Mike Minutes Mastermind 08/22/22

Hello, Augusta Nation. Hope you're all doing super well today. I just finished day one of training and then we have an hour break here. So I think this is probably when I'll be doing the lives, mostly to prevent me from going to sleep the next few days. And then at 6 o' clock they do dinner. And then tonight's the one night we get to talk to Jim. So I want to make sure I'm over there and do some Q A stuff with him. So that will be fun. I wanted to. I, I saw there were four or five questions that came in, so I'm going to get to those. But I actually, what I was thinking is I just took notes on my pad here and I was thinking I'll just read them off to you. So if you don't care about what I'm learning right now, feel free to skip through. I'm going to do questions at the end and we'll get to those. But I figured some of you might enjoy this and some of it's just kind of how I think and what I'm learning here. And so there's really no order to this. I'm just taking notes from what was said this morning and the day. And so I have several pages. I'm happy I came. I really am. I was always, I was crossing my fingers and hoping I wouldn't show up here and just be like, this is horrible. Like just boring, right? But it's been really good from a business standpoint. There's not really like a lot of learning from that element. It's very fundamental. But like no one here has had business experience, management experience. It's very, very elementary, honestly, from a business perspective. But just me learning as a franchisor and then some elements where I'm like, dude, we crush. We do way better at them than at this certain area, than them and others. Like we can improve on that. We can make these better, we can support franchisees better in certain areas. So I think it's a. It's just been good for me because I'm always compared where we can improve and what we do well at compared to Anytime Fitness, which is obviously a. But much bigger and better franchise, but never like service based. I've never been able to go to a franchise training like this and I don't think anyone in the United States would let me. Now I know that they have obviously prepped all of their speakers that I am in the audience. Cause they all know who I am and they all have specifically talked to me. So they, they Must know. But they've been very nice in terms of sharing information and I'm just thrilled that I can be here. So I'm just going to write some, I'll show you what I wrote down and go through my notes. And I don't think it'll take me longer than 10 or 15 minutes, but I'll try to just go through it. And some of this mean, totally mean nothing to you but stuff that I'm learning. So I'm just gonna start going through it. Stuff I learned today. Okay. I didn't actually until 20 minutes ago think I was going to share my notes. So again, some of this might be like notes directly for myself or things that reminders for me to do once I get back home. But I'm just gonna go through and hopefully you learn something. So at Jim's mowing or sorry, Jim's, the whole franchise network, the average franchisee makes just under 140,000 per year in revenue. And that's the average. The, the, the mean is under a hundred thousand. So it's very small. Like we're talking smaller than our solo operators. Like a solo operator was doing140,000 after a few years, you know, I'd really be trying to increase their prices at least to get them up above 20,000 per month and you know, 200,000 per year.

All that to say.

Average franchisee, 140,000 per year. I have it later in my notes, number of franchisees and all that stuff. I'll get to it just second. I'm just going to go through my notes as I came. A call center currently takes lead and says the franchisee will call back in two hours to schedule. So one thing that's really unique about Jim's is that the call center doesn't do a whole lot besides just take the lead, input the data and then they tell the customer that the franchisee will call them back into it within two hours. And so the big thing that they've. I'll get into it. I wrote more question notes down here. They're, they're trying in the next year or two to get it to where they can schedule an estimate for a franchisee. But right now that doesn't exist. So I was like, hey, we, we can do that at least. But when I asked Jim about, he's like, they run it, they've, they've avoided it because of the same issues that we've had to figure out at Command Center. And he, he honestly, he looked at me and he said I can't believe you've been trying to do that at your size. He says, we haven't been able to figure it out for years. So I was like, hey, we haven't nailed it, but we're doing pretty good to leave a schedule estimates because they don't even go and see the schedule of the franchisee. They simply see is the franchisee accepting leads or not. And if they are, they go ahead and tell the customer that the franchisee will call them back within two hours to schedule the estimate or to schedule the job or whatever it might be.

10% of franchisees report poor financial performance or poor income. And what they've seen is that, that on their surveys from the franchisees that say that is a direct correlation with the customer service rankings. So that's interesting. I thought when they looked at the 10% that this part I didn't write down, but if I'm going off memory here, that 10% of franchisees that reported that they, they thought they were making poor income, poor personal income, because the franchise, I want to say it was like 60% of them were in the bottom rankings of customer service surveys. And that was one thing you'll see later on. I put a note that like down the road, when you do a better job of us tracking customer service and requiring it from all franchisees and making it part like if you don't give us sort of have a brand standard and keep customers happy because it will affect more and more people as we get more and more locations. So but that was an interesting thing that they came up again. 10% reported that they didn't make enough money and that had direct correlations to their customer service rankings and surveys.

As of this year, Jim's 5% of franchisees leave in their first year. So 5% failure rate. I'm sorry, year over year, I should say yoy year over year. You'll see. I have more notes about that later. Red flag they are talking about is if a franchisee cannot pay or borrow to start a business, that's a big red flag because there's so much in the first few years in terms of investing into the company and buying more stuff and just potentially going out of business simply because they couldn't afford a 500 repair. Things like that.

See here what else we got. So right now at gyms, what they do is a fixed per month fee plus a lead fee. So per lead that comes in, you get charged for that plus a branding fee plus a technology fee. Typically the fixed fee is around 600. There's some of their franchise services that because they do everything from accounting to fencing, they have all these different franchises underneath the gyms, right? So their fixed monthly is about 600 per month. Their lead fee is everywhere from about 15 to $65 lead that comes in. And again, that is for any lead that comes in, they have a branding fee, which is also like a marketing fee and then a technology fee.

And the reason that they charge a lead, I'm just reading my notes, is because it makes the franchisee value the lead more. And there's one eight as many complaints when they switch to where they charge per lead.

Versus if someone is given leads because the franchisee actually follows up once they actually close the deal doesn't, you know, ghost the customer or just leave them hanging because they're getting charged for that lead regardless of whether or not they.

Close the deal and the franchisee follows up faster, et cetera. Lead fees are charged regardless of the job is closed or if the franchisee can't get through to the client. So they said that they almost never remove a lead fee. It is almost never tracking complaints. They said 4% of all jobs completed lead to a complaint, which we do pretty good compared to that because we have recurring services like if you look at every single day you do 100 jobs, that would mean that four of them complain. And so how they rank that too is you did 4%, that's the equivalent of 4.8 out of 5. So on the survey, anything under 4.8 as an average is considered non compliant and they get a warning. And if within six months, if they don't rectify it, they get no more leads from the franchise and they have to come back to to headquarters for retraining for a week. And if it still doesn't fix itself, they get, the franchise gets terminated.

So the failure rate in their first year is now 10 to 12% in the first year. I don't know how that correlates with the 5%. They told me earlier because I put in there the failure rate was 5% year over year. But then Jim himself said there's a failure rate right now of 10 to 12 in the first year. And his point here was pretty cool. So he said it used to be 75% which is amazing. So they started in 1989. They've been franchising for 33 years. In the first 20 years, the failure rate in the first year was 75%. And he said that was a big reason as to why they really started looking at their training and Improving it. And you'll see why I think that was also in just a second, the way they structure it. The headquarters head office doesn't really have franchisees. They have, I'll show you the structure in a second. But what they used to rely on is the franchisors or like middlemen trained the franchisees. The head office didn't. Now they come for training for like a week, then the franchisors train them. And so now that's led to a much better failure rate of just 10 to 12% in the first year versus 75%. And currently Augusta, we're right around 4%, 5% in the first year, could be 6% because I think it might be 6%. So we're doing pretty good there. But we're still really trying to improve our training this, this fall, especially revamping the whole thing. But here's an interesting thing he shared and I never thought about this and that he said he asked them the classic question, how many people, how many, how many small businesses do you think fail every year? And everyone's like, you know, 50, 60%, whatever. And he said he believes it's more on 90 to 95% of small businesses that are service based fail in the first five years. And he said the reason for that is because if you look at the 50 to 60% number that they share with everyone, that includes capital intensive businesses like restaurants, retail outlets that have 10 year leases on their, you know, a big build out at 5, $600,000 that they have to spend on their restaurant build out or retail space. And so those businesses will stay around a long time because they're simply just a massive upfront capital investment. Whereas service based businesses that require 50, $60,000 or less to start have a much higher rate of closure because no one invested mass amounts of capital and therefore typically the business owner isn't as well capitalized. So that was an interesting stat. I had never thought about like that. And he's probably right.

He didn't have any data necessarily, but he, he, he believed it's 90, 95% failure within the first five years in the service based businesses. So that was interesting.

A couple of things I wrote down, again, these are all just notes to myself. I did not plan to share this. I'm just reading through these. So proactive calls to franchisees, especially when they're first getting started, instead of them requiring them to book a coaching call.

This is something they didn't do. They didn't do any sort of coaching calls for the first 20 years started in 1989. So it would have been what 2009 they started doing coaching calls and it led to 40% higher success rate after five years with their franchise system. So we've done that from day one because the quarterly calls that we had at any time fitness I thought were really helpful. So we decided hey, if quarterly is good, let's do it monthly and then every other month for the solo operators. But that led to a really good outcome for them as well. They oh, here's a note for myself to use franchisees to give meetings and talks and just cherry pick who is best at hiring, upselling, close ratio, etc. And have that have them speak to other franchisees. And he talked about the importance of having, creating the community, having talks and meetings like the Southeast Conference. The meetup we had was just epic. I, I was super fortunate to be there. I love being there. It rejuvenated myself. I think a lot of other people that came felt the same way. Having more of those kind of how can we foster those? I put a note in here like could we potentially have a fund for franchisees if they wanted to organize something in their local area? And that fund is then someone can tap into and use because there's cost to organizing those sort of events. And he talked about how it's important for mental health and community. Let's see here. Direct correlation with success rate and having meetings and people actually showing up to them. So this is something that they do too in terms of having like conference fees and charging them regardless if someone shows up because they want everyone to show up. And he said they, when they started doing that again, success rate goes up getting, making it compulsive. Compulsive, compulsory, I don't know make for enforcing that. People have to show up to an event because it's so correlated, he said, to the success rate if they just show up be at events. So the number one thing that someone can do instead of Jim's mowing or any gyms franchise is to show up to training events and community other franchisees when other franchisees are putting things on. That is the num. If he said if, if he could take that one, one metric he could determine with really good accuracy whether or not a franchise was going to be successful in five years is simply if they came to training. If they show up to other events, stay involved in the community, meet up with other franchisees in their local market. He said that's like the number one thing that he can track as someone's Performance.

This note to myself is like the mentorship program. And that is like some of these are just thoughts myself, like making it available that after 18 months of an operation at Augusta Lawn Care, someone could sign up to be. To be on the list to be a mentor. So if someone ever needed help and they didn't want to really contact a coach or, you know, head office, they wanted to talk to a franchisee that they could do that, especially for franchisee that might not have a local, you know, two or three people right around them. Because some of some. I know some franchisees in Augusta Nation are already within a couple hours of multiple franchisees. But especially for those who aren't having a list of mentors, they would register after 18 months. You could be eligible to be on there. You would have to be in there for, in the system for 18 months and then you would.

You would not have to, but you could volunteer to be on the mentor list. Again, just, again, this is me thinking out loud. And some of the notes I put down, these are not like rock, don't hold me to put the. Creating that system. These are things that I'm thinking about and ideas I'm having based upon what I'm learning. He said that currently an average of 6% of revenue goes to the franchise fees. This does not include the lead fees, technology fees, other fees, just the franchise fees.

Currently their territory rights. No one can knock on doors inside of a sold territory, but you can work anywhere. So similar to what we do. You'll see why in a second. I didn't say they can't market inside because they don't really do marketing on an individual level. It's a little bit strange, but I'll go through it. Just different. I shouldn't say strange, just different. And here I kind of have.

The way that they have things broken down. They have the head office and they have divisional franchisees, then they have franchisors, then they have franchisees. So like there's not like at the head office here, there's not like franchise coaches, there's not like marketing support. There's none of that here. It's all done from the franchisor level, which is. Which is again very strange. Not strange, different number of franchisees. Around 4,000 franchisees. There is. I put 3,400 on here, but he told us an updated number later on. So he said 4,000. There are 270 franchisors and 35 divisional franchisors. I'm going to get more information from Jim, hopefully this evening. About you know what exactly the difference between divisional and a franchisor. I think what divisional is like the different services that they do, they don't really support different services. What happens is a franchise or a divisional franchise or would come and say hey, I'm great at fencing, I want to create a franchise called Jim's Fencing. And then they would then go find franchisors. Those franchisors would then do the support for the franchisees. And what I have here that they said like the franchisee, the franchisors, they do all the support. They change the manuals, they change the fees, which is really interesting. Different franchisors can charge different fees. The contract signed is actually with the franchisor, it's not with Jim's head office.

Compliance is the franchisor checking on the franchisee. There's compliance. All the coaching goal is all from the franchisor to the franchisee. It's not having to do with gyms like the head office gyms group, which is just interesting. It's not wrong, it's not bad. It's just, just different.

Let's see here. They had appointment close rate is 50 to 80%. This is the part where I feel is really confusing because their call center does not book the call book the estimate. If someone. Let's go, let's 30 minutes go by before the franchisee calls them, they're going to lose 50%. So 50% of the people who call the head office book a lead. 50% of them won't even be able to convert to an actual estimate when the, when the franchisee calls them back. I think that's like just strange. I always be honest, you're losing so many customers there and then. But that increases to an 80% close rate of again, close rate. I'm talking about, they talk about close rate as booking the estimate if you can call them back in five minutes. So again their call center says hey, the franchise will call you back within two hours. If they can do it within five minutes though it's 80% of those people will actually become an estimate. If they wait 30 minutes though it goes 50 to fit down to 50%. So very interesting there. I think that's a big opportunity for them to be able to actually book the jobs because then you get 100% of people instead of 80 or 50%. So they have what they call a call transfer option because the call center isn't really equipped to answer any sort of information about services or anything billing related or anything like that. So they Just they have called called transfer option where they transfer the call to the franchisee. Because typically the call center is really just for leads only. Like incoming leads. Like the phone number on the side of all their trucks is the same. It goes to head office, that then goes to that. Then those leads would then be passed the franchisee in the form of a text message. But then there's an extra fee if they call head office and they have to transfer it to the franchisees cell phone number. Again, systems like that would just not work as you scale up. You can't be having to go to your cell phone personal cell phone number. And that's why this whole model is built for a much smaller system.

But typically if someone calls into the head office there is no. They don't really like to transfer calls. They'd rather just fill out a complaint than that complaint is sent to the franchisee. So a little bit different there.

If someone is not taking on new leads, those leads will be given to other franchisees that are willing to service them inside their market. Lead fees, like I said are 15 to $65 depending on your region, your franchisor, the type of services that you're offering, etc. Most common complaints and this is pretty common with us too, not responding to a complaint or a scheduling issue. So these are most common complaints from customers. Not responding to complaints or scheduling issues promptly and then not arriving when you said you would to things like estimates or jobs that are being scheduled.

I put a couple notes for myself and just ideas for myself like franchisees potentially doing some teaching at training. There's already something we want to do more of, especially as we get more franchisees in Washington that could just quickly drive up for a day or two. Having some of the franchisees do some of the training at some of the teaching at training. They had some of them here today and I'm not going to lie like they're not as good as speakers typically. But because they're not, they don't do it all the time. That's not their job. But people listened, I have to say. And people ask them good questions because they actually are franchisees. So that was, that was interesting. A note here. Again, these are just ideas. Don't hold me to these. My notes. I'm just sharing weekly calls with the first two. Potentially having weekly calls for the first few couple months of starting up a location to ensure that they stay in the systems and that they don't go way off. And potentially if they just start getting down, they're not Getting enough leads, things like that. They don't do that at gyms, they don't do any calls like that. But it's just again, these are my notes, thoughts for myself. Okay, a couple more pages. Sorry, I have seven pages.

What's really interesting, they don't do any marketing support. So today like when we went over marketing, it was all of one slide about Google Ads. They don't do any marketing support and they basically just say find a marketing agency.

Franchisees are not allowed to run ads online and it has to be done by the franchisor because they have an ad fund. So they all pay money in to their franchisor. Remember that franchisor is not the head office. There's a franchise or that might have between three and 15 locations underneath them.

That franchisor has an ad fund that they spend. You can't just run ads online. And you are allowed though to do mail drops and door knocking. Mail drops is kind of like door hangers for them. You're allowed to do that, but you can't run the ads on Google or on Facebook. Things like that. You cannot do that. So that was interesting.

Phone number must be corporate number besides a business card. And the reason for that is because that phone number is obviously going to head office. So any leads that come in have to. That's how they get paid. And so it has to go through there and they have to determine which who gets what leads right in terms of service areas and things like that. So failure to do that is going to lead to penalties and potentially franchise closure. This really cool thing called pay for work guarantee. It's basically if someone's not busy enough when they're first starting out in their first few months that they will actually, they tell them to do free work and then the franchisor pays for it. So not head office, but the franchisor has to pay for it equivalent to, I think it's like $800 a week that they guarantee someone will do in work like gross revenue. And if you can't, it's like, hey, go do free work and we'll pay you for it. And the reason they do this, they say is because they know that people go out into the community and just start getting jobs. There's word of mouth and that the word we would use in momentum. And so they're encouraged to lower prices to get jobs until their schedule is filled, to get that momentum. As a note there and then an idea I had is like about, no, we talk about filling to capacity. That's what we talk about a destination, right? I had an idea, like, hey, if someone's doing less than $6,000 per month in revenue in their first six months and have above a 70% close ratio, is there something that we could do for them? Like no franchise fee or something like that? Because that would be the biggest thing I see when locations are doing under six or seven grand in their first few months is their close ratio is at 40, 50%. It's like closed jobs. And like the franchisee that was teaching this part, he was like, I would literally have rather you pay you. You cut the job by 50, 60, 70% in terms of price just to close work. And so similar to what we talk about in the first couple stages of growth, and that is just. Just get the jobs no matter what.

I got two more pages. Let me go through this. No, there's one more page. Good lead chain lead is charged regardless of the conversion, regardless of the quality of lead, or if they show up, if the customer shows up, or they don't even show up in terms of ghosting you. I thought that was really interesting. That was a lot of questions that franchisees had about that. And that's basically if. If you get a lead, you're paying for it. Even if it's like a service that you don't want to offer that time or you're too busy, you have to pay for it. You either you have one option that has turned off leads or turn on leads.

Why they don't work. And it makes sense. Like, that's how the franchisor is getting paid in the head office is through leads. So makes sense.

Why they don't require joining. Oh, yeah. So what's really interesting is when they come to Frick for training, they have not signed up for being the franchise. They haven't signed. They've done a bunch of, like, meetings and know whether they're interested in certain things, all the rest of it. But what's interesting is only 4 out of about 90 people here have actually signed for their franchise already. And about half of the trainees decide this, on average, not to join. And what's really interesting, I thought my takeaway from that is that the fact that they just let people come here without signing, without paying for anything. And it really is proof that, like, the info is not the secret sauce, it is the implementation of the systems. It is not the information.

So I thought that was interesting. I had here they had 220,000 unserviced leads last year, which about 38% of their total number of leads which was 700,000 leads. Again, just out of service area. People can't. Not available for work, whatever it might be. And that's about where we're at Augusta in terms of just the number of leads that come in that we can't service because people don't have. They're. They're not accepting more work or this. Out of service areas, et cetera. Couple more and then I'm done. Call center cannot. Call center cannot weed out leads based on certain services offered or which ones you do not offer. Charge for all leads regardless. And the reason for this is because there are 45 plus services in the gyms group and they can't. And no one at the call center is trained to. On each of these services. One of the franchisees when asked is that about one, about 20 or one out of five leads are usually dead, don't have good contact information, you can't get a hold of them or there's wrong service. And you've got to take the good with the bad in terms of you got to pay for those still. So I thought that was interesting and it makes sense to why they wouldn't want a system like where you can dispute them because it just, it costs so much more just to go through them. They'd have to charge more for the leads. So they basically said, look like, hey, to keep it simple, just pay for all of your leads so that we don't have to have a disputing process and then charge everyone more per lead. Which makes sense. Makes total sense.

40% of their leads came in from the online lead system. We see a little bit higher than that in terms of leads that come from the website, Facebook, you know, online side of things. Asset request form versus phone calls.

Here's my note I mentioned before, customer surveys must be visible by the franchisor. I actually made a note to myself that the, to adapt our, our franchise agreement basically saying that we have to have access to surveys if, if those go out, we need to be able to see those are the franchisors. So we can just monitor customer service. Another really interesting thing and it really again just comes down to the, the size that they're kind of focused on is they don't have a billing system. So basically say like they recommend square the cash app or just getting like a credit card terminal, but it's not integrated with any of their software. So it's not like you send an invoice and get paid through there. Like they don't have that. They literally Recommend, like, you know, send someone an invoice on Square. So I'll see if there's more information that comes up for this week. I know they have a separate software for just the mowing guys because right now it's like the general training, but they were like, yeah, get a terminal from your local bank or use the Square app or whatever. It might be so very interesting. I think it mostly because they're owner operators, so people are. They're on site, every single job, et cetera. It's just really not built out. You can't scale that. You can't scale, you know, hey, just the end of the month on your mowing, if you're at someone's house, just, you know, do Square app and then mark it as paid inside. So that was interesting. I'll learn more about that. But that's all I basically had for the day this day one. I don't think I'll have that many notes going forward, but just things that I'm learning, ideas I have, etc. Sorry, it's been 28 minutes. Let's jump into questions. And I'm pretty pressed on time actually. So let me hop over into questions. I gotta get out of here in eight minutes for next meeting. Let me share this. Let me take a look. I haven't looked at these.

Okay.

Kyle, I've always been fascinated by people that no matter what they do or touch, it turns into a good revenue stream for them in some way or another, they end up being successful in their goals. I look at you in the same way with your landscape, business, website, business accounting, business franchise, etc. Why do you think that people like this excel faster than others in the same space? What can we do to increase the odds of success in a particular space or business venture?

I would say, first and foremost, like, I've stayed in landscaping and lawn care very, very narrowly. So I can't. I wouldn't say that I'm like, everything I touched turns to gold or anything because, like, I haven't done anything outside of lawn care. Landscaping, really, like landscaping and whether it be online courses, the podcast videos, website, building, accounting, all of that stuff is done inside of lawn care, land, teething. It's what I'm really good at. I really understand the industry, I really understand the numbers, the metrics of it. So I've tried to stick to that. In terms of why people, I think that honestly, what you don't see a lot of times is the person that it seems like this is the case, they actually have the Same success rate. They just, they just keep doing more. It's not a level of, of how good they are. It's just they're going to keep going and grinding and they're going to keep trying. And if they try enough things, it start, they start to look like a genius. But you look at people that are like really successful and they, a lot of them have really big failures. And so whether it be like, you know, Donald Trump, Elon, you know, all these people that everyone looks up to and idolizes, they all have failures, massive failures. So it's a matter of like, who takes the next step back and keeps going is the important part. What can we do to increase the odds of success? I think it's, in my opinion, it's like, what are you uniquely capable of doing compared to everyone else in the world? I talked about this with Leon when interviewing that is like, hey, you're like in the top 99 percentile of people in the lawn care industry in terms of knowledge. Just focus on that, like, go all in on that. I feel the same way in terms of lawn care landscaping. Like, why would I go do something in like fencing when I never put up a fence and I would be completely lost and I don't know the numbers and where the wood comes from and vinyl and all the rest. Like, I understand lawn care. I'm really good at that. I know that whatever I build around that will probably be successful because I'll have good product market fit. I know what people need inside this industry. And so when people are like, I'm going to start a restaurant, I'm going to go do like this car Turo thing and I'm going to do this and that and do all these other things. They don't ever actually become a specialist in one industry. And once you become a specialist industry, you can do other things inside the industry. But you gotta ask yourself, like, why would you invest or start a business in something that you aren't any better than the average Joe? And so if lawn care and landscape, if you can cut a lawn really good, like you're probably in the 80th percentile of people on this earth. If you know how to mow a lawn well, as well as manage people and look at a profit and loss statement, understand what it says, you're probably like the 95th percentile. Like, you can keep getting closer and closer to your margin of excellence inside of industry is so much higher. And that's the thing you should double down on. And I think the person who the people who think, who appear to have just always nail it. They're just the person who knows their competency and they stick to it and they just keep going after the same thing. The person who has that like really good batting average typically doesn't hit home runs. They typically just keep hitting singles and doubles, triples. Like they don't hit a lot of home runs because they're not swinging as hard. Most time people with a lot of home runs, like, have a poor batting average.

There's no name on this one. The website for our individual location done by the franchise. So it is something that we don't see or deal with at all. How do we keep an eye on the performance and pulse of the website beyond just trusting? When was this submitted? Oh, this is submitted probably prior to yesterday's video.

Oh, this is probably Jeff. Okay, so can you please give a detailed rundown on what are the important things to be constantly monitoring to to make sure that we are killing the SEO game? Yeah, so that should be helpful. The dashboard. This must have been submitted afterwards. I'm assuming this is someone I talked to a couple weeks back about specifically about SEO stuff, but the new dashboard has some really good feedback in terms of really just taking information from Google Analytics to see where, where traffic is coming from, the number of traffic, demographic information like age of people that are coming to your site, what type of devices are coming to your site, things like that. What are the things that you do at the franchise on a weekly and monthly basis for main top performance. If we had an SEO agency and handled our websites individually, there would be solid accountability and performance. So please be completely transparent with what the website looks like for you as a franchise store. Couple things. First and foremost, if you had an SEO agency, their hands would be very much tied because the biggest SEO driver for all of our locations is the fact that the domain augustalongerservices.com is.

It has a massive strong presence, massive amount of traffic coming to it and the SEO of that is actually the main driving force of all of our SEO. And so I would say we spend about 70% of our time on that URL and figure out how to make it most efficient in terms of SEO, because it's the number one driving factor of all of our SEO across the board.

If you had an agency involved, they really couldn't do much with the domain because we wouldn't let them touch Augusta longerservices.com It's just part of being with a franchisor. We have to control that and you know What? This would be fun. I haven't done this in a long time. Give me one second. This is what I track more than anything because it helps every single location.

Let me share my look, let me share what I'm doing here. Google, I haven't done this in ages. This could backfire on me pretty bad. Especially because I'm sure. Okay, so this does not do well. Let's just put a little disclosure and say that it's because I'm in Australia. But let me go ahead and just type in. Let me share my screen. There you go. Google, let's do USA Lawn care.

Please work for me, baby.

Let's see here.

We were on the first page like back several weeks ago.

Let's see here. There it is. We're on the second page. Sick. We fell since last week. It just again, where I'm at things like that can change it. Oh, that's why last week we were on the first page. And probably because I'm in Australia, maybe it says doing that. I don't know. Anyways, we're on the second page when you type in across the entire country, the United States, lawn care, that's huge.

For us to be able to have that because it means that regardless of where someone's at regards their individual level, you know, locations level performance, it has the fact that the brand, the URL domain power is really, really big. So we focus a lot on that because it gets people up to the first and second page of Google as fast as possible. We can get people to the first and second page of Google.

Usually within three to four weeks now at Augusta, sometimes as much as a day like the first day we put in it, there's not a lot of competition. Whereas even at lawn care web design, it takes six months like just to get them there because they don't have any domain authority whatsoever. So we focus a lot on that. And in terms of what was the other part of the question?

If we.

Yeah, so the performance of things that's going to be much more evident and straightforward and transparent. With the new dashboard, if you have your Google Analytics, it's literally just taking that information and bringing across and presenting in a much more simple manner. Google Analytics thing I have against it is just so much information that most people don't even get anything from it because it's too deep. What we do though, on a weekly month base, etc. We are mostly looking at the domain authority of the entire site. And then on an individual level basis we are really looking at.

Looking at each of the city names that are inside of their territory. We are tracking that against where they've been over time, tracking that against where the traffic is coming from. And like, if you look on the new dashboard, you notice that there's like native search, There is organic search, There is.

Like where the searches are coming from. The thing that's really important is organic ones. How many people are finding it versus people that are actually typing like exact key for like who types in Augusta Lawn Care Bellingham versus who types in Bellingham Lawn Care. That's important. That would be organic versus exact search. So things like that, we track a lot and a lot of that has to do that ratio. For example, exact search versus organic search is mostly a function of how large the location is. Once you start getting like two or three trucks, you literally have double or triple the amount of trucks rolling around compared to one. And the amount of people that do the exact search literally doubles or triples because people see your truck and they like, oh, Augusta Lawn Care. And now when they go to Google, they type in Augusta Lawn Care and their city name or just Augusta Lawn Care. And that exact search holds so much credibility in Google's eyes. And so that's why if a location gets started in Augusta Lawn Care and starts with five or six trucks, they'll get jump really fast because they get so much more organic. An exact search compared to location. Just getting started. All of your search traffic is literally ads. You don't have as many people actually searching Augusta Lawn Care in your market. And that will just improve in time as we get more locations because you'll get more and more people searching for the actual name of Augusta Lawn Care. And so I kind of feel like personally, when a demographic of like 100, 100 square miles starts to get multiple locations in it, that's when you start getting like brand penetration and people searching for a lot. And that's when it can really help your SEO. But we track that and then the big thing we look for is when there's dead space. When, when someone, for example, goes to goes to a site because we have a city name in there, but then the cus. The franchisee is not taking leads in that that area. For example, like Google tracks all this sort of thing and it's like, how long does someone stay at your site versus bouncing back and choosing another person on the page? So for example, if someone says, I'm servicing Phoenix, but really they're not servicing Phoenix, they're serving in a different area, like a suburb. And the customer goes in there and then they can't. They see oh like we. They don't service Phoenix, they service other area and then they bounce back and choose another person inside the Google page. That's the type of thing that like crushes people's SEO. So that's why it's always so important like update command center. If you have the change of service area let us know so we can change your website. Etc. Okay, I gotta run here a couple more. Is it. It is clear to me that most people wing it with mastering their sales skills. They take a little info here and there from YouTube and other places. I would like to get solid sales training. Have you seen any trainings that you think are solid and could actually teach skills that move the sales needle? I think the actual sales skills are going to come become very important over the next couple of years. It has been very easy to sell in the last five years. I don't think the next few will be easy. Okay, is it the same person from before? Okay, this was right after I think 4:35.

Yeah. Okay. So yeah, sales skills. So I think when people think about sales, I think, I believe that most time people think about tactics. Know when they say this, say this like in my opinion that is okay, that is good. That can give someone confidence. But ultimately it is the confidence itself that makes someone a great salesperson. This is why people have a, you know, people will say oh the person is a natural sales leader. No, no, no, it's not natural. They just have confidence. Confidence is what breeds success. People always say that. Confidence though when you're a salesperson is absolutely the thing that makes you a great salesperson. Confidence in your product. Confidence. Confidence in your ability to deliver on that product. Confidence to deliver on the promises you make the customer. Confidence in your team and your crew to again perform. Confidence that you are the best value for the customer. When you have confidence in all those things you will sell, you will, you will have the confidence to ask hard questions about Mr. Jones. Yes. Compared to these other options we are going to be higher priced. Here's why. And you have confidence in the product you can deliver and you don't cower back if they say you know well so and so can do it $5 less can you? And then you don't. If you have confidence in your product and your service, you don't back down or coward of that because you have confidence. And so I would say for someone who.

There'S a lot of money to be made in selling tactics. I'll just be honest because everyone wants the tactic. Everyone wants a sales tactic. And that's why so many sales people who are really good at sales go into sales training. Because there's so much money to be made in sales training. So much money. People love tactics. But ultimately the only thing, in my opinion, those tactics really do, I should say only thing. The majority of the benefit from those tactics is simply giving confidence to the person. But that confidence, if it's natural to someone, they don't have to get trained. They don't have to. They just can come into a situation and sell because they have confidence. And some people, they just fake confidence and they crush it. In my personal opinion, those tactics are the type of things on Facebook or, sorry, on YouTube. You can read lots of books about sales training, whether it be Grant Cardone, Alex Hormozi, the Wolf of Wall Street. There's like a bazillion books on sales training. I'm slipping on my mind in terms of all the different ones. You know, if you really want to go old fashioned, you go to.

What'S his name? Oh, man, I forget his name. Did cassette tapes way back in the day. I forget my apologize. I listened to him way back in the day for life insurance. Tried some of his stuff and some of it was like, now I just cringe at what, like, things that. Scripts that he would say. It was all tactics, but it sells really, really well. There's a lot of money to be made in sales tactics. Ultimately, though, I think what needs to be happening is confidence. Confidence that your pricing is correct, confidence that what you're charging is fair, confidence that you are the best value opposite. Like, if you truly believe that, it's your responsibility to make sure that a customer accepts you because you are the highest value to the consumer, you will do whatever it takes to convince them of taking your. Like, you will give them all. You will naturally ask the hard questions. You will naturally. Someone trying to get my room? No, no, next door. You will naturally do a lot of those things because you have confidence and you care about the customer. And I think most of us, I'd say everyone that gets into a destination cares about the customer. A lot of us fail the confidence when someone gives a price. Objection. When somebody says, well, if you can't do it tomorrow, why would I want to accept you? Like, if someone had lost confidence, hey, Mr. Jones. Anyone that could do the this drop this, drop everything they're doing and work, do this work for you tomorrow, probably doesn't have a whole lot in their schedule. And there's a reason why. The reason we're booked out six weeks is because people know that we do what we say we're going to do and that we provide such high value to keep coming back just time and time again. And our issue is not getting more customers. It's simply getting enough workers and train them to high enough level degree of, of professionalism to where we can deliver our promises to you. You'll say that if you actually believe it, you'll push back because you have confidence. So I think the number one thing you got to sell is sell yourself and your own product, your own service, the value proposition you offer. And I think a lot of times the reason people can't sell is because they don't actually believe they're worth $100 an hour. They don't believe they're worth $80 an hour. And so whenever there's objections, we cower back. So you got to sell yourself on your value. So sell yourself on the value to the customer, like the time savings, the prestige of them in the neighborhood, the them coming back after a long day's work and seeing everything manicured and taking care of their lawn. But then you've also got to sell effect on you versus every other option. And if you can't get that, that's when you need a call with Lee. Get on a coaching call. And why do I not believe that I'm the best option? And literally just like give your objections to Lee. You can even put them here in a, in a, in a question here for me. And I'll go through every single objection that a customer would give you and, and give you, like this is what I would say. And all of those responses come back to confidence in your product. Confidence. Deliver confidence that you are the best value to the customer. If you actually believe that and then you two part two, care for the customer, you will push and you will, you will naturally say all those things that are the tactics. And what most people do is they sell the tactics because that's what everyone's looking for. It's the tangible. But if you don't have confidence, the tactics mean nothing. It'll seem really, really mechanical. And most people will not be able to succeed in sales.

Kyle, you talk about removing bottlenecks in the business for fast growth. What does that process look like to finding and eliminating those bottlenecks? What are those bottlenecks? Are you. How do you navigate that? I actually believe that most times it's pretty apparent to a third party what a bottleneck is in the business. This is why most small business owners struggle, I feel, especially when they're growing a team, is they fail to be able to look introspectively and see their business for what it's worth and see for their business and actually like, diagnose issues because they would otherwise see the bottleneck and fix it. That's why coaching calls are so important, because the bottlenecks are usually pretty evident to a third party. Right. And when you have someone, when someone yourself. When I have done a lot of the businesses growing and then I have my own businesses and had to figure out the bottlenecks and make a lot of mistakes, you see very quickly someone else. You recognize the bottlenecks very quickly. Right. Like, for example today when I heard that like the call center takes the calls but they won't do anything beyond just transfer information to the franchisee. Like, I was like, immediately, like, how would you ever scale a business past 2 or 3 or 400,000 because you literally are getting every single call to your phone number, to your cell phone number. Like, how is that efficient?

So of course the average franchisee is going to do, you know, eight, $9,000 a month in revenue, $10,000, whatever it is, a month in revenue because you can't grow beyond that massive constraint that they have now get an office and an office person, all the rest of it. So little things like that I recognize. And then like I talked about in the video the other day, like a big time, a lot of times someone will fix the bottleneck by simply working harder or putting someone in position to take care of that issue by overpaying them. Or B, having familiar familial ties to them. Right. They'll have a spouse do something. They'll have their, their kids work for them, for example, like that will work. That'll fix the bottleneck of you not being able to delegate and trust your employees. Yeah, Hire your kids. They're probably going to work really good for you. But what happens when they move off to college? What, what happens when they're not there anymore? What happens when you go on vacation now? No work's being done. So bottlenecks can, can get, I see a lot of times, especially up to 500,000 revenue, bottlenecks can easily be band aid. Band aided, that's not a word. Band aids can quickly and easily be applied to small business bottlenecks by things like hiring, overpaying for somebody. Like, for example, someone like, I just need employees. I can't figure out training. I'm just gonna go hire someone for $25 an hour that's experienced, that's a band aid that you place on there. Because the bottleneck is you being able to train an employee that doesn't have the skills. You might not be a good trainer. I see that one a lot. I see people overpaying or they don't want to institute P4P and have that system allow someone to make more money but not have a system that's efficient around labor so they don't do PPP this higher up and they pay overpay or they go get like I think a spouse as an office person is an excellent idea until about 5 to 600,000 in revenue because it starts getting to the point where if they're not there like lots of calls get missed, lots of emails going done. And again, I don't want a family tie to be a bottleneck in the business because now what happens if you both go on vacation? What happens now if there's stress in the relationship and you're going to take some time apart from each other, what happens to that bottleneck? That's when the blow up happens.

So the number one thing that you can do though to remove bottlenecks is simplification and following systems that are outside of a human.

And that's what the importance of things like automations, that's the importance of like a command center redundancy where more people than one person knows something because we, you just can't have one person, like an office person walk. If Liz would have left me in years two or three after her working for me, like in her second or third year, the business would have gone in half immediately because she had all the information right. Command center is literally my goal is like okay, if I was, when I was in like 7, 800,000, if Liz would have left me, I know the business would have been put. We would have gone to 304, 3 or 400,000 the next year. I know that fact because she had all the information, everything she had the keys to the business from the administrative scheduling, billing side. Like I would have no idea what I was doing. And then my time would have been delegated just catching up on that instead of growing the business. Right. So I want to eliminate that bottleneck for people knowing that at the beginning it doesn't seem intuitive at all, especially if you have your spouse. And so I think something I'm adding in the training is I've always said that you shouldn't use command center if one you've already invested in infrastructure like office space A really expensive lease. Internet, you have utilities already. If you're paying 3, $4,000 a month for your space, like you're losing out on the benefits of command center. Like hire somebody. You already have all the infrastructure. Right.

But I don't want you have to pay three or four thousand dollars for rent. Okay, but if you have that, you shouldn't use command center. Secondarily, if.

The one, the other one I wanted to add was. If you are. If you have a spouse, you could probably use them. Just know that you've got to follow the system so you can eventually hand it off. Because if you don't, then it becomes a bottleneck. And that could become an issue as you scale. That will eventually keep someone from growing anymore. Because again, one person, it could be the owner. If you, the owner, are locking up everything in your head, again, that will prevent you from growing. What was the third one?

Infrastructure.

Oh, yeah. If you're not busy enough. That was the other one. I already have that one in training. The one I wanted to add is about the spouse. I think the spouse can definitely be a really good asset in terms of office person. Up until 4 or 500,000 revenue and. And that's when I start looking like this is really becoming a bottleneck because there's so much hinging on this relationship and hinging on one person. I start to get nervous. This is why I don't want like one person at command center being responsible for one location. What happens when that person is sick? What happens when that person, you know, gets fired? Like, then there's a lot of issues. So. All right, I went way over. I apologize for a 52 minute. I think this is our longest one ever. Mercy goodness. I apologize.

I gotta run. I'm late. Take care, everyone. I don't know if the first 20 minutes was helpful. If it wasn't, maybe let me know in the comments or post on Facebook or something. Yeah, let me know in the comments if it was like, man, don't really care about that. I'll make a separate video or something like that. But just want to be open about what I'm thinking and learning and stuff like that. Take care everyone. Have a great day. We'll see you tomorrow.