Mike Minutes Mastermind 08/17/2022

Hey, everyone. Hope you're doing super well. Let's go ahead and hop in into some questions. I apologize for you a little later than usual this morning.

Okay, pull us out here. Share.

If I don't get to it, remind me about a question I was going to expound on that was doing voice notes with one of the owners this morning. And I thought it'd actually be a good topic for us all to talk about because just in general. All right, what should markup be on plants and mulch? Typically at 20% for mulch and 40 to 50% markup for plants. Yeah, I want at least 40, 50% now on everything, including mulch.

Now, if we're going to get mulch for, say, $30 a yard, I want at least 45 that I'm charging on my estimate calculator.

Yeah. Just because there's so much.

Otherwise you can really have a profitable service business, but because you don't mark. Mark up your materials enough, it actually hurts your margins. You want to be the other way around. You want markup of materials to be like profit money in your bank. So I'd Recommend at least 50% markup.

What is the farthest you would recommend driving for lawns? I know you service multiple towns for your bellam job, so just curious. Yeah. The only reason we service Blaine still is because that's where we started with the. The local shop. We have considered splitting into two because it is 25 minute drive, but we have so many in both of them that it's. And all throughout, like, in between, it's like, there's no extraneous clients. But if there's a client that is a mile away outside of our area, we're going to cut them out. And we've cut out certain areas around Blaine or around Bellingham, like the south side that we don't even go to.

There's a. There's Bellingham addresses we don't service just because they're too far south.

Would you charge a higher rate to account for drive time or just bake in drive times, your estimated price? If I was to. If I was thinking about servicing an area that was like a couple extra miles away, I would bake in my budget hours. The fact that they're going to be further away, and I'd do it across the board for all those locations, all of those.

Lawns. And the challenge with that is if you're doing over the phone estimates, you can't have it where it's like, okay, this is my grid for this town. This is My rate matrix for this town, this, you're going to get command center mixed up and it's just going to get messy. I would recommend just having your rate matrix and then price increasing all of them at the same time in a given market. So for example, if you're like, hey, this area is like an extra half mile mile away. I've been saying, no, let's go ahead and include them in my service area. And I'm going to go ahead, get like 20, 30, 40 clients. So I have a full route and I would go ahead, do that high close ratio, get them and then, okay, they're further out. I'm going to go ahead and raise all of them by $5 per cut next spring. I just do it that way, right? That way you get them all in and then that way when you raise your prices, you already have a full route instead of going like one or two or three. Like that's what I hate about going in a new service area is you're unprofitable until you really have a full route where the crew is going and doing at least 10, 15, 20 lawns. And so that's why I really like growing in stages, like in increments. And that is attack the market. Get, get a full route and then raise the prices instead of keeping your prices higher. And then like for a whole year you're unprofitable on those lawns because you're trying to get one, then two, then four, then three. Like you don't want to deal with that. Get a full route, then raise the prices if you need to because of service area.

Oh, there's a longer one. Okay. Oh, there's a picture. This is a first picture. Let's go.

Let me see what happens here. I've never even done this.

Okay. I don't even know what the question's about. Should probably go back and look. Okay. While we were doing an initial mode last week, a pop up drain. Oh mercy. Was in the ground, was sucked up by the mower and shot out of the mower in pieces and was sprayed against the neighbor's siding and made a bunch of cuts in the siding and the main part of the cap hit the metal neighbor's metal door and dented the door. Oh my word. It's approximately thousand dollars in damages. Since he wants the door replaced, I offered to pay for it without argument. And the neighbor was a nice gentleman. Is this something, is something like this truly our fault? Is it worth putting something in the initial mode that we may not be responsible for? Hidden, damaging, hidden items. I've been using a zero turn for eight years and have never had one of those sucked up before and thrown like a projectile. No.

That'S crazy. We've had them sucked up quite a bit, but never. It's all the collateral damage that was created there. That, that is the, the killer in terms of cost. Man, that's brutal.

Here's the thing. If you put this in your.

If you put this in. Sorry, I saw this comment here and lost my train of thought.

If.

If you put that in your, in your estimate comments, you're going to have to do some explaining to customers because they don't, they don't want to be responsible for the damages. And then secondarily, you're going to get a bad review. If you were like, hey, it says in my estimate we're not responsible. So I don't know, $1,000, I would probably just eat those. I know it sounds horrible, but, you know, if it was five, $10,000, like, let's say you broke, you dented the side panel of their Corvette, okay? Now we're talking like, hey, look, that's a real discussion to be had. And from a legal standpoint, they are liable as a homeowner. But then what would happen in a court of laws? They would come after you and after your license. That's what would happen, right? So in that case, then again, if you go to court, that's what they'd be looking for. Check this out. Let's go.

The.

So that's what happened in a court of law, right? So if they, if you had in your, in your estimate any sort of verbiage or no verbiage at all about that, and it's, it's a $20,000 mistake because they damage the side of a really nice car truck and it's okay, the whole quarter panel has to be changed out. If that happens again, the homeowner, they're responsible because their property got messed up and damaged someone else's property, then what's going to happen is their insurance is going to come after you. And so that's when you would have some verbiage, potentially. So I wouldn't be opposed to having some sort of verbiage in your estimate. For one, like, you could just make it part of your service template for service, autopilot or super, that when you select initial mo, it says in there, we are not responsible for any damages due to the overgrown lawn. You could do that. That would be a good move. I think that would be a good move. Is this something that is of a concern to you? Just keep in mind, when any ever a customer, a potential customer sees we are not responsible for damages, red signals go off in their head too. Right. So the question is, are you going to leave, let's just say three customers a year on the table because they don't like that verbiage in exchange for saving $1,000. That's the question. Right. But if it's $20,000, we start early, having a discussion. Right. So I would not be opposed to someone in their.

Estimate template saying for what, for initial mows, like we are not responsible for any damages due to the overgrown lawn. That would definitely be something that I would consider.

So cool. I got to see who this is. This is hilarious. Is it? Oh man. Here. Sorry, I gotta refresh my page in Facebook. Who is it? Who is it? Oh, come on. Ah, sorry. I gotta go to Augustination.

Ken.

Oh, that's so funny. That's so funny. Cool. I have a meeting with Lonnie and Liz. We're gonna talk about departments at command center. So hope you all have a fantastic day and thanks for submitting the forms. I am going to be leaving.

Not tomorrow, I'll be doing a mastermind, but Friday I'm flying to Australia for the gyms mowing training. It's gonna be a super great experience. I'm looking forward to that. Bringing a lot of their ideas that have worked for their thousands of locations and trying to bring up take the best ones for us. They are very different model. I looked at their training manual and things and they're really, they're really only trying to get people to become solo operators. That's because 95 of them are just solo operators. And so obviously we're trying to train for a very different outcome at a destination. But I think it's gonna be a really valuable experience for myself to be able to learn from someone else that has done it so many times in terms of training. And then we come back in a couple weeks, we start our first cohort of training for the fall. So that'll be fun. But I will have Mastermind tomorrow. Not there will not be one on Friday, but I will be doing masterminds next week. I just don't know. Like I'm. I think I'm like 11 or 12 hours ahead. So I'll probably record them and put them on. So if you have questions, keep using that form. And so in the description there's a link to the form and I will absolutely go over that now. Last thing I Just reminded myself right before I closed out, of course, it was actually in relation to one of the owners this morning, reached out to me and asked about their parents. And that is, you know, how do you, how do you kind of like, realistically provide for your parents when they're a little bit older and they can't make income, they can't get a job and they need, you know, three, $4,000 a month. So I can go into this more depth if there's more questions about this, but the first thing I kind of look at is like, can I get them to do like a house with an Airbnb that they can manage? And if they're a little bit more healthy, if they're, they have energy and they're physically capable, it'd be a great move to try to get them into a house where they can have a condo or an ADU or a separate room that they can keep as an Airbnb and make 2, $3,000 a month in income. That is very possible. They clean it. It's really low key. They probably enjoy that kind of staying busy, that business side of things, trying to make it better, like that sort of thing. I think a lot of people would enjoy that in their older age and in later years. If you can't do that, though, and real estate in general is a much slower moving thing in terms of getting your money back. You know, stock market is the thing like, you're not going to invest. You know, you have, they have 75, $100,000. Not going to put that in the s and P500. Like, we're going to invest for their retirement. It's like, look, you probably have five years left of life. We need to be thinking about how do we get income so that we can pay for a nursing home or assisted living, etc. And so the specific owner this morning, actually, I think the thing that he determined is they actually take the money that they have, they do have 75,000 and put that into the business, they can grow it and then just use the profits from that growth to pay for that. That is a very awkward position sometimes though, too, because now you're responsible for someone else's money. I hate that feeling. That's why I don't like to have investors or owe money to people. I'd rather owe money to banks because I just. There's too much pressure. So there's pros and cons of that sort of situation, but it's definitely something, I think that all of us, whether it be parents or grandparents trying to get them in their later years when they can't produce revenue, produce income to get something that's passively making them money. So if you have more questions about that, feel free to put it in. But I like the Airbnb thing, especially if they have a little bit more physical capabilities. I think it keeps them active mentally too, and learning the technology side and interacting with people and meeting new people, et cetera. So anyways, hope you all have a great day and we'll see you tomorrow. Take care.