Mike Minutes Mastermind 08/23/22

Hey, everyone. Hope you're all doing super well. For all of you, it's the middle of the night. It is what, 5:15pm here. So just before dinner, wanted to make another mastermind. I'm going to go over questions first. I saw there were four that came in. I haven't read those yet, but we'll go through those and then I'll go over what we learned at the today in training at Jim's Mowing. And then I'm also going to have a challenge at the end with a prize to win AirPods. So keep an eye out for that at the end of this, this mastermind. Let's go ahead and jump into questions. Let's just knock those out and then we'll jump right into the gym. Mowing training, stuff that I learned today.

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Jet lag was real the first night. I did great. I think I was just so tired that I just fell asleep and slept all the way through. But then last night, oh, it was horrible. Woke up after like two, two and a half, three, I guess, three hours and just wide awake. So today was a struggle, real struggle. All right.

Kyle, do you ever think you will diversify into other franchise businesses? I don't know.

People. A lot of people asked me this last year when I actually interviewed Jim Smelling. And what's interesting is Jim's Mowing is the only division of Jim's group that is actually owned by Jim. Everything else, another franchisor came and approached him, was like, hey, I want to use your brand and like, just tap into it. I'll give you a royalty, basically. And then we'll go start like pool cleaning, fencing, roof inspector, all the rest of it. That's why, like, if in yesterday's Ask Mine, you saw there's the head office, there's divisional franchisors, then there's franchisors, then there's franchisees. Right. I don't like that much hierarchy. I feel like the organization just moves too slow and there's four levels of support like that. But all that to say I don't have plans to. But I'm not ruling it out of the equation because if someone did come to me and it was like a very obvious addition to Augusta, maybe, but I don't. I don't have any plans to. I really don't like, I. I just don't think it's the right thing for us to do now. But again, you know, it just. I just can't. I don't know the future would hold. I thought it was complementary to what Augusta does. And then there's the right person, the right service. You know, potentially there's something there to be said that we, you know, build out a home.

You know, home improvement type of brand. Like Neighborly's already kind of done that in the U.S. honestly. And so I wouldn't feel like we were adding any value. And today I learned a lot about potentially the downfall of adding all those brands. I've seen it happen in Neighborly a little bit closer up. And today is very obvious in terms of Jim's group, the challenges they face because they have all these brands trying to work as one and different services, like everything from accounting and financial services to mowing on the same software. So very, very interesting. So let's go ahead and. Oh, burn questions. Sorry. It's, it's. It's been a long day. 10. If there is someone we know that wants to invest dollars but doesn't know how or wants to be a landscaper, how much capital would they need to invest to start a location and what that would look like?

I feel like if someone's starting their second or third or fourth location, you need, you need at least 60 or 70,000. I budget for 90,000. I've had one location go over that. And that is mostly due to the fact that I expect them to grow quicker. Right. So I expect my locations within six months to be doing above 30,000amonth in revenue. And.

So in order to get that, I'm going to usually spend more money on marketing. I'm not going to take that one year of kind of like 5 grand, 10 grand, 12 grand, 15 grand, 18 grand, 20 grand for that first year. All around the teens. I want to get above 30 within six months. And so to do that, we usually spend more money on marketing, and we get multiple trucks when we don't really need them at the beginning, before we even have the employees. So there's a little bit of waste there, but I want to do that. I, I spend the extra cash for the scale trying to get to 300,000 that first year.

250, 300. So the. I personally budget 80 to 100 grand. I think that a second multiple, like a multiple location, your second, third, fourth location, you get for 60 or 70 grand, pretty easily even 50. Honestly, if someone was getting started, they had no idea what landscaping is all about, and they just have money. Keep in mind, when that happens, usually I call it dumb money because they don't have any industry knowledge. They don't even know if they want to do it for the rest of their life, they're going to make a bunch of dumb decisions because they'll buy the wrong equipment, they'll get started with different services that they actually don't, shouldn't be doing. So a lot of times that inexperience, and that's one thing that we've consistently seen is people who start with lawn care like they've never done lawn care before. They have a tough first year at Augusta because they're learning about the industry, about grass in their local market. They're learning about the, the growing season a lot. And then of course, you have the anomalies. You know, I'm thinking of one personnel that had, did that, did fencing before Augusta in their first, I think the third month, they did like 90,000amonth in revenue down in California. And so it just, it just varied. Obviously depends on the operator. I consistently say it's always based on the operator, but typically, on average, if someone does not have any industry experience and they just have money to invest that typically dumb money, and you're gonna, just fine, you're gonna, you're gonna make some decisions that are wrong based upon, like, oh, I really want to do projects or I really want to do mowing. And it's like, like there's some markets, like for example in El Paso, Texas.

Where it's like, look, there's not a lot of grass. We're not going to be spending a lot of money on mowing. We're not going to make much money on mowing. It's going to be the recurring services around, like pulling weeds, bush trimming, all the other things. So it's about being flexible and knowing your market to some extent and then using the systems to tap into, you know, whatever local knowledge you do have.

Wesley Chappelle. There's a lot of stuff, a lot of exciting stuff going on as we cross 100 locations, Mark, that gives us that unfair advantage. What do things look like at a hundred, at a thousand plus locations in that regard? Okay. Okay. Better and more brand deals for franchisees. Massive network of potential GMs. Zooper doing super cool stuff we aren't even thinking about now. Yeah, like all of the above. A lot of it in terms of like is, is, is software, for example. I'll, I think I have my notes. I do. I'll talk a little bit about later because I talked to Jim last night one on one, and then I'll be doing a couple more meetings with him in a video later this week. So I talked to him though. About software specifically. And that's where you know, when you start getting off locations, you can really start to invest into the software. And that's a big reason why we ended up selling licenses to P2P software is so that we could keep investing in the software. Because we, at 40, 50, 60, 100, at 500 locations, we would not be able to afford what we're spending on P4P. But we need that software. Like they didn't start building their software, he said, until about they had 1500 locations. And just because you need a lot of money to pay for it. So all of the things you mentioned are going to be happening, right? So when you have a thousand locations, not only will every brand want to be a preferred vendor, they'll give better discounts in order to be on there and to incentivize people. Same thing with like super, for example, like right now they're doing a lot for us. We do pay them to do the software updates, but it's way less than what they, I would have to spend if I was building my own CRM, for example. And I have more notes on that in terms of what I had talked about with Jim today.

But when you have a thousand locations, if you're using a platform, we would basically be able to tell them what we wanted and they'd have to do it because we would control so much revenue. And then you have that, you know, golden handcuffs of yes, they have control, but you also have a massive leverage over their head because like, like last, if we were all in service autopilot, we would have over 400, 000 a year that we'd be paying to service autopilot. That's a 400, 0001, which the valuation of that is probably worth.

At least $4 million to a software company. Okay. Just in terms of valuation like to service all or any sort of service like service provider like Zooper, Zooper just got valued at $50 million like earlier this year. Right. So these are massively valued companies and it's because software is so sticky, but the cost development is huge, like massive. And we'll talk more about that later. I, I made some notes specifically because now I know I'm sharing the notes with you. So I made a couple of my notes. They were actually like, I, I put in brackets like, hey, this is something I want to share with the franchisees. What I was thinking. So all of the above. And a lot of it will come down to resources and money. And I'm, I'm honestly the SBA thing right now. A lot of it has to do with me spending every single penny and some and then moving my personal funds into the franchise and keep paying. And so you know when that is fixed and we can spend money on software and things like I've said, I said conference last year, during the next five years, next five to 10 years, the goal of Augusta like our unique advantage will come through software and then that 10 to 20 year marker it'll be robotics. Right. So I've been pretty consistent on saying that and I still do believe that. But at a thousand locations, if I could just take a hundred dollars from every single month, from every location, from their franchise fees and take that, that'd be a hundred thousand dollars, I'd be able to start really moving the needle on software. But like you can't even hire someone that's a full staff developer for under 2 or $300,000 unless they're in Bangladesh and you may be able to pay them $40 or $50 per hour but then you're going to need to hire someone else to check their code and make sure everything's compliant. Especially when you're moving dollars and cents around like when you talk about people's names and dollars and cents and information that's have to do with money, whole nother level of security. So I'll get more into that day. I have more information. So next up it's the last one.

Tyler from North Bend. What do you follow with if a client says they're waiting on other bids or viewing bids when you call the follow up? I like, I like what Thomas Hickey told me of then asking what day we could call them again but wondering your thoughts. I would use.

The scarcity close and so and that is I got a couple spots available and after that we are booked out X amount of weeks. Just make sure you make note of that in your, in their account if you say that. Because then if they call back that you know two days later and want to get on the schedule, if you told them if they don't accept today you then they're gonna be three weeks booked out. You better make sure they booked out three weeks, right. So scarcity is huge.

And.

I think if the big thing is they're waiting for other bids a little harder. If they're reviewing other bids. If they're reviewing other bids, it's like let's just have this conversation now. What was their charge? What was their cost? And let's go ahead and compare these two things. Let's get decision made right now. If they're waiting for other bids, then the question is like, again, back to what we talked about yesterday. How confident are you in your value? Because if you're really, really confident and they still waiting on other bids, he's like, Mr. Jones, it's been four or five days and they still haven't got back to you. We got back to you within 24 hours after I met with you with an estimate proposal. And I think that going forward, I think that's indicative of what your experience is going to be when we're actually on your property. And that is we're professional. We do what we say when we say we're going to do it, and there is no waiting around, we deliver. That comes from a place of confidence. Take a lot of confidence, say those words to somebody. But if you can say that, you'll get a, you'll, you'll close the deal. People like confidence like that. They like when you know what you got and you can say that and you're not doing it haughtily or proud, just you're staying the facts. And they're already thinking that in the back of their mind. So if you pair that up with scarcity. So what I would recommend in that case is use scarcity. So have a very established, hey, I can go ahead and get you scheduled on next Tuesday and we get the job done on Tuesday and Wednesday of next week. If we don't do it, that we're looking at two to three weeks at least, just in terms of our schedule. So if you want to wait on the bids, I totally understand. Just realize that we probably would have to push the job off and say, okay, well, you know, let me. I'm still gonna wait on these bids. I need to get at least a couple more. I have a couple. My desk, let me get a couple more. It's like, no, Mr. Jones, if they've been, if they've taken five days, six days to already get back to you, what do you think it's gonna be like trying to get them on the schedule? What's gonna be like trying to get the job wrapped up and finished and them to do in a timely manner, get your invoice to you. Like, we can deliver on all these things. We've proven that we did it fast. I follow up with you because I care and I know that we're the best value for you on this project. Like, again, that takes some real guts to say that. I'm not understating just how difficult it is to say that. But you watch one out of two people immediately say, you're right, let's go ahead and do it. And I'll just close it right there. Take credit card information, get your deposit. Let's roll. So cool. That was for questions. Let's move on to edumacation. Some education. I wasn't really planning on sharing all this stuff this week, but after last night, I got a bunch of people texting me saying they really enjoyed the Mastermind and the first 28 minutes. So in that light, I think I had five, five people text me and there's like, comments. I think, like the most, like, video ever. And it was the longest one. I promise I'll be that long the day. Okay, so first 14 minutes or questions. Now let's go ahead and talk about what I learned today at gyms. There's only three pages, not seven like yesterday. I'm starting to actually work as I'm listening on the training slideshow and the way that we're structuring the initial training for Augusta. So as I'm working on that, I'm listening to now so there's less notes. Let's see here. The couple again, A lot of these notes are for me. There's very few that are actually meant for you to listen to. This is my personal notes, right? Just literally, I'm just reading these off day two, I put in here, use screenshots for software training.

At. At training, we've always been live. And that. That is great in theory for people that understand the software really well.

But I saw it today again, and that is when they're using screenshots and like highlighting certain parts. Everyone was like, following along as soon as they got into Q A and they jumped in the software live, everybody in terms of the software side. And I am still to this day humiliated at our first couple trainings. We lost everyone when it came to service autopilot. And I understand it's like a thick software, but it could definitely have been done more screenshots highlighting certain things and, like, more systematic. So I made a note for us to make sure we use slides. Trying to go live and be the demo person. You never want to demo software live. Like, if you think that Apple and these other companies, when they're demoing software, you think that's live, you're wrong. It is all recorded, in fact, the very first iPhone demo from Steve Jobs, when he. When he showed the iPhone, it was. It was hard programmed into the phone that he was holding to show full bars on their reception. The reception, like of the service. And they were hard coded things that he would tap on that the screen would change. It was all hard coded. It wasn't like the software is there, it was not there and they hard coded it in. So all that to say software doing it live. Don't try it. Use screenshots, Michael. Make it simple, make it systematic. Okay. Jim's has spent over $4 million million dollars on developing software. Almost 5 million. And what's really interesting, this needs to stay internal. This is just us talking to each other now. So please don't share this because I didn't ask him if I could share this specifically. And this was internal inside of his team. So the media team knows me really well and they follow all my content. So what's cool is I'm able to talk with them and they're the closest to Jim cause they're always touching base with them every single day, knowing his schedule, things like that. So it's kind of cool. So I'll talk to them. I'm talking to them a lot almost every day at lunch and stuff. And they followed what we've been doing over the past couple of years and trying to emulate it, trying to build out a couple guys, teams and do know tips and videos on different social media. And so he spent almost $5 million. And Joel, who's his kind of his main video and media side guy, he said that that is to this date, Jim's biggest headache every single day is the software. And you think about it, they're trying to get everything from financial services to mowing to building inspections, to dog washing, to everything. And it all needs to work in one software system. Now this software system, I wish I could show you my some screenshots. Actually I can. Here, one second. I took pictures of it. Of course I did.

Like, I don't mean to be bad, but this is, this is partly like explanation explaining why I do software the way I do. Oh man. Come on, Michael. Oh, there you go. You can kind of see it like this is inside their software and it just looks like it's honestly 20 years old. And the reason for that is because they can't change and adapt fast enough because they have all these different industries. So back to the first question, I forget who asked it about multiple franchises. That is a very, very dangerous thing when you start getting into multiple industries and trying to use one software. This is a big downfall of service autopilot. My opinion and why it's so complex and complicated for new users is because they're trying to do what most CRMs have done and that is do every single service industry, every single. And just dilutes the product. And so.

But I'm sorry, like.

When I saw what they paid and I saw what they're getting, I can understand the frustration like because you compare their software against any other CRM right now.

And it's just like it's stuck back in the 90s like it really is. And so this is the thing though, that trade off is for the fact that they control the software and that is valuable. It's really nice to be able to like, we want this and then we're gonna spend $200,000 to make that feature and just get it done. It is nice to do that. My hope is that we have a.

Relationship enough with Zooper. We're able to achieve that.

And give us at least five to ten years before we can afford to make the investment in our own CRM. But again, I don't think we ever want to build a CRM because there's company out there spending billions of dollars building CRMs. Why not just, this is why we've done with Super. Why not join a software that is on the cutting edge of the CRM game and then build our own tools that can plug into it? Because it's open source code. Open source just means that we can plug into it, we can exchange data in and out of it. It connects with Twilio and Stripe and all these other things. It's not closed off like, like Apple or Service Autopilot for example. And so.

My takeaway from all of this is.

Be careful. If we were going to build our own, build our own software, very expensive. And you got to remember there are literally companies spending their main thing is the CRM. It's not all this other stuff. Like that's all they do. And they're really good at it. And they're worth, they're worth millions of dollars and they have tons of engineers and designers and venture capital behind them. It's like, why in the world do I go create a CRM? The thing is, can I have enough control over it? So if something ever happened, you know, we, that's, that's where you get nervous, right? That's where I get nervous is not having control 100% of our own software. So down the road we have to do software that would control something. But I don't think the CRM part is something we ever want to build. Like after seeing their stuff today, I'm like, they have technology fees, right? So they every Single franchisee pays to into the technology fund and that's how they're able to pay for that. However.

I feel like they're doing a disservice to their franchisees by using that software. It's very dated, very out. It's very, very simple. But that's what they need because they are getting so many franchisees that are just basically like out of the supermarket. Like, there's no one with management experience, no one's corporate experience, no business experience. These are like entry, entry level. They're getting started for a thousand, $2,000. It's very, very entry level. So they have to keep it simple. But that's difficult to make it simple but also be able to be so even more simplified for all these different industries. And I'm talking like, literally they do everything from tax accounting to dog washing to painting to electrical to solar panels. Like, they do 45 different services to fitness training. So it's, it's just a very hard task. I do not, I do not envy that thought process after what I've gone through with P2P and Zooper and service autopilot stuff, I do not envy that at all. And I'll talk more about that with Jim later this week. And like, we've spent about 400 to 500, no, probably 5, probably almost $500,000 between Zooper and P2P.

And.

Definitely in 2021 we couldn't afford it. So I just knew we had to. And then I knew we just needed to pay for P4P at least, at least some of it by getting it public where people can buy it. But we still Pay. We spend three, almost four times more every month on software for P4P alone compared to what we get in terms of revenue from the public. So.

Yeah, all that say software learned a lot about today. I'll talk more about with Jim and the pros and cons and I'm going to really ask him, like, do you regret building your own or do you wish you would have integrated with someone? Because now they can't. Like, there's no software that's going to be able to integrate all these locations. They've just gone so deep in the rabbit hole. Right? So I personally feel like my future for software is we not build the CRM, we build the tools that we want that are custom to tap into that. So for example, you know, Zooper is nice because it's one thing instead of like right now they have ff, fms, gyms, jobs, gyms online. And so FMS is Like the franchise management system that sends text messages to them when there's a lead. And then they take that lead, they put it into Jim's Jobs and then Jim's online. Now this is the thing, there's no payment processor integrated into Jim's Jobs. Like this blows my mind. They can't send an invoice and someone pay from the invoice, they can't.

Like that is 20 years old. 10, 15. Easily though there's no payment processor. So if you send an invoice you still got to go to their house and collect payments somehow or ask for a check. Like so. Yeah, I don't know. There's a lot of people I think today even that were just like seriously. So what they do have though is an integration with Xero Xero similar to QuickBooks. And then what a lot of them will do is copy invoices over to Xero and then send them out from there so people can pay from that invoice. So that was really interesting. I think it was opening eye opening to me and really important as I know that software is going to be important for us especially in that kind of like from 5 to 10 years from now.

It was important for me to see that the downside of building your own software. And it was so evident to me after looking at so many CRMs over the past couple of years and really trying to zero in what we were going to do. I feel like I know the CRM in the service industry very, very well. The pros, cons, where the money is at what cost the most to change. I understand a lot of that and when I saw it today I'm just like, this is unfortunately probably they've committed so much to it, they have to keep doing it, but they're 15, at least 10 to 15 years behind on technology.

So yeah, it really reinforced to me that we need to create the individual unique tools that would plug into an open source CRM. And so like I really want to be able to have where when someone opens up Zooper, we are able to create a plugin that uses the information from P4P to give a live dashboard to employees. Now this is going to cost so much money. The more and more I think about this and in terms of integrating and all the rest of it, I have a real dashboard similar to like what you would see on your, on your dashboard of your car where an employee would literally set up their phone and while they're working throughout the day they'd be able to see how much money they're making live every single time. The technology is actually relatively simple. Every single time they finish a job and it's completed, there's X amount of revenue. And we know a third of that's going to them or whatever percentage you have in the software. And so they can literally see live how much money they're making per hour. Like their odometer or what we called speed. Speedometer. Their speedometer, right? Like, how fast, how fast are you going? How efficient are you today? All those sort of things. I want that to be live. It'd be so awesome. I think that if you get closer. Because right now we're getting daily feedback on P4P, right? Every single day. The next day they get feedback on how well they worked yesterday. If you can make it live, like after every single job, like, oh, man, I didn't go fast enough on that job. Let's go to the next one. Like, hop out fast, like. And they're able, like, see that needle move? Oh, I would die for that. So that is the goal down the road. Okay, I already talked about this stuff. FMS stands for Franchise Management Software or system. And as the call center software. And then when, again, like I talked about yesterday, they really. The only thing the call center is for is to take leads, take the information and send it to the franchisee via text message. That text message then they can put into Jim's jobs, which is like their CRM. And then gyms online is where they see surveys, they're able to distinguish which areas they want to get leads, et cetera. I did get some good information on that in terms of how they set up where leads come in from and like determining between that. I still feel like looking at a real map was like, what we have right now at command center is the most accurate. And so down the road, we just need to make sure there's no way around that. Because what's happening right now is people, like old customers will call in, they'll pull up their. Their system right away. Like the software pull up their. In super. Pull up their account, and we're like, okay, great. We can service them. Well, potentially. That was a year ago. And now if the franchisee has changed service areas now that's a problem. So we. I don't think we'll ever really have software that immediately checks like geo points to Google Earth and pings us back and says, like, oh, this person is out of our service area. I don't think we'll ever get there. But we need to make a way where it it forces command center to check that because that's what we're seeing most often right now is people that have done service but then the service area changes and now, now they're outside the service area. It's kind of their loop around. Same thing with online chat. Sometimes they can get around getting checking that map but basically that one out of five still leads are out of service area and get by that system. I don't think we're at that. I think it's more probably. I haven't talked to Liz recently but I assume we're probably more like 1 out of 20 or 1 out of 30 that we are still putting out of service area.

But anyways all that say that's Jim's online. They at all all of us is custom build stuff that they own which is again I love the control but I do feel like they are way behind on their technology. Like the fact that you can't send an invoice and a customer can't click pay now I think is a big red flag.

There is a hold queue. Again I have not gone these since I wrote these down. So there is a hold queue at call center. Oh, like when customers calls in the queue that they go into holding. Okay. If franchisees have a different phone number, just skip the queue. Okay. We don't have a queue at command center.

Mostly because like if, if we're missing calls after a minute they're going to voicemail and that should only ever happen during spring rush. And if it is happening that's when I'm in the phone calls like we're making sure things happen. But I don't want where people are holding for five, six minutes. I just don't. I think, I think most customers would rather leave a voice message and we call them back in a few minutes then wait for five or 10 or 15 minutes.

So I could always have my mind changed on that if enough people thought differently. But I think that most people would rather if there's no one available to answer within a minute, leave a voice message and we're going to call them back within five or ten minutes right away.

But that rarely happens. Like right now, phone calls are getting answered within seconds. I think the average I saw yesterday was four and a half or five seconds. So that's good. Oh, this is really important. I learned this something that I'm going to go over in depth later in our command center order of importance for a lead. This is cool. I learned a lot. This spot here, I think they, they breezed over it And I was like feverishly taking notes. Okay, it's kind of what we do already. But it was a good summation that kind of was good for me to just consolidate things order of importance for a lead. Number one, is it owned by a territory? Okay, so what they do, whoever gets, whoever buys that territory, that their first priority to get the lead second then below that is availability, right? So if they're taking work or if they do that service. So now what that means is if someone has a service or territory and there's a lead inside of it, but if they are available or they don't do that service, then it's like, okay, next, who's available and taking work and does that service? Because again, there's gonna be times where service areas lap over. There's gonna be time when solo operators are have already existing before a growth model comes in. These are all questions I kind of had. And we kind of had this same philosophy, but it was good for me to get this chronologically done. Third is lead count. I don't like this one. Okay, they basically give the lead to ever has the lowest number of leads for that month. I don't like that. I don't think it should be right that anyone gets a lead because they just have less leads. It just could be that someone else is spending way more money on marketing. So I don't like that. But it also has to do with the fact that for them, they don't. They aren't allowed to go spend money on marketing. Like they can't do their own Facebook or Google Ads. They can do like door knocking and door hangers and stuff like that, but they can't do big campaigns. And so it makes sense to distributing of the wealth, like spread out the leads. But at Augusta, if there's someone who's just gunning for it in their first three months, I want them to be able to get the lead. So I would not take this one as number of leads have gone to that person. So that would be the next thing. So like again, you're only getting to that point if territory is owned by someone but they're not available, then say, okay, who else?

People that service this lead can service this lead. They ask about lead count, who has got the most leads. Let's give it to the people who have the last, the least. The next one is, is. Is the fourth one. The last one is if there's still multiple people that could service that lead. So we've got a territory person, their first priority, but they're not Available. Okay, number two, who is available? Who's taking work doing that service? That's number two. It's assumed now there's still multiple people that could take this lead. They go to lead count. The fourth, though, is central location. So who's the. Whose center point of their franchise is the closest to that lead would then get the lead if there's still a tie at their fourth level. I thought that was pretty cool. We're not going to do the number three one, the lead count thing. Definitely not. I'm not into distributing like that. If someone's paying more for marketing, they should get the lead if they're doing all the work.

Lead system operates on sms, so info on lead is limited. Oh, yeah. So their leads come through on text messages. So they were talking today about how, like, you're not going to get a lot of information from an estimate on a. Like when a lead comes through you. So, like, they use a lot of shorthand and they only have about one, like, sentence. Like, I think it's like 48 characters or whatever it is. After they put in the phone number, the address, all the rest of it, there's only so much space for them to leave notes. So they're talking a little about that today how like, for them, again, that lead comes in, they call the customer to set up the time to visit the property. And so they're really talking today about, like getting more information on the phone call at command center. They should be getting as much information as possible and then putting it in his notes. And of course, you don't have to call back to set up an estimate. But something that they talk about today. Oh, this is something I just made note of. Like, I really think it's pretty interesting how there's no incentive system for referring leads across divisions. I think the same thing about neighborly. Like, you have this massive network of franchisees. Why would you not incentivize and monetize giving leads between different divisions? Like, oh, yeah, we, we do your lawn, we can do Jim's tree. Service can come along and help you too, because we saw this, you know, massive tree overhanging your house. But they don't have any incentive for that. It's like, you know, hey, it's your prior gyms, you should do that kind of thing. But, man, if I, if I was neighborly or gyms, like we had branch, I would make a massive system. Like, you can exchange leads on us off on software and then people get paid and then money goes across to people and you can Exchange leads. Like I would dive deep on that couple notes I made here for myself and that is text, text confirmation, SMS when a quote is set up so that they know it has been set up. Something I never thought about, especially if someone does this over the phone or via like chat on the chat on the, from the website. Chat is you set it up but like you kind of want a second confirmation that you're like actually going to get someone to come to the property or even if it's going to be a drive by. So I just made a note here looking at making that a workflow inside. Super. So that SMS text goes out just to confirm that the either appointment or the estimate is going to be done as a drive by or whatever it might be. And then another one I put here and I don't know if it's needed. Text confirmation, SMS to franchisee when a new lead comes in. I don't know if that's necessary. I think if you're really small like they're lucky here to get a couple leads a week. Right. That's, that's what they shoot for.

I would understand that. But if you're getting 15, 10, 15 leads a day, you do not want your phone just blowing up with leads. So I think the email is probably fine and then there is a way on Zooper to have it as a push notification. So I think that's probably sufficient enough. But I had written that down. Okay, last page here. Truck compliance. What they do for truck compliance is they make, they make the franchisees do a picture of both front, back and sides with a picture of them with the year on it. It's like they'd have to hold up a sign that says like 2022 and on every side. That way people can't reuse pictures. I thought that was fun. Interesting. Funny. Compliance around trucks is something we will have to dig deeper and deeper on and just making sure that they are more standardized and that we actually enforce it. That will be something we have to do in the future. It's in our franchise agreement. But especially if people start falling off, falling off the radar, we would have to send a compliance note. It's in our franchise agreement. We have to. And then they have to prove certain things like are you still using the software, are you still doing pricing a certain way? Are you still doing everything inside the franchise agreement? Big one is painting your trucks and having the decals, et cetera. So that was interesting. So a couple things I wrote down here. Training schedule is very rigid and on time. I really like that. It's going to be part of the new training system that we have at Augusta for new franchisees is where it's not just like we finish this topic and then go to lunch. Like, this topic ends at 12:30 and then we go to lunch period. I like that a lot. So something that we have to work on because mostly my fault, 100% my fault is I just keep going and going until we're done. The topic I need to know, hey, like it's 15 minutes. I'm bad at watching clocks. When I talk, I'll just be honest. Whether it be a conference or whatever, I'm horrible. So I got to get better at having a timer, having a clock, and be like, okay, I need to speed this up so we get done by a certain time.

One of the Jim's Mowing franchisees talked today. He's they kind of Recommend Starting at $80 per hour. Now keep in mind, that's an Australia dollars. They're about 30% less in terms of exchange rate to the United States, but they're basically equivalent with Canada in terms of dollar. So if I'm going to take what he said, $80 per hour starting, that's kind of like $65 per hour in the U.S. their thing is though, they fill up usually within the first three to four months. They fill up their schedule again. There's one person, so they're usually making like their goal is 1500-2000 a week. That's what they're shooting for. Once they get that point, then they say, raise to $120 per hour. And this is that. This is this one franchisees recommendation. Most franchisees, he said, are, are not over 100, but that's what he did. 120 in Australia dollars is like $95 per hour in United States dollars. And then what he does is once he fills up again, he raised it to $180 per hour. I thought that was incredible. $180 per hour. So $3aminute is what he shoots for.

And again, that's about equivalent of $125 United States dollars, US dollars. So, you know, at the local shop, for example, we're gonna be shooting for 100 probably next spring. We're at 90 right now. I think on everything, we're gonna shoot for 100 and we're gonna talk about a lot of conference. And that is just the pricing and the importance of raising it above a hundred as time goes on. Keep in mind, as he was talking about this, he Was he's made again, massive exclamation asterisks. If you're trying to grow, if you're trying to grow to capacity, that's not what you should be thinking about. You should be thinking about grow to capacity and then that's when you raise your prices. Right?

This is just a note for me. I guess I'll share. I. I just didn't like how they were talking about price matching. They really train a lot around price matching. Or not train it, they just talk about it a lot. Like, match any price.

Which I'm okay with when you're first getting started. But, like, it was a little bit alarming to me as someone who, who's talking to us as a franchisee. Ten years in and still does price matches. That was a little bit alarming.

But definitely getting started, I think, you know, get the job, make sure your close ratio is above 70%, like 100%. But I thought that was a little strange. I just made a note there. 10 years stay. Oh, this is interesting. So this is when the social media team actually started talking. Um, 10 years, they were stagnant with the number of locations they had. And then 2019, they started really doing social media. A lot of videos and all the rest of it. And now they've gone up by a thousand locations since then. So again, the whole franchise Network has like 4,000 franchisees. Two thousand of those are, are Jim's mowing. The rest are all the other divisions combined. But yeah, they were around 3,000 up until 2019. For like 10 years they're at around 3,000. And then 2019, they embraced social media. They said that definitely in Australia, like, they had such massive lockdowns here. A lot of people left their jobs and started doing things like home improvement, their own business. It became very popular because the lockdowns here were nuts. Like literally just in July is when the mandates stopped. That's why I was able to come over. Couple things. Note here for myself here I put. And that is the balance of internal surveys for customer service versus asking for Google and Facebook reviews. The reason I made note of this is because one of the presenters, the same one I was just talking about, he had been in, he's been doing this for 10 years and.

He had like a 5.0, 5.0 rating in their internal, like, review system. And that's great.

But because they asked for surveys so diligently, they failed to ask for online reviews. And so his Google, Google thing, he had like 20 or 30 reviews over the course of 10 years and it had a 3.5 star rating. So again, that's fine if you're not wanting to grow and he's not really trying to grow anymore. But if you're trying to grow, you better make sure you have reviews online. Like you should have 20 or 30 within a couple of weeks after training. So I think I just made a note to myself. There's a balance between asking for internal surveys, but if you do that too much, you're not going to probably get the external and the, you know, the front facing for views. So like yesterday I talked about how like, important I know that is the future for us to be able to have better compliance with customer service and protecting the brand is we need to have surveys that we can see at corporate to monitor who's doing what and who needs help and who's not serving customers well and potentially hurting, hurting the brand. We need to do that. However, I'm not going to jeopardize the fact that we need to reviews, Facebook reviews. That was, that's what drives new, new leads.

They don't provide any sort of social media content. They're really, really. Because like they need all calls to come through their call center because that's how they get, they get lead fees, like 15 to 65 per lead that comes in is what the franchisees have to pay for. So they're very strict about like not promoting too much on social media about like your own phone number or like contacting you directly because they want all these to go come through corporate. So they don't provide any social media content really.

Which reminded me that our auto posting should start up here in September. So if you don't know what auto posting is, you probably started this year. But prior to March or April this year, we're able to actually post for you three times a week on Facebook, Instagram, et cetera. That should be restarting again so you don't have to do it manually yourself. So when that time comes, we'll make sure you're connected and if you don't want to be connected, we'll show you how to disconnect, etc. All right, challenge, here's the challenge. So they were talking about TikTok reels, which is like short form content on Instagram and Facebook. There's Facebook reels, Instagram reels, and there's a couple of their franchisees that do pool service. There's just two of them do pool service. They have hundreds of thousands of followers and all they do is like cool videos, like Time Lapses before and afters, business updates, kind of like sharing with their business how much they charge for different jobs and they get like millions of views. And my thought is this, and this is something that they didn't really push today. And I was like, this is not rocket science. What we should all do is be creating short form video content and then taking the best of all of our content and then, and then repurposing it across all the platforms. Give me a second. This leads me to the challenge I'm going to explain myself. Okay, so first and foremost, why short form content? Okay, so this is the challenge. I don't know what, okay, we're still education, so why would we do this on short form and create a challenge around this versus like a social media post? Because social media posts, like an Instagram post, Facebook post, there's like one in a billion chances that you are going to make a viral piece of content using a post on those platforms because they don't push out organically. They're only going to show it to the people who follow you. And that's about it. Whereas with TikTok, it's based upon the interest of the user. And if a video is really perform well, it'll just keep pushing out to more and more people. And that's why someone with two videos on Instagram can literally get millions of views. Because if the video is good and it reaches their target audience, it can take off, be viral very quickly. So this is the challenge by the end of this month. Okay, we'll, we'll do it the. Oh my God. I better come with an actual day. Give me one second.

Let's do it on September 5th. So it's just less than two weeks. September 5th is the end of the challenge. The challenge is going to be rewarded. Whoever wins is going to get a set of AirPods. Okay? They're brand new, they're in a box, they're in my, at my house in the U.S. i'll send those to you.

And here's the challenges. Whoever has the most views on a video.

By September 5th. Now that video can be on Instagram reels, Facebook reels, or TikTok or YouTube shorts. So any sort of short form content, right? So if you're on any of those platforms, which you should be on all of them, by the way, I would recommend posting on all four of them. It would, it takes an extra two minutes probably to post them the other three. So if you're on Facebook, for example, and you shoot a video and you're Going to post to reels. You can really easily post Instagram, TikTok and YouTube shorts. YouTube shorts is the equivalent of TikTok in terms of like you can post a video and just blows up. We have a video that I think is Dustin sent to me. Dustin or Connor? I always get you mixed up. I apologize. I don't know why Dustin o' Connor sent to me. I think it was Dustin. Three and a half million views on this short form video of YouTube shorts. And we put on my channel. I only care about views. I only care about number of eyeballs. It has to have include Augusta in it. And again. So here's the deal. YouTube shorts, Facebook Reels, Instagram Reels, TikTok, okay? Those four platforms post on all four of those. Whoever has the most combined views on one video across the four platforms on September 5th is going to win the AirPods. So what, what should you record? Like, what does well, edging an overgrown edge. That's like way overgrown edge that bad boy and put on a time lapse. Time lapses of any sort. When it comes to mowing, do really well. How much you charge for certain things does really well and tips and tricks with it. When it comes to mowing. Like if you're mowing a lawn, you make sure you go to and away from and towards the line of sight. It makes the stripes look way better than if you go this direction and you actually show it happening. That sort of thing just does really well. You know, time lapses before and afters. Edging oddly satisfying time lapses. Like that sort of thing just does fantastic. Okay, you just throw a gust in there. The trucks or the uniforms. This is my idea though. If we have a hundred of us doing that every single day. And again, it doesn't have to be highly produced, doesn't have to have captions. It can just be like your phone, your iPhone on a stand or just like leaning up against a planter while you're mowing and then doing a time lapse on it. If we all do a hundred of those, I truly believe that out of a hundred, one or two of those will go viral. Like, I truly believe that if we're all creating that type of content, one or two of those will get millions of views. And then what we will do is we will take the winners, we'll take the ones that are really, really performed well and then we'll all respond to them and you can like mirror them and you can repurpose them and inside of these platforms. So for example, like TikTok there's this one video I had like, a couple million views on. Someone repurposed that and got like 5 million.