Mike Minutes Mastermind 09/19/2024

And we're live.

Good morning guestination. Hope you're doing amazing. Let's go ahead and get things kicked off.

I sent everyone an email yesterday as well as made a post in the Facebook group about the new training for creating your follow up system.

So please check that out. Highly recommend printing that off or at least going into Canva making that a document, making a PDF. One thing that I found helpful when you make documents like that, make it the background image on your desktop. So that's helpful. So right now my big thing is my schedule. Like I'm trying to get everything blocked correctly. So I have like these laminated like three of these and then I have it on the desktop of like all my.

On my screens. So if that's like something you struggle with in the past, like having a system for your follow up calls for then you know going even deeper. I highly recommend it. Especially as we go into the fall and the winter and leads start to fall off. It's easy to think that if your leads half that your revenue will half. That's only true if your close ratio stays constant. It's like I put the bottom of that document is if you have halving of your leads but your close ratio goes from 30% to 60%.

All of a sudden.

You have the same amount of jobs being closed as before. So highly recommend taking a look at the document. The training in on the academy about 15, 20 minutes long walks you through. How to use that how to use Loom to make a personal video. How to make use Loom to do a quote comparison or quote breakdown for a customer. And then I would text those links directly and then I'd also have a link to the estimate itself so the customer can actually accept the quote directly after watching your video. Now here's a bigger hack for you. I did not include in the video aster because it's a little bit more of a little bit 2.0 on loom. If you use Loom specifically go to the bottom on the right hand corner. Once you've made the video there's an add a link button and you can actually make a button on the video that will take them directly to the quote to accept. So you could, you could literally put click here to view the estimate proposal. They could click on it and actually it opened up their portal immediately so they wouldn't even have to have a second link in that text message. So I didn't show it yesterday because it a couple steps I just. Hey, if you just send the video breakdown I'd Be happy. But if you can, if you want to take it to the next level, there is a way to make a button. You can make it red and you literally just put the link to their secure.copilot CRM.com link and then put in there. Click here to view the proposal inside your portal and accept or something like that. And they can just from the video click that. So I do recommend.

Okay.

Let'S go ahead and jump into questions.

Cool, right?

First question is Mr. Anonymous customer called in stating the edges of his lawn is dead and due to the weeding, sculpting is too low. I think some of this is from the weed eater, but a lot of it because the customer has not seeded and this area is very shady. Do you typically replace lawn of the areas when this happens? Regardless of if you think it's your fault or just say or just to save the customer when it comes to P2Pmultiple. Okay, this is the first question. Okay, so first question. I would probably try to meet this customer in person or call them to explain things. If you just do this over email, you will get a mad customer, I guarantee it. But this happens quite often because the crew just continues to do the perimeter of a property or you know, there's like they see an area that needs weed whacking, they weed whack it and then shaded area doesn't grow very much and they over the course of time it does basically become scalps and it doesn't grow a whole lot. I think educating the customer in the fact that, hey, you might want to use some shaded seed. And you know, on the first visit we're going to go ahead and do this for free. But just so you know, this is going to be an uphill battle because there's no sunlight getting this area. But we're going to go ahead and put some use. You could literally do this in probably 10 minutes. And that is like take a bucket of seed or sorry, a bucket of soil, throw a bunch of shade seed in it, sprinkle it on that area, you're probably going to win your customer back.

So you know, if someone was like, I want you to tear out the lawn and put in new soil, you're like, look, I can't afford three grand to save a customer. In this case, you're probably going to be looking at like a few bucks. So I would recommend and you could literally do the bucket and the soil thing, go to the customer's property, explain it to them, put, put it down and they'd be happy and then they would take off that like that demerit on your end of their perception that you made a mistake when it's likely that it's not your mistake at all. It's just how the property works or how the shaded area works when it comes to PvP. Multiple employees were working on the property over the last few weeks. Do all of them get PVP removed? Yeah, this one's tough because it is more of a training thing and that is like look, if an area is shaded and it doesn't, it's not above the actual height that we're mowing the grass. Don't cut it. Like it is tough to train people to be like look, I wouldn't say it's tough too. It's a. A lot of times new team members will think that I must weed whack all areas of the property in terms of the perimeter and areas that I can't get the mower. Not true. You need to mow it only if it is in greater height than what you are mowing the lawn.

And so that's important distinction. You'll scalp it. You'll. Those areas of the lawn can get disease and infected much easier if it's always super low.

So I would. This is more of a training thing in my opinion and I would really try to focus on that.

Joel from Lafayette after seeing the drainage video, is there a plan for CC Media team to offer on demand video editing services as a full service CC task option? No, it's not. I'm thinking of finding a video editor I can send clips to for social media posts in the coming weeks. It would be cool to use someone who already knows the brand image so I don't have to explain what someone new. And I could have the digital marketing content look more similar to the existing print marketing we have. What I would recommend if you're trying to kind of create like custom content like this is download the videos out of the dashboard that you like, download some of the images that you like in terms of like the print marketing, like the brand download, then the brand guide, the brand identity parts that has all the fonts, all the colors, all the CMYK, RGB, whatever it is, codes, etc. And then send all of that to a video person and then they'll knock it out assuming you give them footage that is different.

So.

I would recommend.

Mr. Normas, what's eating expense? What? Well, what eating expenses do you write off? Grabbing something to eat while working, taking the guys out for meals, food expenses while at conferences. Yeah, I write all this stuff off. Like, if I talk about business at all and I'm eating, that food is getting written off. And there's literally not a single time that I'm, you know, gonna have dinner with somebody or.

Even eat my own food that I'm not gonna be doing business. So, yeah, like, even the food I have at my studio, my, like, my house, my apartment, there's not a moment goes by I'm not working while I'm eating. I'm gonna write it off. So I keep track of it all. Like, if I really was just eating, like, cookies while I was driving, probably wouldn't write that off. But, um, anything else, it's like I'm just using it for fuel. I need it. I'm gonna do it between meetings.

While I'm eating. I am talking to someone of business while I'm eating, I'm jotting things down. I bring my remarkable. In part, I like my remarkable because it's not LCD screen. So when I go into a restaurant, I. I can just be jotting stuff down and people don't think anything of it. They don't think you're weird.

And so it's super helpful for me. And, well, hey, if I'm like the light. Night before last. Night before last, I stayed up most of the night creating a plan. Like, and, like, all of it started my remarkable. And then I went to my laptop later and typed it all up while I was walking on my treadmill. So, like, while I'm eating, I am going to write everything off. So this also got a little bit more.

Easier to do too. I think it was in 2020 or 2021 was the new tax code. Sorry. In 2017, I think was 2017, 2018.

There was a lot of provisions around eating out and deductions, but I do keep track of it. So I have a little scanner thing and I keep track of it. Like, if I was literally just going out with, like, a friend to get ice cream or whatever, like, I'm not gonna write it off. I need to keep track of it. Mr. Anonymous, do you have some sort of partnership agreement handy you can show us? If someone was wanting to enter into a partnership on a franchise licen. So I would recommend, first off, talk to an attorney. And if the partner that you're willing to get involved with doesn't want to talk to attorney, I would not be doing a partnership with them. And then I would say.

Just, all you need to do is have an LLC.

Where both of you have a certain percentage of the Equity. And then you are in a partnership. So you can have an LLC that is a partnership and then you could just then sign, say for the franchise underneath the llc. That way it's one way to sign. And then you have, you know, president, you could have a coat. You have different titles inside of an llc. So someone could sign a, say, a franchise agreement or a lease agreement as the president of the llc, if that's the role that's been assigned to them. But then the LLC is what you have a piece of and inside of your operating agreement for the llc, you're going to define how things like distributions work, profit sharing works, et cetera. And then it just based upon the percentage there. So that's what I would recommend. Just to keep it simple. Like, LLCs are very, very flexible. That's why most people like them like you do partnerships. You can then tax them as an S corp down the road, et cetera. Okay, got some other questions. You seem very happy on Yesterday's Mastermind. Any particular reason for that? Anything you want to share? Probably because I was super low on sleep and I just create a, a plan like. So yesterday was the first time I was able to think offensively for a copilot. It's because now we have a team in place that's like extremely high level. And the day before I had listened to the engineering meeting and it's like these guys are in a different level and I, they have an extremely solid plan going into Q1 of 2025 that I'm like actually excited for because I've just been defensive like the past nine months and I still have two to three months of playing defense and I hate, I just don't do well in playing. So it was the first time I was able to think offensively for a copilot for the past nine months. And so I'm excited about that. Josh is going to share a lot with more about that with us at conference, and by then you'll have already seen a couple of things that they're working on now. So it was the first time I was ever able to think about anything offensive for nine months. I've just literally been firefighting for nine months. It's extremely exhausting.

I don't know if I can speak for everyone else, but I know when you're in a good mood, it makes me have a positive outlook. And when you're in a bad mood, oh, mercy. Well, I would, I, I, I would recommend decoupling from my, my mood because they swing pretty quickly and so.

That'S hilarious. Cool. All right, everybody, I hope you all have a fantastic Thursday.

Okay, I'll post that later, actually, in the Facebook group. Cool. All right. Have a fantastic Thursday. We'll see you all tomorrow. Take care.