Mike Minutes Mastermind 08/25/22

Hey, everyone. Hope you're doing good. Let's go ahead and get started. Today was day four.

They focus now more on the mowing side of things. So I didn't really don't. This is the extent of my notes today. There wasn't really a whole lot to take notes on. Again, most of the people that are doing these from here have literally never drove a trailer or mowed a lawn before. So it's very, very basic stuff. How to hook up their trailers. We talked a lot about chemicals and different types of grasses that I don't have. No idea what they are. That was kind of interesting, but nothing really that I took note of a whole lot. Although I did add a little bit more into our training now that we have a fourth day.

I did add a little bit more talking about equipment and truck setups and comparing different options based upon the size of your lot, square footages, average, etc. So that was good takeaway, I guess.

Aside from that, there was not much today that I took note of.

Let's see. All right, we got questions, questions, questions, questions. By the way, congrats to those that posted their first short form videos. Remember, you got till September 5 to post your short form video. And the one that I saw the day, I think the one that I saw today that had the most views. Let me double check, to my knowledge, which again, I could not be seeing, right. The one that I see the most has 15,000 views. Brian Connors, YouTube short. So again, you can take the same video. It can literally be something simple like this is his today.

Is it going to play? I was trying to connect to my.

That's the extent of it.

That was basically it. Now I've got to move my audio back over.

So you got 15,000 views in the past few hours. Probably will get guessing about 50,000 views over the next couple weeks. So that's pretty cool. If you post on though, again, you gotta add them all up, right? So if you post that on YouTube shorts, TikTok Instagram reels and Facebook reels, that video probably took 10 seconds to video and a minute to put that little text thing that you put on front. And 15,000 people saw it. Imagine if we all did that and it said a gust on all of our shirts. You don't have to make it about the business. You don't have to make it about yourself or Augusta Lawn Care. Just make it about mowing lawns, either with pricing or just doing a slow mo. Cool shot, anything like that. If we all do that, like we did 50 or 60 of those a day, I guarantee you we would have millions of millions of views combined. So I highly recommend doing it. Not only would you have the shotgun AirPods, but it's great brand awareness for all of us. That's why I want to really test this out over the next couple of weeks. So thank you to those who've made videos. If you haven't, shame on you. I'm just joking. I know you're busy, but what's nice about short form videos you don't have to pull, it's not rocket science. You can take it real quick, post it to the platforms, it'll take you less than five minutes. We all do that. The amount of brand awareness we get from that is tremendous. So show Augusta lawn care, uniforms, trucks, things like that. It's extremely valuable.

So cool, let us go ahead and I don't even know how I got on that stick, but let's go ahead and go jump in these questions.

Questions.

I glanced this first one. I don't think I looked at the second one. I did look at this first one though. Okay, here we go. Can you see this? Cool. I read the first like two paragraphs and I already know I'm gonna say so. Investing question. I have a buddy of mine that recently started a gold and silver coin shop this last January. He is wanting investors to come in with him and put up some upfront capital to expand the operation and purchase more inventory. Is guaranteeing monthly interest payments of 10% plus whatever you originally put in. This would be paid out each month where you, you could technically pull out original investment plus 10% every month. So I'm actually not going to continue reading anymore.

Because I really don't care what the logic is. That's not sustainable. Okay. So the same thing was said about crypto investing in 2020, 2021 and all of a sudden in 2022 things popped. Okay, you got Voyager Digital, that we're saying if you staked your Ethereum or you staked your bitcoin, you'd make 9% a year. If this person trying to take 10% a month compounded that's like 200% return a year. That is not sustainable. And for anyone that wants to say this is sustainable, it is short term a win. And if everyone, for people that got into crypto and NFTs and they can get 20 return and 50 return and there's some like crypto coin saying, you know, if you stake your, your coin you're going to get 10amonth or 5% a month or whatever it is, give it 24 months. Anything that sounds too good to be true, just give it 24 months and it usually plans out and sure enough, 2020, everyone had money. Everyone was just gambling away 2022. Get a little bit tightening in the recess in a recession and all of a sudden all those coins are down 95, 99%.

You got all sorts of coins that are now worth nothing. People wasted millions of dollars on complete scams. And so I'm not going to call this a scam. First of all because it's your buddy. Second all because there is actual value in gold and silver and things like that, but anyone that's promised you 10% returns on a monthly basis, compounded and it's liquid and it's not illiquid. I don't even have to keep reading to know that that is eventually, eventually going to pop. Might last for 12 months, might last for a year and a half, but I rarely see these things last 24 months. So just my personal opinion, not financial advice. Do with what you want. Maybe I'm just old and an old, what's it called? A boomer name. Just a boomer at heart. Too conservative with my money. But I just never have seen that stuff work out in my very short lifespan. Follow up question My previous question about investing in my buddy's coin shop. How would I approach him about having equity in the business? What type? First of all, if someone is ever promising 10% compounded return on a monthly basis that's unsecured and liquid, I wouldn't want to get into business with them. I'm just, just Give, give it 24 months. Over the next six months you might see other people invest in this. Like oh my goodness, they made 10% this month. The next month, oh my goodness, I would have put a thousand dollars and now it'd be 2000 by now. I understand that inclination.

But.

If it seems too good to be true in investing, especially when it comes to return on capital, it it is and this is too good to be true. 100%.

What type of capital I need to put down to get large enough stake in the business, I'm very interested. The gold and silver coin business seems to be fairly stable over the years. So you're investing in a business, not gold and silver. If you want to invest in gold and silver, you can buy that. You can buy them on a stock exchange too where you buy a piece of gold that is stored inside of know holding your storage facilities.

It's iau, the ticker Symbol, I forget there's a couple gold trusts and silver trust that you can buy. But again, like look at gold over the past 50 years and silver over the past 50 years. They have not performed very well. They've stayed about the same. So you could say it stays stable, but I don't think it's not, it's not a, it's not a productive asset. It doesn't produce cash flow, it doesn't produce anything. It's just a shiny rock. That's what it is. And so you could say the same thing about money. But the thing is money has value because you can exchange it for things. You cannot take a bar of gold, this is an avocado, and exchange a bar of gold right now for something you can't. You've got to exchange that still into dollars. This is why when everyone's freaking out about cryptocurrency, I said just pump your brakes a bit because when was the last time you ever bought something with bitcoin besides the nft which, oh yeah, that went down too. So you know, there's smoke, there's fire. And I think that when crypto went the way direction it went and then NFTs came out, that's, I was very much like, hey, don't touch us. The ten foot pole, the technology is right, but there's a bunch of scams is because it was supported by a bunch of people that were buying into.

Pathetic cryptocurrencies. So 24 month, that is, that is the, the lens by which everyone needs to think about in terms of what is a scam and what is not. And it'll be a scam. Just unrealistic in a pipe dream.

And I think the same thing goes for business. If someone can just get through the first 24 months, it really shows whether or not they're probably going to make the next 10 or 15 years. You know, if, if a real, if a real estate deal or business or stock can get through 24 months of hard times, the ups and the downs, and still be there, still be consistently moving forward, there's a really good chance that in 10 years it's going to be in the same thing.

So the 24 month test is what I would be applying to any investment. And if it sounds too good to be true, it's not like it might be. It always is when it comes to investing 110%. So if someone's offering you something for little investment, no effort and massive returns, it is absolutely 100% unsustainable. So that's why, you know, the US economy is going to be toasted one day. One day we're going to a massive crash. You can't pump trillions of dollars, do what Biden just did the other day, and just forgive a bunch of student debt.

Give away a bunch of tax incentives and things for clean energy. You can't just do all of that and not have a day of reckoning. You can only print money and get your way out of issues that way for so long. And so the same thing goes for high interest rate loans, goes for business models that promise you don't have to do anything, just do it from home, work from home, click a button, you know, pay us $30 a month and we'll create your Amazon, you know, fulfill fba, fulfill my Amazon. Sounds great in theory, right? And I'm sure if you talk to your buddy, I'm sorry to keep going on this, but just in general, this is an investment piece. If you talk to your buddy about his gold shop, I'm sure there's some great reason why he's able to give the 10 returns. But why, if he's holding gold and silver that over the course of the past 50 years gone up like 3 to 5% annually, how is he able to give 10% a month, I.e 200% annual returns to you? How is that possible? Right, so if, if he's leveraging the asset, he could do that. But what happens when you leverage an asset by 200% and you have very, very little collateral against the massive loan? If that value, the asset goes down at all, you're dead, you're out. That's what Voyager Digital went out, a business. That's why all these other cryptocurrencies would have businesses because they leverage themselves so much against an asset that was fluid and when that asset went down just slightly in value, they all got whacked. So. Good question. I guess though that's good for us all, is to think about and talk about. You can get to some. If you, if any investment can hold up for 24 months, it typically lasts 10 years or more. And that's why I usually say years three to five is where you actually start to see the results in your business. Because the first two years just. Hell, I don't care what, what you're doing, especially if you're trying to grow, if you're just trying, if you're trying to, you know, if you've already got a business or if you are going to grow up for the first 612 months and then you keep it level. That's a much more relaxed way of growing. But if you're growing your business over the course of five or 10 years, the first couple years are just. Just horrible. And so any investment, any business adventure you can get to the first 24 months, typically you're going to do very well. Because that's. And that's why I say year three is when you start, like, hey, this is actually a business. And as you get to the end of year three and four, it's like, oh, there's Prof. And year five is when you're like, okay, I got. I got this. I understand how this works. And so I was talking to Jim actually the other day about that, because I was like, why don't you do coaching calls? And he said, well, because they don't hire anybody, usually after the first year, they kind of get everything. We don't really need to do coaching calls. That made sense. I think the difference with the Gus is like, we want to keep growing, we want to keep expanding. We're constantly going to keep challenging ourselves.

And whether it be hiring more people, getting more trucks and equipment, having to go get a loan, having to fire more people, starting a second location, finding other investment opportunities. So it's just a very different dynamic. Because I asked him, like, do you do any sort of, like, training with them? And they don't do, like, a conference at all. So he doesn't really do any videos or anything, like, you know, live or he does a Q A on his public channel. But, like, so I asked him about that. He's like, well, like, you know, because they don't have employees, they figure out the systems within the first 12 months, and they only got to get to like, 8 to 10,000amonth in revenue. So we can get them there then the first year, and then they're usually happy after the first year. So what's different with Augusta is after the first year, if you're doing 8 to 10,000, they're great. Now next year, let's do 20. You have to do 30,000amonth. You have to do 40,000. Is that constant growth is what causes the pain? Right. And that's why it's so important that we do have the coaching calls, that we do have these one on one, these.

Daily masterminds, just to constantly realize that you constantly have to be changing and growing. And so, yeah, it's been really good. A couple more days. Tomorrow I'm doing a podcast with Jim.

And then Saturday I'm doing a talk to all our franchisees. That'll be fun. I'm wore out as I'll get out. I usually been waking up at 3, working until 7 or 8 and class starts, then class till 5, dinner till 6, 30 with all of them, and then I work a few more hours. So. Been good. Learned a lot. I think the first three days I got most of what I needed for my franchise level, like learning about how they do things. Next few days I think will be good for me to see where some of the technical things that we have in the past not had time for in training, like trailers and trucks and what your setup could be based upon square footage, things like that. So it'll be useful. So. All right, everyone, have a great rest of your day and we will see you tomorrow.