Mike Minutes Mastermind 09/06/2022

Good morning everyone. Hope you're doing super well. Let's go ahead and get started. First and foremost, as of yesterday our short form video content competition is completed. So what you need to do to submit your video and the final results is just post the video on the Facebook group along with how many views you got on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube shorts. Even if you just post those four titles with the number of views, that'd be perfect. Whoever gets the most combined views will get the AirPods. I have them on my desk ready to ship out. So yeah, just look at whichever ones you did post to the Facebook group along with those metrics. Otherwise I will spend hours having to try to find everyone's TikToks and Instagram Reels and it'll be a mess. So you probably know which one of your videos did the best. So please post that one with those metrics and whoever wins I will get those out later this week. We do have franchisee training this coming week so I will be doing masterminds probably a little bit earlier, not the scheduled typical 9:30 Pacific Standard Time. Probably doing them a little bit earlier in the day.

Probably tomorrow we will be sending out a Google form from command center that you will feel fill out in terms of what you are doing in terms of snow. And I know for most of you you don't do snow. It'll be you don't even have to fill it out. But for everyone else that is doing snow, we're going to have information that you can fill out so that way it goes into your wiki. It's very standardized in terms of everyone's wiki and what command center will tell customers. So that'll all be standardized. That will be going out tomorrow. I just was working on the final draft with them this morning for Zooper et cetera. So that will be going out tomorrow. Google form again only if you're doing snow do you need to fill that one out? If you are prepping right now for if you're kind of getting ready before the fall rush and you need to up set something to do, make sure that you do have your winter services line item updated with the correct services and what you're going to be doing with those line items, go over it with Lee on a coaching call if you need to. In terms of getting creative with what you can do outside of mowing in your market. We now have 10 different line items that we do at the local shop and if you've never done winter services, there's videos on the academy, but definitely on a coaching call. Go over what dates you want to be sending out your email. Opt out. Oh, sorry, one second. Video popping up. Go over all that in a coaching call and make sure you have all your dates. Make sure everything's ready to go for your opt out email and for the list of services that are going to be done on winter services.

All right, let me go ahead and pull up the.

Questions. I have not had a chance to look at these yet. Give me one second here. Oh, mercy, there's seven of them. Okay, well, we're gonna do some Q A. Let me share this screen.

Share screen.

Do I get a referral bonus for telling Brendan needs to join us and move to Florida yesterday? Oh, it's really funny. We accidentally told one of the owners the wrong dates because he joined months and months and months ago, like back in the spring. And so he showed up at my. Showed up at my studio on Sunday and I was like, what are you doing? He's like, I'm here for training. I was like, bro, it's like in three days. Oh, man. Anyways, let's see here.

Where do I go? There you go. Sorry I didn't pull this stuff up beforehand.

There we go.

Okay, let's go to these questions.

All right, first question. Sorry. I have not gone these yet. Today, I raised price on existing customers in July who were under bid. I am at capacity above capacity currently for the remainder of the year until I resume growth next spring. How soon can I raise prices again on existing customers who had a price increase in July?

Well, supply and demand, I guess you're about to find out. If you're really at capacity to that extent, you just go ahead and do it, do it again and just be honest. People be like, hey, the price of everything just keeps going up. The thing is, if you raised them in July, that's like only a few months ago, right? So.

That's a tough one because you still want to grow. It's not like you're done growing. That's my only concern.

It depends. You'd want to go with Leon coaching call in terms of like, how much did you raise it in July? Like, if you raised it like $10 a cut on, you know, 30% increase, it might be a bit of a pill to swallow two and three months later to be raising prices again. We've never done it that close together. I think we did like, six months is the closest we've ever raised prices. So you'd really. I need context in terms of, like, how much did you raise prices before? But what you could do is raise price on everyone that you've got accepted since then. That would be an easy one because then it's just one price increase. But.

If you're at capacity and you still. You showcase, you raise money under bid. Okay, Gotcha. Okay, so you fixed the under bid problem. Now it's like, okay, now I need to optimize for profitability. So if you're at capacity, it's only September 6th, you probably should go ahead and raise prices again. Just realize that you probably will get some unhappy people, but, you know, hey, it's applying demand, and I think you'll probably retain more than you think you would. So, you know, go for it. I'd love to hear how, how that works two and three months later to be raising prices again. As I said, I don't think it would impact you a lot. And the bottom line is, if you lost 10%, 20% of your customers even, you'd probably fill it up in a few weeks. So if you're at capacity, you have to. Do you have to raise prices or grow? Like, to not do any of those things is like turn off leads is stupidity. So don't do that. Before you do that, raise your prices. But I need more context in terms of how much you raise them, etc. Beforehand. What is the process of sending someone to collections? Is this something Command center does or do we fill out the collection agency paperwork located in templates and downloads on the dashboard? Is there a minimum amount you would recommend? Okay, so if you are.

Inside of the growth model, you have the ability to be able to do collections at Command center, and they take care of everything for you. However, all the paperwork that they use is on the dashboard for download. Literally, just download it, follow the instructions. There might be a video on it, but I know there's instructions. And you basically fill it out and you send it to the person that has it on there from Empire. Is there a minimum amount you'd recommend? There's not really a minimum because it's just a percentage that you're losing to the collections agency. So I wouldn't say there's a minimum. We've sent people for 200 before. It's just so easy to fill out. The paperwork takes maybe five or ten minutes. So if I'm gonna get something from it, it'd be better than nothing. What do we do if the client claim we never completed work when they received the going to Collections email? If they. If they. Yeah, provide proof and send to Collections Exactly. Yeah. You got. If you did the work.

Provide the proof, submit it to collections and let them deal with it. Right. So just make sure you have like the more information you can get better. Whether it be tracking, whether it be guys clocked to the job, whether it be pictures of the job being done or have been completed, the more the better. Right. And like what you're saying here is important. Like when your invoices that are that small, it can sometimes seem like, oh, I'll just eat it. Well take five minutes and if you, if the bill is for 300, yeah, you're only going to get 200 of it back to you. But if it goes through collections, but at least you've now set precedent with that customer, they can't screw you over. So I would just submit them to collections. I've done it for as little as 200 bucks I think before in the past.

Any idea when one click Assets we fixed with Zebra Pro? I'm still unable to send out any bulk emails. It's making impossible send out any Christmas lights.

Send this. Also bring Lonnie into this. There's. It seems like there's a few that just not working still. We gotta get Zooper and link their chain a bit on this because they keep saying it's fixed but I think it's only a couple of their the locations. So let me work on this one. I'll make a note here. I know they were working on it but I thought they fixed it because I didn't hear anything about it. So let me work on this. Obviously it's not fixed yet. That's not good. So give me a second. I know there's like at least three or four locations it was still not working on and that's not good to the Christmas lights thing. Thoughts on a customer survey Automation to customers that decline the estimate I. E. A multiple choice for price, scheduling, work not exact what they wanted, etc. I don't know that many would be filled out but it might create a way to keep that lead warm. Showing that we care why they decline. Yeah. Inside Zooper there's the ability for them to be able to put a reason why it's much better integrated in terms like when they click not accepted they put a reason why. Um, so that's going to be better in terms of compared to service autopilot. But I wouldn't mind doing an automation on the road. The thing is like think of it from a customer's point of view. Like if you've ever declined an estimate like you're typically not going to get an email back to you asking for like feedback and a review or anything like that and like fill it out. You're typically going to be just like let's move on with my life. So you also don't want to annoy them because typically when they decline an estimate they're annoyed. So I feel like the only time you can really ask for that feedback is at the point of declining and in the process of declining in zoopr they can put in why they're declining. That is definitely helpful. But I would be opposed to sending another email because they might opt out of my emails where I just want them to stay opt in so that down the road I can upsell them again and resell them on a one click estimate email.

Does my August command bill seem to be proportional to my revenue and growth? Okay, 16,000 revenue, 31 estimates sent, 80% recurring work. I would say I tended to delegate more as opposed to less. In terms of having command center handle stuff, what were the ways that you would recommend minimizing our commands? I love having command, but I'm just wanting to make sure I'm keeping myself in check. Web chat and online forms for the whole month of August my ERF was not available. Is this all from talk or are there other things that bundle with this as well? In my mind if this is all talk I would be disabling it. So the online forms and web chat is. Yeah, everything from your like talk, which is the, the plugin for your web chat, as well as contact forms, estimate request forms, anything in terms of the online contacts from the website. So there are three or four locations that have disabled the web chat. And if you are not taking estimates you probably want to disable your web chat because a lot of estimates come through web chat. I remember doing training even the spring and it's a constant flow of estimates coming in on the web chat. So if you are not doing any estimate request forms you probably want to disable the chat and here next week you'll be able to do that with a click of a button and then we'll be able to get done within two days on the dashboard. So that login and everything, we're finishing up the security on that and then that should be out. So that way you can literally disable or enable web chat whenever you want. But if you're going to disable like no estimates whatsoever, like no request forms, I would probably probably recommend taking your web chat off because most of what comes to the web chat is estimate requests and it can cost you five, ten dollars by the time it's back and forth, back, getting the address, getting their information, all of that back and forth, it could cost you five or ten bucks, which is a great deal if you're trying to get estimates. But if you don't want any more jobs and you have your estimate request form off, I would recommend taking your web chat off. So just hang tight on this one for a second till next week and you will be able to disable this yourself on the website dashboard. In terms of like what you're spending, like, I really don't think there's a reason why we don't allow full service tasks for people in the solo model. Partly due to the fact that if you're under 10, 15,000amonth in revenue, you shouldn't be delegating more to command. You have time to do it yourself. When you start getting above 20 and you have an employee now, that's when you can start delegating. And if you're trying to grow, grow, grow. You should not be delegating to Command center. If you're twiddling your thumbs for two days out of the week because you're just getting started and you're only doing 5,000amonth in revenue, you should not be delegating to command center. If you already have a massive office space that you pay $2,000 a month for. Like you should get an office person. And especially once you get above like 1.5 million, you probably need office, you need an office person as well in addition to command. It just gets too expensive with so many moving parts when you get massive, massive. And if you have a massive office, if you have one, you know, if you're doing one 1.5 million, you probably need an office person in addition to command center. And command center will save you from having to buy get office assistance and having to get, you know, a bunch of office offices and utilities and all the rest of it. But at that size, you're going to need somebody that is hands on with the guys most today from an office side of side of things. So like we try to do the working GM model for the Bellingham shop this spring and it was a miserable fail. Like that's why I'm very confident the working GM model works great for like 5, 600,000, but you can't do above 800,000 because you just don't. The working GM will work way too many hours and be burnt out. There's so many much work to be done on the office Side at that size of size of business. So Marcus tried it, basically doing all the estimates, all the office work, all the dispatching everything. And it was just way too much. We got way behind, way behind on estimates. And there's just too much work at a $1.5 million location to have it all on one person. So you have to kind of get an estimator at that point or someone that is working with the guys from the office side of things, dispatching throughout the day, etc. So.

My command bill. Oh, you actually put the pictures in here. Give me a second. I don't know if you guys can see this. Oh, you can't. Let's go. Cool. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay, so this is. Yeah. So it looks like you're getting a lot of chats if you didn't have any contact forms. One second, let me look at your site. Augusta lawn care service.com glendale.

Yeah. What, what you. I think everyone would be surprised by. And what we're wanting to work on here is actually creating videos of done with this back end stuff. At command center, we're want to create videos so you all can see it. So this is the thing. When you don't have an estimate request form, but you have the chat, the first thing everyone does, as you can see. I think you can see my screen. When they see no screen here for getting an estimate. And then it says here, do you need estimate for lawn care? They're going here, like every person that goes to your website. So highly recommend. This is a great point. Actually, I never really thought about this. If you're going to turn your request forms off, you should probably disable your web chat. If you're going to do both of those things, like don't do one or the other, do both. Great point there. I never really thought about that because that's what's happening is people are coming to your site. They're like, oh, no estimate. Oh, do you need an estimate? Yeah, I do. And then you're starting to type. And then what's happening? If you've told command center, Nick, no estimates, it's literally a fact of wasted time. Because now the customer is asking, we're checking the wiki. Oh, we don't do estimates. Sorry. And so, or potentially they're saying, you know, we can do it over the phone. Which is now they're in here doing an estimate of an OTP inside the web chat, which takes a while because we are measuring, we are giving them the numbers. It's back and forth. Which again you'd be amazed how many estimates we close through the web chat. It's just a matter of if you have your estimate request forms off. Whoops, sorry. If you estimate request forms, often you don't want new jobs, you probably don't want your estimate your chat on. So again, hold tight till next week. You'll be able to log in and literally just disable your web chat and turn it back on when you want new, more leads. But this is, this is what's happening 100% they're not seeing this and they're going directly to here and this costs you more because now there's more time back and forth with them, whereas with the form they submit it, it's all on them and it's like a quick set up from command center, just a couple minutes. This can take 5 to 10 minutes of back and forth, getting the address, getting everything locked and loaded, giving them pricing because you're, you're saying you can do pricing over the phone so they could do an OTP in the web chat, which is great, but it's going to cost you. You know, if there's, if there's 600 minutes in a month, that is literally 20 per day. That could literally be two estimates, that could be two conversations that are back and forth giving pricing and all the rest of it inside the web chat. And I would say about 50% of the web chats end in, in radio silence. It's still worth it because there's so many estimates that come in through it. But I would say maybe not half, maybe 40%. You'll be literally going through the estimate process and they just disappear. You have nothing you can do.

Or you'll ask for something like an email and then they stop. So it's just, it's a fickle thing. And sometimes what happens, they'll go through the process and they'll call. Well now we put all this information out and someone else is picking up the phone. Right. So sometimes it's a bit of a pain in the butt, but it's still worth it in terms of, if you're trying to grow expanded, you're not. If you don't have, if you don't have your request forms on, I would personally turn off your web chat and that will be available for you to be able to do yourself next week. It will not be like immediate, it'll be, you're basically submitting a ticket for us to do it. But it'll be much more automated compared to, it is now.

If you, if you, if you are a solo operator and fanned everything out of the house. How would you. Oh, you run everything out your house. How did you do orientation? I'm confused on how this part of my apartment of my bill is so high. I'm not sure if I received any clients from our website. 2k every month is kind of high when I'm only bringing 5 to 10 7k. What's this?

Okay, one second here. Okay, so this part, there's two questions. So first question is about command center. It looks like.

Command center web chat and online contact forms. See here.

Let's go back to this.

So a couple things here. If you're only doing 5 to 7k and you're not growing, I would recommend your web forms being sent to you right now. If you're doing, if you're doing 5 or 7 this month and then 10, 12 next month and 18 the next month and 25 the next month, that's different. Right? But anything under 15,000, if you're not growing, I really don't recommend Command center be doing a lot for you besides answering the phone and the reactive stuff of the business. Right. But if you're doing it five to seven and you're trying to make it profitable, you, you should be doing as much as possible besides the phones. So I would recommend asking Lonnie to bring your contact forms over to you. You could turn your web chat off if you want. But if you're trying to grow, like if you're again, if you do five or seven this month, next month you're going to do 10, next month you're going to Do 13, 14 and you're growing, that makes a lot of sense. But keep in mind with the web chat as well as estimate request forms, if you're not growing and you're doing under 15,000, I don't recommend using a lot of Command Center. You should be doing most of it yourself. So you can have the S request sentence yourself. You can have the web chat turned off. It's really up to you. But that web chat is used a lot. Like customers get on there. They'll ask questions about their service, they'll ask questions about their bill, they ask questions about their credit card on file. Ask a bunch of random questions about like last week's service. It's great for the customer, but it does cost. And so those things can be disabled. The web chat. And like I said next week that we easier to do. But in terms of the actual contact forms and the estimate request forms, I would recommend if you are doing 5,7000amonth in revenue. Have those forwarded to you. And that again will also be something that can be done on the dashboard next week. So hang tight for all of those things and you can move those things around if needs be.

Cool. That's all the questions on there.

Let's see here. We are currently doing double E fees and double dump fees on estimates. Our next available day is October 18th. For landscape. We are always expecting mowing. We are all working five days per week. Should we also just raise prices on projects according to across the board? Give me one second. Let me see who this is so I have better context. Give me one second. Just jumping into Facebook.

This is Connor.

Yeah, so one second. We jump back to my screen. You're doubling the E fees. You're doubling the dump fees. Our next available day is September. So it's five weeks booked out. Six. Six weeks booked out.

Yeah. I would raise across the board. Yeah, you're five, six weeks booked out. Right. So it's not like crazy going to fall.

But if you're. If that's growing. Yeah, I just raised prices on hourly for projects. Obviously you're gonna be really profitable in the next couple months as you start getting to the work that all these price increases are on. Like, what happened for us locally is we raised all our prices in June, but we were six, seven, eight weeks booked out. So now it's like August, September is where we're really starting to do really well at the local shop. Their profit margins have been fantastic the past couple of months because now we're hitting $90 per hour rates and our EVs are $100 and all the rest of it. Right. So, yeah, you know, the bottom line is if you're above three, four weeks booked out, you should be raising prices unless you're trying to go hire more people. And so just had two more set this morning. Just worried that it'll be crazy storm with being booked and fall service is coming up. Yeah, you go ahead and raise prices. Just keep in mind, if you're booked out for six weeks.

Really, I guess in six weeks is probably when you're starting fall services like fall cleanups and leaves. So keep that in mind. That's why I would say raise prices to wazoo. Because if you already know you're going to have a backlog of work just with existing customers, then yeah, raise prices. Right. So it just simply comes down to. Or do you grow? Like, do you have a truck and a couple more employees or do you not raise your prices? Stack Cash and then go growth mode in the spring, which sounds like that's what your plan is. So ultimately just keep raising prices, right? If you're not going to grow and you have excess leads, I would not turn off your leads, I would not turn out your estimate request forms. I would not turn off your chat. I would simply raise your prices. If you can raise your prices by two or $3 an hour, you would pay for all those extra estimate request forms, all those extra web chats, simply by raising it by a couple dollars an hour. So I what I would recommend, and I kind of alluded this in my talk at gyms because so many of them turn off their leads. Like the majority of them, they talk about that and I'm like, why would you ever do that? Why would you not take those leads that are 15, cost you 10, 15, 20, $30. And for us at command center, it's the cost of like a web chat, cost of command center doing something for you for an estimate request form, like, hey, 10, 15 bucks, whatever, great, I would keep those on, but just keep raising your prices. So that way, like you literally, if you get a estimate request form and they call them and set up an estimate or whatever, or do an estimate over the phone and then you spend 10 or 15, like that's probably the cost of it. But if you're able to raise prices and you're doing, you know, let's just say 500, 600 budget hours a month and you raise it by a couple of dollars, you just cover all of that and some. So why would you not want that? Right? I really do believe that keeping the leads coming in and then replacing your bottom customers by raising your prices is the way to do it. It's not to turn off leads.

I really don't like the thought of turning off leads. It's a matter of keep the leads coming in at least over the phone estimates, at least drive by estimates to be able to keep replacing your bottom customers. And how do you replace them? You raise your price to the point where they drop off, right? So the cost of admission, of estimate request forms being done, you know, things like the web chat like we're talking about today, that is the cost of keeping new leads coming in to turn that off means your prices are going to stagnant. I'd rather raise my prices on all my customers, raise my prices on all new new jobs, raise my prices on e fees and dump fees and then easily be able to afford the extra 4, 5, $600. It's going to cost to keep that lead generation, that lead machine on. Right. So it's just, it's just aggressive. It's a, you know, offense versus defense mechanism. Right. So defense is like turn the leads off. Don't, don't have any command center costs. I would take the 4, 5, $600 extra and have the website on to be able to get the extra 10, 15 customers and drop my bottom 10 customers and replace them with high paying customers. Right. So a healthy business is constantly dropping off the lowest least profitable customers and raising prices and getting new customers that are higher prices. So keep that in mind. Yeah. So if you're trying to stack cash, then Connor definitely just keep raising prices. Right. Especially if you know now that you're booking into what is going to be fall season, you better make sure those jobs you're crushing it on and your crew will be happy and they'll probably be willing to work longer hours if they know they're just demolishing budgeted hours and making a killing. Right. It's funny thing how everyone during spring rush doesn't want to work overtime now all of a sudden they do because they're all making like 25:30 an hour. Right. So it's just a, it's just a balance. If they can make a really, really good crush P4P during the fall, they're probably willing to work an extra Saturday or work extra hours to get those extra jobs done that are coming in from your existing recurring customers. So cool. Good mastermind. Hope you all have a fantastic Tuesday and we'll see you tomorrow morning. I'll be a little bit earlier than because we do have franchisee training starting this week, but I'll be getting these done earlier in the day more than likely. So we'll see you then.