Mike Minutes Mastermind 09/04/2023

Hello, Gus Nation. Hope you're doing super well. Let's go ahead and jump in. Happy Labor Day.

Let's see. Command center is open today. Just a slightly abbreviated hours, but they're doing basic service for everyone.

Here.

This link in and we'll get started.

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All right, let's jump in. First one's from Max Harwood from Burnaby. Do you rec. Do you have any recommendations on making money in the off season? Typic lawn care typically slows down a lot and I have a lot more free time. Unfortunately, there isn't much opportunity for snow removal where I currently live. Would you recommend acquiring certain kinds of skills or starting a different kind of business that can function alongside the long hair business? I'm not opposed to this and some people do a really good job. I feel like of doing a secondary business that is, is strong during the winter. What I have found for I'd say 90% of business owners in this industry that do that is it diverts them from their main thing and prevents them from being able to.

Really take advantage of the opportunity with their main primary business. And so the reason I say this too is because my first three or five, three to five years of business, I tried to figure out like a different business. So I tried doing pressure washing stuff. But really pressure washing is just as it has its own spring ration, it aligns exactly with lawn care. So it was the same uphill battle. Like trying to convince people in the middle of winter to do their pressure washing was just as difficult as trying to convince them to do their bush trimming during the middle of winter. Winter. Right. So, and this is definitely one of those things, I wish one of these days I could I have some time to do like a one or two week challenge. And that is like drop me in some place where there's like in the middle of winter, there's no grass growing and like I have to like grow the business because I truly do believe, I truly do believe that the vast majority of us are just burnt out. And so the winter is a great time to.

Just kind of just take time off, relax a little bit. It is nice to just learn other things besides focusing on your business. You know, read some books, have a little more time with family. And that's great if you're trying to grow the business. However, I truly believe if someone just wants to grow it and wants to put in sweat equity, there's still work to be had, especially if you don't have snow. Right. So like in our market locally.

I wish, I wish Back in the day, I had instant quote door hangers because I would do property cleanup, instant quote door hangers all the time during the winter, and just, I would just keep people busy. That's, that's exactly what my strategy would be. It's like, okay, how many people do I have to put a property cleanup door hanger on their door in order to get one cleanup? Okay, how many cleanups does that equal on average? How many, how many budget hours? Okay, how many people can I keep busy? Realistically, if I have, if I'm doing door hangers all the time? Okay, great. Now if I go hire someone to go do those door hangers, does the math still work out to where I can keep my crew busy, I can continue getting more contacts and doing cleanups. The thing is this typically because you having to put so much more money into the marketing engine, whether that be door hangers or running ads, et cetera, it makes the work basically unprofitable. So it is a matter of like, you're kind of spinning your wheels. The advantage of keeping everyone busy and is you keep the momentum going into the next spring.

And I would say that the one thing that you should do during the winter when you do have more time is like, all the things that you want to get to right now should get done, right? So even if right now, like whenever, when you're still busy and it's still like a lot, write down everything you wish you could get done. You know, painting the trailer, reinforcing the baseboards of the trail, like the flooring of the trailer, painting something.

Pressure washing stuff like whatever it is, write those things down. That's the time to do it as a winter, because you want it to be when, when spring comes, you are like eagerly chomping at the bit to just crush it and you have everything in line, all the systems and protocols that you've created throughout the beginning of the year, those things start to show holes and you don't have time to fix them until the winter. And so things like maintenance of equipment, tagging of equipment, or organization of your facilities, all that stuff is something that you should definitely focus on during the winter. But I do believe, I do believe that.

With enough ability to do some kind of grind that someone can stay pretty busy during the winter, especially if you don't have snow. Because like, in our market, we can still do property cleanups. We can still turn bushes, all the grasses have to be cut down to the ground. Leaves continue to fall to the end of the year. And honestly, most people still don't clean them up until January, February. So there's a lot of opportunity. It's just people aren't thinking about it because the grass isn't growing, the sun is not shining, they are not out in their yard at all in our market. Right. Max, you're in Vancouver area, Max. I would also touch base with Ali. He's thinking about trying to sell and so I know he might be an option for you. It might be a too big of a business for you to take on. But just as a side note there.

Kyle Tarvin from Moore, Oklahoma, you mentioned multiple times that you allow your GMs to have fairly free reign on the business while they are running it. Would you allow a GM to take on more project based work like larger landscape projects, planting sod, commercial and other things outside your standard sop? Personally I think it'd be risky to allow the GM to dictate what work you do just in case the GM left. It may leave you vulnerable if you don't have to provide those services. Yeah. So um, for the, for our locations we don't allow them just to you know, run willy nilly on what services they offer. If they have been around for a while, they get more and more credit credibility in terms of like giving them a little more flexibility to do this sort of thing. But like project work is something that I would allow them to do during the winter season when it's slower or if there's a couple months where you might have drought and it slows way down for, for mowing and you gotta lean more on projects. Like that's the whole beauty of having both projects and mowing is I have the recurring revenue that I can use projects to fill in the gaps. And so we don't do any more planting or sod. We don't do a lot of commercial. But during the winter they will flex sometimes and they'll okay, we will allow certain types of projects, we will allow, we will go ahead and do a planting job, etc. But those are only based upon like we don't have enough work. And that's why I can then flex the services a little bit in order to be able to accommodate if needs be. But in practice we don't do any of these things. We stop planting, we stop doing seeding. The Bellingham shop is thinking about adding sod back in to be able to fill in next year's summer because like the lull during the summer can be pretty brutal because like we're not used of having really, really hot summers and we don't, FYI.

But for us if we don't have water for six weeks like everything goes dormant and so like rain. So they're thinking about maybe next year get doing a little bit more sod stuff because it's pretty basic. But again they'll do it in a very limited capacity because we've done it before and there's just.

The last thing I want is a 1 out of 10 jobs. Even you know, the edge is not doing well or if someone doesn't water the lawn as a customer and then they blame us and all the rest of it. Right. So obviously there's ways to mitigate all those issues and prevent those from becoming issues. But it's just something that in the past if you're busy enough, I just don't want that headache. But Kyle Ty from Worklahoma since you're taking starting to take owners distribution from your locations based on distributable cash, are you still taking monthly distributions or are they on a quarterly basis Location is distributed cash available? Yeah, it's all based on quarterly.

What are you doing? What are you going to do about the locations that don't cross the distributable cash threshold? Just not take any distributions from them. Yeah, exactly. And that's why I've always said like I typically don't expect to take any cash from a location for the first year because they're not going to be able to get above the distributable cash threshold. It's usually I feel like the middle of the second year or towards the end of the second year. But again it just depends on how fast they grow. Right. If they grow way faster in the first three months, then they're easier to cash in on the beginning of the second year if they take a little bit slower. Typically that second spring rush is really when they get a big hit because they have the brand awareness and the online authority and they take off and then they become profitable at like middle of the second year and end of the second year. So yeah. But then that's why we have the GM's incentives aligned with growth in that first year and a half. Even though I'm not making any profit, it's a matter of I need them to grow as quickly as possible so that we we give the incentive based upon gross revenue per month. I believe last year mentioned you were setting a monthly auto withdrawal your account from business. I just curious that so accurate? Nope, that was before I started all the new locations and we've really ironed out like GM's positions, their comp plans, and then how distributable cash works. I'm able to give them a way more distributable cash compared to just profit. Piece of profit. Like a piece of profit. They were topping out. The very highest they could get was 25%. Now I think they can get as high as 40% of distributable cash.

So they can get significantly more. But now they've got to think more holistically about the business in terms of distributions and not just like make trying to make one quarter real. You know, spend all their money in one quarter so that all the other quarters look good. It just aligns everyone much more and if they do a good job, it'll lead to actually significantly more money for them.

Marcus from Redmond, Washington. Is there any possibility in the future for clients being able to text our location phone numbers? I feel especially for door hangers, it would be seamless. For a client to text a photo of a door hanger is less friction than having to take a photo, create an email, format the screenshot into an email. It's a picture. Okay. Type in our long email and send that. All right. Especially. Yeah. So part of this. Okay. Whoa. I don't know the logistics of calling all our phones. I don't imagine it's very easy to route text to one place. Maybe if there's a way that any of our text phone numbers could create a ticket for us to call them back. Gmail or Twilio might have some sort of integration like this. If not, perhaps some sort of auto response. Any text such as thank you for contacting Right now, there's no autoresponse. So a lead gen. So a lead might text our number, wait for us to respond, never hear back, and forget. I'm sure you have looked into this. It's not simple. Just wondering your thoughts and let's just go to this. Yeah. So Ringcentral has texting. We don't use it anymore. We tried it the first like half year year of Augusta. It's very messy the way they have it and it's extremely hard for us to create. We can't create tickets off of. Can't integrate with anything.

And it was just a mess. We were just getting text messages all over the place and very hard to track. It didn't sync with our CRM so we never had customer names. So we always have to search the numbers. It was a joke. So there's a few things that will be helpful. Number one is Even above texting, it should be a QR code. So this is something that we have in the works for Copilot next year. And that is where on the.

The.

Door hanger you'd have your prices based upon certain QR codes. They would scan the QR code, enter their information and that would all be entered into Copilot automatically.

Instead of having command center then have to take the information and literally they are reading off of someone's handwritten off the door hanger which still works, but it's not ideal because a lot of people mess up and it's honestly trying to read a lot of these door hangers is difficult. So we just want to make it as seamless as possible and not even require a text message, but rather it's a scan of a QR code that locks in the price, automatically creates the estimate based upon that QR code and then takes their information that they enter and put that into Copilot automatically. So that is something that we have on our to do list for 2024 and that's going to be the most seamless, honestly. So.

Yeah, in terms of the texting you what, what I would recommend you do if you really want to do this sooner, is you could have them text it to you directly.

And then just set it up like that.

Like they could text you the photo. The problem is too like with photos, depending on where people texting from, like a lot of compression on SMS text gets messed up with photos and we don't get the photo or it gets encrypted like especially if they're not Apple. If it's not Apple to Apple like imessage is great but SMS is still just like kind of somewhat archaic when it comes to sending multimedia messages. We have.

In. In Copilot you do have an actual number and so you could give that number away. And the reason I'm like wheels are turning as I'm talking about it is it would still it would at least come in your inbox in Copilot because you have a number associated with your Copilot account and you could put that on there. So that's probably I would do like in January or December whenever you move over Marcus is I would use a number inside your copilot if you want people to text the picture to. It would come in there, you'd get a notification that there was a message, you'd be able to address it, take the information, etc. But really where I'm ultimately thinking like much more than like next year instead of Thinking it's like two or three months and fixing this is. I want everything to be digital. I don't want them, don't want anyone to have to take information off of a written door hanger. There's just way too much room for error. People forget fields, they mess up their email, they mess up their phone number. You can't read it. The water gets on it and then you can't read it.

You know, all sorts of stuff. So.

All right, there you have it. Really cool on Wednesday, feature notification or feature update coming out for copilot. One of the things is a direct feature for Command center and that is when they make a call note it'll keep track of all the calls in a separate spot inside the client portal, but more or in the inside the client profile. But more importantly, they'll be able to automatically send you text messages or emails every single time a call note is made. So similar to Zooper, but it'll actually work. And that is when they make a call. Now instead of having to create a ticket for you inside of your dispatch board, it'll just be a matter of it'll notify either text or email. And we can format that. We have a formatting for that. You just get an email or a text message saying what exactly happened in terms of the call notes and who it was from, etc.

And the call notification thing will now allow. Because one thing we've always had trouble with is like how do we always want to try to close the loop at command center? And that is like finish the task. But sometimes people don't answer their phones. They don't, they don't ever like finish the actual the loop of what they're trying to get done. And so in that call thing now in that call notification it'll alert whoever we want in terms of a team member via text or email. But it'll also allow for a follow up right from when you're doing the call notes. So they put the call notes in, they would notify, notify user, they check that they would go to you and then it would have set up a follow up. And so if someone's like they couldn't get ahold of them or were playing phone tag, we can now set up a to do automatically from there for a day or two days or three days or whatever it is. Which would be super helpful with just making sure that stuff does not fall through the cracks because of voicemail or like. Well, do we mark this as a complete. We left them a voicemail but we never really got, like, a response back from them, so that should be helpful, too. So that's coming out Wednesday, along with a whole bunch of other cool stuff from copilot this coming Wednesday. All right, everyone, have a great rest of your day. Great Labor Day, and we'll see you tomorrow. Take care.