Mike Minutes Mastermind 09/27/22

All right, let's start it. A reminder in a chat. I was with some of the owners today and we were talking about the importance of being at the shop at the beginning and end of the day in a matter of just a couple days, of you being gone or not being available during those times. How the culture can very quickly deteriorate into people being late, people not showing up with correct uniform, people showing up very sloppily and taking a lot longer to get out the door in terms of getting their truck set up. These things happen very quickly inside of a culture, especially if you have less than 10 employees. If you have 10, 15, 20 employees, your culture is going to be a little more resilient because you're going to have internal leaders inside the company have been with you for a long time. If you have 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 employees, culture can deteriorate in a matter of 24 to 48 hours, very, very quickly of you just not being there, especially at the beginning of the day and the end of the day. Highly recommend that you do whatever it takes to be there at the beginning of every single day and at the end of every single day, if that means the crew's going really, really late, either you hop out on the job and you help them, or you wait at the shop until they get back and you work on estimates or other clerical duties or sharpening blades or whatever. Because I promise you'll spend more time working on firing and hiring if you don't do this, versus staying a little bit later, sometimes making sure you're there for the crew when they're there at the end of the day, and making sure that you're there at the beginning of the day if you have a doctor's appointment, if you have drop off your kids, whatever it might be, in the beginning of the day for school, whatever it might be, I highly recommend you do whatever it takes to get to that shop for the first 15 to 30 minutes of the day while at least getting their truck set up and getting out the door. Highly recommend that. I literally see companies that's four or five employees go to zero within a matter of a day or two of the employer and boss being gone. Okay, if this is happening at your location and cultural standards are getting really weak, this is the time of year for most of us where we aren't, don't have a ton of work, and you, this is the time to enforce standards. Again, a standard is only a recommendation until you fire over it. So if you're going to, if you have been annoyed by people being late to work, this is the time to fire based upon people being late. If you've been annoyed by the fact that people don't show up with their uniform correctly and you've made it very clear, and you stated this at team meetings, it is time to now fire based upon that. All right, there's no reason to be having people not holding up standards of the company and they're only working 25, 30 hours a week. That means there's plenty of space to fire somebody and the team be able to pick up the slack, no problem. Okay, so don't look at this time of year when there's maybe not as much work as a curse if you have employees is the time to weed out the one or two that you need to kind of use to make an example that this. The things that you talk about, the policies you talk about are not recommendations, they are standards. And you will fire based upon them. All right, hopefully tomorrow everyone's going to have access to a couple things. Number one is the new Christmas light store hanger. I know that the pictures were not ideal for the one we made last year, so. So Zach is working that one day, finalizing that and then we got submit to Vistaprint. Usually they take a day or two for it to actually be where you guys edit the text boxes or kind of at their mercy. Sometimes they do it really fast, sometimes they do it slower. But I will let you guys know as soon as that is up. Probably tomorrow in the mastermind, I will show you what it looks like and then it'll be available within a day or two from the pro shop for order. Second thing is tomorrow morning you will be getting access to the backend dashboard for your website. Again, I apologize for the two week delay on that. I thought we were gonna be done two weeks ago, but we are completed. And just keep in mind, when you log into your dashboard, it's gonna look like you have no clicks and no visitors. It's because as of today, the metrics are starting. All right, so metrics to your site, click throughs and all the rest of it. So don't freak out when you go to your site and there's basically no clicks. Okay. In terms of the dashboards that you're gonna see on the back end and the graphs. So please don't freak out. There's not. There has been traffic to your site. It's just a matter of. We started tracking that today, so. But tomorrow you'll get access to that in terms of your login information and I will make that on the mastermind and I'll also send everyone email with their login and password to access that backend dashboard which will basically just be@dbagustalongerservices.com so again tomorrow I'll go over all of that. Do not worry about it. All right, let's help induce some questions.

Haven't read through these yet. Mostly because I enjoy not reading questions and dumping them alive. Very fun. All right, let's see. We got follow up question from yesterday is from Ken. If it takes me two or more years before I can start a second location, my thought is that any good employee is going to want to use the 3F program and potentially start his location just the next town over if that happens. Okay. So first of all that doesn't happen because part of the 3F program is that they cannot start one right next to you. So if you look in the two page document, it actually states this and you as the owner of the person who's doing the 3F program has to agree to their location starting. So look at the document if that happens. Do how do we handle it when we would like to start our 2nd, 3rd, 10th location, would we just buy that person out to close the gap so he isn't surrounded by my locations or would we just have to go in the other direction of the map? Yeah. So first and foremost, someone using the 3F program can't be right next to you. It's actually in the document unless you agree to it that they can't. And secondarily I would say I would be thrilled by having other locations around you. This is, we've seen this consistently at Anytime Fitness. If you look at Anytime Fitness on a map, you will see the west coast is where they have a bunch of them and then there's like the Midwest where they're kind of sprinkled throughout the Midwest. Ones do atrociously, they do not do very well, mostly due to the fact that there's not a brand awareness around Anytime Fitness. The locations that do really well are on the west coast and the east coast and specific cities where there is 10, 15, 20 of them in the same city. That's where they do really well because you get brand awareness. And we've seen the same thing happen with Augusta and that is the locations that are close by, especially the first six months, are massively impacted in a positive direction by having multiple locations next to each other. And so if you were all around one location, if you had a whole bunch of Locations and there was one person in the middle of you, it'd be the best thing ever because you're going to get most of their clients due to the fact that if they have a territory radius, anyone outside of that radius you're going to get. So you'd basically be getting a bunch of their leads.

So I wouldn't worry about that. And furthermore, we just consistently see your customer acquisition cost dives as locations get closer and closer together, especially in the first six to 12 months. So like if I was, if I was just like when we start locations we're going to be starting them in clusters mostly due to the fact that your customer acquisition cost will be driven down as a per unit per location simply because there is better brand awareness and market penetration.

You've always said paying for leads on lead gen sites is a bad idea. I have never been in a position where I can test that. So why is that?

I wouldn't say they're a bad idea. They're a short term use of marketing dollars. Right. You're renting space on a third party site in order to get a lead. And also doing this basically is why it's so hard to compete with SEO from these lead generating sites is because people pump money towards them, they then spend those money on ads, they get tons of traffic towards them. They, that's why they're so hard to displace. Nick, in your market you have already displaced them. You're the number one SEO. I would go ahead and try it, go ahead and pay some of you know, pay home advisors, see what kind of leads you're getting. And most of the time people that do what I'm recommending, that is have a good business and then go test the home advisors, they like it and then eventually sours. What I don't like is when people build their business based on home advisor leads or the, the equivalent and now they have no SEO, they have no brand, they have no customer base and they have a whole bunch of rented clients from these services. That's what I get. Really afraid so just go try it though. I've seen in some markets where they're, you're getting really good deals because there's not a lot of of contractors or providers in their market. So give it a shot. There's nothing that hurts. There's no hurt in trying it out and seeing what kind of leads come your way. You go into a brand new market and for some explainable reason you are required to charge $150 for mowing. But competitors Are not. How do you make this work and what does it look like? Yeah, that's a good question. This is the type of thing I like to think about in terms of doing sort of mental gymnastics and mental, you know, flexing your muscle. So if I had to charge 150 per hour for mowing competitors or not, I'd be thinking about two things. Number one, that is an hourly rate, which means the customer doesn't see it, they only see the price to themselves. So if I be 50% more efficient than everybody else, all my competitors, it means that my hourly rate now went down to 100 in terms of what is the effective hourly rate to the customer. So first and foremost, I'll be looking at efficiency, making sure I P4Pmy equipment is in spec, I am very, very tight on my routes. So that way, even though I'm charging a higher rate, the charge to the customer is not a whole lot more than my competitors. And then the second, the second thing I'd be looking at is, okay, if I'm charging extra 50, $60 per hour, what can I do that cost me 10 or 15 or $20 per hour that is going to differentiate me from the customers. This is the reason behind command center answering your phone calls. This is going to be other things that you could do though if you're turning $150 per hour, could literally be you talk to the customer every single visit, right? We don't do that. We can't do that. It would make our guys inefficient. It wouldn't be great on P4P. But if you're charging 150 per hour, something like that white glove type of service could definitely work. All right. So I'd be looking at how do I completely, how do I use that extra margin to completely do something that none of my other competitors can do? That's super hands on. And that's going to be in the form of great customer service, really good communication, sending videos to clients over things, that's the type of thing that separates you from the pack. And in this industry, honestly just answering your phone is literally the main thing you gotta do. It literally is just gotta answer the phone. So, but yeah, the two things I'd be looking at is number one, how do I get more efficient to where my rate is effective. However, I'm not twice as much as my competitors. I'm only 20 or 30% more than my competitors. And then I'd be looking at how can I take that extra margin and make it a moat around My service by making it very clear as to why I'm different than everybody else.

Part one, same situation as before, but this time you must charge $50 for all services and somehow make a thriving business. How do you do that? Again, the reason this is why I'm not a huge fan of this $50 per hour thing is the customer does not see this. They only see the cost to them. So let's just assume though, using your example, that you're just cheaper than everybody else. How would I make this work? I would literally knock on the doors of every single person in a neighborhood and, and I would focus 100% of my time on route density. It's all I would care about. I would also, at $50 per hour, I would not do estimates. It feels more like 40 or 45. I'd probably not do any estimates. I would just give people the hourly rate so that when they called and asked for an estimate, I would literally just set up the job and give them an hourly rate. And when you're, when you're the lowest price in the market, you can do that because they can't compete with it. You can't compete. They cannot get a more competitive price. It's not a good idea. It's not what you want to be. You do not want to be in this market at all. Your margins are way too thin. But if you had to make it work, you need to focus on route density and you need to focus on cutting out all waste. And that comes in the form of doing any estimates whatsoever. You do everything over the phone and you would do projects based upon hours and you could do that because you're confident you're going to be the lowest bidder in the market.

You probably wouldn't be at 50, though. That's why I was kind of hesitant there.

I think we have an issue with our service maps, etc. Estimates come in, some of them in our service area and some are not. Okay, we notify the ones that are not by sending them the email. But they continue to be part of our client base, which I think CC uses and looks at them on all the map to see our service area. So if those clients that are not in our service area are not deleted, then they will come on the client map still that CC uses to pull up the service areas. We just had this happen. Client called for an estimate. CC says yes, they are in our service area. I find they are not. And sent email and client gives us a bad review because they say we did not, didn't show up on our estimate, even though we emailed them and I can see they open the email the morning of, it's very frustrating to say the least. Okay, so first few things, Number one, make sure the command said that your map is accurate. It's updated every single month. So that's the first step. Let's assume that that is done. The next thing is 100%, and this is the issue, is if somebody calls and they're in your database but outside of your service area because you've changed your service area and now you have people outside, that's a tough call for command center because they can see you've done service services for them and they're typically not going to go double check your service map. This is something we're trying to retrain them on and as you got to check regardless. But think about when you call someone that you have done business with a whole bunch. It'd be annoying if they're like, let me check your service if you're in our service area and you've done a whole bunch of work with them. So there's this balance of like, we don't want to annoy existing customers by always checking the service area. But on the flip side, just because we've done work for them does not mean we got, we can't check their service area. Like, so I would say the only way to completely 100% annihilate this from happening if you've constricted your service area or done work for people outside your service in an area in the past or they're in your database, is to remove them from your database. That is literally the only way to 100 ensure this. Because if you did a job for somebody, they call and now they're talking about that job. We're not going to tell them like, oh, we're not sure obviously now we're just questioning ourselves because like, well, they did work for them, you know, last month. Why in the world would we not do it for them now? So there's a balance there. And I think the only way to a hundred and ten percent ensure that that never happens is to delete them out of the database or make them inactive, for example, inside service autopilot. But we were, we are working on retraining everyone to check the service area regardless if they've done work for them in the past. But again, it gets very hairy because, okay, if they did work for us, you know, two weeks ago, do we check their service area? No, no, no. Okay, what about two months ago? Well, Maybe. Well, where's that line? So now we're doing this, all this like very subjective stuff and that's very difficult when you're talking about scaling at command center. So I think the first thing is number one, double and triple check your service area of maps with.

Command center and then to the trickiest thing is existing customers that you've done work for that are outside your service area really mess things up.

And so I would consider if you are restricting your service area to potentially make the customers outside of it inactive. And it's not a bad idea either because if you're doing one click estimate emails, again this is another thing that happens. Someone's in your database, they get a one click estimate email and they call in and command says like, oh no, you're out of our service area. It's going to make people unhappy. Like they, you literally just emailed me asking for service and now you're telling me out of a service area. So if you're going to take people out of your service area and you don't want to service them, I would recommend making them inactive because they're going to get one click estimate emails, they're going to get newsletters, et cetera. They're going to call in. And command centers can be very confused because you did work for them in the past. They got one click estimate email and now we're supposed to tell them we don't, don't do service for them. So I'm happy to answer more questions, but we are trying to retrain commands to check every time. But again, we don't want to annoy someone who's, who is inside your server here. And every time they call we're checking that. So it's a bit of a balancing act, right? So for example, if they're on recurring services, we should not need to check that, right? Because obviously you would have canceled them otherwise. But it's like how far back of service do we go check the map if they've done work for you in the past. So it's a great question. It's still something we're trying to work on. And perfect.

We are raising our pricing, slightly padding budget hours to cleanups, et cetera, and raising MO rates, et cetera. But our close ratio has plummeted. At what point do you consider reconsider your price points? Note that your close ratio this time of year is probably plummeting due to demand and there's just, there's not a lot of urgency right now depending on what market you're in leaves have not really started falling a ton. So there's not like they gotta get the leaves cleaned up. The grass is not growing like super fast. That for most of us we haven't had a ton of rain. Just depends on where you're at. So it's kind of a weird in between zone. We haven't really got to fall cleanups yet. But then it's kind of. The mowing season is coming to a tail end. Projects are tough to get right now because people that wanted projects, they got them done in the spring or early summer so they can enjoy the outdoors of their house during the summertime. So most of those have dried up as well. So at what point do you reconsider price points? I'd be cutting your estimate fees and dump fees immediately if to impact that and then start starting to be a little more skinny in your budgeted hours. So all of that is totally fine to do. But keep in mind that close ratio plumbing this time of year is mostly going to be akin likened to.

Demand going down dramatically this time of year. It's very common end of September before we have fall cleanups, etc because everyone has finished the projects they want done for the year and mowing season is tailing off and we don't really have have leaf cleanup yet. So there's almost always a two to four week window where it's just. It just. There's not a lot going on. It's pretty common in most areas.

Cool. I think that's all I got for questions. Anything else here? Nope. Cool. All right, so tomorrow, the dashboard for everyone's online website, add banners, adjust hours, ad service pages, et cetera that will be available tomorrow. And I'll be giving you all your logins as well as the door hangers for the.

New and updated Christmas lights, print marketing. All right guys, have a great day and we'll see you tomorrow.