Mike Minutes Mastermind 09/25/2024

Alrighty, welcome everyone.

Back in the office. Let's go ahead and get this thing kicked off. We got seven questions came in today.

All right.

First one is coming from coach Connor. A good friend of mine is a grainy grounds guys operator. He's doing 1 million plus so he was allowed in a conference call with the entire neighborly brand. They have about 2600 operators across their brand space and they're saying that old fashioned marketing such as eddm, doorhangers, flyers is currently performing better than online advertising like Google. They're saying it's because a lot of people are starting to turn away from social media, are taking breaks from social media because of how polarizing it has gotten. What are your thoughts and opinion on this? So the first, there's two different assumptions. The first assumption I think is very, very market based.

In terms of where what markets perform better. Like I know that in my Bellingham market when we're getting customers for $30 a lead, that's gonna be tough for me to beat on doing door hangers and actually scaling the door hanger situation because it takes a lot more of my time. I can run ads and go passively, whereas if I'm running campaigns or door hangers, it's gonna be tough to beat 30 bucks per lead just because of labor. The print cost and then managing that's always the biggest cost that people don't take into account is managing it. So I'm not saying it's always better though because if that cost also goes to 70 or 80 door hangers probably make more sense in my market. So I would say the first assumption is very market based. The second one I think is ludicrous. Look at the data. People are using social media more than ever before and they will continue to use it more. So yes, people are taking away, taking breaks from social media, but their breaks for a reason, they come back to it. So I don't believe that social media is going anywhere. I don't believe people are going to use their digital devices any less. The idea that that's going to happen is very, very old fashioned in my opinion. So like whether or not you agree with it or whether or not you're one of those people or we all have, you know, friends and family have done that as a whole. People are using the Internet more, they're using social media more. Every single day, millions of users join these platforms. And so I think it's somewhat naive to think that somehow that's going, that, that that trend is going to reverse.

So yeah, we all we, we will all have like specific individual cases like oh my friend did they took a social media fast for a month or like they deleted Facebook or they deleted Instagram or whatever and like they're back, they're back.

So.

And I actually believe it's our target audience is the growing market. Like most teens don't download Facebook. They'll do something. They might do Instagram like Snapchat, TikTok, etc. But like our target market I think are embracing Facebook more than ever before because most of them don't have as much of an addiction. So they'll read the headlines about it and they'll get more concerned and worried but they'll still download it. So I just follow that data. Whether or not, you know, whether this is tied to neighborly or not doesn't really matter. So. Ricardo from Alexander Hey Mike's A thought for window services I know we market as pay the same price as you are now for mowing for XYZ services. If the point is to be on the fence of which services why not charge a flat rate to be there for an hour? Example $75 per hour BI weekly or 150 per month for XYZ services from December to March. There's upside and downsides depending if bi weekly mowing prices are higher than the hourly rate. But just thought also how would you word this in the customer understand and see the value I I will be attaching the price comparison sheet to the opt out email to make the decision easier for the customer. Let me know if this makes sense or not. Yeah, so the whole point here is I agree with your sentiment. There's like 10 ways you can skin winter services in terms of pricing. The ability to be able to sell existing customers the same price and it fits into their budget alleviates the whole idea of having to explain things to people. So it's like hey, we stay there for the exact same time we would spend there for mowing and it costs you the same amount because in their mind if you tell them it's 75 bucks an hour they're probably going to balk. Or even you know, for me, like if I told someone we're going to charge you $100 per hour for winter, they freak out. But if I say hey, it's the same price as winter as your mowing service and it is.

Here let me swap these and it and we're going to be there same amount of time as we promoting they can unconceptualize those without me having to give away my hourly rate.

And you know, adjust pricing in any way. So I think potentially to new customers you could potentially do this. But in general, most customers, if you told them $100 an hour were charging for their mowing services, they'd freak out. So. But they won't freak out when we get there. We do it for $50 and we're in and out of there and we're efficient and professional so.

Mr. Anonymous, comparison is often the thief of joy. However, it is sometimes hard to compare yourself to others, especially in this hyper connected community like ours. Any tips to stop comparing myself to others? Can you give me a mindset shift? Yeah, like the best, the best.

Mindset shift on this one is like comparison is not the thief of joy. Judging yourself based upon the comparison is what creates.

A.

Drain on your joy. But comparison itself is actually super healthy. It tells you where you're at compared to others. It tells you who's winning and who's losing. Comparison is not the theme of joy. If you judge yourself based upon the comparison now you've made the next step that then will create usually anxiety, stress and negative emotions. And so I would say comparison is ability for me to benchmark where I'm at compared to the average. It allows me to benchmark myself against who's winning. It allows me to get benchmark myself against my past comparison extremely helpful. I'm just not going to judge myself because I'm not as far along as I thought I would be. I'm not going to judge myself because someone else is ahead of me. It just proves that I can get there. Like if someone else is better than me and someone else has built a better product, some of bigger business that makes more money than me, it proves it to me, to me that it is possible. And so I will compare consistently and all the time and the lack that I feel will likely drive me to become better. And so comparison can actually be a huge source of inspiration and motivation for you to come better. I do not believe comparison is a thief of joy in any way, shape or form is the judgment of that in a negative perception because that same comparison could be taken in a positive light and say oh man, that means it's possible. Oh man, I'm way behind. I've got to keep working harder. Like I got to make this happen. It's possible and I just need to close the skill gap between where I'm at and where they're at right now.

Mr. Anonymous, this is a follow up question, the comparison question, but just submitted. I do compare myself with others. However, I also get upset at myself for not being further along the process of business and life. I've learned a lot this year and have a lot to implement next spring rush. However, I'm a little bit annoyed at myself as it seems like I've had to relearn things I should have already known. It's kind of demoralizing at times. I know life and business is not linear though. Maybe it's just me having to come across with life's ups and downs. Maybe things are going to take a lot longer to accomplish than previously imagined. Legend I'm just demoralized from not being where I wanted to be at this point. When I first started my business. Yeah, like the first, the fifth year in. I guess to be the fourth year in business, I lost more money than I did my first year of business.

And fifth year I made a little more. But then it was the sixth year, it started like, like very, very profitable. That's when we switched to P4P, et cetera in the middle of year five.

And again, this is goes back to like I didn't care Paris and is not the thief of joy because if you compare yourself to everyone else's walk the the game of business, they actually have thought the same thing. And if you compare yourself to realize that you're probably actually doing pretty decent is if you compare yourself, it's like, what. What group are you comparing yourself to? Make you make yourself feel better, get around a bunch of new.

You know, poor people. Like, all of a sudden you will feel very rich. All of a sudden you will feel very accomplished. So it's the frame that you're looking at. And social media allows us to suddenly have eyes on the 0.001% of the population in health, fitness, looks, money, et cetera. And so all of a sudden it becomes very like, oh man, it's all around me and I don't have it. It's like, no, you're literally looking at the 0.001%. And if you want what they have, then it's a matter of, let's look at their story because I guarantee you every single one of them had this exact same story. And that is like, there were times that they felt demoralized. There are times that they felt like a quitter. They feel. There are times like they feel like they wanted to quit. They feel like they weren't measuring up. They were insufficient. They were, they were lacking and they were falling behind. Like every single one has that story. And so it is a Matter of like they kept like you would not know them today. You would not, you know, look up to them, quote unquote as that 0.001% in their field if they did not get through that time. And so the difference between the people who make it and the people who are simply the ones who are able to withstand the pain and the pressure and the demoralizing feelings that you're currently feeling. And so if you want that, you will have to get through these feelings.

Because most people will quit right now.

Thomas001 I'm debating on purchasing my first condo or townhome to live in. I've been renting my whole life and I certainly could have paid off a home at this point. For context, rent is usually 2k ish for a 2 bedroom and I don't plan on leaving the area anytime soon. Places I'm concerned be 2 to 3k ish per month after mortgage fees and so on. Financially I could afford the 3.5% down without breaking the bank. 1. If I find something that could use little work, unfinished vision, would you recommend moving forward? I have the knowledge to do this type of work. Okay. 2. Would you recommend waiting until rates come down or some other perfect time? Would you consider this getting distracted from the business or and. Or jumping ahead on the path is path Stages of wealth Appreciate brother. Yeah, so I specifically in the stages of wealth left out a personal home because I do feel it is.

Not linked to the stages of wealth a personal home because it's a personal decision. All right. Now.

In terms of this, like if you bought a house in the middle of 2005 when everything was in Boomtown, it would be almost 50% less than it would be worth today.

So as long as you assume that that trend is going to continue, which it's not always, it has the potential to stop if like population in the United States starts to decline. It happens to be that everyone is trying to get into our country right now. So I don't think that's going to be a problem for the foreseeable future. But like the the cost of real estate will continue to go up as long as in the population of the United States continues to go up and as long as we continue to make it hard to build because there'll be a, there'll be more demand than there is supply. And so this is what causes the real estate market to go up is because like if you made it really easy to build, you wouldn't have a, you would have way more supply of housing Also if you had way less demand, I. E. Less people trying to get into our country and we produce less babies, then we would ultimately have a collapse in.

In our population. And that would also damper the demand for, for housing, which would bring the housing costs down. This is the problem they're having in Japan. They've had it for a long time. This is the, the looming problem that China is going to face over the next couple decades is a very, very aging population and a declining population.

As like a recipe for housing disaster. And so what you're seeing right now is in China is a result of that. A lot of their real estate is down 40, 50%. This is something we don't talk about for some reason in the United States. A lot of their, a lot of their real estate down like between 30, 40, 50% right now. The average net worth of their, their household has gone down, I think it was like 60 grand in the past year because so much of their wealth is held up in real estate. So there are times that things can turn very quickly in real estate as we've seen at, in multiple bubbles throughout history. But even like right now, it's happening in China. I recommend like look up Evergrande, look up what's happened to China, China's real estate bubble right now that it was like the sure fire way to invest was put your money into real estate, buy condos even if you don't live there because like everything's going up, up, up, up. It's for so long there. And so you want to be careful of that. Do I think that in 20 or 30 years that those condos that they're, that are currently.

Overpriced there will probably be worth more potentially as long as people keep wanting to move to the big cities, move China probably still happen. So.

Like in terms of buying a house, sorry, I gotta cut off a little track there. If you find something that's unfinished, you can add value to it. That'd be super big. I think if, if I was you, Thomas, I'd probably be doing, I was looking for something. You could have a value add too, where you get in you, you could spend your weekends, you could spend your off season a little bit improving the place, increasing the value by 50, 60 grand by making some improvements. Maybe you put 10 grand in of cash, you put a bunch of sweat equity and you improve the house value by 50, 60,000 and then you'd be basically being patient. What are you doing in the meantime? Until the interest rates do come down, you probably refinance the house, get all that money back. If you've increased, improve the value of the house. Assuming that the market stays strong, interest rates come down. I talked about with Lee this morning, he'll put up the pod soon about this in depth about what happens with interest go down. Everyone assumes, oh, that means everyone's gonna keep buying stuff more. Also keep in mind people have not been moving for the past two or three years because interest rates. And so because of that, what it can do is now interests go down, they're like, oh, now we can move because we can't afford to move. And then everyone tries to sell. You increase the, the.

Saturation of sellers and that causes a collapse. So right now like the reason the real estate market is pretty propped up is because no one's selling their house. The inventory is extremely low and if you have, if you have supply constrained, price will go up through the roof. And that's what's happened over the past couple years. But, but on the flip side, if you bring interest rates, people can afford more house, they can go buy a house. So like, well then wouldn't you have more buyers and more, more sellers then yes. And then that was a market rip. So like that's one thought. The other thought though is that people that have not been selling the house for the past two or three years are suddenly like, okay, now we can afford to move, let's go ahead and sell. That increases the inventory, which would then really dampen the market. So I can see either of those scenarios playing out.

Dustin from Champaign, hope that your day's off to a fantastic start. All right, thank you. Dustin, I got two questions for you today. First one is I think you said you would show an example of how to screen record an iPad and sell winter service with a video. I'm not sure if I missed this or not, but I'm going to start Monday selling all 300 plus mowing customers in both locations. If you can point me in the right direction, that would be awesome. Yes. Next week, Dustin. Unfortunately not gonna be my Monday. The media team is putting together like ads for winter services, actually sell them and then one of those videos is going to be me actually explaining to customers. Um, that being said, there is already videos in the folder of me doing the price comparison. It's just not an ad format. So like the price comparison, the one I made in the folder would, you can send it to customers. Now I pull up the thing, I do the iPad, I show the comparison as an example. But what I'm going to do Next week, probably available the week after for everyone is make a video that you could do for an advertisement. So it's not going to be an iPad sharing. It's going to be more of like a things on a whiteboard. Here's the two prices. This is what you save in less than 60 seconds. But I think it's like a three or four minute video I made already. It's in the folder. You can download it and it will. It's useful for anyone in Augusta Nation. I made it like generic enough.

Same question is one I asked last year. Around this time I become increasingly annoyed at almost everything when we are getting close to the end of mowing season. I don't know if it's the minutiae of the business, if I'm starting to get burnt out or what is going on. I bring it up because my wife called me out on it last night and I was pretty annoying. Wow, it's very vulnerable. Okay, I bring it up because my wife called me out on it last night. That was pretty annoying as well. Mostly because I felt I was doing a good job hiding it. But she could obviously tell, which means team members and customers probably get hints of it too. I could write you a list a page long of all the things have been annoying even in the last two days. But my question is, as a leader, when should be the steps to get these little annoyances out of the way and not allow them to affect the higher lows and lower highs mantra? Thanks for all you do. Wow, I was very vulnerable. Dustin. Okay, so.

So as a avid annoying, an annoyed person, I deal with this a lot. So.

Just at the first one and then he like had to step away and then.

Honestly, I think it stems from being impatient, at least for me. It's like, look, I know what the plan is. I know exactly what the goals are. I know I'm going to get there. And literally I just have to keep doing this quote unquote to your what you said minutia until then. And that stinks because it's like the scenery doesn't change and so you're on a marathon, but then you look down, you're on a treadmill and you're still running the 26 and a half miles but nothing around you has changed. Changing.

That's what I would say. And so like the scenery looks the same every day looks the same, your problems look the same and you are still running a marathon. And.

The prize goes to the person who completes 26.2 miles, not whether or not the Scenery around them changed.

And so.

Like, realize again, if you step back five years ago, you'd probably dream of where you're at currently in terms of, you know, having a general manager, multiple locations, being able to turn the one location around like you would probably dream where you're at five years ago. But five years seems like forever. Forever. And so what I would say is assuming that you have clear goals and targets of what you're trying to hit in the future, assuming that's true, and then assuming that you know that what you are currently doing will track towards that and you are directionally correct, then I would stay. I would, I would just say, like, stay in the game. That's it. And, and then it's a matter of, like, especially if you're people that love you or calling you out on this. And then, then it's a matter of, like, how do you tweak this? Like, I don't think hiding it is actually a great solution. Eventually you'll bottle it up and then it'll blow up and actually cause more damage. So I would say, what, what size of business, how much revenue, how much profit do I need to be making in order for me to start delegating some of these things that are causing me a lot of headache? Because if you're getting frustrated, it's fine. Who cares? Use whatever you got. I get frustrated all the time. But if that frustration then causes you to do stupid stuff, make bad decisions, say dumb things to people that you love and cause havoc, then we've got a problem. And so to avoid that, I think it's a matter of make more money. Because if you make more money, you'll be able to delegate those things that are causing you a lot of frustration to people that are much better at you and more equipped than you to actually deal with them.

And like, the, the solution is make more money.

Like, and so.

You get, you get, you get the luxury of choosing the problems that you face every day as you make more money, because you get to, you get to take people that are better at dealing with the stress, dealing with the anxiety, and are more equipped to handle the problems only if you have more money.

So, but then it's like, well, how do I make more money? Keep probably doing what you're doing and executing on the plan, and in time, you will have the money required to be able to delegate those tasks.

Seven of seven, folks. We're going to Cassandra Turner. Love the workout pick. Cassandra. Let's go. Last night, I was trying to think about, think through some Countermeasures for when things get forgotten to be done at the end of a job. Let me restart last night. I was trying to think some countermeasures for when things get forgotten to be done at the end of a job, such as making sure all the gates are closed so that they won't happen again. Is there a way to create in the job notes a checklist that has to be completed off before a worker can press complete on a job and it can be closed? This would ensure that nothing would be missed when a worker tends to forget things. Yes, this is on the.

On the roadmap. I would be careful with this because we have found with checklists, if it's the same on every single job and they're doing it 15 or 20 times in a day, they end up just mindlessly checking it off and passing it anyways.

And so this does come down to training. It comes down to yellow slopes, it comes down to incentives. People will not forget to close a gate if it's going to cost them 50 bucks. And so I would much more incentivize. Here's the five things that got it to get done. And the reason I don't think they need a checklist is because they're doing those five things 50 times a day. And so the checklist just becomes another step of minutia for them to work through. Because you're like, well, they do it 20 times a day. Why wouldn't they close, close the gate? The same thing is true. Once you have a checklist, they do it 20 times a day. Why would they even look at it? They just click through it and they go next. And what ends up happening is then you put notes on that, check that checklist. I've seen this before. You put notes in the checklist thinking, oh, they're going to read these. And now because the other 10 jobs a day look the same, the 11th one that you actually made a tweak to, because it needs to actually change the process of the checklist. Like they want their gates left open, all of a sudden gets missed. So.

This is, this is a training thing and I would recommend this being in job notes and you training around it.

I was talking to a guy who does a manufacturing plant the other day and they talked about their. He was talking about their PPE because they get so many like, workers comp claims. And he said they had all these checklists, like, wear your glasses, put your gloves on. Like, like, I think it was like 12 things. He said that before they walked on the Shop floor. They had to have all these things. And he said they just kept having all these problems. And then he, he interviewed and like quizzed everyone. He thought, like, that's the problem, quizzing everyone, like what they should be doing. And everyone could recite them like the back of their hand. He's like, so why aren't we doing it? And so then he just simply watched them in the morning when they would have to do the checklist on the. He had made an iPad. We'd have to go in. And he literally said people would take two fingers down the iPad, click enter and then walk through the door. And he's like, no one was actually even reading it. And so they just simply made it an incentive. It's like, look, if you go the whole month and every single time you've been checked on for getting all your PPE, you get 50 bucks. I forget exactly what the number was. It might have been 100, but it was like a dollar amount. And all of a sudden compliance went through the roof. Like, follow the incentive. Like the cuz if the employee is not incentivized to do the checklist or to read the checklist or to perform closing the gate, they're probably just not going to do it. Especially if it's routinized. It's always happening. It just becomes white noise. So not to say that we're not planning to. We are planning to have like an eventual thing where it's a pop up. They can't pass without seeing it. But.

Yeah.

The owner of that place is fast Cap. Really cool, dude. Paul Acres. If you want to read his book, it's pretty cool. All right, folks, what are we doing? I think that's it for the day. All right, have a fantastic rest of your Wednesday and we'll see you all tomorrow. Take care.