So give that a shot. But if it's happening to. Oh yeah, I see you've got pictures.

Your account violated the circumventing systems policies. Yeah, that's weird. So basically they're thinking you're trying to circumnavigate, like get around something, submit an appeal. Unfortunately, content within your campaign does not align with these standards.

Content that violates or is crucial advertising content or accurately represent the products or services being promoted. So I would really look. So it's. They're basically saying you're being misleading. So I would probably look at your. Your creative and your text and make sure it's very, very clear. It's lawn care.

Just maybe, maybe check on what your words are saying. But if you're copying over from what we're I'm using done for your ads, like we run those all the time. So I would appeal, see what happens, see if they come back with the same thing. And then I would change the creative, submit again. And then I would take the same creative and then I would change the text and see which one actually gets through. Sometimes once you get through and then you just change the creative or change the text randomly, it starts working again. So just FYI, sometimes the solution is literally just get accepted into Facebook or Google and then go ahead and you can make changes without them flagging that campaign. You did not hear that from me.

All right, everyone, have a fantastic Thursday. I think we now have, like, almost 40 locations that are up and running for Augusta Christmas lights. Very good. Media team is working hard on all sorts of designs. Business cards, flyers, door hangers, postcards, email signatures, the whole nine yards. Oh, and wraps for your trucks, all for Christmas lights. So those same designs could be used for trailers or anything else, too. But those are all getting worked on and should be up next week is what they're targeting. All right, everyone, take care, and we'll see you tomorrow.