Mike Minutes Mastermind 09/03/2024

Hey everyone, let's get started.

Cool. Quick announcement. I made a post already on the Facebook group, but if you have a Augusta Lights website. We have now made on your Augusta lawn care website, underneath the drop down for services, there's now a link to your Augusta Light site. We've also done on the corporate side corporate page. We will be monitoring to see if there are leads that come from that for locations that do not offer lights. But we don't anticipate this to be a problem. We have not seen it yet where people are calling about Christmas lights from other locations. I don't anticipate to be a problem because you won't have it mentioned on your site. You won't have it mentioned on your Google page if you don't have. If you're not offering it and you won't have it.

You won't have an Augusta like website, Augusta Lights website at all. So I don't think it'll be a problem at all. Unless someone tries to go to the corporate site and then sees Christmas lights and then just calls you. That's the only way I see I can see them kind of thinking you might be doing lights when you're not. But we will, we will keep an eye on that, make sure it's not prohibitive. I don't think it will be. That was my. Our only original apprehension of putting on the main corporate site is that only about half the locations going to be offering it this year. And I don't want people going to the main corporate site seeing the service and then calling you. But we will, we'll monitor it. And Liz is working very closely with the team for Max AI and making sure that we are training Max on very specific Christmas light related words, et cetera. So she's probably in the next few weeks she will have a video showing so you don't have to like test it yourself. She'll actually just call Max several times and ask him specific questions about Augusta lights, about Christmas lights mentioned different things about like lights being broken. Lots of different little scenarios. Maybe three or four. She'll kind of pull out of a hat for you just to show that Max does understand what those things are. But those, those things are being refined and tweaked over the next few weeks for a Christmas lights related words and verbiage for Max to understand.

All right, let's get this thing kicked off.

Oh, I'll say this in case you need some inspiration, motivation.

All right, we got September, October, November, December. If you're gonna be on the bubble of making a million dollars this year, I recommend you, you know, throttle things up. The.

The venue we're looking at for the retreat is super cool. It's gonna be a lot of fun. Can't wait for it. We're gonna probably do it next summer. July, end of July, that's kind of when I see peak, kind of a burnout. And then you're past spring rush and it doesn't interfere with the June Memphis meetup. So that's probably kind of approximate dates. We'll get exact dates and mention everyone who's in at the landscape summit, which is the Augusta only portion of the blue collar summit in January. So looking forward to that. And yeah, it's gonna be cool. Already kind of have what I'm going to talk about different events and stuff that we'll do throughout the day. It would be for, you know, you and your spouse and if you have multiple locations, as long as you made over a million combined inside of Augusta, you'll be there. It'll be a lot of fun. Okay. Oh, and by the way, being in Washington in July is beautiful. It's the best place on the planet for July, August and September. Let's go. Let's go. All right, first question of the day. Matt, Salem, Oregon. Is anyone sending me a team going to the Louisville Christmas Lights event to record the training? If not, could that be put in a schedule for this year or next? No one from the team is going to that event. Specifically.

There is recorded training of Christmas lights from two years ago in Memphis when Ryan did kind of a workshop and everyone kind of put them together and stuff. That one's recorded. If anyone does record in Louisville, feel free if you want to let us know. But it's going to be tough. You're going to have moving angles. You're going to have. You have to have wireless mics. It'd be a pretty comprehensive setup. So they aren't going to be there.

But I think if this event goes well and there's another one down the road, potentially I would try to show up and we'd bring the media team too. But.

Chad from Valparaiso and yeah, I would also say the whole point of the in person ones is to get in person. Like, I would really recommend being there in person. Same thing with the. The training from certified Lights. It's free as well. Like, I do believe something like Christmas lights. Getting some in person training is a good move.

I think that's the real value of these free events that we're putting on for certified Lights. And then, you know, Jason's putting on in Louisville for everyone. Chad from Valparaiso, Indiana. My employer asked me the other day, are you making money with me or losing money with me? I had to pause and actually think about it after reviewing my scorecards for the last two months he's been with me, it would seem I'm losing money. The issue is I'm working. I'm was working seven days a week to keep caught up. I raised prices and only lost one customer. So I figured I would hire someone so I don't get burned out. We switched to four day, four work. Four day work weeks. Mowing Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday and completing projects on Thursday. We are only clocking 25 to 30 hours a week. His clocked in time marketing the summer months isn't bringing in a lot of new customers. So my question is, does it make sense to keep him on? I believe I'll need him come time for fall clems and Christmas lights. So do I keep him on that with that in mind also, he's a great employee. This is the thing. Just have a conversation with him like he might be very happy, especially when it's hot, working 25 to 30 hours a week. We always make these assumptions as owners. Like everyone wants full time. He might be thrilled that he works 25 to 30 hours a week. And.

You know, I don't know how that ties in this first part. Are you making money or losing money? If he's inefficient, that's a different topic. Like it sounds like he's a great employee. So for to me, a great employee is you're making money with the person.

I would just be like, if. If you're saying that you just don't have enough work for him. I would definitely keep him on if he's a great employee. He's only working 25, 30 hours a week. He's happy with that. And you know you're going to need him up to 40 plus hours in the fall. I would just be really honest about like, hey, you're going to get more hours. I just want to make sure that you're fine with it. I don't want you to have to like you leave over needing extra hours or something like that and if so, have that conversation with them instead of just assuming that everyone wants 40 hours a week. Brenton, Utah.

The design team is good at making pretty content for door hangers and other print material, which I'm sure helps Augusta look professional. Has there been any corporate a B testing with content on print pieces, Changing the text and pictures to determine what converts best. Even a slightly higher converting door hanger might affect dozens of locations. Results. Thanks. We definitely have not done actual split tests because it's so difficult to actually get a real result on this. Because if you say split test, right, for example, what you would have to do to make this actually effective is you have to do the same exact like neighborhood.

And it's like, well, if I do the exact same neighborhood two weeks apart now, is it a timing thing? So then if you could find exactly like, or you could cut a neighborhood in half, for example, and like, hey, we're gonna do half on this one, half that, that could potentially you could split test it. I've seen each of the designs in the pro shop work really good in some markets and not good in others and flipped in a completely different market. So like that's why like there's like several different designs and each year they've done new ones like the retro one. Then there's like the, the old one, Then there's the, the instant price ones and then there's three ones. There's the single instant quotes. I really think you're gonna have to test in your individual market because I generally believe what would be split tested and a B tested in one market would be completely different in another market. I really do believe that based upon the income of the houses, based upon the timing of the year, based upon what services are being offered.

Average age and income like in each individual, not just territory, but neighborhood.

So you know, that's why there's like several different options for each one. And each year we kind of add another layer to different options in terms of designs because it is a matter of like I have seen some of the ones that have in my markets. I'm like, oh, these ones don't work as good. And then other people, like those are the ones we always order and I can see which ones are they're always ordering in the back end of Vistaprint. Like they're always ordering those. So that'd be really, really tough. I would say Brent, you, I would probably recommend to do this, say if you wanted to do like 300 of every single one and then take. Try to get as close like tight area as possible, like same house, same age, same income demographic and try to do it that way that could be beneficial. And then you could just like save you quartiled a neighborhood. And there's like 300, 300, 300, 300. And they're all very similar houses, very Similar demographics, very similar cost of the homes, etc. And then just track which ones the leads came in from in terms of address perspective could be effective. I would venture to believe though, if you only did 300 in each each quartile, that if you did it the next week and you change designs all of a sudden that other design does way better. But it's more of a timing thing, so it could be really gray here.

So I would, I would probably test in your market a few different designs and then if you see a strong winner then just okay, that's my strong winner. And then what you. I would probably do is the next season take one other design and kind of just test it small and see if it beats it out and just kind of do that each season to kind of find which one works best for you is probably what I would do and basically replace it once there's been another design that is outperforming. It's probably what I would do.

So we do have a whole bunch of designs done for Christmas Lights Vista Print keeps messing up a bunch of the font stuff, so apologize for that. The media team and Zach will send posts on the Facebook group once they're all finalized and released on the pro shop for you to be able to use for the printing side of things. They did a whole photo shoot for Augusta specifically. So everyone's in Augusta gear hanging up the lights and those will be up. There is already the email headers like the actual images for emails, email signatures, invoice and estimate templates, et cetera. That's all in the dashboard as as graphics. But the actual print stuff we have to go through vistaprint they just keep messing stuff up. So if you see any errors, feel free to always send it mediagustalongerservices.com errors on the pro shop they just seem recently to be dropping a bunch of stuff and randomly like designs, missing things and missing sizes etc So I think the other day someone let me know about there was like the smallest yard sign and like the largest one but nothing in between. Simple stuff like that. They just, if I don't know why it just. Yeah. So just let it, let the media team know and then they can get on there on the horn with them. All right everyone have a fantastic day. We'll stay in touch and we'll see you tomorrow.