Mike Minutes Mastermind 08/30/2023

Hello, Gust Nation. Hope you're doing well back in the office a little bit later today. Sorry about that. All right, let's jump in. I'll just jump right into questions.

See here, Let me just drop this Link in from YouTube.

On Tuesday Facebook.

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Let'S see what we got here. Questions? Present Share.

All right, number one, Kyle Tarvin from Moore, Oklahoma.

We have a pocket of clients from our old brand when we transitioned that we no longer service as they are north of our service area. Since we have greatly shrunk our service area since joining, we are in the OKC Metro and all the surrounding cities basically join together into Oklahoma City. I'm thinking next year we could start a route and fill it with those clients from our old brand. Are we able to run a mowing route outside of our normal service area in the next city over and not have to buy another franchise license? We do not have any other franchisees in Oklahoma currently, so I don't think it would be an issue. As far as butting up to another owner and stealing their territory. Yeah, that's totally fine. I think there's a good strategy and that is especially if you don't have a whole bunch of owners around you and you're not worried about losing the market.

You can absolutely get clients outside your service area. You will need to make sure your command center is notified that you now accept customers in that area in terms of your service area. And then what you could do is if you get say 20 or 30 customers, that's a great candidate to be a secondary location down the road. And maybe you just grow that slowly until you have a good gm. Now I'm going to pull the trigger and start the secondary location. Here's a few things I would do if I was doing that. Number one, I would draw a map what your territories in the future are going to look like. So that way you have a very clear what that's going to be. And I would talk to Lee about that on a coaching call so he'd be very clear about, okay, I'm going to extend my service area. I'm going to get 20, 30, 40 million customers. This is eventually going to be my secondary third location, whatever. But I'm going to do that now. You'll need to make sure command center knows and they get updated monthly in their maps for service area so that way that you start to accept customers in that area. Yes, it's not the most profitable way of doing it because they are far away from driving from your current location, but it Saves you from having the initial outlay of the franchise fee and setting up a new shop space and all the rest of it. And don't have to find a GM like establish a good mowing route for, for 30, 40 mowing customers. A means that you, when you get a GM and they do start the location, they already have basically full time work for the gm. So I'm a big fan of this. As long as it's not in someone else's service area, you can get mowing customers. Just keep in mind if someone else bought that territory and you were not ready to actually move on it, then you would be locked up from getting new customers in that area. So I would be careful with that. If you like, well, in three years I'm going to get the territory. I would just wait. I would not go away outside your service area like that. But if you're like hey, within the next year I'm going to start a second location but I'm going to like start doing it sooner now getting the customers 100% support that big time. So I think it's a big, a great move. Save the initial capital and improve the market. Then you hire the gm, you basically are already at break even cause you have 30, 40 million customers which fills their schedule. In the perfect world, that's what you do.

If someone was like man, I want to just like you know, start a chain of Augustas, this is what I would personally do is I would have a starter, I'd be growing that to 50, 60 mowing customers, maybe 30 or 40. If you're doing it faster than hiring a GM and putting them through, through everything like 50, 60 is a solid mowing route. You know, you have full time for your GM and then it just helps so much when it comes to like not losing money on the location. So I think it's a great strategy. I'd highly recommend this if you're ever thinking about starting a second location is get.

Customers outside your service area, prove the market all of a sudden if they start pouring in like oh man, this is great, they're getting a bunch of door hangers accepted, like great, I got a full route. Basically that's a perfect candidate to now go actually start territory, get a GM in place, get a secondary shop space so it's actually efficient and profitable. Just keep in mind that if it's significantly outside your service area, you're probably are not going to be profitable on those. And it's potentially until you break it apart going to somewhat hinder the performance of Your first loc because now you're driving significantly further to go get these jobs done.

Excuse me. Sorry, Alex. At Stanwood Camino we sent a one click estimate for flower bed cleanup. Three sets of 300 emails. Click rate was about 7%. I got the percentage and the list of people who clicked from marketing email tab activities in Service Autopilot. Screenshot attached. We have been pretty diligent following up with these people and we are finding out that 2/3 of them said they did not click the link and that they did not want the estimate. Is this unusual? Why could this be happening? All right, I'm going to open up these pictures. One second. So we've been testing this at Bellingham Shop. We still can't get a lot of our emails to go out at all. About 50% of our emails are not going out in the bulk. I'm not sure why.

Again, this is service autopilot.

So links clicked. I get the list of 24 out of. Interesting. To be honest, I have not seen this where there's this like it's unlikely that you know, 8, 9% of your customers are going to click on these.

Unless these are, you know, existing mowing customers. If you had a 280 existing mowing customers, it'd be more likely to get 24 clicks.

And I just don't know. I don't know. It could be something with their merge tag thing county as clicks when they don't really click on it. Oh, I know what it is. I know what it is. These links right here, make sure I'm showing this correctly. Yeah. So these links are going to be considered as the 8%, 8 or 9%. That being said.

That would only be true if, let's say you're getting three or four of the emails saying people clicked and then you're getting 20 of the people saying or 20 in that report saying clicked. It will count these links towards this report right here. So links clicked. It is going to count the ones that at the bottom of your email are clicked. So just keep that in mind.

So if they're clicking your email or they're clicking anything at the bottom there, it will still count right here. It is not going to be the 8.6%. Now what? The part that is more troubling is the part that you're saying that you're calling them, they said they did not want the estimate and you're saying 2/3 of them.

That's the part I don't have an answer to that one. I haven't seen this happen yet. So it is unusual and I do not know why that part is happening. In terms of the report you're looking at, it is counting the links in addition to the email link. It is just counting your regular links that you have at the bottom of your email.

So hope that was somewhat helpful. But we still don't know why. Like at the Bellingham shop when we send out, you know, 10,000, we're still only we send them out batches, like 2 or 3,000, we're still only about half of them delivered when usually we get like 90%, 95%. So I don't know why we've been trying to space them out every few weeks just so we're not like annoying the customers who it is getting to.

So I'll let you know if that changes. But I can't say like don't send your one click custom emails out because I want you to do that even if it is only getting 50% of your customers. But I just don't know why. I'm sorry. I'll reach out to scout Howard again and see if he can give us more reasoning. But yeah.

Cool. All right, little shorter of one today after a longer one yesterday. If you have not watched yesterday's mastmind, definitely do so for some updates and things about Max. Super important. So appreciate all of you and we'll see you tomorrow. Take care.