Mike Minutes Mastermind 09/18/2024

Augusta Nation. Welcome to another Mike minutes Mastermind.

Let's go ahead and get this party started later today. You're going to be getting a bunch of training. I'll post in the Facebook group. It'll be in the academy, it'll be in the dashboard and it's basically going to be this document here which I'll add again, a lot of training to. There'll be documents in Canva that you'll be able to edit. This document.

Is essentially a way for you to. You'll be able to customize everything over here. Well, you can literally customize every single aspect. The bottom line is as your close ratio and or weeks that you're booked out changes, your follow up strategy should also change. And I know I've seen some people struggle to create systems around this simply due to the fact that. Oh wait a second, I did put this in the Facebook group. Sick. What did I send? Give me one second guys.

Oh man, did I send the wrong link out?

Sick. Sorry guys. Give me one second.

Give me one, one second.

One. One.

Is always. Okay, we're good, we're good, we're good, we're good. Okay, cool. Facebook group.

It's coming, it's coming, it's coming. Content live copy get shareable link. All right, Facebook group. Boom. It's like, why is no one in here? All right, now we're good. 18, 20, 24. Boom. Okay, so, so you set up that event on this Wednesday.

All this will be editable but we need to have a strategy in place and I've seen some people struggle with okay, when do I follow up more? When do I Like you do not want to be doing a ton of follow up. If you're booked out two months and people are literally canceling on you because you can't put them on the schedule. There's no reason to be doing like a whole bunch of follow up and spending your time. You should be spending your time and doing the work so you don't have as long and like hiring and like removing the actual bottleneck because it's not leads so.

You'll be able to edit this. How this kind of works though is say for example, if you want to do it based on weeks booked out, you say hey, for four weeks are booked more booked out. We're just going to send the estimate basically right. Command center is probably going to do this part for you. If we're three weeks booked out or less, we're going to send it out and then we're also going to do a follow up phone call. If our two weeks booked out, then we're going to do send it. We're going to do follow up phone calls but we're also going to send them a personalized video. I'm going to walk you through how to do all of these in the training coming later today and then if we're less than one week we're going to do all three of these things. Plus I'm going to follow up with a loom quote breakdown and I'm going to show you again how to do this as well. So you'll be able to customize however you want to and then you'll be able to edit it based on even seasonality. So it'll be completely customizable to how you want to run things.

So again, training is coming out. The CANVA document's coming out later today and I'll have training on how to get loom and how to use it to make a personalized video, how to make it to share your screen and do a quote breakdown. So all that is coming later today.

Lets jump into some questions.

Why is there two of these?

There we go. Cool. All right, what have we got today? We got seven questions come in. Let's go.

First one's from Ricardo. Hey Mike. Idea for cc I think be beneficial to introduce a system for CC to do OTP for Christmas lights where they measure the front roof line for linear feet. All extras will do manually but to have that draft estimate set, cut down on the time to get the estimate out. Don't think it'll take longer than measuring a lawn. I agree. This is just not what we're going to do this season. So this is a fantastic idea. We will do this next winter. This year I am focusing primarily on driving leads. This is the SEO. This is what we're working on. The website side of things, the branding, getting the trademarks, et cetera, we're going to execute really well on this upcoming season. Now more than half of Augusta Nation is doing Christmas lights. Cool. We're working quite a bit on the winter services side as we had training come out last week. For those who are not doing Christmas lights next year on my list I have to be able to sell winter services via Instant quote. I have to be able to do snow services via instant quote on the website and also to be able to train command center on OTP for Christmas lights. So it is on the list but just not happening this season. I agree with you. It would be beneficial and I know that it would be nice to be able to just have them sell it right on the phone. This will this would be a huge retraining effort that we will not knock out of the park this year. We need to stay focused on a massive amount of organization and training happening on the phones for command center and that is our focus. We're not missing calls. That's the focus was this year. Not missing calls, not having a massive backlog. Estimates going out super late. We nailed that this year. Now it's a matter of we're taking our existing team retraining massively tons of game day footage on organization to make sure that larger locations can scale using command center and they don't have to get an office person. That's our focus. And so this will be next year though it is on the docket.

Number two is from Dustin from Champaign Winter Services Ads Question we are going to try a couple of approaches including text with before and after picture of cleanups and snow removal on a carousel. Likely some videos of snow removal or blowing leaves. Do you think that a video myself walking through average cost with comparison is worth advertising with or is it that too in the weeds for people scrolling Facebook? Also we are going to run a separate ad with just a picture of the price comparison and see how it does. Okay, I'm interested to see how just the picture of the price comparison does. It is gonna be very very fine. Small print people aren't usually gonna see that. What I would recommend if you're gonna do a video on winter services is take the video that I made about kind of the comparison of the different prices. But this is what I would do. Okay. I would just print off.

Watch what I do with some of my videos where I print off a one word on a eight and a half by 11 and I would print off all of those for winter services and I'd stick them up against the wall. This is all you're going to get. And here's the price. Bam. Do it in like red text. There's the dollar amount. Okay, here's what would cost if you did winter one fall cleanup. A couple snowplows and a full cleanup. Boom. Here's the price. Here's what you're saving. If you want to save that, click below. Get your property looking good all all winter long throughout the holidays. So I would just focus on big font. Big font. That's my only like hey, I would love to see how the ad the separate ad runs with just the picture. Very interested to see that. We will be testing a lot of this sort of stuff at the Bellingham shop. So I don't have a definitive answer what works and what doesn't. But I know that a video if you're going to do video big letters, starting off with here's how you can get your properties looking great throughout the off season and save $700. Boom, boom, boom. I'm doing big, big sheets of paper with big font as as the comparison there. If I'm doing a video, the text, as you, as you've pointed out, it can be pretty straightforward in terms of save. Here's what like, here's the hook. It's like homeowners in this area, you're going to save this much money and your property's going to look good all winter long. And then in your picture you are showing things like before and afters. You're showing what is cheaper. Like, I would take like the before picture and put like this cost $1,500. This cost $700 and like the side that looks good is $700.

So there's a lot of creative ways you can do this. Definitely as you guys are running ads, share them as, as we make them at like the Bellingham shop and Mount Vernon shop, I'll be sharing those too. But just like the more creative ideas you can create on this, in my opinion, and run small bits of ads against on Facebook, I think that's the better strategy here. And so if you can spend two hours, make 10 different videos and have different concepts, those will perform way, way better. And especially if you do it in like your local market. Like I could make these videos and I will make these videos that you could use kind of across the board. However, I do believe this being done in like somewhere in your local area that people know is local would do even better.

So yeah, I'm really looking forward to seeing how the ads actually run and perform as well because we've never actually gone on the offensive. We've just always just tried to convert like pick up the scraps of converting recurring customers. Dustin from Champagne, Is there a benchmark percentage for how many people should be on recurring service instead inside your database? Probably depends on number of years in business as well as marketing spend while in business. Reason I'm curious is we currently service about 20% of our database in Champaign with recurring revenue, but around 14% in Bloomington. Yeah, it's just because your Bloomington one is older, like been around longer. Doesn't seem like much of a difference, but seeing feels like it. And if we should be farming our database in spring for mowing to existing database customer would how would you approach that? Yeah, so like as your location grows you're gonna get tons of leads inside your database. So it's a good thing though because your one click estimate emails your bulk texts are going to get more leads. It's not like it's a bad thing. Just yeah, just as your location grows a less and less percentage of your contacts will be paying recurring customers. Very common.

Lee Park Reminder Christmas Lights webinar with Certified lights is September 18th today folks. 6:00pm Eastern Standard Time, 3:00pm Pacific Standard Time. This is free. Ashley and her team are a great resource for all your questions. Fantastic. If you want to get there, you're going to go to go on the Academy, go to Winter tracks, go to Christmas Lights. Boom. Takes you right there. You can also just go to Augusta. Was it now? Oh, it's blank Augusta.

I Forget. Augusta Light Supply.com I forget. Okay, now I'm blanking. I apologize. If you follow what I just said, you'll get to where I just talked about. Sorry it was a short night. All right, next question is from Ken Lynn. My growth fee is due in March of 2025. Do I need to pay it before January to get the twelve hundred dollar month fee for ten years? Also, when I originally signed up for the growth fee it was $15,000. Now it's $22,000. How does that work for me and those who get in the franchise with solo first and then the fee goes up. Yeah. So it's always when you join that is always what the fees are. It's a snapshot in time when you join. Here's the fees. So talk with Lee if you've already talked with them or Nick owner Success Manager highly recommend that they will get you on a plan. We have been able to convert almost everyone over smoothly. So please just stay in touch with them. That's all I ask. But it is a matter of like when you join that's the fees that you're gonna be paying. So please talk with them and they'll make sure they get you on a plan and make sure you're comfortable with it. Mr. Anonymous, I spoken recently with an ex Augusta member who said they have spoken with 30ish members who contact him out concerns and question about possibly leaving Augusta Nation. Maybe we've all had those questions and concerns at one point or another, but my question to you is how do you go about encouraging Augusta members? What are the similar ways we can express our concerns and have you give us positive feedback and encouragement that staying with Augusta is best for them. So this is going to be constant. Any decision you make in life, you're going to have level of questions about it. And so first off, I would say that someone has left Augusta. None of them, I would say, do I have anything negative against. There are several members that came to last training out in Louisville and Jason had asked me about them. That's fine.

But ultimately, everyone has to make a decision as to whether or not Augusta is the right choice for them. We built differentiatives in a way that people can leave at any time, and we've done that because if someone decides there's less value in joining Augusta and being with Augusta than being by themselves, that's fine. Only thing I cannot focus on this. I cannot focus on. I cannot control the uncontrollable. I can't fight ghosts. I can only deal with what's being put in front of me. And that's why we've surveyed owners every single quarter. And we take action on every single item. Every single one is addressed. Our net promoter score at Augusta is 57. And if you want to look that up, that's extremely good. So I will not fight ghosts. I will not fight words like this that I cannot control. What I can control is feedback. And we have multiple channels of gain feedback for command center, there's a direct form that goes directly to Liz and every single one is addressed. There is surveys every quarter that I we go over as a leadership team and then we address every single one. And each of those has action items that we then execute on over the next quarter. If you look at I can only control what I can control. And so the thoughts and opinions of people, I can't control that. What I can do is take feedback and execute on it. So the things that have been given in the surveys, every single one has been executed on. And every single time I see someone not doing well, whether every time I see a coaching call where I see someone struggling, I am asking, what can we do to fix that? So, for example, this, today's training is a direct response to me seeing people having faulty systems of close ratio because it fluctuates throughout the year based upon if you have tons of work or not, you need to have a system for that. Last week's training on winter services and selling that, that is for the people that do not have Christmas lights. And so the massive effort going towards Christmas lights is to fix the problem of Q4 collapse. So my job as a franchisor, as the leader of the community, is to Fix every problem that would cause any of us to go out of business. This is the best thing for the business owner. This is also the best thing for the franchisor because the franchisor only stays in business as long as each of us stay in business because we do not have a royalty. I'm not encouraging anyone to grow revenue simply because we get more money. I don't make any more money because of Augusta Lights.

If you go get more revenue, you would all question if I said, hey, everybody would go to Augusta Lights and pour money into saying, go get started and generate more revenue if I was getting a royalty. I don't get any more money by you making more money in Q4. It cost us a lot of money to go through the trademark process, the legal process, build all the websites, create the infrastructure in the back end. It does take us a lot. And all of that is just adding more and more value. I can only add more value. This is the equivalent of your customer saying, hey, I was talking to some people down the street and they're not really liking. They've heard from other people that the quality of your service is going down. It's like, look, I can't control that. I'm going to survey my customers, I'm going to ask for reviews, I'm going to quality control and do spot checking to make sure it's good quality. And then I'm just going to get better every single day. So I cannot promise perfection at Augusta. I can promise the number one value of Augusta Nation, which is constant improvement. And you can fault me for not being perfect 100%. You cannot fault me for not having a spirit of constant improvement and taking what feedback is given to me and acting on it. And so there is exactly zero people have ever given feedback at Augusta Nation. That's critical. That has not been responded to, that has not been addressed, that has not resources given out to, etc. And that's all I can control. And that will be to continue to be the spirit of Augusta Nation forever. And if that doesn't align with someone, that's fine. If they see more value outside of Augusta Nation, that's fine. I was constantly add more and more value to what we have inside the community and what we can do together. And I believe that'll have a long term impact on the industry. That's why we do what we do.

Landon Smith from Tallahassee. I watched a recent video on retaining good team members. One thing you always talk about is being the first and last one to leave. How do you recommend a GM do this when running out of a storage unit? That's a good question. I actually was thinking about this last night. In the video you said you should just push off your computer stuff until the end of the day for the office. But that's not really something I'd just be doing in my storage unit. So I get up first, so I get showing up first. That's pretty self explanatory. But for meeting back at the end of the day, I normally have to, have to time it just right to meet my guys back at the shop. Sometimes they meet me there. It's not really worth their time to wait on me to get to get there to meet. Wanted to hear how you handle this. Thanks for everything you do. Yeah. So if you're, if you are, if the crew leaves out before you at the end of the day, that's fine. They know you're out still working and assuming that you have conveyed that, that you're on the truck or you're doing estimate, that's fine. What I don't personally like is and I made sure never happened when I was in daily operations was someone getting back late because of most of the time a scheduling issue or under budgeted job, et cetera. Them going back at 7, 8 o' clock at night and no one's there. That's very demoralizing. Especially if they don't know where you're at. They just assume that literally everyone got off at 2 or 3 o' clock and they've been working all this time out in the field by themselves. Like they'll build this narrative and I want to just prevent that. And so back when I was at the shop all the time Liz was at the shop, we would both stay until many times six, seven o' clock at night simply because there's one or two guys that maybe something went wrong in their day. A customer took way longer, a job took way longer and we're just going to stay there until everyone's gone. And yeah, that costs you extra money if you have a general manager and it's going to be harder to like. It'll be better if your general manager is watching this. You, you will what you, what you lose in an extra, let's just call it few hours a month that you have to stay. Those later days you will save in retention of employees, buy in from team members and not having to retrain new people all the time because of massive churn. And so.

Yeah like it is, it is a huge unlock from a morale standpoint And a lot of times people wonder like so all of a sudden someone didn't show up to work. A lot of times if you trace it back, they were just.

They were just working. They just worked a super long day and they got back to the office when no one was there. I've seen that many, many times. All of a sudden they just don't show up to work. It's like you trace it back. A job went way over scheduled. They didn't make P4P, they had a huge yellow slip. They get back to the shop and no one was there. So.

How will CC handle calls coming in for winter services OTP based on MO price or drive buys? This is a good question. I briefly mentioned this with Liz.

And.

We will likely do these as drive bys. I'll have a final answer on this Dustin next week for you because I know people are going to actually be trying to market new for winter services. It's nothing. We've never handled that before. We want to be careful because keep in mind when sometimes when you have mowing customers and they're going into winter services, you'll say, hey, I'm going to give them the weekly price even though I'm going bi weekly because their, their lot is just so small. So I've seen some people do that. And so sometimes it doesn't make sense to the customer. If they're buying winter services, they're like, let us measure your property. Sometimes there's a bit of a gap there. It's also a matter of training command center reps. Like if someone's asking for like they saying my trip, I need my bushes trimmed. Can I get winter services? We're thinking bush trimming. So I think it would probably be good too from a drive by perspective because you don't know the quality, the condition of the property. And a lot of times if someone's buying winter services, I do believe an initial cleanup would be required because they're like, oh, it's overgrown. You're like, hey, let's clean it up. And then, then you like really? Winter service is an upsell. It is. Let's maintain the house because if you, if you have a property that needs of an entire day's worth of work, they're going to be unsatisfied. If you just show up the first time and do 40 minutes of work, they will 100% be unsatisfied. I do believe it's a service that is a drive by or at least or even an in person to be able to sell them on. Hey, here's winter services. Let's get your property looking good first and then this will maintain it for the rest of the season.

Cool. Send all the questions. I.

I might have accidentally. One second minutes.

Oh, that's it. Cool. All right. Very good. Cool. That's all I got. I will have the training out later today on the. The close ratio stuff and showing how to use loom. I know for some people that might seem daunting, so I'm gonna actually show how to do it and I think be super helpful to have that system in place. All right. Love you all. Have a fantastic day. Stay in touch.