Mike Minutes Mastermind 09/29/2022

Are we live? Cool. I think we're live. It was weird. It was. Give me an error message. All right, I think we're good. Let's go ahead and hop into some Q and A.

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All right, we got seven responses came in. Zoom in.

Joe Dilmore.

See here. Why is this kit that size?

Is there any way we could explore doing estimates, phone estimates or auto estimates for snow next year? Thanks to the absolute rock stars at Command Center, I literally have about three days full of snow estimates to do. But literally all I am going to do is go out to these houses and measure the sidewalks and drives. A few years ago I worked for a company that had a massive contract.

For residential properties. They got all at once. This company would just send them the addresses and all. They did Google map to outline the sidewalks, driveways, measured and sent them a price. The other advantage of this is that if the price is too high, they could maybe ask while they have them on the phone if they might only have one a smaller part of the driveway done. I do remember having a few customers a year on average that thought the price was too high. I would ask if they would need the entire driveway done and many only need a portion of it done. And the price difference between was accepted. Thanks as always and hope everyone is doing well. Yeah. So I addressed this a couple weeks back in terms of why we are not currently going to offer this snow over the phone estimates for snow. The fact of the matter is that less than 20% of Augusta Nation does snow. So for everyone on the phone to be trained on, that would be a big undertaking. We're kind of doing a little bit of a hybrid by having a snow department and down the road, potentially that could be something that we do build out further so they can do over the phone estimates. That being said, for now, if you, if that's all you're gonna do is measure the property, you could just measure the property yourself on Google Maps. If that's gonna save you driving around for three days, maybe you'll get done in a day if you did it by measuring yourself. But currently we're just not going to deploy the resources for to train everyone at command center on doing this. And also back to your point here, you know, you have this, you know, extra little thing of like, hey, like if I don't. If you don't need the whole driveway done, I'm willing to Google cheaper again. That's just another variable that there's another 20 of these type of things when it comes to snow that every Single location is going to want customized slightly. And it's just not as straightforward as edge, mow and blow. And so the expectation of being able to tell a customer that we were willing to lower price based upon not doing some of the property is a very subjective thing for your location. And that seems easy for one location. But when you're talking about many, if we try to customize it that much, we'll just end up making a bunch of mistakes, right? Because then the next person's like, okay, well, you can't do that. You can't only plow half the driveway. And so they. They have different notes. And then that one person, they say, well, snow blowing is a different cost than plowing. And another person like, well, sand is a different price than salt. And so there's so many different variations of that. We would just make too many mistakes. And down the road, I think down the road, as we get more locations that are doing snow, we potentially might be able make it work and have a division for it. But currently that's why we are not. I went into a little more detail a couple of weeks back about that. Specifically.

Do you think door knocking or door hangers yield more customers? With door knocking, you're able to be more persuasive. With door hangers, you can cover more ground because you aren't waiting for people to come to the door. I think doing door hangers with knocking on the door is the best. Just because you're already at the head house, like at the front door, you might as well knock. Usually you can kind of tell someone's home, and if not, you can. You can usually hear, like if you have a dog, you know, right away, stuff like that. But personally, if I'm going up to someone's door, especially if I'm putting the price on the. On the door hanger, I might as well do it right at the front door. Like you. Literally, what we could do is walk up the front door, knock on the door, and then start riding the door hanger out. So that way you're not really wasting any time.

In terms of you're putting the price on the door hanger itself. But again, it kind of comes with your personality for some people, like, there's nothing more scary in the world than knocking on someone's door and talking to them. So you potentially might just go with door hangers. But I don't think the return of maybe getting twice as many door hangers is as good of a return as doing half as many, but talking to people. So it Just comes down to mostly your personality. Honestly, some people would rather die than knock on someone's door and talk to a stranger. I am Scheduled for over 120 snow service estimates Monday. Let's go. Is this due to customers not opting out of snow services or they actually request for customers? Okay, this seems insane. It seems insane that if this so many customers would request snow removal quotes all within a couple hours. How do I proceed? Get the estimates done or is it a glitch? Also, my mower broke down Monday and my mo. My truck broke down today. Feel like I'm being tested by the universe. But I'm up for the challenges still. If everyone can send some positive energy in my direction, please appreciate it. Okay, cool.

I'm just wondering.

If you put the wrong link in your case. I. Yeah, I just need more information on this. So first and foremost, did you send a one click estimate email out for snow? Secondarily did you send a link out for something like you mentioned opting out of of widget services. Did you send that out and accidentally put the wrong link in instead of doing the opt out link you put in the snow or the one click estimate email link. That could be an option. So definitely we aren't at command center sending those out randomly for you. So yeah, you just need. I would recommend calling command center and getting the bottom of what you sent out. If the link wrong, maybe send an email to help gust alongerservices.com or text them. But we don't send out one click estimate emails or opt out emails on your behalf. So I have a feeling that if you sent these out potentially. Hey, let's just. This is worst case scenario that the link was messed up. But hey, maybe you did get 120 if you actually sent out one click estimate email for snow service with that link. So feel free to add some clarity on that in the comments.

Are all these snow estimates that are coming in actual? Okay, something's wrong. They actually clicked on. I got 150 coins in like 3 hours last night which is great. But I know at least one or two of them. People who broke off work with us and.

Okay, I need to look into this. Give me a second.

Obviously.

We would, we would love to think that you get 150 estimates of one click estimate emails, but your size, that seems fishy. So I need to look into this one and see what's up.

Do you think small businesses are going to be hurt? But. So let me go back.

I will look into this because two People have mentioned this. No one click estimate one thing, let me look into this, see what's going on.

Potentially if this is your first one click estimate email, you are getting a lot of response but your size of company 150 seems like a lot. So let me look into it, see what's going on and potentially see if there's multiple triggers going on or something like that.

That was Joe and Chad.

I'll check it out.

Kyle, do you think small business are going to be hurt by the Fed fund rate? Fed rate hikes? I don't pay much attention to politics or what the Fed is doing so I have no idea that will affect us small business owners. Yeah, so when you increase Fed rates like the interest rates, basically borrowing money costs a lot more. So people are less inclined to invest the money. Because ultimately when you talk about raising interest rates or what happens is basically what's considered a risk free investment which is becoming in question. But what's considered a risk free investment is investing in a T bill or treasury bond with the US government. And so when that is currently at 4% you basically for no risk at a 4% return. That's insane. And so what that means is why would you ever invest money if you know you get for no risk 4%.

When literally not too long ago that was like less than 1%. Right. So.

When interest rates are low it means that spending money and buying assets is going to be the better decision instead of just parking your money in bonds or in the savings account. So typically when you raise interest rates, that's why the economy will contract is because no one wants to spend money. There's no, there's less incentive to spend the cash. So that's why asset values will go down. Stock market has already gone down, real estate will go down, more car prices will go down. It's way. Basically the way they're trying to fight the inflation problem is by raising interest rates basically slowing the economy down.

Good morning Mike. We are trying to decide what we want to do next year. Either a rate increase or audit of all our clients and their budget hours. We have been doing OTP mowing quotes all year for one man mowing teams. We only have one solo truck and five two man trucks. As you know, Brian and I plan on opening other locations and that is where we see most of our profits going. We do not have the cash to go all solo trucks and it will take several years to get solo. We are seeing 70 to 77% efficiency scores on our team members and very low bonus Dollars. We want to make more dollars for, for the business and for our team. We are concerned about raising the rate and not budgeted hours.

We'll provide more dollars for the team, but while teaching new team members about ppp, there will be a disconnect because they're not hitting the times. If we stay at $80 per hour, increase most clients by 25% budget hours, we will see more revenue to the business and team. So whether you raise the actual rate. So okay, I see you're saying I would in this case say, like, I guess what you're trying to determine is whether you should buy in trucks to help them on P4P or you should raise the rates. I would rather you raise rates instead of buying assets. If your, your goal is simply to increase the PPP and at 70 to 77, yeah, you're gonna have a skinny P for P. If you're above 80% efficiency score, that's when your guys start seeing P4P bonuses very consistently. And it's simple because if you just take 100 minus the 33, you know, you need to be above 66, 67% just to make anything. So if you're at 70, very few of your guys are going to get bonus dollars. Right. So I would recommend raising your rates, whether that be a across the board increase on mowing or whether it be actually moving your rates actually like from 80 to 90, for example. I really believe if you did that you'd immediately.

Increase the, the amount that the guys are making on P4P. And it seems like that's the issue you're trying to tackle. I wouldn't go buy trucks just to solve that problem because by buying more trucks, you're going to increase your capacity and that's going to basically allow you to keep growing at a lower profitability marker. So especially because I know your situation like I would make that location just as profitable as possible. And raising your rates by $10 an hour is what I would recommend over buying the truck. Oh, here we go. Sorry. I was, this is what I was missing. I was like, what's the question exactly in this situation? Would you raise the hourly rate or adjust budgeted hours? We do not want to raise rates and budgeted hours because we believe that we'll be pricing ourselves out of the jobs. Yeah. So just do one or the other. It really doesn't matter. Flip a coin. Right. Because you adjust your hourly rate. If you adjust your hourly rate up, you're going to have to move your budgeted hours down. So then what you're going to do is you're going to raise prices, right? So that your budget hours are the same and your hourly rate has gone up. So just remember, like, the only thing the customer cares about is the price to them. So if you adjust your hourly rate, like, oh, I'm going to charge $90 per hour instead of 80. Great. That means that all your budget hours just went down slightly, right? So what I'd recommend doing is to keep it simple is you do a. You just increase the hour, the per cut price, and then adjust budgeted hours up. Or again, this is why in the document that we had last week, we there's two different ways to price increase, right? One is by raising your hourly rate up. And by doing that, you keep your budget hours the same or you just increase the price, which will also increase the budgeted hours on the job. So either of those two things, I really don't care because at the end of the day, the. The employee gets a third of the labor revenue. So whether you raise the rate or you raise the budget hours, and therefore the rate goes up, as long as the price goes up, that's the main thing we want to make sure of. Don't be concerned if you're adjusting budget hours or adjusting rate. If you're gonna just, you say, hey, we're gonna charge $90 per hour, for example. Okay, great. That means all your budget hours now need to be changed. Okay? So what you could do is say, okay, I'm going to keep my hourly rate or my budget hours the same, but now charge more per hour. Then that would imply a price increase. Right? I hope that made sense. Sometimes it gets way more complicated when I start talking about it. But ultimately the customer only cares about the price and the employee gets a third of labor revenue. So whether you adjust the rate or the budget hours, it doesn't really matter. As long as the price goes up. That'll make more money. So.

My thing is like, it's easier to change the price than it is to adjust budgeted hours and all the jobs. So if you're going to do the change of rate, just make sure that's something you want to stick to long term.

This may have been asked already, but I can't figure out how to do the performance. Max ads. My Google Ads page doesn't show me anything like yours. How did you get there?

We got a screenshot. Let's go. Now we're talking.

Okay, so you're in smart campaigns. So if you click.

Yeah. So if you click on the Left hand side. Oh, you. Sorry, can you see what I'm talk looking at? One second.

Oh, sorry, you guys are not looking at what I'm looking at. Give me a second.

Here it is. Okay, so yeah, on the left hand side. If you're. You're at all campaigns showing your smart campaigns though.

I would click on this piece right here. Oh, you can't. I would click on that right there.

That will probably take you. Well, this is your smart campaigns. Now basically you're creating a smart campaign for some reason instead of an actual regular campaign. A smart campaign is a little different. So I would try clicking on that's enable and pause. Click on this little button here, see if that gives you more options. But for some reason it's only showing you the smart campaigns. That being said, you should be able to click new campaign and still trigger the same thing.

I have to see this in more depth. I don't usually go from the all the smart campaigns. I go from the all campaigns.

But you've clicked on that. Yeah, I would click on this thing here and see where this. If it allows you to get out of smart campaigns, the first thing I'll be looking at.

Okay, let's see here. We got more questions. Couple more came in. Share my screen.

Whoa. There you go. Share screen.

Okay, number eight. We will be mowing most of our customers until the beginning or mid November, depending on the weather. When would be a good time to introduce our clients to winter services? Planning is in one click. Estimates for recurring leaf clamps and fall clips within the next six weeks and no one to overdo it. Should we give a month's notice two weeks to think. Yeah, I'm like a big fan of two or three weeks, especially because you can take advantage in October of the fall. Cleanup one click estimate email and do that at the beginning of the year or the beginning of the month. So like if I was you, I'd probably wait like a week, do your one click estimate email for leafs and then wait like a week or two and do your oh wait, you're doing mid November. So I'd probably do like the last week of October. That way if someone cancels you bill them at the end of the month and you're good to go. But yeah, that way like wait a week or two, do your leaf cleanup one, wait another week or two and at the end of October, do your winter services opt out. This is the thing. If you, if you do your opt out too soon, people are going to cancel for the year and you're Going to lose out an extra mowing or two. If you do it too late, you're going to get a bunch of people canceling prior and they don't even know about winter services.

And most people once they cancel mowing aren't like. They get, they don't like opt in. You can't opt into, into winter services, right. Unless they called specifically for it. So you can't really send the email out to somebody that's already canceled mowing service. You can only send it to people who still on mowing service. Just the way it's worded and the way that we just kind of seamlessly transition into it. So if someone cancels before you send out the email, you can't really send them the email.

So that's why it's like you don't want to go too late because you're gonna. A bunch of people are gonna cancel prior, they're gonna be proactively canceling for the end of the year and then you're. You don't wanna do it too soon because people will literally like oh, thanks for reminding me. Go ahead and cancel. I'll see you next spring. Right. But click on the button and you'll use that on one or two, two mowings. So I'd recommend just like two to three weeks max before mowing season ends. Like three would be my max. Basically don't do it before the previous billing cycle.

I haven't sent a one click mo and I got time to schedule it and I've ready confirmed with a few questions that they did not ask for. Okay, great. That's all I needed to know. There is likely a trigger that's going on. I know they were testing stuff yesterday, not at Command but at Zooper. So I will send super an email. So it's Chad Valprazo, Joe Delmore, Terry Hill. I got you guys. I will send. Yeah, if you guys did not send a one email then they're definitely testing something.

I know what they're testing. We're trying to test this whole no reply thing service all pilots had a problem with in the past. Some I know some locations in service automatics still have issues with this. And that is when they send estimate emails stuff doesn't go through. It's because the email server in between is mail serviceaupath.com and so with.

With super we're trying to use no reply@augustalongerservices.com but we're trying to get away from that. We're trying to test a bunch of stuff to see how we can just improve the amount of people who get the email versus going to their their spam. So we're working on that. I'm assuming Z person out emails and I apologize for that. They did not request that. But I'll get back in touch. I'll make a update on the Facebook page once I get to the bottom of that today.

All right, let's see here.

I can share what I do for residential snow with you. Didn't see who asked the question. I'm out mowing now but happy to show pricing, communication and prepayment service to lock in priority service because capacity limited ice snowblowers with ramp rap trucks just like the push mower ramp rack model.

New prepayment of 5 is that puts towards their invoice. It's non refundable. If it snows then 55 times then we charge additional I price double for 56 inches. Okay.

Perfect.

Maybe ask this one Ally on Ally or Sarah on the Facebook group. You can get some info on this to the square footage by the minute. There's several different ways that you can charge and usually like different triggers 3 inch 6 inches etc. For different pricing tiers. All right everyone, it's all I got. Oh we got another question just came in hot off the press number 10.

I think my question missed something. I'm going to send two different one click estimates. Leaf cleanups and fall cleanups is two one clicks and winter service is too much more than I would recommend.

Like make your leaf cleanup one just to encompass fall cleanups. Right? Because if you're doing a leaf cleanup you're probably doing a general like trimming bushes, pulling weeds, etc. So like if you look at the most recent fall cleanup, slash leaf cleanup one click estimate email, it's kind of all put into one thing. It's like look, if you want an estimate, click this button and it includes leaf cleanup, trimming bushes, weeding and it's a way for you if they click on it for even leaf clip you're not able to upsell them in those other services. Right. So I'd recommend just putting the leaf cleanup and the fall cleanup thing together. Most people that are doing a fall cleanup this time here are needing leaf cleanups, right? So you get them to click for the leaf cleanup and give them the options the other services and then potentially give them a recurring leaf cleanup option too. I see you're saying, you're saying recurring leaf cleanups. Yeah, so I would just modify the one click estimate email and try to still put it into one, because getting three of these in one month, you're going to dilute your winter services one by the time they get the third one. It's almost like a weekly basis. It's not horrible, but, like, I'd try to combine. Combine your leaf clamp and fall clamp one and just say in there, like, recurring. And then that way, when you do, if they click on the button, what you're going to do is give them a price for a fall cleanup. A recurring leaf cleanup. That's literally you're giving me two line items inside your estimate. Fall cleanup, basically get everything up to snuff, pull weeds, trim bushes, whatever. And then step two is that recurring option for the leaf clamps. That's what I would do.

Cool. Awesome, guys. Have a great day, and we'll see you tomorrow.