Mike Minutes Mastermind 08/27/2024

Hey everyone. Hope you're doing good. Let's get started. Yesterday there was only one question. I didn't do a mastermind. But there's only one today, so feel free to submit your questions. I did have several things to go over. First off, if you are in Canada or Australia, Command center, the QuickBooks department can help you. Now, they've been working on getting that all set up for both of those countries. So if you've been waiting on this in Canada or Australia, the QuickBooks department at Command center can now help you.

Also, another thing.

I've used this service recently.

I would recommend if you do not like doing compliance stuff for your business. It's called mainstreetbusiness.com Main Street Video Services.

The one I recommend is the company compliance service. This will do your BOI report, which is new as of this year. State renewals, Corporate bookkeeping is like your minutes essentially for your S Corp, etc. Now look, you could literally do this yourself in like all of 10 to 20 minutes a year. Honestly, I still see about a third of small businesses that don't do it correctly or mess it up or forget to do their annual.

Minutes or they forget to just make sure that their entity doesn't default just by filling out their annual report. So it's 200 bucks. I do it for all my entities as of this year, mostly because I just don't have to deal with it.

Though. It's not cheap technically. But again, I still consistently, when I look through all entities inside of a destination, I don't still see about a third of companies that will like go into default and then you have to reinstate it or you have to redo certain elements. The bigger thing though is this. Most people don't do their minutes every year. If you have an S Corp and you don't have minutes being done every year and you're not filling out your annual report, the benefits of an S corp are lost in a lawsuit because.

The attorney can just be like, yeah, they weren't maintaining their.

There you go, microphone's better. The attorney can just be like, yeah, they weren't maintaining their S Corp. And they, you know, therefore it's not valid. And so I do recommend this Service. Again, it's 199 bucks a year. If you're just getting started, you don't need this. But if you have multiple S Corps, if you're doing multiple locations, might want to think about doing this. If you're not going to do this, totally fine. Just make sure you do this. Stuff your BOI reports now do this year. Every year you're getting an email typically from your Secretary of State, where you got to do your annual report. It takes literally 5 minutes just to upgrade your address, etc. But this is the part I see a lot of people not doing, and that's their minutes. You could literally download a template from the Internet of what a minute should look like and fill it in yourself and then upload it each time you do your annual report to the Secretary of State's website. But you do want to make sure you have this in case you ever got sued, that your S Corp is actually upheld and that your protection against your personal assets are upheld. So just saying it might be helpful, especially if you've defaulted, like your entity structure has defaulted or you forgot to do an annual report. This is a way to kind of prevent that from happening. These ones aren't super useful. The registered agent, none of us really need this. The privacy address service. This is if you're trying to hide kind of like where you know people from, seeing where you live or anything like that. You could use this stuff down the road. So.

Yeah, I'm working with like doing a bunch of disregarded entity stuff like out of Wyoming and like kind of setting up my business structure, a bunch of stuff like that. As I learn about that stuff more and more, I will pass it along to you, talking probably mostly with it about it with the seven figure club next summer. Because once you get that size, it starts making more sense to actually think about like having disregarded entities, having a revocable living trust, like making sure S Corp, you know, how much do you pay yourself? And like where do you. How do you protect that money from taxes, etc. So I'll probably get in with them a lot more. But in terms of just like keeping your S Corp clean, I would recommend highly.

That service. Or just do it yourself. Just make sure you do it. The Secretary of State is going to email you every year asking for your annual report. In that annual report, you can upload documents and those documents should include your minutes. And your minutes. You can literally a template online of what your mention include. It's going to include things like did you take any debt? Like just like think of it like doing a book. It's like your, your quarterly report for your business. Think of it like all your, you know, big things that change in terms of acquisitions, hires, the economy. Like during COVID like everyone in their minutes had to include like what how Covid was impacting them, which was super helpful when it came to came around like getting ERC money if you had it in your minutes, like it was really defendable. So.

Yeah, if you hate that sort of thing and you hate the idea of having new compliance stuff, that services has been pretty smooth for me.

Joel from Lafayette, would you recommend we add a DBA for Augusta Lights? Is there any benefit to doing this? If we're not planning to create a separate Google business profile for lights, I would just make sure that in your liability insurance that you have it included as a service. So that way they have an accurate profile of your service mix and then they will tell you if, oh yeah, no problem. Just don't go on the second story, for example, or whatever. Or they might be like, oh no, we need to like reassess your, your.

Your account, do more underwriting with that service being added and they'll ask you questions like how much revenue, what percentage of your revenue is going to be coming from Christmas lights? And they'll have a different risk profile potentially for Christmas lights. I haven't seen anyone like there were their insurance like doubles or triples over this.

But the only reason you really need a dba, I would say, is if people are giving you checks that say guess the Christmas lights. That's probably the only time I would say it's necessary. But again, if you're taking credit cards, if you're requiring deposits and things like that and it's all going to stripe, you're not going to need to worry about it, in my opinion. But it would be a bad thing like on your, on your annual report or on your business license. Next time you have to do the upgrade, just add a DBA. Cost you like, you know, 20 to 50 bucks depending which state you're in. Just add a DBA. Wouldn't be a bad thing. Just in case someone writes you a.

Check in that name and it can be still cashed inside of your business checking account. Not a bad idea. So cool. Well, there are no other questions, so if you have one, feel free. Yesterday I did not do the mastermind because there was only the one question. You can just comment it too in YouTube if you would like. I'll hang out here for a second because usually when I do that, people do leave comments.

So feel free to comment or fill out the form here. I'll hang out here for a couple seconds though.

I was looking through the other day. July is looking like it was like a very definitive switch in July of profitability across Augusta Nation, which is great. The second half of the year, typically is when we see all of our profits. But, like, when I was looking through all the numbers, it's looking very much definitive that way, which is awesome. A lot of people raised their prices in June and July.

And I'm looking across the P4P numbers, et cetera. It's like, very, very solid. So kudos on that.

All right, we got a comment. Let's pull this down.

Fortune. We have more designs. They might already be up there, but we're just waiting on Vistaprint. But we've been waiting like a week. So as soon as they're up there, the media team will post in the Facebook group and then I'll make sure everyone knows via email too. But we have like five or six designs. We have pending. We have a whole bunch of the. Oh, sorry, I was talking about Christmas lights for snow removal. Will we have more designs? Nothing really that we're planning specifically. There's already the snow removal in terms of designs that are in the.

In the pro shop. Sorry, I thought you heard Christmas lights. But for snow removal, we don't really have plans for more. More designs. If there was like, something very specific, you could ask the media team. If you're like, I need this, this, and this, feel free to ask them. But we don't really have plans to make anything. The compliance thing is only for true S Corps. And does the compliance thing is only for true S Corps, or does it apply for llc taxed as an S corp. The compliance thing. Oh, I see. You're saying. So if you're being taxed as an S corp, you do need to still have, like, annual minutes, things like that. But it literally, like, again, if you're willing to take the lesson 20 to 30 minutes and save $200, you can get a template of minutes, fill in the questionnaire, upload that document with your annual report for the Secretary of State, and you'll be good. If you forget this stuff, though, it costs more time and energy of missing one entity than $200, I can promise you that. So also, it's a matter of like, making sure it's done correctly in the event of a lawsuit. You just don't want someone being able to pierce the corporate veil and go after your personal assets. Again, if you don't have a lot of. This is not a big deal. But again, if you're. If you're a larger business, I would say over 500,000 in annual revenue. If you have personal assets outside your business, like a house, cars, et cetera, and there's Equity in those that people would come after in a lawsuit. I would definitely make sure you have your annual compliance in terms of your annual report, your minutes being done to prevent any sort of piercing of the corporate veil where someone comes after your personal assets.

Even the other day, man, like I was talking to attorney, like, there's so many ways people can get around it. One second it's called.

Where people can basically get around even the corporate side of things. What's called a charging order protection entity, or cope, because someone can do a charging order where essentially they say, hey, look, you got your corporation, good for you. I'm going to put a kind of like a lien on the corporation though, where you can't take distributions until I'm paid. And so even though they can't go after your assets, they'll say, okay, well the S corp, it can't make distributions to that person until.

You know, we've gotten some sort of judgment. And so sometimes even though the corporate veil is upheld and your assets are protected personally, what they'll say is, okay, well the S Corp can't give any sort of distributions whatsoever until we are paid. And so that's called a charging order. And in a lot of states it's upheld. Wyoming is one where it's very difficult to do that. So a lot of times you'll create LLCs that are disregarded entities in Wyoming and then that Wyoming LLC will own your equity in your S Corp. So it's a disregard entity. You don't like have an EIN number, you don't pay taxes from it, etc. It's a disregard entity that is simply there to prevent a charging order. So these are like little things that really don't matter until you're in stage seven of, of wealth. But I would say, like, it's like, you know, the basics of health is like eating well, exercising and sleeping. You know, if you're starting an S corp, if you have an S corp, maintain your annual minutes, maintain your annual reports. Good hygiene is just like a good thing to do to protect yourself. So it just becomes a bigger problem as you get multiple locations and as you have multiple entities.

Any chance you sell Augusta Lights only franchises? Probably not, no. I don't really have the desire to do this.

I see Augusta Lights as a way to be able to.

To take Augusta Lawn Care and massively improve our unit economics because I just consistently see that we are usually running between 20 and 24% profitable for three quarters of the year. The other one I haven't looked at this year's but the year before when I looked at it, we average like a negative 6 to negative 10% profit margin. So all of a sudden we start to really, really damage our profitability. So if we can just fix that one thing and even get it to say 5 or 10% profit, the profitability of our locations are dramatically will go up. Like turning it from a negative 6 to 10 to a positive 6 to 10 would be huge. And when I talked to Alex Ramosi like that was the thing he said, like just fix that one problem. And if you can fix that, you'll get to a thousand locations in a matter of a few years. And so I think it'll take only a few years to fix the problem to where we rank nationally across the board for Christmas lights and leads pour in because of it. I think it'll take me at least two years to do that. But if we can do that and we can get to the unit economics is just like fancy language for the average return that someone gets over the course of 10 years inside of a franchise.

If we can fix that problem, all the other stuff will happen. So I'm not really interested in doing just Christmas lights only.

Yeah, it just. Yeah, I'm not interested in changing the Christmas light industry. I'm interested in changing the lawn care industry. But to do that we need to fix Q4 collapse. And so that's why Christmas lights are even brought into the equation.

All right everyone, I hope you have a fantastic Tuesday. We'll see you tomorrow. I apologize. There was on the weekend the notifications going out for day before service on Copilot stopped working and they backlogged and then sent out this morning. Very sorry for that. We're creating protocol of which automations should be backlogged and sent out versus the ones that like if it backlogs, just don't send them out. Because in general, like if you were sending out invoices for example, you would want those to backlog if there was any sort of issue and then go out when they, when things were, you know, the throttle was released or whatever. When it comes to automations around like we will be there soon. You do not want those being backlogged, you want them being taken away if they're not sent out immediately. So I apologize for that. They're creating protocol around this which ones should be and should not be backlogged. So have a fantastic day, we'll see you tomorrow.