Mike Minutes Mastermind 09/24/2024

Hello, Augusta Nation. Hope you're doing good. Happy Tuesday. Sorry about the lighting, but it could be worse.

So I want to make sure get these in. I did send this out a little bit sooner than usual, so you might be hopping in live several minutes after already starting. Let's go ahead and get started. Do some questions here. Really good questions yesterday by the way. Thank you for all participating. Some really good in depth ones yesterday. Projections in depth stuff. So really, really good. All right. Make sure my audio is fine.

Okay.

First one is from Coach Connor. Thoughts and feedback. Recurring bed maintenance is a higher quality issue than knowing for us and some of the issues the team brought up to us that when they come back to the property there are weeds in areas they worked in the week previously. So it's almost like they never got to move the next section before time runs out. Specifically commercial accounts.

So I'm wondering, because we may often times have to do a rotation of beds to make sure not all beds become awful, that we would have to take pictures of the complete work and show that we are making progress on the beds. It is just growing fast. Sort of like fall cleanups. You spend six hours blowing leaves but you show up next week and you cannot tell that you did any amount of progress the week before. Is taking after pictures for commercial and residential bed maintenance too micromanaging? I'm viewing it as more of an insurance play to the customer that we can show we are doing when doing this service should they have concerns just like our initial MO's. Well, I think you're going to have some pushback on this from customers mostly because when they pay for a service they expect to kind of be done from start to finish unless you are charging for a specific amount of time.

Before time runs out. So if you're actually saying, hey, we're going to weed for one hour, I make sure it's really clear in the estimates. And then I basically when they complain say, hey, here's the picture from last time we did do service.

You have an hour on the schedule, which means most of the time we'll be able to get everything done. But during peak season it's going to be more. So do you want to either a, we can add two hours to the time for these few months or just across the board, let's add an hour and a half. So that way we it's going to be a slightly higher cost per month, but you know, we'll have more time to chip away at the project. So I do think if you're not completing A job to finished like completion, you kind of got to take a picture. You're just going to save yourself hassle and customers complaining. I would recommend that. And then your crew just tell them hey look, to avoid yourself getting a yellow slip, take a picture when you hit time so that you can prove that the job was done and we can back you up when the customer calls in to say you didn't do anything. That's how I'd kind of pitch it. But now usually I don't like doing per hour. Like, like hey we'll, we'll weed for one hour. I like to say, hey, we will weed the service, we will weed the property. And then I increase the number of budget hours. That is the price to, to accommodate the fact that I need to get all the job like the whole job done. Because otherwise it just leads to complaints. Even if it's in the estimate, even if you take pictures, like people just complain. The nice thing about winter services is because the weeds aren't growing very much, you can stay on top of it. Because the bushes aren't growing fast, you can stay on top of it. But if you're doing that throughout the growing season, that is a tough one. I don't think I've, I've tried to get away from those on in my locations.

Chad from Valparaiso. I'm looking for some direction on driving light installations to my website through my Google business page. Are we able to add a second website to that account or do we need to make a new Google business profile? Also will Google flag an account if the address is the same for two businesses? Okay, so I've been doing a bunch of research on this. I do not believe those latter is true but Google is making a lot of changes right now and I wouldn't put it beyond them to make this change change. The reason they haven't done the passage is that a lot of business that do share the same address and from everything I can tell they will not penalize you to start a second Google account. I would mostly the reason I like the idea of keeping the same business profile is because it ranks year round and you don't have to build up the credibility for the like one season. You don't have to keep it warm like with posts and answering questions and like updating it year round. So it's more a matter of like I want to have great ranking. I would probably just change my name to like Augusta Lawn Care and lights of whatever. I would change my logo when I know I'm pitching Lights. And for the vast majority of my services I'd probably just change the logo to be Augusta with Max with his hat on instead of just his regular face. I'd make just a few tweaks to make it very clear like hey, this is lawn care and Christmas lights. And I change my website. And based on all the evidence I, I found, I've dug in this a bunch. Google does not penalize you for changing your business name, changing your logo or changing your contact details. I have found when you change your address, that is when they will, they will ask for verification. So that's based upon me. I did a lot of research in this and based on what we see at for the locations and for even longer web design, you can change just about everything with your address without getting too much scrutiny, including their business name, which is kind of crazy. But Mr. Anonymous, it'd be really nice for the franchise to put up guidelines regarding marketing and how much to spend. Sorry. At every level of business, grand opening, budgets, etc. Maybe this could include a breakdown or formula of how much you should spend to be able to hit the revenue goals you want at every season. I sometimes feel like we are spending a lot in marketing, but in hindsight it might not be enough for proper brand penetration. I think this would be, would give us a tangible benchmark to be able to base how much we are spending versus should be spending. Yeah. So.

My trouble with this is I have seen in the past I gave more guidelines and then someone's like, well I need to spend the money and that's why it's not working. And then they spend the money and then come to find out they spent it really, really poorly. So I much rather would say like here, here's my customer acquisition cost, I'm willing to spend. Here's then therefore my lead, my cost per lead. Now I'm going to track that on Google, I'm going to track it on Facebook, I'm going to track on my every door, direct mail, my door hangers and then I'm just going to beat that number and I'm going to spend my budget up until I like. Because if you increase your budget, your customer acquisition costs will go up, your cost per lead will go up. And so it's more a matter of like how much are you willing to spend? It's not a matter of budget, it's more a matter of how much are you willing to spend per customer? Because that number will slowly go up as you increase your budget. And so I'm much more inclined like what am I willing to spend? Customer acquisition wise? And I get training. I talk about like a crazy $200 customer acquisition cost as the benchmark for all growth. And I use that as a very conservative number because most, the vast majority will beat that number but still stop spending money because they feel like it's not working. But even the math we talk about in the examples at training, I use $200 customer acquisition cost as the formula for growth. And they spent like I spent like $20,000 on my initial marketing spend and got 200 customers. Sorry, 100 customers. That's a $200 customer acquisition cost. So 100 customers, $20,000 marketing spend. The vast majority of people though will get disheartened with that kind of spend and stop marketing and spending the money and then wonder why they only get 30 or 40 customers. It's like, well, you only spent six to $8,000 in the marketing, so it's much more a matter of like, figure out your customer acquisition cost and then divide that out of your budget and you should be able to come up with how many customers you should be having. And then it's a matter of did I not, did I get the customers? But then I had a horrible fulfillment and like horrible customer service and I kept making mistakes and I lost a third of the customers by the time I hit my three to four months benchmark. That's also another thing to keep in situation, especially when you're new to the industry. We've seen the first three, four months, you just make mistakes. And so even though your customer acquisition cost might pencil out and you're actually really doing well because you're churning literally 10% of your customer base every single month. You get to the end of your, you know, six month launch and 30, 40, 50% of your customers are gone. And so it looks like on paper, like you're not making, you're basically treading water. So there's just so many. I definitely would like to give this, but it'd become like a three way, like churn. Customer equity cost and budget would be like, it'd be a, like, I really believe it's like what's your budget, what your, what are you willing to pay per customer? And then track your, you know, reduce your churn as much as possible.

And that framework is usually more accurate. But I will think about this a little bit because I could probably do this, but there's so many, there's so many variables because like the average ticket, some locations in Augusta per month is around 100 bucks. For smaller lawns. And they have a lot of bi weekly mows. Others, their average ticket is almost $300 per mowing customer. Also, it has to do with the lifetime value customer because if you can sell them into winter services, you can almost double their lifetime value of the customer. And if you can sell them one other upsell again, you can triple the lifetime value of that customer. And so now I'm willing to spend a lot more. If I can increase the lifetime value of my customer from $3,000 to $8,000, I'm willing to spend twice as much. So there's so many variables and sometimes people, they'll just be like, well, you said to spend this much and I'll get this many customers. Like, well, yeah, but your churn tolerable. You're spending money in all the wrong places. You're spending money on Google when it's $300 per lead, when you can literally go do door hangers and you're getting at 50 like. So I'm calling cautious sometimes, like give absolutes because I just don't want to set false expectations of like, if you just spend this, you will get this many customers. Yes. If you also do these 10 things, including great customer service, you don't have massive churn. You actually are optimizing your ads and then tracking which ones are performing well and diverting money towards the ones that are working. So I just don't want to give absolutes because it leads to false expectations. And yeah. Lawrenceville. As an owner with multiple employees under you, how do you deliver what your day with meetings that everyone thinks their issue is the most important. Let me think about this one second. As owner with multiple employees under you, under you, how do you schedule your day with meetings? That everyone thinks their issue is the most important.

Does really depend on the size of the business. So if you have a few employees, most of the time you want to be doing this asynchronously, which is if you have a problem, send me a voice note on WhatsApp.

When you start getting larger, then you're gonna have to start time blocking stuff. And then usually you will find out when you time block stuff, people figure out like 80% of their problems without you saying anything.

And so like even in the past week, like on Copilot's Facebook group, for example, there has been four times where posts have come in the past week where like it seems like this big blow up and this big mistake. And then literally by the time the support team reaches out to them, like, oh, we figured it out. And so like there's so many times this will happen with team members as you grow. And sometimes just putting time between your reaction and their problem, literally they figure out problems to figure out the solution themselves. And when they do that enough times, they start to just not come to you because they know they'll be able to figure it out. And then you time block when you can actually she address them once a week, twice a week, whatever it might be, or even morning meetings, for example. And then anything that they didn't figure out they can bring up to you. And much more efficient that way. But you don't need to do that at the beginning, I would say up until you have eight employees, like just focus on asynchronous communication. It's the most efficient because asynchronous means there's no prep time, there's no getting to the office, there's no like holding, holding up and holding everyone else on the team stopping to address an issue that has nothing to do with them. Asynchronous communication is like usually the most efficient. And then the longer you can do that, usually the more efficient if your time is just going to be honestly.

Okay, what's happening here?

Cool.

Okay, so we got.

So rather than making a new profile, change the current one. This is not working. My wife not being good. He said rather than making a new profile, I should change the current one to fit the season.

I would try that. Ideally that's what I would do. So your SEO is higher, you don't to manage a second profile, etc and I think you just change your business name, change your logo, change your website. And again we are on the lawn care side tying over to the lights. So even if, if there's like a little bit of gap.

Sorry. But yeah, I would say you can change your logo, change the name of your business, change if you want. But again, the lawn care site will tie your lights. So there's a little bit of a crossover. I would probably have it just pointing to the lights or sorry to the Augusta lawn care site. So, all right, looks like my wi fi is going to kick me off. So we're going to call it. But we got all the questions done. So that's it. Thank you all. We'll see you tomorrow. Have a great Tuesday. Take care.