Mike Minutes Mastermind 08/18/2023

Hey everyone, hope you're doing super well. Let's go get started.

I'm just getting all this set up.

Bam.

All right. There was a question that came in on via email. One of the owners I had talked about, I was talking to about massive projects. There's like a two or three million dollar project, their city that they are potentially going to be getting and then they're going to sub most of it out, Almost all of it. They're going to sub all of it out.

When someone asked me that question, there's a couple things that I am thinking about.

In the five stages of growth. There is a point in there that I do say specifically about large projects.

To do. Be wary of ones that are that large because you likely don't have the manpower or skill to accurately estimate it or do the work. However, that being said, I've also had jobs that are massive that I subbed out and I was really just the relationship with the client. A lot of times this is with like commercial or city and municipalities where you need these massive, massive contracts where potentially you are just the middleman. But because you have the infrastructure to have good communication, there's actual values you in the relationship and not just going with their general con or the general contractor or someone that you're going to sub out to. So the number one thing I'm thinking about is can you actually manage that size of a project, like emotionally and all the rest of it. Secondly, financially, are you willing to. Because if you, if you're off by 5 or 10% on a million or $2 million project, that could mean your shirt. So making sure that financially you have guardrails as well as if your subs misquote you and then you make a quote based on their quote, you need to have certain ways of being able to recoup any additional costs that come up throughout the project. So work change orders are huge importance on those big, big contracts. So I'm not against them, especially when they're like one time jobs. Typically maintenance gets devalued massively, gets easy to bid on. But one time projects, a lot of it is going to come down to sometimes the relationship, it's going to come down to communication. And that's something that. Augusta, you're going to be far superior than, you know, Joe schmo that has 30, 40 guys working for him. But it's all kind of like under the table and they're all kind of all over the place. The next thing is that kind of leads me the next thing you want to make sure is you have great insurance when you submit your general liability. Typically after year one, year one, they'll take you at face value and just trust you whatever numbers you say. But after that, typically they're going to do a payroll audit. That audit is going to include having to submit your payroll reports because that's usually what your premium is going to be based upon. And then they're going to ask you how much of this is how much approximately for revenue for each of these services, because different services have different types of risk associated. And then they're going to ask how much of subcontractors, because subcontractors open up them to a lot more liability because you don't have direct control over them. And so if you're going to do these massive projects and have a whole bunch of subcontractors, you better make sure that your general liability knows what's going on, that your insurance person, you have talked to them. It is worth increasing your premium dramatically by two or three fold. If you're taking on that size of a project with subs underneath you, you better be very clear that those subs have to give you their certificate of liability. They should be giving you a certificate of liability so you are covered. And you should also be making sure that your insurance agent or company knows exactly what's happening and be very above board because again, when you're playing with that size of a contract, if you're just getting into business and the person I was talking to has several employees, but you know, we're not going to be able to take a $3 million hit. And so make sure that your liability is intact. All right? Make sure you have at least 10% on the bone. And then again have buffer for the fact that there's gonna be work change orders from your subcontractors on that size of a project. So I know it's very alluring, like, oh man, if I can do this 2 million dollar project with a 10 margin at $200,000, even if it takes me a year, year and a half, this is basically double my profits for the, for my business. Great.

Just make sure that you're not opening yourself up to a year and a half worth of liability. That if there's tons of people working on the project, a bunch of moving parts, there's a good chance someone gets hurt. It's a really good chance someone gets has to go to the hospital. There's a really good chance that something bad happens. Especially for dealing with lots of equipment and lots of machines and you're next to residential areas where there's people walking around. You got to be careful. So that would be my 2 cents on big, big contracts because yes, trust me, they are alluring. I've seen. I remember my first couple years in business like you. Yes, the city projects are great. They're awesome. I would say 90% of people in their first year business shouldn't touch them because they simply aren't experienced enough in terms of estimating or how to deal with that type of project from a project management standpoint. However, I have to caveat all of that by saying we got a project that I'd made like 50% margin on because I did the subcontractor work. And so that paid for me to move from Blaine to Bellingham like six or seven years ago is basically all of that was paid for by one massive contract that I subbed out like for, for one part I've charged, I charged $75,000 and I paid my sub $10,000 to do it. That was just one part of the project. But for every one of those size projects I have other stories of those same size projects going poorly and us either breaking even or just mostly not so much financial part, but more like demoralizing the team, dragging the job way out, customer being dissatisfied, things like that. So just be careful.

All right. I think there was just a couple questions.

All right. Thomas from Isqua, have you used the text feature in SA before adding the trigger for a drive by to be set up in the automations. Was going to send it based on next video he uploaded a couple days ago. Was curious if there are any glitches on that end. I have not seen the video that Nick made and I have not used essay texting before.

So if Nick had it set up correctly though and you like it, feel free to definitely make it.

Next one. Kyle Tarvin Moore, Oklahoma I was just looking at the reviews the other day. I noticed the Bellingham location has a few of our five star and a one star review on your Google page from our customers. I've double checked that our after job review request email was changed this spring when we switched over. Is there anything else I need to change? It's weird how people are finding the Bellingham location versus our location.

Yeah, I'm seeing it's like typically in your first year or two if someone's really mad and they just search like Augusta Lawn Care on Google it will show the Bellingham location. Typically it's been in business for almost 10 years and it has the most reviews and it has the most domain authority. So if they're on maps and they search Augusta Lawn Lawn Care it might pull up the Bellingham Shop if you haven't created enough domain authority. I see like the larger locations never have problem with this. Ones have been around now for a few years, they don't have a problem with this. But it also happens when someone just goes on Google and they're mad and they want to leave a bad review and they search Augusta Lawn Care. Typically the Bellingham shop will pop up especially if they have their geolocation turned off. Like if they've disabled the ability for their phone to see where they're at on the map, it's not going to look for the closest, it's just going to look for the highest ranking. So that's usually the case. Unfortunately that's kind of the way most of these OS systems are going in terms of Apple and that is you can very easily disable location tracking. And so therefore the searches are not as geo specific, they are based upon just generalized Google. Like wherever you're searching the world that that's going to show up. So the problem with that is it is going to pull up the Bellingham shop if you just search Augusta Lawn Care. So.

I haven't seen tons. Like I see all the ones that come in the Bellingham Shop for example. I haven't seen a ton recently.

But I know it has happened especially to newer locations.

I've seen in the essay page that one clicks are still not sending. Are we safe to send? SA said the issue was one of their users sent over 15,000 market emails and overloaded their system. Yeah, so we, I saw that same thing.

But we sent an email out from, from Bellingham Shop last Thursday and I know it still was half of them went out and half of them did not. So I, I don't know as of this week we, we did one a couple weeks ago, it did the same thing then we did it last week, did the same thing. So we can't really send another one from Bellingham Shop. What I would recommend you do is go to like a section of your customers. Like for example, you could do it to customers that are a year old or something like that.

And do it for like 200 people and see what percentage of that 200 went out and if it's like 30, 40%, you know there's still an issue. Otherwise if you know 180, 190 of them go out then you're probably good to go. So that's the Safest thing for me to say because, like, even today, everyone in Canada is having issues logging in, so I'm kind of monitoring that.

Yeah, I'm just looking. Yeah. Canada. Canada. It seems like service autopilot seems to be having an ISP issue. So any of our Canadian franchisees might be having problems getting a service off today. I haven't heard any update if it's fixed, but that was, like, the past five or six hours. It seems like it's down in Canada.

So hopefully that is repaired sooner than later. But, yeah, in terms of this specifically, as of last Thursday, I know it wasn't fixed, but I haven't heard anything this week. So I'd recommend is just sending out a smaller chunk of your customers to test it out yourself, and then if it works well, then send it to everyone else. Just make sure it's a filter that you can then, you know, reverse and do the opposite of. So. All right, that's all I got.

Cool. I will probably show you all on Monday the designs we're working on with the website. It's really, really cool. A few touches I want to add. We delayed a little bit. I was hoping to do it Wednesday, but there's a feature we are trying to do. I think it's gonna. Everyone's gonna really, really like, and I would. I would want to roll it out same time as the redesign.

I feel bad for her. Oh, yes. I don't know who this is. Let's see who this is.

Oh, it's Connor. Yeah. Tara, Tara, Tara, Tara. She might make a good project manager at Copilot. We'll see. All right, guys, we'll see you take care.