Mike Minutes Mastermind 09/02/2024

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. Happy Labor Day. Let's get started. They're Mike Minutes Mastermind. A couple quick things we got.

Over the next couple weeks. We will be working on several action items from last Friday's Mastermind video. If you haven't watched the Mastermind from last Friday, highly recommend. I talked a lot about Winter Services.

Different strategies around that. There are several action items I'll be taking over the next couple weeks to create training videos, templates for you to be able to sell Winter services both in person over email via text, and creating templates for you to use. So really looking forward to that.

I should have it done by next week. So not this week, but week after. I should have it done as most of you, end of September, beginning of October, November, etc. Start tailing. Kind of the tail end of the mowing season.

Also, one thing that I've been doing at Copilot that's been really helpful and I would recommend, if you are a regional manager, or if you are looking to start locations, or if you are hiring general managers, is creating a recruitment video that you send to applicants. This could even be done for your frontline team members, FYI. And that is a video where you sit down and you just talk about different aspects of what they can achieve with the company, why they should choose you, etc. I think this is sent to them before an interview if they're a laborer, and then after an interview if they're a management position. And so because with the managers you're usually going to share some numbers, you're going to share some more sensitive information in terms of the business. So I would probably wait until, um, they've already come in for an interview. Uh, but you could definitely do this even if it was for.

Frontline team members and laborers. And that is create a 5, 10 minute video of exactly what they expect from the job, how they, how they get paid, the upward mobility and positions of like the 3F program, etc. Thing that they can tap into. You can make it one time and then use it the entire season. I recommend highly this is how I'm recruiting some of the higher level talent. I made a video last night, it was 25 minutes long because it went very much detail about myself, the business, projections, revenue, future, the whole nine yards. Because these are very high level people that I'm trying to pull away from very established positions. And so that's the type of thing that will speak to them. So I would recommend making a video. I would make it three to five minutes long for frontline team members, five to 15 minutes long for general managers or salespeople or like that sort of level. And I would sell them on why you should they should work for you. I create slide decks for it. I spend a significant amount of time honing in the presentation and then I make it and I can use it the entire usually 6 to 12 months. So I do recommend I would make this part of your recruiting process. Especially if you're having a hard time finding people they're not showing up to interviews. That's why the late for the laborers. I would be sending that with a text message as a text message through through copilot or even if you want to text them manually yourself. I would be sending that video prior to the interview to get them to show up to the interview. If you're looking for general managers, I would set that as an expectation that you would send after the interview or maybe the right before the interview. If you do like a phone screen or something, it's up to you.

But.

If you're looking for a general manager or screening them, you're going to be sharing projections, profit numbers, you're going to be sharing what they can expect in terms of their compensation, in terms of percentage of profit share, etc. Equity, however you want to do it. So it has worked wonders for me. We lost a really good candidate at copilot that I really wanted because we didn't have this in my opinion and I didn't expl. There was no explanation directly from me. And so especially as you have 5, 6, 7 location, you start growing, you're going to be removed from hiring. And so the ability to be able to still have that given to your OPS person to be able to use during the hiring process where it's like a note from the founder. Pretty impactful. I would highly, highly recommend.

And if you are a general manager and your owner is not visible, feel free to do this. And it's ask the owner, hey, I just want a five minute video that I can use for onboarding. That's like a note from the founder and I want you to say in the video X, Y and Z. And that's usually going to be along the lines of like hey, you're going to meet this probably the general manager. So and so I'm not there every single day, but here's how things kind of roll. Here's the opportunities you can have, et cetera. You could also just make it as a general manager and then send it to your owner or regional manager and Be like, hey, this is what I created. What do you think? Make a quick video. It doesn't have to be fancy. Throw up your phone. Hi, my name is Mike. I'm the general manager. I'm going to be meeting you tomorrow for the interview. I'm really looking forward to it. I wanted to talk about my experience here at Augusta as well as what you can expect on a daily basis and the prospects of growth in terms of making money as well as positions here in the company. If you did that and then you're gonna have way better take rate of people that show up to interviews. I would highly recommend you make that video one time, one time. And you include it with all your follow up with people that are coming to interviews. It'll dramatically impact things. And I've. I only know this because I've started recently. Do it for higher level positions. I genuinely believe this would also work really well for laborers. Just change the scope and the depth at which you're talking. Because a frontline team member does not want to watch a 25 minute long. But if I'm trying to pull someone away from a position that they are extremely experienced and been there for many years, I'm basically trying to poach really, really good talent. I am going to have to spend 25 minutes breaking down my philosophy about the business, what we're trying to change, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So gauge that 5 to 25 minute level based upon their compensation, based upon their involvement, based upon the leadership, based upon how many years they've worked at their current position.

Would be my recommendation. Okay, let's jump into questions.

There it is. Cool. All right, what do we got today? We got four questions.

Got this. All right. First question is from Mr. Anonymous. Is my thought process correct in thinking that as. As long as your crew is above base pay on PVP consistently, you don't have to worry too much about labor percentages of cost on your P and L. It should stay pretty consistently around 30% of sales as long as everyone is above base pay. Yes, you are correct. That is when it comes to direct labor. So don't expect your wages to be at 33% if you have someone other than a working GM. So if you have like if you start getting above 6,800,000 in annual revenue and you okay, I need to have like an admin person or my general manager is no longer producing revenue, that's when that number will break down. But until then, as long as everyone's producing revenue, this number is correct. Yes, we are currently one person overstaffed and I'm wondering if I should keep this spare person on the team. This time of year people tend to fall out due to the heat. So I like to be prepared. Everyone is making vrp. However, hours are reduced for everyone to be able to absorb this person, this extra person's hours. I don't want to shoot our profitability in the foot by having a huge increase in labor costs on our P and L. Yeah, so like your labor costs will not go up if you get rid of this person. So when you have this quote unquote problem where people are only working 30 to 35 hours a week, this is exactly where you want to be at. Because if someone really has a problem with not working full time hours, they will just leave. And if they leave, you won't care because you'll have excess of labor. So I don't think this is a problem. I would leave it as is a lot of times if they're above base pay, they're making as much as if they were working 40 hours a week and they'd prefer in the heat to be working 30 hours but making enough as if they're working with the full 40 on P4P. So I would leave this as is not a problem. We overthink this a lot of times because we want to keep them full time all the time. And they're like hey, as long as I make X amount I'm happy and if I can work less and make them out on P4P. Let's go.

Mr. Anonymous. Number two can we get some 12 by 18 yard signs that say Holiday Light insulation? I see there is one that says Xmas Light and sales but we are going to be offering Halloween themed lights too. Thanks. You can submit this request immediate gustalongerservices.com they could probably ask Vistaprint to change it up. There is literally they take forever at Vistaprint is not the media team that creates this bottleneck. So I apologize for that but submit it to the media, see what they say and they could probably switch out the words for you instead of waiting on vistaprint. Joel from Lafayette, Colorado. Excuse me one second.

Like Dustin for winter services, I'm planning to combine snow removal and winter services into one called Snowmoval Season Pass plus. Okay.

What about just calling it.

Seasons Pass?

Okay, let's keep going. From a marketing perspective, I think no one understands what winter services is. While most would understand what a snow removal season pass. Okay, gotcha means and most would be familiar with plus from Disney Plus, Apple TV plus, et cetera. Unfortunately, it's a long name. Do you have any thoughts on a shorter, easy to grasp name for a snow forward? Winter. Okay, yeah, I would say something like Winter Seasons Pass. That'd be kind of cool.

I don't think the plus needs to be in there. That kind of makes it too long because you don't have another package that's non plus. So unless you were going to start selling this as like you have your winter season seasons pass and then you have your winter season pass plus. And the pass plus maybe is you add in snow and then the other one doesn't have snow, for example. You could do that. But they're just my thoughts. You're thinking about this. This is great. Second, would you recommend doing a per month or total price comparison of this service compared to a leaf cleanup, property cleanup and snow removal? Seasons Pass. For instance, let's say the three services on an average 250, 400 and $960 while the plus service is 160 per month or $800 total for five months. Would you compare these as 800 versus $1600? Or you want to see your total savings? I feel like the per month is a better sell, looks like a lower price, but maybe requires more thinking of the customer to do the jump from the one time prices to monthly. Okay, so let me make a quick note because I am doing sketches of this today. Let me just duplicate this real quick. This is a good point.

Okay, give me one second. I'll show you what I'm talking about here in just a second. I need to make one for snow. I had not thought about that.

Okay, all right, so this is what I got currently. Boom. This is going to be operationalized and then create for everyone to be able to use this. And I have like tons of ways to use this. Like video laminate and do in person sales PDF editing so you can send it to customers. I know you like do a whole bunch of stuff. There's like a list of 12 things I have to do. But this is kind of what I'm. I've sketched up in terms of like comparing pricing for customers. And again this is me sketching without the intention of showing this to you. But what I will do is I will add snow right here. So.

I'll do blank snow.

Service.

Visits.

And then you can kind of fill this in however you want. There you go. Cool. So it'll be something like this where you could fill in the number of approximate snow visits with a price and Come up with the total. Compare that to what your bi weekly property cleanups are going to be. In this case, what we want to do is we want to call it bi weekly.

We probably want to call it differently here.

Let's do.

Snow slash property cleanups. Okay, cool. So I will make two versions of this.

One for snow, which is going to look some more like this, which names it slightly differently. And the other one is for basic winter services as we've always used it. I have several training videos about this. How to do it in person, how to do it over email, how to do it for follow up to people that opt out of winter services and then you send them this to capture them. So this will look very cool. It'll look very clean once the media team does their magic. And I will be working on that throughout this week and next week I will have it up for everyone. I'm also going to do some videos that you could potentially use if you didn't want to do in person. That I could. I would actually be able to make a generic video that you could use to all your customers if you wanted to attach it with the opt out emails like hey, this video. You can embed videos with Copilot. So you can embed the video inside the email saying like hey, click here. It shows kind of how this kind of works instead of just doing what we currently do, which is mostly text driven. And then I will actually pull this up like on my screen and actually kind of show the breakdown of a kind of generic winter service situation. Obviously you could change it, make it your own. You could customize and personalize for every single customer, which I would recommend. It is worth the extra 40, 60, 80 hours spent individualizing this for every single customer or and or going and knocking every single one of those doors. It is worth your time versus spending way more on ads or doing door to door or doing tons of other marketing during the winter. So I'm gonna have a ton of training on this and it's not even all. I'm not even gonna get everything done before this winter services kind of focus because I'm still focused mostly on Gus the Lights right now. But next year I have more stuff I wanna do around this. There's a ton of stuff we can do around how to like I. My target is I want everyone getting above 60% of recurring mowing services into quote unquote winter services. And there's gonna be different variations of that. So. Good question. There's a follow up of my last question about combined Winter service and snow removal.

What should I call that? Snow removal.

Okay. My goals for the winter are to keep the team as busy as possible, to keep everyone on through spring and to break even on net profit. I need around $25,000 per month to break even with four. Four full time team members. Current team size. If I got enough clients to sign up for combined winter services and snow removal, big assumption. I could hit that mark and only need two team members to fill the service. As part of the service, however, I would need, I would need all four to fulfill the winter, the snow removal part. Whenever we got a storm. If I don't have other workers or other enough work for the other two team members between March and January. January, March. What would you recommend I do with them? I'm thinking I could get everyone a guaranteed minimum 25 to 30 hours of base pay per week for those two months and split whatever budget hours of work there is evenly. This would mean everyone would work half days or short weeks if I condensed the winter service into three days and everyone would be on call for snow every week. So this is what I would recommend. Angel. I would say, okay, I got four full time team members. I'm. Hey, hey, look guys, I'm going to be only able to guarantee 20 hours a week. So part time, if, if you need full time hours, you are welcome to go get another job elsewhere. And then when you come back, you have a guaranteed start date for March 1st or whatever date you want to have for your spring rush. I have a feeling that one, one person might do that. And if you did, if they do that, all of a sudden you're basically back up to 30 hours a person when you only have four people. We're making this massive assumption that everyone stays on. In addition to like, you're also assuming people sign up for winter services and snow removal, but like you're also assuming all four of these people stay on. I would reason to believe that by spring rush only two or three of them will be with you still. That's still like seven months away, right? So I would, if I was you, I would probably just be up front with the team. This is what I can guarantee you. Here's how it's going to work. If you need 40 though, you, you are welcome to get another position. I think one person will take you up on that. And if they don't, then you're kind of like off the hook of like trying to make up this work. You're just going to do what's right for the business. With the expectation they're only getting 20 hours per week. That would be my recommendation. And usually people don't complain about it. They'll go one of two ways. Either A, they're all like, yeah, that's totally fine, 20 hours a week, it's going to be cold, don't really want to be working outside anyways, or B, one person will take you up on the offer. They'll go work someplace else with a guaranteed start date so you won't lose them for spring rush. But then you won't have to also be making up and fabricating this work that's unprofitable throughout the winter. And then you won't feel bad because it's like, look, I told them, and if they want to stay around for 20 hours a week, great, so that'd be my recommendation. But if you need that fourth person, you could even say, hey, hey, if you go get in the job, I'll pay you extra to come back during the snow events if you needed to. If that's. If that's a concern, like a time and a half or something like that, you could say, hey, look, if I need a job, totally fine. I will pay you time and a half whenever you're doing the. The snow stuff or double time or whatever. And then you'll come back full time again starting X date. So. Good question.

All right, everyone, I hope you have a fantastic Labor Day. I'll be working a lot this week on the winter service training. We have like four or five different ways. I want to break this down. The training videos in person, over email, via text, personalization of the form, etc. And then hopefully share that week after next. And.

We'Re continuing to work a lot on the SEO side of the Augusta Christmas lights. So I know we are coming up on training in a couple weeks. Down with Jason Murphy. Big, big team members, 70, 80 people, it looks like going to be there. So shout out to Jason for putting that together. And I know it'll be a lot of questions. I've seen people asking questions. A lot of it gets answered. I think literally once you get on that roof, starting putting in lights, start realizing like what linear feet means and the lights. And it makes a lot more sense when you actually start doing it based on what I've seen. All right, everyone, have a fantastic day. We'll see you tomorrow.