Mike Minutes Mastermind 08/30/2024

Hello, Augusta Nation. Let's go get started. We got 11 questions this morning. Bit about a marathon. Let's get through those. That'll be great. I've been working on several things last couple days. I pretty much have most of what I want to talk about with the Seven Figure Club next summer, which is funny because that's like probably 10, 11 months away and I'm still working on the workshop, which is only five, six months away. So that workshop is the day long conference I know some of you have already been reached out to evolving Augusta Nation quite a bit into some of the morning workshops. So appreciate everyone that's been jumping in on those. Should be really fun. So the mornings of conference there are going to be several workshops for, for larger operators, younger guys. Like we're going to segment people. There'll be like Bible study stuff they'll be running. So there's a lot of cool stuff and we're trying to like bring Augusta Nation owners into it. So thank you to everyone that's volunteered or been recruited into helping for those morning workshops. I think they'll be a lot of fun. All right, let's go ahead and get started.

Oh, real quick, one thing, thank you to everyone that submitted feedback on the surveys, to all the owners. Really appreciate that. I think the majority of people did. So thank you very much. Thank you, Nick. He kind of puts it all together but like which ones are most commonly asked for things like that. So it was really, really positive.

And so they probably next week or the week after we'll have a video response for some of them and then you'll start seeing actions being taken on a few of them. So figure if every single quarter we can tackle three or four of the pain points, we'll make it better and better. And so overall, really, really thankful for that feedback. All right, we've got 12 of them that came in. That's. Ooh, first one's for coach Connor. So there is a good portion of us in Augusta on the younger age and.

Have never experienced much of an economic downturn like 08 09, big recessions, etc. How do you plan for next year when stuff like that is looming more so looking for how to approach that conversation in coaching calls. I get that these can be fear mongering and I get that, but how does one stay prepared? Is it just cash is king default aggressive? Use me for the example. I'd love to buy another truck and possibly estimate car to go into that 800,000 to $1 million range next year. But just Curious if something like something like that happens, what's next?

So.

The best way to deal with a recession is having cash because in a recession things get cheaper. And in a recession debt either gets called or it is hard to get it. It's hard to get the debt or the debt that you have actually becomes greater than the value of the asset that's backing it. And in that event your loans to get called or secondarily you just don't get enough work to even keep that truck busy. That's actually the bigger downside for all of us. And so what happens is you actually have to have downward pressure on prices during a recession because you need to fill the schedule. And the alternative to lowering prices is.

Not having work on the schedule and letting trucks sit there doing nothing. So.

My perspective on this is that the more of your revenue is coming from recurring, the less it will impact you. And the reason I am very confident is because I have talked to people. So like four years ago, four or five years ago, like right when we were starting Augusta, I talked about this at conference a ton and I actually believe 2020 would have been a massive recession if the government would have stepped in. And I thought when it was happening, oh, this is what we've been talking about. And every. And it was, it was going to happen and, and then the government stepped in and just printed money. They're just going to kick the can down the field. It will eventually happen and typically it happens every about 10 years. But we are so, we are long overdue. We've been 15 years since a recession and so is it going to happen next year? I don't think it's going to happen really, really harshly. I don't just there's so many factors that they'll keep propping things up and then it takes a good recession though to like reset everything. Like the interest rates to volatility, the interest rates is, there's going to be consequences of that.

And so what I would say is this, if a massive amount of your revenue is coming from one time jobs, I would be more cautious because anytime I've seen any short term pain in the market or in the economy, the first thing that's affected is long term large projects. And that's why the people that you hear talk about online, they're like, man it's so busy or like man it is, I can't get any work. Like is that anyone else feeling like there's no one else getting any jobs? Whenever that happens, those people usually have a higher index of One time projects and I am not against one time projects. Lee actually is probably going to be posting today if we go into a bunch of detail about this on C Suite unfiltered. Like I am not against project. You make so much money. But I just implore people to have a good chunk of their revenue coming from recurring work. Because if I, if you talk to people and I think there's, I'm trying to think of some of the owners that would be, would have been in business. I think John Garretson might have been in business in 2008. Let me think. I'm going through.

Like Ryan would have just gotten started.

Jason Murphy might have been up and running by then.

Trying to go through, go through, go through 50, 60.

Like I like I was just getting started like so 2008 is the year is two years into an Andy's lawn care started. And so I remember actually helped us because we were cheap guys and we were small and so you know people that were looking for service and were price sensitive, we got them and so.

There'S just like no one. I think if I look back to when Covid hit and for most of us we can actually feel that pain of what those first two to three weeks look like. That's what a recession looks like. But for a year or two and so.

In those two or three weeks we, I think at the Bellingham shop, if I remember correctly because I was much more involved in daily ops still then.

I think we lost like three or four million customers when Covid hit and we had big projects cancel or stop and like just just froze for there, there for a few weeks. And every person that called me during that two or three week period that was like big businesses that, that did that were extremely freaked out of their mind and wondering what they should be doing about their lines of credit, et cetera. They were all project based companies. We lost maybe one and a half percent of our mowing customers during that scare. Leads for projects stopped and we had a few projects back out and just be like hey, we can't do the project even if keep the 50%. We just can't do the job. So I would just say that that would be my, my word of caution. You realize that that's what debt does is they give you more risk and debt in a economic recession is obviously going to be very hurtful and painful because the last thing you would be doing is having fixed expenses on a piece of equipment that you're not using because there's no leads coming in. So that's one very quick way to lose money. Califree is from Billy Minton, Illinois. For those who are doubling down on winter services, what things would you focus on doing to maximize retention and even growth? Better education of existing customers, door hangers, ads, et cetera? Okay, this is a great. Like I said the other day in Svrine, this year I am really, really focusing on Christmas lights. There's a bunch of stuff we're doing in terms of SEO, split testing, et cetera. I'm really working hard on. I want to stay focused on that. However, next year, you're going to see a bunch of stuff around winter services. Because I feel like we have tested this, and some markets we get 50%, 60%, some markets, more like 30% of your existing mowing customers convert. I think this can be more like 70 to 90%. I really do. And there's a few locations I know that they do about 70%. I know Nick has had a huge amount of his customers convert when he switched over, et cetera, to winter services. This is the thing. I think.

That if you spent, like, if winter services is going to be your track, I would probably knock on the door of every single one of my mowing customers and talk to them personally.

You're like, man, that's take a lot of time. I have 100 or 200. You could probably knock them out in one week. And that's the difference between, you know, making 5 or $6,000 a month and 20 or $30,000 a month in recurring revenue throughout the winter months. So, like, I genuinely believe your time would be better spent doing that than doing door hangers in the middle of winter trying to get more winter services. I would talk to every single mowing customer, and I would be. I'd probably print them all off on an Excel spreadsheet and I would go door to door. Every single one. Explain what it is, get their convert. Like, explain, hey, this is what it costs for a spring cleanup that you paid for last spring. Here's what's going to cost. If we just do winter services all winter long, it's going to cost you way less. Would you like us to do winter services? Yes. Boom. I crossed them off the list. And no longer will I need to send them an email about opting out. I'll take them off the list, I'll put a tag on their account, and I will not make them go into that email sequence of opting out. And then you're going to get people. You knock on the door, you can't get Them and you're going to have to send the opt out email, which will still retain maybe 30 to 60% of people. But I believe if you talk to everyone, you could probably get 80 to 90% of people because from the math perspective, they save money. Like, it should not be a hard sell. This should be very simple. It's like, look, our basic, our minimum price for cleanup is 499. If we do it in fall and we do it in winter, that's 1,000 bucks. If we come every two weeks, it's going to be six or seven hundred and it's going to look good all throughout the holiday season. It's not a hard sell. And so I would probably, if I was doing winter services and that was my exclusive track for the winter, and I didn't do Christmas lights and I didn't do mowing, I would be 100% gung ho on this. And as I'm saying this, my general managers here are hearing this and we'll probably be doing this. And that would be the move. Like you would be better off spending that time, energy and money for, for two weeks at the end of mowing season, knocking on every single customer's door yourself and going through a checklist. You could, I genuinely believe every person you talk to, 90% of them would convert if they just saw the cost of the winter services versus two cleanups. And that's how you would compare it. You could literally just create. I would probably do. I'd probably either print off a bunch of flyers that have this comparison chart. Okay, one second. I'm not making that. We'll make this a media team for you. This is actually a good idea.

Comparison chart, Winter services, business cleanups. Okay, we're going to make this. Where you could. So what you could do is you could laminate this. You could take a white, A whiteboard marker and you could literally just go to each person and show on a 8 by 11 printed off laminated what it costs for their wedge of services and what it would cost for their spring cleanups. Winch services versus the two cleanups. It like the math is on your side. So we will, I will make a project for the media team and in September we'll have this done. And that is on that you could do as a whiteboard thing. You could just print off a bunch of them too. Like print off a couple hundred and then you give it to them. Boom, boom, boom, boom, check. You could even have a thing at the bottom. Okay, one second.

I won't do that. Actually that would require in person where you check off that they accepted it. It'd just be where you could use it however you want. So if you want to, you could fold it up and put in their door even. I will work on that. The back explain winter service is a little bit etc. Okay. But that would be my my response. It's like if you want to really go hard on it that that would be what I would do. Mr. Mons, what's the URL for our Lights Christmas lights site? It's augustalights.com/your URL name if you have not submitted. We do usually take about a week or two to build the site out. You just gotta go in your dashboard and request it and we'll get it built for you. Matt from Delta. Hey Mike. We've been presented with a sponsorship opportunity. Would love to hear your thoughts. Firstly, have you done any sponsorship and do you see value in them? How would you analyze a sponsorship deal? We've been approached by a local youth soccer league in South Delta the Ask. We volunteer with our time by helping provide field prep, free field prep. In return, they promote us as field crew prep experts across their website, games, events and social media. Their community is about 50,000 people. Wow. With a 1400 parents involved in the league, the cost on our end would be about 60 man hours valued at $6000 based on $100 charge rate with actual payrolls closer to 1800. Aligns with our mission of getting back to our community. But we also feel the need to consider the ROI side. How do you generally assess sponsorship like this? Especially when ROI is hard to quantify. Additionally, how do you calculate ROI on marketing spend if you're aiming at a 10x return? Is that based on gross revenue? Yes. 10x marketing leads to 100k revenue. And if you operate at a 20% net margin. 20% profit on 100k, would that effectively be a 2x ROI in profit terms? We'd love your insight. Thanks. Yes. So you're nailing it. I usually want at least a 3x return in terms of profit. So that's why I generally want. I'm looking for more like a 15x return on gross revenue. So. Yeah. So the bottom line is this. If you're gonna. If the actual cost to you is 1800, let's round it up to 2000 just with like fuel and equipment, et cetera. Like your, you know, let's say your. Your cost per lead or let's say your customer acquisition cost to get customers from Facebook is a hundred bucks. Well you need to get 20 customers to make this worth it from a money standpoint. And like, well, we only got 15. Okay, well then you're paying $500 out of the goodness of your heart and branding, which is long term. Right. So like in the short term, we're focusing on direct marketing typically because you'll get an instant return and then over the course of time, people see you enough to where branding occurs. What you're doing here is you're doing a branding play in the hopes that people do call you and that is harder to track. It is going to be not as direct as direct marketing because you're asking for a sale and it's likely gonna. You're not gonna be able to quantify this. So that's where it's like, okay, do you think you get 20 new customers? If yes, do it 100%. If no, am I what percentage of this is out of the goodness of my heart and trying to help people versus a long term and a long term branding play. Right. I tend to think that giving back to the community is just a really, really good thing in general. And it is going to be good, but it's a very long term play. To be the type of person where people just see you over and over in the community, that's a very long term play, like three to five years.

Whereas it's like, do I need the money now? And if you need the money now, I'd probably go spend this money on direct response marketing. If you don't need the money now and you're willing to hold your breath a little bit More on branding, 50,000 people is a lot. But it's not like they're getting a direct pitch. They're just literally seeing your name. Like you're just gonna see your name. That's it. So that's those sort of touches is what takes 8, 10 touches for someone to make a buying decision. Whereas with direct response marketing, like a door hanger on their door, giving them a price is like immediately they're making, they're making a buying decision immediately.

Javier from Stone Mountain. How do you approach a conversation about lowering the P4P signage with your team members? Specifically, how do you present this change and what reasons should you provide? In my first year in business, I initially set the P4P rate at 40%. I okay, I've laborator motivate my employee because we had low prices and poor route density. Recently, I've increased prices and improved route density, which has led to better earnings. For example, one day, last week, my employee made over $28 an hour on P4P. His base pay is $15 an hour, and he usually averages $19 to $22 an hour, P4P. Now, I'm considering lowering the P4P percentage to 33%. Is this too big of a reduction? How can I determine whether a higher percentage like 35 or 36 might be more appropriate? Okay, great. So we recently did this at the Bellingham shop because we raised prices so much. So it's definitely doable. You just want to make sure that you present it to them in the right way. And so first off, in terms of seeing if it's too large of a reduction, you can just do the math. So, for example, if you're taking it from 40% and you're taking it down to, say, 30%, well, you're actually reducing their pay by 25%, right. So you're going from 40%. Let's just say you were taking down to 30%. That'd be a 25% reduction in pay. And so then what you can do is, okay, well, if I reduce $28 an hour, or you're saying 20, $22. If I reduce $22 an hour by 25%, that would mean that he's making about 1750, which I would think is too low. If his base is 15 bucks an hour, like, you want them to be making at least three to four dollars more per hour. Like, I know that they made one day of $28 per hour, but if his base pay is 15 and he's averaging between 19 and 22, I would say that's perfect right now. Javier, that would be my personal opinion is that right now your P4P is actually perfect. I would say as you grow and you continue to add more out density and increase prices, I would probably do this change.

Down to 35 or 33% at the beginning of a spring rush when it was a bunch of new team members. Right. So I wouldn't do it now because I think 19 to $22 per hour on a $15 per hour base is actually really good. If it was like 17 to 19, it might not be enough for them to actually work harder. We're talking about, like 100 bucks extra on a paycheck. So but you can. You can just do the math of what percentage reduction are you taking 40% down by. So if you went from 40% to 33%, that's 7% out of 40. That's going to be.

We got 18% reduction in pay so if you take what he's making on average, that's about. If you reduce that by 18% now all of a sudden he is only making about 1650 to 19 bucks an hour. Right. I don't know if that's enough to motivate him. So I'd say right now, Javier, I'd keep it the same way. And then if you're going to make a change, do it in the spring rush. And ideally you do it when you raise prices. So immediately they actually get a start, a bit of a pay bump. Because if you, if you lower their pay, say for example, like from a percentage basis from like 35% to 30%, but then that's a 5% difference. But out of 35%, that's about a 15% decrease in pay. But then if you're raising prices by 20 or 25%, you'll counteract that and they'll actually make more money. So I would either A, do it at the beginning of a season when you have a bunch of new people, or B, and you're going to be adding to route density, like massively or, or B, I would add it when.

You'Ve raised prices recently.

Should we add a page to our regular Augusta Lawn Care website for Christmas lights in addition to our Christmas Light site? Great question. This is on the last mastermind. We are split testing this and seeing what the changes in the SEO does when we do this as a service page from Augusta Lawn Care. So I didn't want to jump in right into it. We are pleased, playing very carefully with the SEO, trying to have a solid base case year for 2024 so that we can compare to it as we tweak stuff in 2025 because we don't have a solid base case year. So there's nothing for me to compare against, like, oh, this did better. This improved it, anything like that. So I'm trying to get a solid base here and we gotta be careful not adding too many more variables as we go closer to the season.

But this is one thing that we are testing right now. And as it. And as adding a page on your Augusta laundry site for Christmas Light that just tags you over to augustalight.com so.

Cool. There we go. All right, next one is Coach Connor. Where can I get a description or breakdown of each command center task, the 828departments, etc. That's on the form. When you put pretend like you, Connor, pretend like you are trying to change. Sorry, Connor.

Pretend like you're changing your. Your.

Your services go to the form. And then there's a link at the top that says like, for an explanation of all the command center departments, click here. You click on it. It has like half a page on every single one. Exactly what they're doing. We want to stay in command center as much as possible at the root of our local office. I emailed command and Louise said he. You can't show those things because of it meant for a team and said to wait for the seminars. We that mean in two years when they're down as their monthly we. That would mean in two years when we're down as they monthly, we have to break down the rows of shared for collections. Like seven, day seven, we do this. Day 15, we do this. We love that for each department. Maybe I'm asking the wrong thing, but I run down actual set of each department. Yeah, it's on that list. It's like a. I think it's like five to ten pages long. It goes through every single. Very specifically what they do and do not do. And then the webinars will break down those departments each month. We'll go through each one and kind of show it more in depth and live. And if you have questions, you're happy, you know, more than welcome to do that. And I would do it on the webinars. I wouldn't just chat with command center because you get charged for the chat with command center where the webinars. You can go in. You can ask as many questions as you want.

But yeah, the actual breakdown of what they're doing for each department is in that form. At the top. There's a link.

Corey from Bellingham. Hi, Mike. Two questions we had at the shop today. What does a P and L look like for a software company? We figured labor cost would be pretty high. Part of the ticket, since your engineers are both your labor and your product cost. Yeah. A P and L, a software company, is 90% wages, 80%. The other, like 20% is.

Is mostly like actual hard cost of like, servers. At AWS, we probably have like 40 subscriptions to different services. Everything from, like, recruiting software to like. It's just a lot of software we use. We lose a lot of software to run the software company. So. But yeah, like, servers are not cheap. I think the other month we paid 30. Like, I think my highest month this year has been $30,000 to AWS. So it's a lot of that sort of thing. And then you have like, software for.

Testing. So you have like, software for doing what we call feature flags. So that Only some users see it and there's just so many little things. There's a lot of software. 2. Do you see private equity becoming a relevant play in the long term landscape industry? You mentioned that you've seen this in H Vac in a previous mastermind. Yes, yes. Private equity will 100% get in this industry. 100%. And I know that because they are coming after us in terms of trying to buy us, which is not going to happen. So I just know that there's already funds being created around this and they're eyeing what's going to happen in 10 to 20 years with robotics. And they, they know, they, they see the opportunity. Can we have Command center submit yellow slips for themselves? When we mention issues in Command center and Connect Team instead of us having to go through the yellow slip system, I often have Command center fix things they messed up on. But I'm sure I'm not getting a refund for their time. I feel bad constantly filling out yellow slopes for them. When Command center knows something was done wrong was done, it would be nice for them to hold themselves accountable. You can submit this form if you want to Liz, right from the forms page, like the Command center feedback thing. She would want to know, she would want to dive into these details with you, actually see your location, see what exactly you're talking about. Because typically it's like, look, if you're working with an employee and like someone's like, hey, make sure to strap that down over there. Are we going to yellow stuff? No, you reminded them and you know, I'm not going to create a yellow because someone didn't lock up the thing. I just told them at the end of the day to remind them. So there's an element of just like working together as a team. But if there's specific things that they're actually making mistakes on, Liz wants to know about that. So please submit the form there.

From the forms tab on the dashboard. And she'd actually want to look at your see what's actually happening and see why and like actually fix it instead of. Because like we aren't going to submit yellow slips on each other like all the time. Like if it's a mistake, it's different. It's a matter though of like, hey, could you quickly do this? I noticed that so and so like, you know, didn't put Gmail. It says end mail or whatever. Like we're just going to fix it real quick.

Finn's from Medicine Hat. Hey Mike. We are considering starting a second location in the spring of 2024 and I would greatly appreciate your insight on my financial plan. 1. Step 1 Rent a new home. Step 2 Sell current home for 200 to 250 to 300k to reinvest in a new location and other investments I will run on what the other investments are. 3. Promote current operations, manage full GM at current location, invest 100k and start a new location.

5. Higher growth minded GM for second location from the beginning. 6. Step 6 Act as regional manager for both locations. What are the risk factors I need to be aware of with going ahead with the above plan? What would be effective methods to hold or invest the remaining 150k, 200k after the home is sold and the business has been started to maximize liquidity and ROI at the same time. Thanks in advance. Okay, so keep in mind your net worth is going to take a temporary hit on this because you're converting equity into cash and that cash is being turned into trucks and marketing dollars. So long term I support growing equity in a business because I think that you take this money a hundred thousand and you can turn it into a business that's worth 3, 4, 500,000. So I would believe this is a good move generally, however, there's a few things. Moving your current operations manager into full time GM where you're no longer doing those tasks, that's going to be a task that is going to be a SAP on profitability. That's my biggest concern with this proposition. Because what you don't want to happen is you throw this.

Operation into gm. You now then focus on being a.

Regional manager. A regional manager of two locations, you are not doing a lot of regional manager type stuff. You're basically having a meeting a week with each GM and then you're blocking for the person that's having weaknesses like bad hires, etc. It's not really until you get to five to six locations where the regional manager needs to actually do regional manager things, which is basically just training the managers. And so be careful with trying to be a regional manager too soon. That would be my only apprehension. Especially because you've grown your first location so quickly. So what I would probably do if I was you Vince, I would probably raise prices and make sure my first location was in profit mode. I would do that in order to be able to cover the cost of that GM and the transition of you being into a less profitable employee for the business. That would give me a lot more confidence than if you raised the price and went into profit mode that the second location. Even if there's struggles at the first because there will be, if you're not there, that you'll be able to get through it financially, then I would say you have plenty of capital to be able to make the second location profitable. It'll come down to number five if you can find this person. So I would hinge this entire operation and whether or not I do this based upon number five. If you can hire and find a growth minded GM that wants to really, really grow quickly and I would probably try in the next three months to test this out by getting them in front of customers now at your current location and actually making sure that they are a growth minded GM like that they actually can sell. If you check that box, you have plenty of equity and you have plenty of backup cash. I would say always increase the amount of cash you think it's going to take for a second location by 50%. So if you're like, I'm going to do 100,000 so I can get like two or three trucks right off the bat, get a general manager from the bat, get two or three employees from the bat and just hit the ground money, hit the ground running and spend 20 grand on marketing, great, you can do that and you can get to 30, 40,000amonth in revenue within the first few months. You can do that. I've seen it over and over. However, plan for the fact that 50% of the time that GM won't last if you haven't worked with them for six to 12 months. And so that's why I right now would be focused on number five. I'd be finding that person, knowing that you have the capital to be able to put the juice on it and pour gasoline on the fire. But I would, from a conservative perspective do that. And I know when you have that much capital you can actually make a lot of mistakes and things go well. But I would be careful with being too offensive without making sure your first location is in profit mode. I know you've been growing like crazy. I flip it into profit mode and make sure that you'd be able to financially take the extra hit of not being there, having an extra overhead person, et cetera. And then realize that your regional manager position when there's two GMs is essentially kind of a backup GM because it's just not a full time job to manage two people when they are supposed to be general managers. What you're really doing usually is covering their weaknesses or if they're like, oh man, I need like four employees hired. You go jump in and you help hire them and train them up, et cetera.

Devin from Red Deer, Alberta. Hey Mike. Dan Martell, buy back your time book. Once they coach me, is it worth it? Probably 500amonth or are your, are our coaches enough? Yeah. So he butts that through his, his YouTube thing where he says like hey, I want to, I'm looking for six people. I want to coach you, whatever.

I've been in his coaching programs, but not the $500 ones. I've been in the $5,000 ones and they're good and I just didn't think they're worth $5,000. So I went down to the $3,000 level so I can continue to have a couple events a year with sas founders, software companies.

But I don't know what he's offering for the $500 a month. So I don't know what it is exactly. I would say the coaching that I have got, even at that higher price point.

I don't know.

I just would.

I think if you're, you know, above like eight figures, like 10, 15 million, I would say the coaching I'm getting is helpful. But if you're smaller like that money would probably literally be better spent on marketing. If you got an extra five customers every single month through advertising. Six customers, that adds up to, you know, making you know, significant amount more money when you're doing 200, 300,000 in annual revenue.

Oh by the way, when it comes to coaching, people that advertise coaching, nothing against them but they're usually the lowest quality coaches. The people that don't talk about it at all and they have a really almost hard to find how do I get coaching from them? Those are usually your best coaches. Just FYI.

Dustin from Bloomington Champaign. Our winter track for the Bloomington location is going to be winter services. We've been working through how we handle this for a couple of weeks and have kind of came to a conclusion, but we want you to put coals in this and see how we would handle everything. The last two years we have done fall cleanups, winter services and snow removal all as individual services. However, we have never been great at selling fall cleanups and typically have to take off all fees and reduce and even reduce hours on jobs just to keep that guy's the guys working our winter services, we have always sent out an opt out and generally have 40ish percent conversion until January and then about 20 to 30% once people see their bill. Snow removal has honestly been our cash cow in the past, but we have scaled way Back.

And decided to make it profitable with fewer guys.

This year. The plan is everyone that wants snow removal must be on recurring winter server. Excuse me. Winter Services. Roughly a 600 contract. Excuse me, when I got hiccups. One second.

Okay.

And if we get no snow, there's still some value by having a cleanup bi weekly. If we were to get a snow event, we would take off one cleanup. For instance, they would get service on every other Tuesday. We get snow on a Saturday. The following Tuesday would get no service as that snow event took the place of that cleanup. For fall cleanup only customer, we would highly recommend the winter services and keep them on for snow as well. But if they push back hard, we would sell them a one time clean cleanup but they would not get priority scheduling pros. This could hedge our issue with selling fall cleanups, boost our recurring winter services and keep the crew busy most of the year. Cons Nobody sells contracts around us unless it's commercial Central Illinois so we get about four to six snow events but most are minor. So every sale would have a lot of education to the customer.

Ultra interested in how you would word the estimate description and how you would send an opt out email still or give a personal cell or text each existing million customer and hards. Oh, sell them on the Sorry guys on the service over the phone to get the ball rolling. Thanks. Didn't get a chance to proofread this so hopefully it's clear. Makes sense. It makes sense to me. Okay, so I would say if you're doing winter services, the first, the highest, the way the highest convert people would be literally knocking every single person's door like we talked about earlier in the video.

Second thing, you could do an opt out email with a video. I would say, Dustin, you should simplify this. This is too complicated. You want to be able to explain winter services in two sentences or less. If you have a bunch of scheduling and this is how it's going to work, people get confused. So as it currently stands with winter services, it's like this. Hey, during the winter, instead of doing two property cleanups, we're going to come and maintain your property every single.

Week on the same recurrence as you're doing for mowing and the same price. That way it looks good all winter long instead of just for fall and spring.

I just can't make this as nice as possible. How I think this could work, Dustin, is like, hey look, here's the price that you would usually get charged for for this extra cleanup. And all these, the snow services and all the other stuff. Here's the price. If we do winter services. Do you like winter? Yeah, I do. Okay, great. Let's go and get just signed up. Here's how it works. If on Thursday this happens, we push, we come next Tuesday and you get priority scheduling and you can put that as part of one of the benefits and then make the differential of value different. So he's like, hey, it's only 600 bucks versus it's going to be 1500 if we do six no events, two property cleanups and you add up those costs versus we come every two, two weeks. And this is all the stuff we're going to do. Right. So I definitely think you could do this. I also think that you could. I've never done this myself, but I think you could play with because you have snow. I do feel like people potentially would be willing to pay up front with a discount if you were selling in person. So that, hey, it's not, it's usually, it's usually $800. Today it's gonna be 25% off, it's gonna be 600 bucks. And if you pay now, that gets you snow, snow service and winter service all year long and you're essentially paying the equivalent of one property cleanup and one snow shoving service. But you get all this other snow stuff for free essentially and you get priority scheduling along with it. So I think you could really sell the value here. I would say number one, I would try to get every single person knocking on their door. Two, I would make a video inside of the opt out email to explain this and I would make that video less than two minutes. If you got to explain things in so much detail and it's gonna be like, like I'd be looking for literally two, three sentence max.

Mike from Athens. I'm considering adding different packages, try to upsell current customers. What would you think about having a premium package that included Christmas lights installed? This would be more of a monthly premium agreement. I would like to make it 12 month agreement and require them to have weekly service during the growing season and winter stores in the winter. This is great. Hey, if you want to keep your business in growth in profit mode. This is a, is like 2.0 level. This, this is 2.0. Because you could literally get someone on 3 to 400 bucks a month, year round.

And get them Christmas lights. Mowing lawn, fall cleanups, all their treatments, weeding service, bush trim. Like you get everything together including include the Christmas lights and even snow if you're in a weird spot and try to Put this together. This, this is not a growth orientated move because you're going to weed out a lot of people that don't want all the services. And it takes more time to sell these, like, a lot more time to sell. You can't do instant pricing on mowing. However, what you could do if you're in grow, if you're in profit, when you're switching to profit mode, you can take all your mowing customers and then just upsell them on this. And that's what I think you're doing here, Mike. So again, this would be a similar situation. You got to get this tight as possible. It's like, okay, what does this include? All right, Mr. Jones, last year you paid $1,500 to us because you did one cleanup. And I'm sorry, let me take it back. You paid $2,000 for a cleanup, a mulch install stall. And we mowed your lawn every single week. And now you're asking for Christmas lights. Great. Why don't we just put this as a package? And now you're going to pay us 300 bucks a month. You're going to get all the Christmas lights, you're going to get your lawn mowed, you're going to get mulch installed every single year. You're going to get two property cleanups and winter services all winter. So your property is going to look good all the time and it's literally only going to be about an extra 50 to 100 bucks a month and you get all this extra stuff. I think that's a huge value prop and way better for cash flow. This is a very, very profit mode driven decision though. So I'd just be very careful if you're trying to say I want to grow and then do that. But yeah, big fan. I've never done it myself, to be perfectly honest, but I know people that have and it's usually the operator doesn't want to keep growing. They seem to like it a lot.

Josh from Yorktown, would it be would be able to possibly get a monthly or quarterly M3.

What's an M3? Q3.

Oh, you're talking about. Oh, you're talking about Josh Kale.

Monthly or quarterly? Empty. Yeah, you'll hearing a lot more from Josh as time goes on.

And oh, good use of his time. Yeah. So like first off, you can email him if you want. He gave his email on the interview. He is in the Facebook group, by the way, so if you ever wanted to tag him. Josh Kale is in the augustination Facebook group. And part of his agreement with Copilot is actually to be able to start franchises at Augusta. And so probably down the road sometime he would probably become an owner as well. So feel free to, to, you know, if you could just tag him or, or email him however you want. Hey Mike, for the instant quotes, can we have CC remeasure the property for verification? We saw this in the.

I saw this in the, in the feedback from the surveys. There's like five reasons why I can think why not to do it and there's a few reasons why I can think of why you would want it done. Here's the thing. Instant quotes exist for speed of reducing admin costs so you're not having to measure and secondly it is being done to increase the speed of which estimates are accepted instead of creating more friction. So by, if you're going to instant quotes, like if you're going to, if you're going to do this, like if you're going to measure the property, resend the estimate and not mark it accepted, you might as well just have an estimate request form like instant prices. Yes, you're going to lose some accuracy. Yes, you are going to have people that submit and they don't put a card on file like the long term fix for a lot of these problems that people are having with the instant quotes. And it's a lot less than most people think in terms of percentage that I see getting changed. But.

That problem comes as a result of getting the benefit of actually having instant quotes instead of a fancy estimate request form that looks like an instant quote and it's not. I want them to be able to click accept and I want us to be able to show their property and just have the, the verbiage that says we're covering our butt on the first visit because if you don't, we don't get any benefit of not having admin time spent on that estimate. And we also are going to still add friction because we're going to have them accept the estimate. Again because we're supposed to be two or three dollars more or less. You are going to have a less accurate estimate when you do a instant quotes. You are. But if you look at the distribution of where those are going to come in, it averages out to be the same. I've seen this consistently across the board. There are people that are clicking medium when they should really be small and so they're going to be 5 or $10 more and you say, well that's like out of my accuracy. You're right. And that same thing is going to happen 5$10 less but it averages out as long as you stay consistent in your pricing the same. And so what I would recommend more of is like capturing every three to six months the people who are too low and raising their prices. And then you're going to automatically capture the people that are willing to pay an extra 10 $15 per cut simply because you made an instant quote form and they want to just check out and get done with it. Excuse me. So I like I'll have a video about this and then we will potentially look at. I can maybe bring this up to fac, but we are eliminating all the benefits of instant quotes if you have this. Like if you're going to do this, I would just do estimate request forms like because the instant quote forms are simply allowing you to reduce admin time. So no, no command center time is spent on measuring the property like sending it to customer, waiting for them to get back, calling with questions. You eliminate all of that and then secondly it reduces the friction of that process. And as soon as we get asked where the card is added it will cut all the problems in half because the people that just like submit and then they don't want your service, which is super annoying. Even if it happens 1% of the time it's annoying. But I do believe it's worth having that 1% in exchange for the extra 10 to 20% of people accept because we have instant quote forms and they stop, they stop going to other competition after they've clicked accept. So yeah.

Oh yeah. Jason would have been through it. 2008 didn't hardly affect me at all. Almost all recurring work we've never done projects over 10k.

For the 7 figure requirements. Can an owner that has 2 locations doing under 1mil but combined equals 1mil still 10 yes. I'm nowhere close to this goals yet but just curious. Yes. So it'll be based upon revenue across your locations inside of Augusta.

Tips on communication As a company grows and starts developing different departments, is there too much communication? How can you operationalize it? Just ask your team like hey do you guys think we get bogged down in communication? They'll tell you and usually they will be very honest. They'll be like no, I don't hear from you enough or B it'll be like yeah, this is keeping me from doing my job. And so when I was early on I probably over communicated. Then I kind of slipped more towards probably too little communication. And then you eventually kind of find your cadence. And so at Every size of business is very different for me now. I focus on, like, short intervals of time, very high impact. So I'm going to.

Make a internal mic, minutes, we call it, for the team. And it might happen every two to three months, but it'd be like 45 minutes long. I'm gonna be diving into, like, very specific details of the company. And then there's other times where like more of a. Their. Their manager should be more hands on. So it should be like, hey, checking in. I'm leaving the office. How did, how did today go? Like, you're gonna be much more involved as a direct report. And that's why typically, typically when people talk about how many people you can manage as a direct report, they're thinking about the person that you're communicating with every single day. And so I think most of the time, if you start having a general manager that has more than 15 people, that's when it starts to get a little tough because they can't keep that cadence of like, hey, just checking in. I know the job went late. Thanks so much for your help today. I really appreciate you pushing through. Like, they stop being able to do that after 15 people I've seen. Thanks, Mike. I actually meant to say that my employee used to average about 19 to 20k tuning per hour before the price increase. He's averaging 25 to 28. Okay. In that case, Javier, I do think you could take it from 40% down to 33% very easily. That's going to put him back down around 22 to 23.

How to pitch this to him is probably open book management, right? Like, hey, the company, you're crushing it. And I'm super thrilled. Here's. Here's why we've added all this. You know, we've raised prices, we've done all this stuff. If you just raise prices, Javier, hop on a coaching call with Nick and he'll walk through this because we just did it at Bellingham, like, how to walk the guys through this. And we didn't have any pushback because they were making like crazy amounts of money. And so I would talk about this with Nick, see the rollout, see what happened in terms of negative and positive side, and he could kind of walk you through that.

Would you recommend getting the money up front if you can do it, Dustin? Like, I would only do that. Dustin, if you were doing in person. If you were going to go knock on every person's door, like I mentioned at first, I would. Yeah, go for it. Like, hey, dude, can you imagine if you were able to get $600 from 50 people, you know, and all of a sudden you got 30 grand going into winter. Not bad. And they're guaranteed to stay in all the way through winter. Now let's say you convert like 60, 70, 80, 80% of your customers into something like that, all of a sudden you could be getting 100 grand going in your winter and you got them locked in for the rest of the year. Right. So I would, I would probably, if you doing the money up front thing, I would only do that if I was doing it in person. I was comparing prices and like being like, hey, if you pay today, you'll get this discount and be like, no, I don't really want to pay it. Okay, no problem. We'll just continue at the usual. You'll get the month, you know, monthly invoice or whatever or weekly or whatever you're doing. So. But anytime you have an option to bundle things is a great opportunity to do a upfront all payment discount. Also reduces your admin time significantly. So command center doesn't have to worry about invoicing them every week or every month. Like that cost is a hard cost that is reduced when you get money up front.

All right, everyone is a marathon Friday. Great questions. Appreciate you all tremendously. Some of these I did come up in the.

Survey and I'll be doing more videos about them or a video addressing a lot of them doesn't ask for the two minute video. Would you recommend the comparison? Yes, yes. If you're gonna do that comparison thing that I just mentioned, I would ideally do it in person and spend two weeks knocking through every customer. I think you get 80 to 90% of people and I think that would drop down to 60 to 70% if I had to guess if you did the opt out with the video. But if you're dustin, if you're trying to get them more of like a contract style, including all as soon as bundling services, you're going to reduce that the customer base. So if, if you are trying to bundle the snow and you're trying to bundle it with the winter service and all that, it's going to drop a little bit more compared to just doing like, hey, let's just get everyone on winter services and do the comparison and lock, lock them in. If you start adding bundles, if you start adding prepayments with discounts, that will reduce that percentage conversion a little bit. But I would say in the two minute video I would do the comparison. Yeah, 100%. Like we always think that winter Service is good for us, but like we got to step in that mind of the customer. It's going to look better all year round. They're going to have priority service on something like snow for you, Dustin. And thirdly, it's going to save them money. So like it is a win, win. And if we lean into that, I think the comparison video or doing in person sales, like, if you have any decent, like ability to be able to sell and I promise you you'll get a lot of good customer feedback as an owner or GM doing this. If you went and knocked on 200, 300 doors and all your customers, like, you get five things you need to improve in your business. And like this is my. The reason we do the surveys, like the reason we do that. So I'm going to choose three to five things that we're going to make a gustination better.

And we're going to track that. Like if you just did this, if you looked at your close end of winter services as your quality control and then you just like, oh, the same two or three things people kind of mentioned they didn't really like, like five times. Great, I'm gonna fix these all next winter. Like they kept saying, the guys kept sitting in the truck on their phone for like 10 minutes before they actually started the lawn. Okay, great. Part of training next spring rush, we know exactly what we're doing, right? So you can kind of get good feedback too. In addition to, I think having a killer close ratio. Hey, everyone, have a fantastic weekend. We'll see you Monday.