Mike Andes answers questions on delegation, franchise growth, and estimate emails. He advises against heavy delegation when revenue is low, explains how corporate-owned locations could work with investor funding, and recommends one-click estimate designs over multiple service links.
Questions this video answers
In November (conference sign-up form added to the Facebook group).
If you are doing under $10,000 a month in revenue, you should probably only be on basic services at Command Center and handle email management, payroll, invoicing, scheduling yourself.
Low-level guarantees like 4–5% interest.
About $1,200 a month ("$1,200 a month"), which he equates to roughly $14,000 for the year after discussion of margins.
Yes — you can set up multiple get-quote links and tie each to different email tags, but Mike does not recommend it; he prefers one service per one-click estimate and sending focused emails over time.
Chapters
Hey everyone, hope you're doing well, Been a great weekend. Let's go and get started. Let me just copy this link.
Into Facebook.
In case you missed it. Feel free. There is a form I added to the Facebook group for registering for conference. This is mostly for people that are coming to training in November and don't have access to the dashboard or academy where the actual link is at for conference sign up. But also I know I know quite a few people signed up in the past couple days so that's great. One one form entry per person is required just so we can get everything ordered and ready to roll.
All right. And I believe the voting for Franchisee of the Year is ending. If not today, I think it's tomorrow so make sure you get those in if you have not already. Again, that was put on the Facebook book group by Lee last week and the top three from there will be going to the leadership team for evaluation more from a business side of things instead of helping each other. All right. Amero Uno Devin from Red Deer how much do you delegate? I'm guessing delegate cc. I can delegate everything as I do the estimate, make the notes incomplete even if I can do it. Also I can let them answer all emails and everything. I have no problem delegating everything on the back end. Thoughts? I think it should be really based upon how busy are with estimates, hiring, etc. If you are not doing any estimates, if you don't have a lot of work, you should not be delegating things to command Center. Delegation should happen after you are kind of tapping out your own capacities. So in my in my general thesis, if you're doing under 10,000amonth in revenue, you should probably only be on basic services at command center because you should likely be doing most of the email management, payroll, invoicing, scheduling yourself. Same thing is true if you have a big shop space that can accommodate office staff and you have an office person already, I. E. Your spouse that's willing to do it. Same thing. I'd probably just be doing simple services.
Tyler Kukul can you expand on your comments regarding moving to a model of Augusta growing through a credit investor funding corporate locations down the line? I recall you speaking at times on eventually moving to new franchisees only being allowed through the 3F program. Do you see these events happening around the same same time in a few years? I don't see them happening anytime soon and I don't have a timeline on them. There are thoughts that have crossed my head in terms of like making sure that people only join if they've been, if they've worked in Augusta location. The problem, the problem with that is it would basically cut out half of the people that want to join and that is people who have an existing business or would be a great operator but are never going to go work for two years at another location as an entry level person or even a manager because they already have a business doing a million dollars in revenue. And those are sometimes the best operations operators in Augusta are people that have existing businesses that between do between 5, 600,000 and a million dollars in revenue. Because when they join there's so much they can learn and like immediately cut out waste that's like extremely good for their business. And they're usually the best at giving help and support to other franchisees. So I don't think I'd ever make it where you have to be through the 3F program. I think down the road that potentially might be something that we, we do for like the solo model. You only can do the solo model if you're doing the 3F program, for example. That might be something that we do in the future. But I'm not, there's no timeline on it. I'm not planning on it in the next year or two or three even. And if I ever was planning in that direction, I would let you know in terms of the accredited investor side of things that would be in parlay in addition to the franchise side. And that would really be a matter of look, I'm never going to run ads and try to convince people to join Augusta. So it's just going to come down to how many people are wanting to join and see the value and what I want to join the community. And if I'm able to grow outside of that by forcing it myself using outside capital, I would absolutely do that. Because if I can get a 20 25% return, give half away that to investors and.
Fund the growth that way, I'd be thrilled to do so. But ultimately 2024 needs to go by and I need to prove that all the locations that we started this year ramp up and become profitable. And I have solid numbers to be able to pitch to potential investors saying hey, year one, this is what you can expect. Year two is what you can expect. Here's what I can guarantee. Etc. So I will. I would never do first, I would never do an accredited invest like any sort of investing thing without giving some sort of guarantees. Those would be low level like 4 or 5% interest, for example. So that way it's like hey, look, you're guaranteed a certain return.
But I'm not going to do that without knowing beyond the shadow of a doubt I can crush those numbers. So that's still at least a couple years away in terms of that being like a solidified growth mechanism. But it's definitely on my radar because I have full control of it. And think about from my perspective, right, Just from a money perspective, right. The most money I can make in gross revenue from a franchise location is, is $1,200 a month plus whatever I make at Command center, which is low margin and negligible. So $14,000 is basically for the whole year that I can make in gross revenue. Well after I take out all my costs and stuff. That's again, that's a gross number. So why would I not want to own a location that if in three or four years I can make it five or ten times that profit, to me that makes a lot of sense. And when you think about the fact that once you hit around a thousand locations, there's going to be constraints on just terr. I'm going to get to the point where it's like I need some space to grow and I would rather control them just being honest. Because if the goal is to change the level of professionals in the industry, assuming that all the locations that I own, I can govern the systems, P4P et cetera, et cetera, we just have way more control of the brand. And so it's definitely on my horizon. The flip side is the whole goal of Augusta is to allow other people to join and improve their businesses and become part of that. So it's not just me running them because I do believe that four or five hundred owners distributed across a thousand locations will do a whole lot more good for this industry than just me owning a thousand. And we'll get to our, our mission a lot faster if that's the case, versus just me, one person being someplace in the Pacific Northwest and not having a whole bunch of other owners, like minded people throughout the country, we achieve our, our, our goal slower if I do it by myself. That's why we've always, that's why we've done franchising. But ultimately if I, if there's capital sitting here and I'm not going to deploy that against marketing, I'm not going to deploy against like convincing people to join Augusta. I will just go start my own locations and make far more profit on a corporate location than I would a franchise location.
Tim from Mount Vernon. Is it possible in a get quote email Estimate email to have multiple links for different services. Like ones for cleanups, one's for mowing and one for fertilization. Where would we know which one they clicked on and provide an estimate for that service. Yes, you could do this. You would have to set up multiple get quote links. So multiple email links and then rename them separately. And then you would have to just tie the.
Type of email to each one differently. So it is possible. I don't recommend it because you start to distribute your focus on the one click SM email. I would rather you send more emails with one focus and really really pitch mulch and have the button for mulch really really pitch leaf service and have the button for. For leaf service. The conversion is much higher than having a whole bunch of garbled about different services and then a bunch of different links for them to click. If they want, they'll accidentally click the wrong link. Now you're offering them the wrong service and I think it's just going to be a lot of chasing your tail. So I would recommend one call to action which is click the link and one service per one click estimate. And I'd rather you send out three or four of those over the course of a couple months. Even if you're doing them every two or three weeks, it's instead of once a month. I'd rather you do that than.
Send out an email that has four services and four different estimate links in my opinion. But it is possible. You just have to make different email different email links and then connect them to different tags. And those tags would initiate different.
Estimate emails or emails. I should say. I would also say that in copilot when we have the upsell button, that's probably going to be the best thing kind of in relation to what you're thinking here because then you can just from the upsell button you'd already have all that in the back end created like which which emails are sent out based upon which service you click. So this is. That would probably be the fastest way to do it down the road.
All right, what else we got? Oh, that's it. Okay, cool. Well, hope everyone has a fantastic Monday. Make sure you sign up for conference. Make sure you vote for franchisee of the year and got to order up the trophies. So cut off. I believe it's tomorrow if I remember correctly. And see you guys tomorrow. Thanks so much. Take care.
