Mike Minutes Mastermind 08/16/2022

Hey everyone, let's go ahead and rock and roll a little bit earlier than usual this morning. Let me go ahead and pull this up. I'm going to jump into a little bit of education stuff right off the bat. I'm not really education, just some observations. So in the stages of growth, the very first stage of growth, I mentioned how using a CRM at that stage seems more cumbersome and more trouble than it's worth. And the reason for that is because we have 20, 30, 40 customers, it's actually faster and more efficient just to keep it in your head. But that does not scale. And ultimately it's not using a system. And you create a massive bottleneck in the business by having information being locked up in the brains of you or an employee or anybody. You got to have it in the CRM. And I see it in the stages of growth. If it's not in your CRM, it doesn't exist. If it's in your head, it doesn't exist. So the reason I'm saying that is because especially our smaller operators, especially our solo operators inside, Super. We are getting calls a lot at command center where people are talking about their invoice and we see an invoice but there is no proof of work being done, there's no estimate that's been done. It was like they, you did a handshake deal, you did the job and you sent an invoice to them. We cannot back you up if they start disputing their estimates because or just being invoice because there is no estimate, we have no proof of you being on job site. So again, the system has to be followed if it's going to scale. And people wonder why they usually top route around 10, 15, 20,000 in a monthly revenue type. It's because your brain can only handle so much. You can only keep so much information in your head. You can only keep so many verbal agreements and handshake deals in your head. You've got to go to a CRM. And furthermore, if command center is answering your phone calls and trying to block for you, it's costing you money not to have those things in the system because they just end up just going around in circle with client. Because we have no data, we just see an invoice, we just see a job was done but wasn't invoiced, but there was no estimate. Like it just seems like super random. So I highly recommend that that be done. I'm saying this because again, when someone starts going out of the system, we have what we call yellow flags at Command center. And when yellow flags are getting waved all the time in a location, it's consistently the fact that when people call in, we can't help them because there's things being done outside the CRM, outside of the systems invoices that are there, but no estimate or job. That's the type of thing that you will absolutely create a bottleneck for. You cannot grow the business. Okay, so highly recommend not do that. If you have questions about that, email Lonnie, email Command center, get in touch with them if you need help. But is a surefire way to keep yourself from growing is not putting things inside of a CRM and a sure thing surefire way to rack up it commands and it's absolutely useless and pointless. And that is.

To simply be not putting things inside the CRM to where they cannot help the customer and they're just passing it along to you and you're having to pay for that. Whereas if you just put in the system, they could literally diffuse the entire issue and you never have to address it. Okay, next February we're going to, I'm saying this, you know, in faith. In February we are going to be. Once we're all in, super has a much better mobile version of creating estimates compared to Service Autopilot. And we do believe that we can, we know we can make it to where we do not need Command center to create estimates, but rather you're able to create the items and services kind of like your, like your estimate calculator inside of Zooper and be able to quickly, you know, copy and paste your template and then quickly choose the items as if you were creating the estimate inside your double brackets. But you're simply choosing which, you know, how many hours, how many yards of mulch, etc. And then it puts together the pricing for you. So we are going to be working on that this fall, kind of trying to get the kinks out of it. But we need everybody in Service Autopilot or sorry, out of Service Autopilot into Zoo before we try doing that. The reason, the main reason we didn't never try, we never tried to do that Inside Surface Autopilot because it is possible Inside Surface Autopilot to use what they call rate matrixes. The reason we did it is because the mobile version is so janky in terms of creating the estimate and the formatting of that estimate to the customer looks so poor. Whereas in Zooper we can automate a lot more things. Attaching a video, the formatting will look a lot Better and it should be able to be done without Command Center's involvement, which in my opinion right now will bring down everyone's command center bill by about 20 to 25%. And that is simply the fact that there will be no touch point beyond the estimator to get the estimate sent out to the client. And again, even further, creating a speed equation where there's not Command center doesn't even have to touch the estimate. Okay, again, service autopilot, I would love to do it, but their mobile version of creating estimates just does not look good. And we have tried it and there's just multiple errors and then spaces that drop into the estimate formatting and everything. So all that say keep that on your horizon. That's going to be in February. There's going to be a lot of changes in January. February, obviously everyone's moving over to Super. Then February we're going to try to be getting rid of where estimates don't have to be touched by anyone besides the estimator. And literally five minutes after they leave the property when they're in the driveway, it should be sent to the customer. That will be the expectation since Command center does not need to touch it anymore. That's going to be coming in February. Okay. So I hope everyone has change boots buckled on which is December, January, February, January, February. Especially after, after conference is going to be a lot of change in terms of the CRM. But it's a simplification and the things that we need to be able to just really SC scale up Command center. But furthermore reduce time touches, the amount of touches on every single estimate, every single call, every single email, et cetera. And so that's why we're switching to Zoo for in the long run and keep that on the horizon as well. Last thing the the document I uploaded yesterday, let me go and share.

It. There it is. This document yesterday I've updated the download inside the dashboard. This is the orientation template. It's four page document that I recommend. This is how an orientation day should look. They come in the first day of work, they sit down with you for 30 minutes and you go over this document word for word. Then you go show them a tour of all your facility. And your facility might be like a garage. That's fine. Show them where all the tools are at. Show them where they get the keys in the morning. Show them where they get the blade sharpened. Show them where they put their equipment at the end of the day, park with their truck, etc. That should be literally a 45 minute at least the first day of someone's job, before they ever hop inside of a truck, we need to abandon this idea that someone can just show up to work, say, hey, great, here's, here's the keys, here's your uniform, hop in the truck, let's go. You've got to abandon that if you ever think you're going to retain people. And I've seen the difference between, like the Bellingham shop versus a lot of guys with one, two, three guys out in the field. And even my corporate location have 1, 2, 3 employees. My retention on the local shop, the Bellingham shop, is so much better in part because there's a larger team and secondarily in part because the orientation is so much better compared to locations that have 1, 2, 3 employees, where it's like, okay, great, we have hands. Hop in a truck, and you're going to be spreading mulch all day. Like, I understand that, like, the fastest way to, like, try to get them up to profitability, but you've got to give them some sort of orientation. Otherwise, like, if you're not going to give them any sort of commitment upfront information, answer their questions that they have, how do we expect them to stick around? Okay, so you, you will have a much better retention if in the first day you explain these things, go through it words, word by word, line by line. And I've already made changes to this document for my specific locations. You know, Marcus is like, hey, I want three week notice. I don't want two week notice for time off. There's specific things we went through. If you don't have time off, like PTO paid time off. Don't put that in there. If you don't have medical benefits, take that out of there. I already took medical benefits out of this one because the Mount Vernon shop doesn't have that set up yet. Whatever it is, make it your own. That's all I care about. Because at the end of the day, I need you to sign off on it with them at the end. And I've also added this in here that says they are there. They know that they are responsible for the checklist of training and for meeting to assess their performance after 30 days. So again, this document needs to go over in person. There's just no ways around it. It needs to be done 100% and just make it your own so that you have a clear formula. Now at the very top, you have these attach. Okay, what I did inside the dashboard. Now when you download it, just go to the dashboard, go to Templates and downloads, go to the download section, templates and download section, and you can find the orientation document. But these four attachments I now have attached with this download as an example. So some of you will, you will need to go download these individually and edit them. Where? I have editable documents inside the dashboard for you. But this is an example of what you're going to need. And the reason I did this is because I want you to do is have this orientation day document, all of your attachments in one folder. And every single time you have a new employee, you print them off, you staple them, and you have a packet. Okay, this is not something like, oh, like the morning of, let's like pull it up on my iPad. No, have these printed off. So that way when you get these, when a new employee comes in, you have the orientation document. This one right here, you have the four attachments or three or whatever you're attaching, and then you sign off on it. You give it back to them after taking a picture. That picture goes on their employee profile. And now they have the record of this. The reason, the main reason I'm doing this is because, yes, they have a 30 page handbook. No one reads that. Literally one out of 100 employees will ever read that full employee handbook. But there are parts of that document that you really do need them to know to be a successful employee. There's parts of it in there that are like lactation breaks and like bunch of random stuff that they don't really need to know about. It's more of like we got to put in there for legalities and, you know, one in a thousand employees that will try to sue you over something, but you don't need them to read every single word of that. You need them to read every single word of this document. And anything that, that you don't need them to read, get rid of it. All right, you got to make sure you spend this time with them on that first day. So all those downloads are available, including, let me see here, if I can't pull this up for you guys, one second. I can't, seriously.

But yeah, all the documents are in there. Everything from the P4P, the training checklist, the training manual, the guide for them, all that's in there as an attachment and as a PDF. And if you want to make changes to it, download it in the dashboard as a editable document.

All right.

Top into questions.

Why is this in here? Stop that screen. All right, share.

All right, here we go. Let's go ahead and move this Over.

I haven't seen all these questions, but let's just go ahead and hop in. Ken asks, I have a few videos of a lawn care app I use as many qualities I would like Zooper to use. Is it okay if I send it for you to review and you could show it or just keep it in house to show Zooper. This is something that maybe next year we can address. And we'd probably have meetings like Late Spring Rush to go over things we want change in Zooper. The reason for that is because they have a pretty clear picture of where we need them to be in terms of certain changes over the next three to four months before we get ready for January. Specifically things like treatment packages, treatment treatment track, chemical tracking, the dispatch board. There's improvements we want to make for larger locations. It's decent for a location, has one employee, two employees, but when you have thousands of jobs in a day or hundreds even, it gets pretty overwhelming because it's very pictorial. And so we want more of a list view as an option for the dispatch board, similar to service autopilot. So we already have a very clear picture of what they need to get done for us to. In order to get the switch over in January, after February, we're going to have to switch over the estimate thing. And so there's no estimate calculators needed at command center. March, April, ironing out kinks, going through the spring rush. Probably May or June of next year is when it's like, hey, let's all have a zoom call and talk about like what features requests do we want to put on Zooper's plate and what can they do for us? Because there is a thousand different softwares out there and every single one is slightly different and has pros and cons. If we just bombard Zooper, we're like, hey, here's a thousand different things that we like about thousand different software. They're going to push us off. And honestly we got to keep them on our side. They are a strategic alliance with Augusta that we have to keep a very good relationship with. And so the fact that they've treated us pretty well, I feel in the development process in terms of not charging any of the franchisees for the software is pretty remarkable and shows kind of what their vision is and has a long term relationship with us. So what do you think about lawn painting? Seems to be opportunity for residential and commercial. The more experience I get, the more I notice 99% of people are incapable of actually maintaining a nice lawn. I've never gone into it mostly because.

I think this is such a short term service. Like a couple months out of the year you get busy.

And after say six or seven months of not doing that service, you might literally have a brand new team. So you got to retrain them all on a new service. And then that tank, all those chemicals, the paint, that's inventory. But like the truck is sitting there. If you, I don't know how you, if you have a spray on your backpack sprayer or if you do an actual tank. But like you're not using those for a big chunk of the year, I just don't like that. Now if you're really, really having a massive drop off in July and August, potentially it's something that you invest in and you're able to, you know, make some extra money and during those months and if it's a big thing in your area, again, maybe it's a good thing. But again, someone is paying for the equivalent of usually a month or two of green lawn, maybe two and a half months. And so what, how, how much price flexibility do I have? Is the question. And furthermore the question is I, I have rarely seen someone add a service to their business and be thrilled about it in a couple years. Usually they're thrilled about in the short term to get the revenue boost, fill in some gaps in their certain, their, in their schedule. But very rarely do people say I look back and adding more services to my business made me more profitable and I'm happy I did it very rarely. So I'm not a huge fan of adding short term. Very, very, very seasonal like hyper seasonal businesses like lawn painting that are only for one or two months. If you can mow a lawn for six, eight, nine months out of the year, it's seasonal, but at least it's current. It's current, it's, it's consistent enough to be able to produce like create P4P around, create systems around. It's hard to create systems and budgeted hours accurately around something that you do for like a few weeks out of the year. So that's the, that's the main reason why we don't do Christmas lights. Not against them. Lots of money to be had there, especially in your second year once you've done all the investment in the initial light purchase. Not to say any of these services can't make money. It's simply a matter of the headspace, the time, the effort that goes into them. Is it worth the squeeze? And if I spent that same amount of money and time in the current services that already am offering. Would I have a higher return and would I be more profitable and would it be based more on systems than just adding another service?

Sorry for any sort of repetitive repetitiveness. I think it's repetition.

Repetitiveness. I don't think that's a word repetitions in my questions lately. I'm just trying to get clarity. Yesterday in the Mastermind I was asking questions about starting my second location and you had mentioned it would be best to wait until you had 50k minimum to invest. I totally agree with that. I think I'm just excited and getting a little ahead of myself. I'm still wanting to hire GM for my current location to let go of a lot of the daily operations. My question though is what should I be working on while my GM is running my first location?

I was thinking have the GM do all the employee related tasks, put out fires, schedule management, et cetera. I would just take over estimates. But I don't think this would be a full time since we are trying to maximize profit at 500,000 prep cash for a second location in 2024. Yeah, if you're in that weird location, weird spot where you have a gm, they're really good and you're like man, I don't want to lose them. I would not try to put them into a GM role while you're still around at 500,000 revenue you have, you're too top heavy at that point. You're doing, you're touching things too much. You're going to have too much overhead. I would just keep them involved in all the finances and the businesses decision making and just constantly be putting in front of them that they are going to be be the gm. And here's how I think about things. Here's my decision framework. Here's whether or not we should buy equipment, here's how we talk about hiring issues and employee issues and here's the framework that I use. When you start doing that and you've given them a very clear time horizon like one year, six months, whenever you're going to start a second location and then they're going to take over the current location, then they'll start, they'll be more involved even though they are out in the field more doing the actual work, that's fine. I would stick with that because you do not want to have a GM and you there on a $500,000 revenue business. The only way a $500,600,000 annual revenue business in my opinion can make money and be really profitable and actually make six Figures in net profit after their second year of being at that stage is having one working GM in the field. Okay, I truly like that's just the bottom line, having a working GM out in the field. Now if you are that person, that's fine. You would be a working owner out in the field two, three days a week doing the, the operational side, the overhead side, non revenue producing estimates, etc, two or three days a week. It's absolutely possible to do that. But if you have two of those people, immediately the profits are gone and that's typically what happens. So I would just say promise him that the, you know, given the timeline of what you want to do in terms of handing him over to gm, tell him over this year he's still gonna be on the field most of his time, but you want to spend maybe an hour or two a week going over the numbers, going over maintenance records, going over the systems, going over the schedule and just getting him adapt to the systems and then he's ready for a transition next spring.

When taking a part time helper out, how many budget hours should I have on the board for the day to be profitable? If they're a part time helper, let's assume that. Again, if we are doing projects, we assume six budget hours. Sorry, if we're doing mowing, we assume six budget hours per person per day. If you have two people, I would assume 12. Okay. And just to keep it simple, keep the math simple. Okay. Obviously during time that's really dry, grass isn't growing, they can do more, right. When it's really rainy, they're probably going to do less. But on average a really good rule of thumb is six hours per mowing per day for an eight hour day of clocked in six budget hours worth of mowing. Okay? Again, if you're dry, it's gonna be way more. If it's really, really bad weather, grass is growing like crazy, it's going to be less. Okay? On average that's what you're shooting for, that's your target.

And I don't want to change that a whole lot. So if I have a helper for me today, I'm still going to put 12 hours on. So six and six. If I'm doing projects, I'm going to try to get eight budget hours done a day. So if I have a helper for the whole day, guess what? I'm going to be putting a 16 budget hours worth of project on my schedule. Okay? So it should be really simple. You got, if someone's solo, six budget Hours is the target. And again, it can fluctuate pretty substantially based upon the weather. If it's released good fast time of the year and grass is going like crazy, you're probably more like five, five and a half. If it is really dry though, we expect our guys to be able to do 7, 8, 9 budget hours of mowing very easily. So there's got to be some flux there and just some, some level of subjectivity. But six budget hours for mowing on an eight hour day of work, eight budget hours on a project, pretty much how we look at it and it scales. We just use the same math. If there's two people.

In your mind, what determines the success of a location? If you're talking about like whether or not someone will succeed, like what's the odds of someone succeeding? I'd say 100% of it. Okay, 98.5679% depends on the manager. If you are the manager, if you're the owner, it depends on you. I've seen this consistently at my locations. I've seen this at many locations that are franchisees. I've seen horrible territories. I'm like, there's not a chance in the world you can build a business in this area, just crush it. And then I've seen locations like, man, this is the best territory. I would take this territory. Every single day of the week is a perfect demographic, perfect income, demographic. Everything is perfect and someone just stall out and they can't build the business. It a hundred percent depends on the manager or the owner as the deciding factor of that location. Doing well and going forward. When I have, you know, locations that I'm looking for, general managers.

I am going to put way more emphasis on the hiring process. Way more. They have to have management experience, they have to have employees in the past.

So it could just. So much depends. Like you can take a horrible location, horrible income, horrible age demographics, put a good general manager in there, put a good owner in there that is good at selling, good at close ratio, they'll get past 500,000. If they're good at close ratio and if they're good at hiring and management and teamwork and leadership, they'll scale past 500,000.

Oh, I think this is the same one as before. I'm afraid if I, if I send the videos, they will just overlook it because I'm only one person. Yeah, I wouldn't say definitely don't send stuff to super directly. It is just going to get overlooked. Keep in mind, we are still one of many clients for them. It's just only that because we're all together, we become a big client for them. So yeah, the only way that they're going to listen to feedback from us is from us here at the corporate side. So that's why again, we have a very clear roadmap of what we need them to do before everyone switches over to Service Autopilot. And then after next spring rush, that's when it will be like we will have Zoom meetings. I'm like, hey everyone, hop on here if you have ideas, questions, concerns, whatever. And then we'll just systematically be creating a list from highest priority to lowest priority. And then, you know, we really just hope that they keep working on things and really working with us. And so if we treat them good, they will help us a lot more on the feature side of things and customizations and integrations that we want to have. So cool. It's all I got. It's got. We got a question here. It looks like this.

Is your goal right now to just make Zooper match exactly how we use service output, but maybe more user friendly.

I wouldn't say exactly, but right now is trying to get to make the transition as smooth as possible. The reason why most people will not leave service Autopilot is because they lock you into their system in terms of like their system is quite a bit different than most other softwares and once you're in their ecosystem, it's hard to get out. And so our goal with trying to make Zooper closer to Service Autopilot is to make that transition easier. But more importantly, there's, there's some really great stuff about Service Autopilot. The problem is it hasn't changed in five to six years. And when I look five years down the road, I do not see stop service off like being the leader in our industry when it comes to technology. That's the bottom line right now. It's a good software, there's pieces of it I really, really like. This piece of we don't even use that I like, but I can't look into the future like ah, we're going to. We're on the cutting edge. We have someone who's constantly innovating, making changes. We're able to make customizations, be able to make adapt things quickly that we might need. Like even if it took a year to get a new feature, that's fine. But servers AutoPilot has been four to five years in the making of their version three and we still don't use it. It's so faulty. I would say 98% of their users still use the version 2 but they've been trying to do version 3, this new feature thing for years. And so yeah, yeah, it has all the automations and they don't call them automations, they call them workflows and then they have follow ups. So follow ups are kind of like what we call an automations and service outputs of follow ups are for estimate. There's estimate follow ups and then there's invoice follow ups which is basically the collections automation. Then there is workflows. Now workflows are extremely adaptable in super and we're only cutting the top of the iceberg right now which is basically just trying to take what we've done in service all part there's a lot more down the road that we can integrate with do a lot more inside of Zooper it is a little bit more complicated to create and I would put a big asterisk next to that saying a lot of people look at Service Autopilot and think it's complicated but it's just a matter of repetition and doing it. I am not familiar with super as much as Service Autopilot like I am. I feel pretty competent at Service Autopilot in terms of getting around, understand where stuff is at, seeing where people make mistakes and why most of most of their errors that people complain about are user error just because they're just little buttons and there's 10 ways to do the one same one thing. So it does have all the automations. There's definitely little features though that we will not have inside Zooper that I love. Inside Service Autopilot there's multiple but for the, the larger good of the organization and the future of the next five to 10 years of where we want to go with software, we have to switch, we have to switch to someone that can integrate the open source. Open Source means that we can integrate with other softwares, bring in our own technology, you know, build a piece of software and then plop it onto zooper. Integrate with p4psoftware.com none of that's happening with Service Autopilot. They're closed off system. They're going to keep raising rates. They've, they're integrating now with Field Edge which is a software that's twice as expensive. So I expect prices to continue going up at Service Autopilot for a software that's very much outdated. And the only reason they can keep raising prices because people are legacy locked into their software and it's going to be, it's A pain in the butt to switch. It's been a pain in the butt this January to switch over. I can guarantee that people are going to hate my guts in January, but I know that in the five to ten year window we have to make this change and it's better to do it now than when we have two or three hundred locations in a couple years.

I heard you can't bulk charge cards. Yeah, you can. They just made this, this the, the feature last week. Rolled it out two weeks ago actually. So it's there, there's a whole bunch of things that we still have to get done before the end of this year. So don't judge it quite yet in terms of your service. All pot users don't judge it quite yet because there's still quite a bit of things we need them to switch over that are going to be like service all part more. So trust me, there's going to be lots of bumps, there's going to be lots of issues. Even as every single time you make a new feature there's always bumps and problems. My matrix of whether or not a software company has it put together is how quickly do you deal with the bugs and the issues and then make it a usable piece of software. Servers all rolled out V3, four to five years ago and still in my opinion is not usable. It's not user friendly. Super makes mistakes like every other software is bugged. When you roll out new features, it's like when you, you fix one thing and it creates five other issues. That's what happens in software all of the time. How fast you deal with those five other issues is the determining factor of how well this, this technology company is going to move forward. And Zooper is usually very responsive. And again, I'm not looking in terms like I need it done tomorrow if you get done, if you need a new feature, if you get something done in three, six months, I'm happy compared to service autopilot. And again, open source is the future of software in my opinion. And so dealing with a closed off system like service all part we are literally giving them the keys and hoping and praying they do a good job. Open source with super, we control all the credit card information. We have all, we have the ability to hook up our own software to be able to tap in with other integrations and we're not dependent on someone else. So.

I am not, I'll be perfectly honest, I am not looking forward to January because I know, I know there's things inside service that everyone's going to like that is not inside Zooper. And we're trying to again make those things better and improve those and get those features there. But I am not looking at the next 12 months which are going to be a pain in my butt to get switched over. I am looking at five to 10 years that we have to make this change and get on with a company that is massively improving and making changes and evol and evolving their business because that's what we want to do. There's just no shot in the universe. We're using Service Autopilot to become the industry leader. There's just not a shot in the universe.

So the biggest thing that we have to make sure in Zooper that no other software would help us or work with us on is the integration with Command Center. That's the biggest thing. So when like a phone call, a phone rings at Command center, it immediately is opening up the Zooper account that is associated with that location. Saves time. Every single call. It allows us to track every single action of every single user at Command Center. So Command center is going to be way better equipped inside Zooper compared to Service Autopilot. The timers are all baked into it. We can see exactly what people were doing. The it's just so much better. So all that to say it's not going to be fun next 12 months. I resent every single moment of thinking about Zooper transition because even just my own businesses on my own locations, I don't want to have to switch. Like man, we know service all about pretty well. It works good. I really like the dispatch board. I like automations. I like the bulk email and the, the new estimate or email creator or document editor. I like it a lot. A lot of stuff I like. But when I look five to ten years down the road, I know pulling the band aid off now is better move than waiting. And there's other softwares out there that I really like. Service Titan. Love it. Very expensive. If you're running small, a small operation, we're talking like 7, $800. And for a small location to get started on it then we're looking at something like Jobber. Love Jobber. Absolutely love it. I would die for Jobber. Here's the problem. They won't do any integrations. They're closed source and.

We, they won't let us do any sort of Command center integration to where when someone calls in we immediately hooks up to where we have one login and we can get into every single account. We don't have to log out, login log out, log in, all that garbage. So.

Yeah, this is a five year play. Keep telling myself that. Awesome, guys, have a great day and we'll see you tomorrow.