Mike Minutes Mastermind 08/28/2024

And alive. Welcome everyone. Doing good. Sorry for the bad audio. I'm in the airport today. I don't have any announcements though. So if the audio is that bad, feel free to check out.

See here. I guess one announcement. Yesterday I did do a.

Interview with the new VP of Product. Obviously right now his main focus is copilot, but over the next several years as ppp, TOPA and Augusta really start to work closer and closer together, he'll be the C suite of the entities as a whole. He'll probably be joining us in the Facebook group. You'll be seeing him at conference and you'll see more of him. So feel free if you want to get to know him a little bit.

Sorry about the background. Yeah, you'll be seeing a lot more of him, so feel free to get to know him a little bit. The 20 minute interview, I put it on Instagram, I put it on LinkedIn, I put it on the co pilot Facebook group and I put it on the co pilot Facebook page. So feel free to look at those. Get to know Josh a little bit. He's at Madison, Wisconsin. We've worked with him. We didn't talk about a whole lot on the interview. We've worked with him for over six months now on a part time basis, kind of an advisory role. He's worked at ActiveCampaign for the past four or five years. They do over $200 million in annual revenue. So he'll be coming with a lot of experience and very helpful in a lot of the initiatives that we have in terms of technology and really polishing the bridge between design and engineering. And then you'll be hearing about down the road some really important key hires we're making the engineering front as well.

Jump into questions.

Sorry about the honor. It's just either this or I don't make these. I'm driving right now. I'm flying to Washington DC.

Okay, Mr. Anonymous, and there's a question. I feel like Christmas lights will be a really good thing for November and a little bit of December. Do you have any ideas besides winter services to help fill our schedule in January and February? Yeah, like I have a ton of ideas around this. I do think it is the number one problem to solve. It's my number one focus. We are focusing this year exclusively on Christmas lights. So there's five tracks. Christmas lights is one of them. Snow removal, winter services continuing to mow and then basically being locked down, which is cut all overhead, cut all expenses and just essentially.

And so I have several ideas of those other Four tracks and how to make them really good. I'm really going to focus on Christmas life this year, but you can expect next year for me to continue focusing on this. What I feel is the main problem in our industry and I was convinced of this prior to talking to Alexi. He basically said, if you fix this, you will unlock everything you want to be done in this industry. That is my new initiative. But then before that, even before I already knew like if you take out one quarter and most of our P Ls, we have a very profitable business between 20 and 30%. You add that one extra quarter of unprofitability in there and all of a sudden we're averaging around 10 to 15%. Not great. Not a great business. So.

Again, sorry about the background noise. I was continue. All right, number two, Hutch, do you still have a media buyer or you testing ad yourself? How can we know if we are? If you're running ads in our market, I see favor influxes of work for specific services being pressed in only one territory via the website form from time to time. I'm really trying to nail in our marketing avenues going into next year and no customer life cycle swing. Okay, real quick. Okay, let me get real like customer life swings that I'm just curious how you recommend looking at this and how you account for it. It's outside services like a media buyers running ads. Was there an update on door handles with the QR codes to instant forms we talked about in the spring? Okay, okay. So first off, I usually only will test in markets that are brand new with the.

If I'm running ads in your market because otherwise there's too many factors that will play into it. So like I've never ran ads this year, for example, in your market, if you're an established location, et cetera, etcetera. It's the new ones where I'll test stuff because then I know it's only because of my ad. It has nothing to do with brand awareness. And so if you've been established for years, I'm not running ads in your area. And right now we're not running any ads outside of my my locations. Because summer just throws such a monkey wrench into things in terms of demand, weather, etc. Whereas spring rush, where I know everyone is getting mowings, it's pretty easy for me to target and actually benchmark what's working and what's not. So right now there's none running and I don't run them against locations that are established because then brand Awareness skews everything.

Right now we do not have door hangers with the QR code going to instant forums.

My hope is that it wouldn't just be a QR code going to the main website. They're actually a separate form. This is not something we have done worked on at all. There are designs on the Photoshop that allow for QR codes and you can put in there like what URL you want to go to. There's a couple of those like for reviews, things like that. But we have not been able to hang out with the QR codes.

My hope really what I'm looking for, to be honest Connor is I'm waiting on before we can connect Copilot and the credit card part to instantly because it'll help so much more with the.

Adoption rate of people that are actually scanning those and actually information in. If it's door hangers. I am a little concerned about just how accessible it would be to basically sign up for service and then not have a credit card on file. That is usually probably 1 to 2% of the time right now I feel like it go up a little bit, have a pretty good jump to where it be annoying like if that goes above like 10% like for like 15 or 20% of your instant price forms people are not putting cards on them and they're like stiffing you. It'd be annoying. So I, I really am trying to wait on this one Connor until the. Until we can actually get credit cards being entered with instant price forms and then going to co co pilot and all of that syncing up so you'll see a big effort like once the connection is made. There's a lot of stuff we can do on the RN like the website side to make that process like way more streamlined, way more simplified.

And like reduce the friction of having to ask for a credit card after they put an instant price form.

What's the best way to accurately track out your monthly profit and loss statement? When you bill clients at the end of the month the payments are often delayed by a few days or more due to issues like processing times and failed credit card transactions. My expenses are recorded throughout the month, but my income doesn't always reflect in the same month statement. How do you guys deal with this when profit sharing and when sharing profit and loss statements with employees? Yeah, so the main thing when it comes to this last part is just staying consistent. Stick with either cash or accrual and then stick with like this is the day that we're going to pull stuff. So for Example I think I pull on the. Nick, you can correct me if I'm wrong in the, in the comments. Nick's my region manager. But I believe we pull all of our like quarterly profit sharing for GMs on the 5th of the month to make sure that everything went through as well as even expenses because sometimes expenses might like the 31st, we'll post on like the 2nd or 3rd. So I think it's the 5th when we actually like, we'll do it. So just hit stay consistent because like, look at the very worst, it's going to roll into the next month and as long as you stay consistent, like this is the day we pull it, this is what is included. We're doing cash, we're doing accrual and just stay consistent. That's the main thing. Because yeah, there's processing times, there's holidays that will throw massive monkey wrench into stuff, et cetera. So just stay consistent with either cash or accrual and stay consistent with like the day of the month that you pull these reports. And yes, realize that there's going to be times when they're $5 above and $5 below, like a benchmark or target and that's gonna stink or be really good one way or the other. But just staying consistent is important.

Everybody with Josh, when does he officially start? He's, he's already started. Monday was his first full time.

Full time day with the team. But like I said, he's been working part time, like 10 hours a week for six, six months almost. And what are the first notable changes we will see?

He mentioned a little bit in the.

In the interview and it's like the UI improvements. There's a lot of stuff in the back end that he can now see in terms of Netflix, like where people are clicking. Are people frustrated? Are they confused with certain things? So they're doing a lot of tracking on that end to make sure that like a lot of things that are recorded as bugs are not bugs. They're simply like someone can't find something, the button is hidden, it's not intuitive. So we're tracking. Like for example, with the new release of automations that are going to be coming out, we actually go to the engineering team, we set surveys out. Like we can see what people are clicking. So we could see that the add automation button and the plus button being next to each other adds a bunch of confusion. So things like that.

Because there's so much more bang for our buck if we go after like user frustration than if we go after like new features, so and so stability, then UI and then adding new. He's talked about the very end his art. What we're focusing on.

How do you handle the negative comments said within the Copilot group due to user frustration with bugs.

I talk a little bit about this in a video I have coming out about creating more finish lines. Like, I know what the finish line is obviously to fix the bugs, but when you realize that it is, you know, it's gonna take millions of lines of code to do that. We've been working on the last eight months. It's just a matter of like, I've got to create benchmarks. Like there is evidence of success. Like, okay, I know that switching over to ECS is really helpful.

Elastic container storage, switching aws. Like all these little things that we're doing I know are positive.

And so I'm trying to do something I know will take a long time.

It's like.

But in terms of how do I handle it, like, I just know that like hiring Josh will help. I know that hire a great CTO will help and having better and better engineers. I know that switching from PHP to Node JS will help. Switching over to a mobile app with React instead of using what we currently have with the web app will help. I just stay focused on that stuff and otherwise get buried.

Do you think each location has their own brand culture that their clients see until outside of the main investor brand? What I mean by this is the way the cool GMs estimators continuing carrying themselves and speak to the clients give off who we are and their perception of the guests. Should we be focused on giving scripts and customer service hospitality courses to our guys?

Yeah, look, ultimately, because each of us have a different leader, whether the owner Jim or my manager, there's going to be variations and flavors of perception. The thing is, you could say we've got a cookie cutter at all. In some markets it works, in some markets it doesn't. If you offer different services, etc. You might need different skilled employees. So there's a level of flexibility that comes with the franchise and being part of the community. And so we have to give that. If I said, hey, you must do it this way, then I am now liable. If you're in a market that doesn't work, for example, in places like El Paso, Texas, for example, there's no graphs. Very little of the revenue comes from mowing. And so if I was like, well, these scripts are going to be all about mowing. Well, now all of a sudden we just threw him under the bus. And so the goal is to have the flexibility and then create the frameworks by which the standards of the community and the destination are upheld. And if they're not, then we kick people out. And we've done that recently. And trust me, there's so much warning and notice prior to and warnings of like this is not against community standards, against your strangers agreement, it's hurting other owners. Like you get warning. You'll never be caught off guard if you're outside of what we consider as the Augusta brand.

In no way, shape or form. Nick was saying that we do pull on the 5th for monthly. We wait until after CC draft is sent and TB expenses have been clarified different day each month but quarterly is the fifth. Very cool.

All right. I think that's all we have for today. I hope you all have a fantastic Wednesday. I will see you tomorrow. Take care.