Mike Minutes Mastermind 08/29/2023 (Max Update)

What's up, Augusta Nation? Hope you're doing super well.

I'm currently in the airport.

I'm sitting in this hallway because I don't like to be the guy that's like on a zoom call rambling about business while people are sitting waiting for the plane. And it was really quiet, so I was just gonna sit in the hallway so I don't have to think about that. Okay, I have some notes I want to go over. There was no questions. It's perfect. I want to take this mastermind and talk about a few things that changes. Max.

I have notes right here, so I will be looking at my phone. I want to make sure I said specific things. So let me get to that in just a second. I just need to copy this into Facebook.

I think the WI fi is decent. I checked it just to make sure the video would come through okay.

But I am on free airport WI fi, so I apologize if it is a little bit pixelated. That being said.

That being said, you should really just have to listen. I'm not showing much. I'm just gonna be talking. Give me one second. Just takes me a second long because the WI fi is slower.

Mike minutes. Done. Copy that link. YouTube, Facebook paste. All right, we're live. Okay, cool. So.

All right, So I have 1, 2, 3 points and I wanted to bring those all up. So again, I apologize if I'm looking at my phone.

So first off, so I wanted to talk about Max specifically and some of the things that I did wrong on the rollout and what I've learned from it. And yes, go over each of these things. So first and foremost, I hate when I have notes because it feels like I'm reading, which I am. I'm reading currently. Okay. But really, it comes down to what happened is in end of May, beginning of June, when we did the.

We had Max taking all the after hours calls.

What I failed to realize was the downside impact of moving in from just after hours to in hours. And what I mean by that is when. When Max takes a call after hours, there's really only upside because the alternative is a voicemail which is processed, takes longer to process, requires us to call back the customer and potentially not have their email address, other information. Most of the time, people when they get a missed call after hours do not leave a voicemail. The vast majority do not. So it's a lot of lost opportunity. So there's really only upside to having Max take the calls outside of office hours. And there are still more than half of hours of the day are not covered by the office because there are 12 hours five days a week, and then eight hours on Saturdays, which leaves 12 hours a day, Monday through Friday, it's unstaffed. And then 16 hours on Saturday and 24 hours on Sunday. So there is a significant amount, in fact hundreds of calls that are missed otherwise because it's late in the day, early in the morning on the weekend, Sundays, et cetera. So having Max answer the phone calls during that period was only upside. And what I failed to calculate was that there are negative impacts to bring him during office hours because now the comparative personal answer is a live human being. And.

And so I did that too quickly. And so.

What I've learned is that if we're going to change something in the franchise level, if it's going to be mandatory and like there's a hard cut off, I need to give a lot more heads up, lots of heads up. So, for example, Copilot, we've been talking about it for eight, nine months now.

And everyone expects like, hey, January 1st and you got to roll it out. There's a schedule for rollout. And I've been able to communicate this whole year about what that change is since Command center will not be servicing CRMs outside of Copilot starting January 1st. Which just leads to a lot better efficiencies on their, on their angle on their end in terms of Command center and less mistakes because we're not requiring to do things in different CRMs. Makes sense. But even though that's a good idea, it's good efficiency, blah, blah, Having the time frame for everyone to ask questions, communicate, et cetera is important. And then if I'm going to move faster, what I have learned I need to do is make it optional, more of an opt in and opt out so that, for example, there's something that's really cool working on the website, we're making it optional and where you would actually opt in for it to be effective that way, if you want to just like, hey, let me sit back, let me see how this works a little bit and then I'll opt in later that you could do that or at least have the ability to opt out. Like it needs to be optional essentially, if I'm going to move quick, if I'm going to change things fast, otherwise what it can lead to is franchisees feeling somewhat out of control. And I apologize for that. I get the sense, and I know this isn't like everyone, but there's enough people for me to talk about this and whether or not. You've mentioned it to a franchise advisory council, which I appreciate all of them taking feedback or to myself directly or mention on the Facebook group. It's not so much like this. I think the vast majority of people, based on my feedback is it's not like this isolated event. It's like, you know, this just puts us off how future decisions are made. And so I apologize for that. And I have learned that either a, I need to give more, more time, explanation and the ability to ask questions. Have it off in the future if it's gonna be a hard deadline or make it optional if I'm gonna move fast. So my mistake was is was speeding up the process. In June and in July, switching to our Max was on top. And just so that way. Like I'm wrong for that. But let me explain what my logic was on that. Just so you know where I'm coming from. So first off, there was no real downside, like I said before, of Max outside of office hours. And so I was like, great. The next thing is, I knew that calls could be answered more efficiently if when they come in to command center they are correctly routed. Especially that scales up and there's more and more departments and they become more specialized. I knew that it was a more efficient way of answering the phones. That was my first thought. Second thought was the biggest complaint that we had when it came to customers when we listen to calls was the fact they could never get through to an operator. The reason was because the way that technology works is once you send it to Max, it can't. It's hard to route back to command center. And so the main reason that the customers were like showing frustration was when they said, I want to talk to an operator when I want to talk to them. Or like, hey, I have an estimate. I also want to talk about my invoice. That's when they Max struggled the most. And so we figured is that, okay, let's create the top and it can handle what it can handle based on the first sentence. Otherwise everything gets dumped off the command center during office hours. Meaning that when there's a peak of leads, we'd still be able to capture all that information within a matter of minutes, send that out to the customers. So that was my logic, which was flawed in that I didn't see the full ramifications of the comparison of Max versus a human being during office hours versus Max versus a voicemail outside of office hours. Ultimately, what I should have done from the get go is make it where you could opt out. And that's what we're going to do. Let me just spoil that real quick. We're going to allow you to opt out. Let me just explain in a second. And some of the successes I saw in June, for example, is when we'd come back, when Command center would come back from the weekend, you'd have like 300 void voice up, 300 missed calls and stiffy 60, 70 voicemail.

Which would cause a backlog significantly throughout Monday because we were always getting back and you have all these voicemails, you need to go through half of them when you call back, don't pick up the phone. And the bottom line is we missed out on 70% of them because they never left the voicemail like the missed calls, which is potential leads. And again, that was all upside, right then. What also was really, really helpful though, with that Monday backlog was because it was going to max. Now instead of coming back to all these missed calls and 50 to 60 voicemail, now command center was coming back to, you know, 200, 250 very itemized tickets of people leaving their contact information. So if we couldn't get them back on the phone, we'd be able to email them still the quote.

And if they called from a number that was blocked, we'd still have another number. So it was a way for cancer to easily get in on Monday morning and pound through things and send out estimates. Instead of someone leaving a voicemail saying, hey, I want to quote from my mowing, please give me a call back. We call them back Monday morning, we can't get a hold of them, they don't pick up, we leave a voicemail, they call back Tuesday, right? This back and forth was wasteful. And so instead we would at least capture their information, send the quote to them, and then call them like, hey, we got your voicemail. We also just sent the quote. It's in your inbox. Let's roll and sell it. So that was the positive part again. I took all the positives from June. I was like, okay, let's extrapolate this. The biggest frustration is that people can't, can't come back to Command center if they have a problem, let's fix that. And I, what I should have done is just, hey, look, if you want to opt out on top, going to be a more efficient way, you're going to save money at Command center and.

You can opt in. So I apologize for that. Like I said, the thing I have learned overall is if I'm going to move quickly, which is how I've always defaulted to doing that. But I have to learn that with all of Augusta, everyone's businesses are in different spots in different areas and there are certainly red flags that should be raised if you are being forced to do something very quickly that you don't think is right for your business in your stage. And so I do apologize for that. That was an incorrect judgment on my part. And in the future, like I said, I will make sure that if I am making a quick decision, it is an optional thing and it is not forced on anyone. And then if it is going to be a forced change, I will give as much notice as possible. Months, Sorry.

I'll give as much heads up and notice as possible, whether that be three months, six months, something like a CRM thing, 12 months, as much as I possibly can. So again, I can't see. Sorry, enough of that. That was a mistake on my part and something I'm just learning in myself. So I will improve. Let me see here. I want to make sure that. Okay, second thing. So we have made a pain free option. Sorry I'm breathing to opt out of Max calls during office hours. I do believe for the brand this is something that I want to keep and that is Max answering calls after hours. It is by far and away the math is just like so on our side, way more leads during office outside office hours, way more response rate because we get all their contact information on the weekends, in the evenings, etc.

And it's way more efficient for command center to come back in at the end of in the morning or the end of a weekend and have tickets with contact information versus just reaching out to people that miss calls and voicemails. And it's a mess. And that's what has always caused a big backlog on Mondays and even going into Tuesdays in the spring rush is that like you can come into 500, 600 missed calls and 100 voicemails on a Monday. In the spring rush it can take up but like the call team just gets bogged down in that while at the same time they're getting all these calls coming in. So.

After hours.

Everyone can still stand that. However, what you'll be able to now opt out of is Max answering your calls at the top during office hours. And let me show you. Actually it's just a quick form you gotta fill out super fast.

Why it's blocking the dashboard.

Sorry guys, it's not letting me open the dashboard. Also I'll put a screenshot in the description later, but for some reason this WI fi is not letting me get on the dashboard.

Showing me your connection is not private.

Okay, I'll share that later. But basically if you just go to form, go to forms, you'll see a thing that says opt in or opt out of Max AI calls during office hours. And what this is going to do is you can opt in or opt out of Max AI call. So everyone's in right now. If you want to opt out, just fill out the form. And then what you can do is as you see Max improve over time, if you want to opt back in to save more money at Command center, you can do that. And so the call time goes down. Customers are on the weekends and evenings are responded to faster. But I do understand there are frustrations around certain parts of Mac during office hours and certain customers aren't happy. And if you want to switch, there is no hard feelings. What did I say here? That's specifically no bad feelings. Anyone opts out, yeah, don't feel like you're going against me or Augusta. Do what's right for your business. And so.

When I think, when I, when I talk about efficiencies at Command center and saving that command center, just keep in mind what I'm always thinking is like the price of Command center that we have to charge everyone, right? So what I'm always thinking about the fact that like I've said this before but like our base pay for Command center started at $14 an hour. Now I think everyone's over 20 and we still have a hard time finding people as all of you have in your respective markets.

It's a little bit better because of the recent layoffs and like more white collar jobs, but still it's difficult. We have full time like benefits for all of them, paid time off the whole nine yards. It's still very difficult to find and then train them. It's extremely expensive. Our cost has gone up more 50% and yet we haven't changed the $9 cents per minute for the phone.

Since the beginning of Augusta. So almost four years. So that will have to change. Especially if only phone, if you only want phone call operators. Now that being said, we're not doing that now. Right. It'll likely be November and I want to get as much heads up as possible. And you'll see in the form it states this specifically, that right now the cost is the same $0.09 regardless whether Max answers the phone or someone else is answering the phone. But in the future if you opt out of maps and you specifically someone only answering the phone calls as a human during office hours, there will be a higher rate. And the reason I've done this is because I have assumed incorrectly that everyone mostly wants just like reduced costs at command center at all costs. I understand that also people, and this is what I've been learning over the past few days is that people are willing to pay an extra few hundred dollars a month, but they want the in office hours to be answered by a human. And I want to give that option. And I just, I didn't take that into the calculus of like my always objective like bringing down the cost of command center overall.

So I do believe that what is, what is going to happen is technology. With Max, the cost will continue to go down as he improves his skills and becoming better and better every single week. We are improving him. At the same time, labor will continue to go up. It'll be harder and harder to find people that want to do these type of jobs, whether it be mowing, answering phone calls and doing call center type of activities. And so.

My, my thought process has always been like, hey, get on the technology bandwagon because deflationary goes down in cost. However, however, when you only have two or three leads a week, or even four or five, like I understand the notion, like hey, I want every single one taken care of by a human. And I don't want to lose any of those because someone's unhappy with Max. I get that 100%. And I made the false conclusion that when I look at as a macro on the numbers and how many leads are coming in and what the numbers are, it makes a lot of sense. But when you zero in on one location, it is only getting a few leads. I understand that mentality and I don't, I don't think it's wrong at all. So don't feel bad if you opt out. Please do what's right for your business. And right now the cost will stay the exact same. But I do want to give heads up that if you in the future require phone calls answered by an operator, the cost for us to just gone through the roof, it'll continue to go up. Labor will get harder, Office rent will get higher, everything will get higher. We will have to have the two trajectories of what the permanent rate will be. And if you allow Maps to be able to get more calls, it puts not just the minutes, it's a matter of the backlog and the way that it works with Copilot even down the road, that will make it so much more efficient. And we'll be able to offer a lower rate. So at conference I'll be answering questions also have very clear of what those numbers are going to be. But I want to be clear with the fact that like what I want to do with commands in the future is instead of us doing what we have to do now, which is like in the next 612 months, raise prices on that phone call from 109 to another number, 139 or whatever it is.

Instead of doing these big jumps every four or five, six years, we should just be having this on a much more gradual scale. And so that way there's not like any uncertainty of what those prices are going to be in the future. So I will outline that conference and that is okay. What are, is the different rates going to be for if I'm opted into allowing Max to take calls versus if I want only operators during office hours? And then.

I'll be very clear into like in the future so we never have to like do jumps in prices again at command center. We should just have a set amount based upon inflation what those prices need to be. And I think that's the most fair. It's also the best for budgeting and the most that you never feel like there's a rug pull or like when it changes dramatically in your business and is forced to climb in. So one second, there's a question. Let me answer the question. I'll get my third thing. If a person opts out, does that include opt out or. Yeah, so the opt out is for only during office hours.

You still have access to Max after hours where like the map is inextricably better than taking a voicemail. And just the fact that like literally 70% of people will not leave a voicemail when they hit a missed call at the end of a missed call. Whereas when we have maps after hours immediately goes to maps, immediately gets their information. And 80, almost 80% of people go through that process and get the information in terms of contact. So in terms of answering this question, if you opt out, you will still have access to MAX after hours. It would only be during office hours. You can opt out. So it has to go to command center and go into the queue like it always has. All right, third thing, I think I've already talked about this.

The end goal of AI and integrating with Max, the whole co pilot thing, all of that is reduced costs and that's the ultimate goal. Like I said at conference I'll announce what the increased cost if you require agents is going to be compared to Max And I feel like this is the most fair because it aligns the higher and increasing cost of labor, training, etc, Command center along with what someone is paying as a franchisee. Meanwhile, I believe the cost Max will go down in time and lower prices can be sustained because the cost to command center is so much less. Our workflow is much more even with Max at the top being able to govern where things go, but able to get the departments, it's just, it's a lot smoother for command Center. So the, the savings that we have at command center we should be able to pass down to all of you as franchisees.

Yeah. And as Max gets better and better, the decision becomes more obvious for each owner. I really do believe in six to 12 months, even if you opt out now, you will want to reconsider it when it's like okay, could I take my command center go from 1000amonth to $500 now? Maybe it makes sense. If not, that's fine, you can always stay with this. That's fine. But I do believe as Max gets more and more competent, learning more and more and more.

That there will be improvements. For example, you might hear a voice call on Google services. It's a recording of Max taking someone's information and saying yeah, we'll get that estimate to you in a few matter of few minutes. You then look in your CRM and there's no information. You also look in Google local services and there's no information as to why this person can't be serviced. And so what happened though is that was processed a few minutes afterwards and immediately checked in terms of your service area. That person's not in your service area. We are going to call them, tell them sorry, we're not in your service area or explain if they are confused at all about why we took their information. We'll explain, hey look, we take your information, we then see if you're in your service area and we can give you an estimate and you're not in our service area. Not a great customer experience. We integrate with copilot, we'll be able to have service areas eventually defined. My goal is by next summer to have service areas defined so that Max can already know that information. And so right now for example, you're like, well, I don't see the CRM. They're not in the CRM because we don't want to put them in the CRM if they're outside the service area. And now their contact information isn't there for a one click estimate but that you Never want to service their property anyways, sorry, we're on standby for this flight.

So.

And then you look in Google services and nothing's been dealt with there. And the reason for that fact is we get on the tickets from Macs outside of Mondays within a matter of minutes. And whereas the Google local services are checked once a week and disputed or resolved, etc. And so I know on urine like both, there's no information. Max says that we're going to send an estimate and there's no estimate and they're not even in the CRM. Things like that we can patch and we'll just get better and better, especially once we connect with Copilot because we'll be able to look for things that right now Max is not privy to. He doesn't know if someone's set up a service. He doesn't know if someone's an existing customer. He doesn't know if they want to change their payment information. Like there's a lot of different things that he'll be able to do in the future. And then we want to off back in. You absolutely can. So I wish I could show you, but if you want to opt out of maps during office hours and where calls come directly to Cancer, please do not feel bad. There should be absolutely no thought if someone opts out that they're against me or against the guest. That's not. That's not it. All right, we're going to make align. Align the objectives of everyone by giving a lower price for Max. People are optimum down the road because it makes Common center significantly more efficient. And so I always think in my mind, like efficiencies at Command center better for franchisees because I know the cost like how I'm looking at the cost, like cost here I must translate over to Command Center. And I just keep seeing costs go up and up and up and up Command center and as all of us have in terms of labor and that's like 80% of our cost of Command Center. And.

And that is concerning to me because in the end the way that we can really take the market share is being higher quality but also being a better price because then there's just no competition. And so I jumped the gun on this in terms of what's in it. And I apologize for that, especially for those that were impacted in any way. But please, please, please, there is no negative thought in my mind or anyone commands in mind if you decide to opt out of Max during office hours.

At all. So please don't anyone Feel that way, don't feel bad about it. Don't anyone say anything negative about Franklin. If you do opt out, it is your decision as a business owner. It is much more efficient for command center and there are definitely cost savings, especially down the road for command center and we will make sure it is aligned with you and your cost savings so you can just make the decision. It's like look, am I willing to pay the extra, you know, a couple hundred bucks a month or whatever for phone calls? For some people they'll say yes and that's totally fine. But most of all I needed to apologize for the fact that like in the future I will be better at if I'm mandating a change, I'll give lots of heads up, like lots of heads up. I'll explain it, answer questions, etc. And then if I want to move very quickly on something so that it's easy to around technology, I will make it optional. And that's already something. In the past few weeks we have figured out something else on the website we were really looking forward to but I'm not forcing anyone and it will be you will have to opt into it if you want it on your site. So I hope that clears some things up. I am happy to answer questions. I got to hit this flight so there's no other questions in the chat but feel free to put them, submit them on the form and I'll get them to them to them tomorrow. So yeah, I hope that cleared things up. The biggest, the biggest thing is my fault for rushing this and I will just do better in the future. I don't want you ever to feel like you're just like crossing your fingers and hoping we don't change anything or like that we don't spring something on you unannounced. I don't want that. I know what that feeling is like as a franchisee at any high fitness and hating things and them not listening. So I've heard and I want to respond. First off apologizing. Secondly, there is an opt out. So please, please do not feel bad to ask questions. If there's more clarifications I can provide.

Like giving me critiques is not going to hurt my feelings. I don't take it personal.

Usually.

But if I think you're wrong, I'll give this explanation why in this case I was just wrong in how I did it. Not necessarily the technology. In the long run it's how I did it and I could have given more optionality and so I apologize for that. So yeah, happy to answer more questions. Fill out the form. I'll answer those tomorrow. And it's playing. And hope to catch up on some sleep. Thanks, guys. We'll see you tomorrow. Love you all.