Mike Minutes Mastermind 09/13/2024

All right, let's rock and roll. Happy Friday, everybody.

Let's get started. I think I know a lot of people are out in Kentucky for the Christmas lights workshop, Jason, and so hope you all have a fantastic time. I got a couple videos already. Looks like it's been super fun and very instructive, so that's awesome.

All right, well, we'll jump right into questions. Just a quick reminder, if you have not already, the winter service training is up. I was talking with my regional manager the other day, Nick, and really emphasizing the fact that we cannot wait until the last couple weeks of mowing to think about winter services. If you're going to take the more aggressive approaches of steps one and two on the training, we actually go out and sell it. You will need to do it really like a good solid four to six weeks before at least because you can sell someone. Let's just say you're ending mowing at the end of November. You can easily sell someone in the beginning of October on winter services and just set their mind at ease. And then they will never cancel their mowing as it kind of fades off towards the end of the season. They won't quit because they just know what's about to come. So highly, highly recommend. Do not wait the last couple weeks.

Get ready to rock and roll sooner than later. If you're going aggressive. If you're going aggressive like states the steps one and two out of the four, I highly recommend doing it six to eight weeks before the end of mowing season because usually you're having starting to. People start trickling off three to four weeks before the end of the season and it's going to be harder to sell them versus if they're already in mowing and sell them into win of services. I highly recommend.

All right, let's rock and roll.

First question is from Devin from Red Deer. Hey, Mike, Andy's. At what stage do franchisees get their own offices? Should I be answering the phone? If I'm doing 100 to 200k, I feel like I could be answering the phone full time next year and doing all the estimates to go from 100,000 to 300,000. I'm talking to all my customers and I feel like I'm a good salesperson. What's your thoughts? So I would say so. I have a whole video about this. If you go to the command center portion of the academy, there's a video walking in depth about my recommendations about when to switch to getting your own office staff. I really don't believe from 100 to 300,000. You should have your own office staff. I really don't think so. And furthermore, well, I'll just do it myself. You're the highest value person and at 100 200,000 in annual revenue, you don't need a full time person. You need a couple minutes here and a couple minutes there and a couple minutes there. And if, if you spend all of your time on it, it will take a full time job. That's why a lot of people will stall out at 2, 300,000 because they are basically the full time admin person jumping from task to task to task. But it's not a full time position. And if you take even just you working out in the field at 80, $100 per hour, it is cheaper. Let's just say Command Center's working five minutes an hour for you. Like they're doing a call here, an email here, they're sending out estimate request forms, they're taking web chats, etc. They're working five minutes. It's going to cost you.

Like five fifty an hour. Let's just call it five bucks an hour.

In that same amount of time, instead of you focusing on those five different little tasks, if you just worked in the field, you make eighty to a hundred dollars an hour. So I genuinely believe like 100,000 to 300,000, you spending your time in the field producing $100,000 in annual revenue is going to make you a whole lot more money than trying to save $1,000 a month at say Command Center. And so assuming you're trying to grow, if you were like I'm in profit mode, I'm going to stay at 200 to 250,000 in annual revenue, I'm going to take back my services for Command center. That then I'd give you license to stay in profit mode at that stage, assuming you're trying to grow, I would tap in and let them handle as much as possible. And then, and then around 7, 800,000 is usually when it starts. Okay, like now I could probably fill someone's schedule full time, at least for spring rush. And so like I think the easiest segue is once you hit that 7,800,000 level, get someone for spring rush for four months full time where you know they can, you can keep them busy. And then as it goes off in the other eight months of the year, you don't need someone full time. And then you could either give it back to Command center or if they wanted to work part time and then you like let something like Phone calls being answered more full time from command center and then they take all the full service tasks, etc. So you can kind of blend it in is my recommendation. And I know at Command center they're making huge efforts to like improve a lot of aspects of services to that even once you cross 7, 800,000, like our goal is to push that number as far as possible before it makes more financial sense just to have someone in house. And that's just. They're getting better at just trying to nail every single aspect of command center because really like none of us want to run an admin team. It's not fun.

It is an expense to the business that can easily balloon past 12% of revenue and especially when you have overhead like rent, et cetera. And so our big goal at Command center like going into 2025 is become a world class phone service. But more long term is like we want it to be where financially it just never makes sense to even have an office, even if you grow past a million. So I know Liz and Brian and the team are working a lot on that. Ken Lynn, I watched your video on winter services training. I really appreciate you spending your time to go through and perfect that, especially because I know that you are working hard on Christmas lights right now. One of my concerns was if we are telling people that they will save X amount of money, that is essentially telling them they are getting a discount for signing up. What if they want to quit halfway through? Do we somehow charge them the full amount for the services we already did? Or am I looking at this the wrong way? Yeah, you're looking at the wrong way because remember we're only doing a certain amount of the services each time on the like for a certain amount of time equivalent to that of mowing. So if they quit halfway through, it doesn't matter. There's, there's no skin off your back. You're happy because you're charging based upon the time spent there and you're breaking those individual parts and pieces. What you're showing on that price comparison is if they stayed the whole year and what those. And you say, well what happens if there's one or two extra visits on winter services? That's fine. Like don't worry about, you're trying to make the comparison for them. And I genuinely believe it's not even about having savings. Even if you're saving were negative by 50 or $100. I genuinely believe most people willing to pay an extra 50 or $100 to have their property looking good all Winter long instead of just in the fall and just in the spring. So.

Yeah, there's no. It's totally fine if they cancel halfway through because you're not doing all those services on, on the first winter service visit. You're just doing amount of budget hours that would typically be assigned to mowing. And I talked to like our, my region manager, Nick yesterday. Like, we are going ham on winter services because we're not doing Christmas lights at my Bellingham location or Mount Vernon. We're going ham on this. Like, I actually want to run ads against it. I genuinely believe that we've never attacked it. We've never really taken our existing customer database and tried to upsell them into winter services. And using this price comparison sheet, I think we can totally do that. And so like, so for example, at Bellingham shop, they have like, I don't know, I think it's 15,000 contacts. So let's just. That means that like 14,500 of them are in our database and not having mowing service. We've only ever addressed the 500 that we're trying to convert into winter services for mowing. Well, now it's like, go after the 14,000 and show them that their property looks better. And like, oh, I don't want to do that. Go after the 2 or 300 that did a fall cleanup and did a spring cleanup and you can actually save them money by getting them on winter services. Well, that means I'm gonna make less money overall, isn't it? No, because during those seasons, like spring cleanup, you have tons of work coming in anyways.

So. And you're always gonna be able to do a one click estimate email to people just for spring cleanups and get them all the people that didn't get winter services. You'll convert them, no problem in the spring.

So like, we're gonna go offensive and we have benchmarks of like how much we're willing to spend cost per lead. Because again, if I can get a customer in the middle of the winter on winter services, because that's the thing that's top of mind to them. And really go after baby.

Snowbirds because there's so much value to snowbirds for winter services, making sure their property looks good, making sure that there's no damages, we do a property inspection. If there's things like broken glass on site, we can send them pictures. Like there's so much value to them. And if in our market there's lots of snowbirds, we're going to target those people. And we're Going to run ads and we're going to see what our customer acquisition cost is during the middle of winter if we have a service that actually is useful during that time.

Ken Lynn, I've always liked the idea of winter services being a flat monthly rate. How do you consider. Have you ever considered doing the same thing for all other seasons? I was thinking something along the lines of spring services, summer services, fall services, season. Since each region has different things that people need, we would have to tailor each one to our customers needs. I didn't run oriental services the first year because the things that were offered were not anything that customers in my area needed. But now tailoring around snow makes more sense. If this is a good idea. Is that something that you are going to work on or should we just work on these individual based on our market needs? Yeah, if you're trying to like tailor like four different types of seasons to customers, that would be more or less a full service maintenance package for their whole property. And that's not going to be like a winter services type of a sale. Winter services is we're taking mowing customers and we're turning them into winter services customers. And then we're having to be able to sell them winter services that then those people convert into mowing. So it's only two. If you're trying to switch into like four different things. I just be. I'd just call this like a year round maintenance package. And here's what you get in the spring, here's what you get in the fall, here's in the summer, here's you get in the winter. Like I just do that.

That's really what you're doing there. You're just doing a full service maintenance package.

Kevin from Bloomingdale.

The last few years for leaf cleanups, I've been selling mowing clients on four bi weekly cleanups October through November. I'm trying to find a way to implement your strategy for winter services and encompass fall cleanups, winter services and spring cleanups. With winter services, the idea is that we would spend the same amount of time we did for mowing on cleanup instead. The problem is that it is not near enough time to clamp all the leaves that fall during the weeks in October and November which the client would expect. Do you have any ideas around this? Would I put a clause like future visits times on site maybe decrease due to time extra time spent on fall cleanup? I don't think it'd be acceptable to do a partial cleanup during the fall season. Okay, this is, this is a great Question. Okay. Okay. I genuinely believe this is. You can sell winter service like crazy to these customers because what you do is you do the bi weekly fall cleanups knowing that at last service there, there's still some leaves that fall. Like I would maybe even cut out one of those services and just make it to where, like when you clean up in the last, there's still some leaves in the trees. And then you sell them winter services. So you sell them on the fall cleanups, they're still mowing their grass. And as they're closing out their mowing, it's like, hey, would you like us just to continue? I know we've done the leaf clamps for October into November here. Why don't we just continue these, these winter services? That way all the straggler leaves that continue to fall in December and even in January, sometimes they all get picked up and they'll fit into your budget and it'll look great. And then what I would compare on your winter services price comparison is a December leaf cleanup. So instead of fall cleanup, I would do a winter leaf cleanup. Because a lot of times in most markets the leaves will still kind of trickle off the trees end of November into December and even into January and some types of some species and depending on wind, et cetera. So if the customer's having fall cleanups four times, I can guarantee you they would like winter services. You just need to pitch it at the right time. I would pitch as Right. Right. Once you've done two or three of your fall cleanups, pitch them on winter services and then get them on winter services that will flow right into mowing and then you do your spring cleanup in that process as well. And they'd save on the spring cleanup and then they'd probably save what would otherwise be a nicety of having a another fall cleanup service from you in December or January.

Like this is a candidate that does four cleanups for leaves is a great prospect for winter services. And you get them in after doing those first couple initial ones where you're getting everything like you're, it's like a full out cleanup. You're not doing partial. Then you sell them on the winter services part. Because if they're doing those four, I can guarantee you they will really like having their property looking good their other few months of the year. If you have seen this. Exactly the same. Mr. Nomes, can you explain how business credit scores work? Is it personal, similar to personal credit scores? I'm looking at getting a loan from QuickBooks and I'm curious what amount they would loan and the terms. But saying there would be a hard pull on my business credit score. I have no idea what my business credit score is.2. If I was looking, if I was to be looking for funding, should I do all my applications all in a short amount of time to reduce the effects of hard pools on business credit. So people really over talk of this whole business credit thing. Like I'm telling you, like there even come, even people I talk to that are doing over $100 million a year will still have to personally sign on credit applications in order to get good terms. Like this whole idea that you can just put everything on a business. So what? Like the only advantage is if you go belly up and go bankrupt, then your hope is that they're not going to come after you personally. If you're planning in that direction, you shouldn't be taking out the debt. Like if you're planning for a business like this could potentially fail and if it does, they're not going to come after my personal assets. Like I would rather sign personally get way better loan terms and like I understand, like I don't want it to affect my personal credit score. Yeah. Like I just don't think it, I think it's overblown.

To date, even when I buy commercial real estate, I am co signing personally. By doing that I save a massive amount of interest. I get much better loan terms in terms of the percentage down that I have to pay.

And I like, I'm like I'm betting on myself. Yes. But if you think the business is going to go bust, if you think the real estate deal is going to go bust, don't buy it. So I really think this is overblown. A lot of times this is like very TikToky type thing. YouTubers like don't ever do it on your personal build up your business credit. It's like look.

Your personal credit is going to usually be the strongest because not because it's a better score but because the bank knows that if your personal assets are behind a loan, they're going to be much more secure. It just is a more secured loan. So like to be perfectly frank, I think maybe once or twice have I ever signed on something and not just co sign it personally. Like if your business goes bankrupt, you're gonna have a lot of problems. Just because one debtor doesn't get to you because you sign on business credit instead of personal credit, it's not gonna matter. It's gonna be hell for you. So like make the business decision Correct. And then realize that you'll have a better chance of winning if you don't pay as much interest and you have better loan terms. So I just, I just see this all the time, and it's completely overblown in my opinion. Like, oh, sign everything with your business. Don't have your name on anything.

Yeah, it just, it doesn't make a lot of sense. And you're like, well, what about legally? Legally, that's all through your s. Corporation. That's all done through your cope. Like your entity, if you're doing LLC outside of state, etc. It has nothing to do with whether or not you're a lender, has your credit score and your. Your.

Social Security number. So, like, the telltale sign is like, if you're using your ein number versus your Social Security number, I can just, I can tell you your, your loan terms are going to be less, are not going to be as good, your interest rate's going to be higher. And I know most people, even doing hundreds of million dollars revenue will still personally sign on stuff because they know they get way better terms and they'd rather save 30 thousands, if not tens of thousand dollars a month on a loan, then be like, oh, no, if the business goes bankrupt, they can't come after my car.

Joel from Lafayette, would you recommend we create a personal Facebook page for Christmas sites if we're running Facebook ads? Typically, Facebook ads have to be done from a business page. Like, you want to have an ads Manager account? If I was you, Joel, I would probably create a separate page and then I would link it to your Facebook Ads Manager account. So you can run all ads from one account. Otherwise annoying, logging in and out. You have multiple Ads manager accounts or ad accounts, business ad accounts inside of Facebook and then just go to different pages. So, like, I have way too many ads accounts, but it's good because I have one account I log into for my ads and then I have all my pages. I have all my accounts. And you can have one account that manages multiple pages. So I would probably keep one account inside of there. And then you can have it do multiple pages.

Yeah, maybe make a separate ad account, but I'd keep it all underneath the one Ads Manager account. In one Ads Manager account. You can have multiple ad accounts. Hope that made sense. But the question of, like, should you make another Christmas lights page? Totally, totally valid. I would probably, if I was you, probably take your current Facebook page and just put like Augusta Longcare of XYZ and Christmas Lights or something like that. And Then change like your banner and change your logo to be Christmas oriented. That's what I would do because you have way more brand power. Your audience is warmed up from the entire season. You're getting a bunch of cross sells versus starting up a page that you're only going to use for like three to four months of the year. It gets really, really stagnant. You have less following, less impact in terms of natural.

Like people already following you. And then furthermore, if you once you switch from Christmas lights to mowing and they see your banner changes, they see your logo changes, it's like, oh, it's mowing time. I'll ask them for my mowing quote. I got my lights done by them. So I think you can do this in a way by just changing the banner on your page and the logo and maybe the name of your business inside Facebook relatively easily and keep all that momentum and then be able to do a lot more cross selling.

In terms of running the ads, I think that would work just fine too. Just having this keeping the same Ads Manager account to keep it simple. I'd probably do that. Honestly, if I was doing lights, I'd just keep the same Facebook page. I change my logo, my banner and my name and then my Ads Manager account would be the same single one. It'd be keep it nice and simple.

That being said, I'm sure there's been people have done their own page just for lights and been successful. It kind of like what are you comfortable with for you, Joel, I know you're very technical savvy. I'd probably say you might want to do the two because you're going to understand how to set up multiple accounts, connect them all, etc. But that'd just be my my word of caution there.

Mr. Anonymous, is the Augusta franchise being modeled after any other franchises I indefiniteness or are you growing it and filling voids as needed and issues arise? I'd say a little bit of both. Like I definitely learned a lot from Anytime Fitness in the way that they do stuff. But before I started August, I interviewed about 50 to 60 franchisees and about 15 other brands, 10 of which were home services, about five or six that were outside of home services and just like interviewed people on like, what do you like, what do you not like, what's your pain points? I really wanted to know like, how do we continue to produce value for the larger operators? A lot of them were very mad because they were the ones paying the most on royalties, but they felt like they kind of got the majority of the benefit by, you know, already in the training and the initial setup and the lead flow, etc. And so it's like how do we continue to provide value for them? So that was always like a big thing in my mind. That's why we're doing like the seven figure retreat, seven figure club starting next year. It's like how do we continue to provide value for people and beyond for me, because the community aspect, like I want to be able to help people get the seven stages of wealth. And it's not about just getting a, you know, business, it's like get them to the seven stages of wealth. Which means when they hit the seven figure club that it's like we're going to talk about real estate like estate planning, thinking about your will, thinking about how you set up things from a tax advantaged account, you know, making sure you're maxing out things like IRAs, 401ks etc that are tax advantaged. Those things don't matter when you're first getting started and everyone gets all hyped up about them. It's like it doesn't matter, like get the business, get the seven stage of wealth. Then we start figuring these things out. And I want to produce value from someone just getting started all the way to someone having a massive chain, a bunch of regional managers having now started diversifying their real estate. And there's just so many benefits to doing that at that size of business. So like there's stuff that we'll be talking about with them for that specific reason. Because like you can use your spouse for example, if they like manage your properties in real estate where they get their license and if their full time job is managing the properties, you can then depreciate things an accelerated rate instead of waiting for 27, 30 years that you to amortize like a new window. I think it's 10 years for a window or 15 years for a window. If you, if you're a real estate professional, I. E. Your spouse can be that, then you can take all of that in one year as a, an expense versus an amortized asset. So there's like so many little things that you can, like if you have a really, really profitable business, you go and do something like that where you can just depreciate everything off and you don't pay taxes.

And so like that sort of thing matters. Once you're really profitable. It does not matter once you're, when you're first in the first four or five stages of wealth, you're trying to Grow, like, focus on the business. Just keep focusing on that.

And so that was like my biggest takeaway when we first got started. But I'm always, like, listening to other franchises. I interview. I talk to a lot of franchisees, I talk to other franchisors, but those are hard because the founders usually bail before they get to 100 locations because private equity is buying them all out. So, like, usually if I'm talking to someone, an executive, a franchise, they're CEOs and they have different thought processes. They're thinking much more in terms of, like, you know, unit metrics and not unit metrics in the form of, like, how much money the owner's making. They're thinking, like, how much money are we getting as a percentage of the revenue? Like, they're trying to figure out how to get, like, more fees. They're trying to figure out how to, like, increase their stock pricing. For me, it doesn't really compute. Like, I usually talk to people that have exited as founders and basically, okay, if you would have gone to 500 locations and you're at 50, what would you have had to change? Because they are the ones who usually are a little more mission driven, the CEOs and most franchise doors, like, because they're private equity, like, they just have different incentives. They just do. And I have nothing against them. It just, they're not. They, they just don't care once someone is in the system. They just don't. Like, they know they have them over a barrel for 10 years and they can't leave. And if they do, there's massive fees. So they just, they just get a royalty. So it's like pump everything possible into increasing revenue. So I'm just not a fan of it. I just try to always think about, like, if, you know, if I was a franchisee, if I was an owner, August, like, what would I want being done? And I just try to benchmark against that because I do have two locations. So I know it's like to be in the systems. I know it's like to like, have certain things. It's like, oh, I wish we could do that, but we can't really because we're. We need to use command center. I understand all those, those pain points. So it's like, I just try to make sure, like, if it can serve my locations well and serve at a large location, a smaller location. And like, I just try to think about that more.

Happy birthday, Mike. Reflecting on your past year was one accomplishment you're proud of going forward to this year was Something you're looking to accomplish? Oh, man. Someone asked me this yesterday. I'm not very good at this.

I was trying about incremental improvement. And so I don't really think in terms like what was a big accomplishments. I would say definitely looking forward to next year. I really look forward to being able to prove myself in terms of copilot. It's just been such a difficult past nine months. And so I am very confident in 2025 will turn it around and like, that it'll be obvious. Like, I know what's happening in the back end, but no one sees it. And so it's very difficult.

And so what I'm looking forward to accomplish is basically to prove everyone that betted on me correct and show that, like, what we did in 2024 was required to pick up the innovation again in 2025. And it was, like, really tough. And we're still kind of in the middle of it. But I know it's being on the back end and no one sees it, though. And so it's very. It's a. It's pretty painful. So that's what I look forward to accomplishing. I look forward to proving everyone right that stay with us and said that we would eventually turn it around, and they were believing in me to do it. And so I know that copilot and my name are pretty much synonymous, and so.

I will redeem the brand. That's that. That's the goal. So.

Yeah. Anyways, all right. Love you all. Appreciate it tremendously for all the birthday wishes and everything. Really do. And I hope you have a fantastic weekend. Enjoy your time in Kentucky for everyone there. Love you guys. Take care.