Mike Minutes Mastermind 09/29/2023

Happy Friday, everybody. Let's go and get started.

I don't think I had really any announcements today, but.

Got a bunch of questions that came in and I know someone had text me said they were going to put a big one in there. So the follow up to the one we had last week. So looking forward to that. All right, let's go ahead and present and jump right in.

Okay.

All right. Numero uno, Vlad from Winter Garden. Can we have a total row in the PVP report page when sending the report? There is a send reports button on the report page to email report. But email the report does not have a total row like on the web. See attached photos for reference. Thank you, Mike. Okay, so here's why we did not do that. But I could be convinced otherwise.

So, yeah, this is the email report then. Nice.

And then.

Here'S what is on the internal side of things.

Yeah, the reason. So there are a couple things. There's a technical limitation and then there is a.

Process side of things. So the technical limitation is the fact that when you run a report inside of.

P4P, it doesn't know when you do payroll, it doesn't know if your pay period is like two weeks or three weeks or four weeks. So what we would need to do and to do what you're talking about, which we can do, is we would need to assume that whenever you run a report, it is a whole pay period.

Because otherwise, remember, there's some weeks where people have a negative P4P versus another week where there is a positive P4P and then there is no P4P given despite having a positive number on one of the weeks. So the only way to really do that is when we, when we click send reports, we would assume that whatever we're running a report on is a pay period. So it can get a little bit messy if you start giving totals. Because if you run say a report for an entire month, it would not equal what the combination. It could potentially not equal what the addition of two pay periods is.

Because you can have a negative P4P balance for a week. However.

We could make that assumption, as in, whenever you send a report, you're just made for a payroll period, a pay period.

Because otherwise what you're going to do, you're going to explain to employees more often if this report is added about the fact that there's a negative and a positive P4P and how that affects the fact that they didn't make any P4P on this pay period, despite having one week where there is a positive number. All right, I am sold. I will take these photos.

I will make a ticket.

All right. That will be worked on later this year. There are reasons why we hit we didn't do it. And like I just outlined.

And we, we have played with the idea of locking in your, your giving us inside the software when your pay periods are. But there's some other technical difficulties with that. When you start running reports that are across multiple pay periods, how it's supposed to respond, et cetera. So all of that to say I made a ticket for it, which means we will work on it.

Kyle Tarvin, two part question. If a GM wants a base hourly rate versus salary, would you do that? I would do that if someone really wanted it. You're probably going to ask why don't they want hourly?

And I've gotten pushed back not wanting to work crazy hours in the spring only to make what they would normally make in a 40 hour work week. I know that it all evens out as the season winds down. The GM will still make the same even though they are doing a fraction like 20 to 30 hours a week. The problem is not them working crazy hours. They just don't want to work crazy hours and not get compensated for that.

Honestly, I just care about their performance. So if you're on salary and you bail early because you don't have any commitment to the team past because you, you. It doesn't matter how long you work, I have a big problem with that. That's why typically I like them to make more money during the seasons when they are working way more hours.

I'm okay with it being salary. If.

Someone has to do like out in the field work and estimate and office and they're juggling everything, that's why my GMs that do field work and like they're like working GMs typically are on salary.

But I like hourly.

The most personally. I don't really care though because ultimately I just look at their performance. So if they're like I really want this, I'll be okay, great, I'll give it to you. I just want to see performance. If your location is profitable and you are functioning a high level and you are taking care of your team, I am happy and I will probably be very flexible in terms of whether or not you went hourly or salary. But if someone's a working gm, that's usually the only time I really want them to be on salary because I want them to feel.

Like when they work 50, 60 hours in a week that they actually get paid more.

And during the winter they'll make sure they pick up a lot of the slack to make sure they get all their hours. Number two, if this something you would consider, would you alter the hourly rate down or at all at any in the spring to compensate for the increased overtime cost of the business? I wouldn't, no. I just look at the overall thought process of it and average things out. Like honestly, when you the debate of hourly versus salary for a management position is really inconsequential because it just comes down to are they going to push hard when everyone else is not? If that is true, then I don't really care how they get compensated.

And if they demonstrate the fact that a salary makes them sit back on their laurel a little bit, I will very quickly not want to work with them.

Or put them on an hourly. But typically at a management level, regardless, if you give someone hourly or salary, they're either going to work hard or they're not. And that should be determined in my opinion, prior to them becoming a general manager or a manager of any sort. Devin from Red Deer Hey Mike. And he says franchisees, owners, estimators, managers, etc when handing out business cards and estimates, would you put your name on it as Mike Andy's and under his estimator or would you just have it say Augusta longer services with the website, phone number, etc. I would personally put as the estimator so that way I could do follow up phone calls with that person and if they had billing questions or anything to do with the admin side, I can just tell them to contact the office. So estimator is the way I always put my business card. I put my voicemail, etc. Chelsea from Arnold. Hey Mike, I thought on the P4P app if a crew member did a project, it lists the project information on their timesheets. One of the guys did mowing and three project last Friday and he has only seen the information for mowing so he thought he didn't hit P4P.

I'll put both screenshots below. Am I looking at the wrong spot? We got screenshots. Very nice.

Okay, so that's what he's seeing.

That there's zim overlap. All right, let's look at the other one.

And this is payrolls. Yes. The part you want to make sure you're looking at is right here in the bottom. Can't do that. No, right here. Yeah. Anything on projects is not going to be added to this part.

Projects are not on this breakdown in terms of the payrolls would you complete the job? So you said your project fever will only display on the day of which the project is marked as completed Project working pay will be calculated for every time card that contains a project.

So.

The only time that I would say that there could potentially be an issue is if on Friday all those three jobs were. Com products were completed. Then you could have a problem and it could be that you complete the projects after running generating payrolls potentially. But if you completed all three of those projects on Friday and then you ran payrolls and it's not showing here, then there is a problem and you can send me an email supporter4psoftware.com or more likely is if he just worked on those projects he's going to have higher working pay because he, you know worked on those projects but he's not going to actually see on P4P.

Yes working pay $150 and project P4P is right here. So I just don't know if he's if he completed all three of those projects that would be the big delineation on that one. So if you did, please let us know and we will take a look Devin from Red Deer since I'm only 100 to 200k this year, should I be making a personal Instagram account and posting and leveraging Augusta Red Deer? Should I be screaming Augusta on all platforms under my own name or just let CC post Instagram, Facebook?

I also got a 10 by 10 storage unit and these and use their address for the business and mailbox. It seems more legit but my parents garage was bigger with a dump pile. Should I go back or get a bigger unit? I know winter is coming but I want to grow the last part. You should talk about with your coach and go over the details of what it looks like at your parents garage versus the 10 by 10 unit.

That would be a coach call in terms of making a personal Instagram etc. I would be careful about coming overly promotional on your personal side.

Because then people just kind of turn you off. I would recommend posting in addition to what command center posts on your everyone's Facebook and Instagram. I would definitely recommend making your own stuff localized if you can. We post on there not because it's the best content to make sure it says that you are open and that you post consistently because 95% of Augusta Nation does not post their own content on their social media. That is the most ideal if you can do it and if you can do it in addition to the two or three posts a week that they put on for you from Command Center. That's great. Videos of you at your shop, videos of you doing a project in the community, etc.

Kyle Tarvin More Oklahoma. How does it work when you have leaders under you but you want to get you either? Okay, let's try this again. How does it work when you have leaders under you but you want to either get advice or run something by them? I know you have Lee, Liz, Chuck underneath you, and if I'm correct, you may run things by them to get their opinions. How do you not blur the line between being professional and getting advice?

The assumption here is that being professional and getting advice are. Cannot be joined together. And that is a false assumption in my opinion. You can absolutely ask someone for advice and still be very professional. In fact, high performers will not stick around if you don't ask for their opinions and you just do what you think.

The vast majority of my meetings are actually me asking for advice or they're telling me holes in my logic. So we had a leadership meeting on, what is it, 26th, Tuesday, Monday or Tuesday last week. I have all the things that I'm thinking about and things I want to change and every couple minutes I stop and. And they poke holes in it. That's how it works. And most of the time when they have something to poke a hole in it, they're right. And so in my opinion, a limiting belief is that you need to have all the answers. You do not need to know all the answers. You need to facilitate the best decision for the business and get people's advice and opinions and criticisms and objections and what they really love about it and what they really hate about it. And then you as a business owner are the one that just has to make the decision because you, you can, you have to synthesize all those, those opinions. And if you have to wage war by going against opinions, you better have the goods to back it up. Otherwise you'll need to rationalize your decision making in front of your leaders for them to.

To feel that you warrant their following you. Them following you.

But yeah, the, the thinking that this is somehow separated like being professional and then if you ask someone for advice as not professional is a flaw of thinking. In my opinion.

Getting advice is typically a really good sign that someone is a leader if they can synthesize it and if they can.

Take it from multiple sources and then come up with a really solid execution plan. That's what a leader does. A leader does not have all the answers and I do not.

All Right. This is probably the big one. Oh, it is. Okay, so this is the one. If you guys remember, last week he put his name here so I can say it. He was the one that was thinking about stepping away from the business and becoming a manager someplace else and merging the company in with someone else. So let's go ahead and continue. I have not read this yet. Hey, Mike, thanks for answering my question last week.

I just wanted to clarify that I'm not considering this merger as a way of quitting or lowering my goals. It seems like it could be a pragmatic step forward. You asked what my why was. I'd love to give a wishy wash answer, but the reality is, at this point in life, the why is to make as much money as possible. The goal is $1 million profit or income per year. And I made this clear to the owner of the company that the only reason I would do the merger is to get me to that goal quicker. Okay. We get numbers. We must write them down because all numbers must be written down. $1 million in profit per year. Okay, now we're talking. Okay. Also to address some of your assumptions. Lol. I hardly spent anything on marketing this year. Okay, great. Didn't offer new services, cut down on bigger projects, and we are on track to do the same, if not slightly less revenue than last year. Great. One of my biggest issues is that my books aren't up to date, so it's hard to give 100% accurate answer. But I am fairly certain that we are not profit, despite having a bit of a step back here. Okay, my pushback to this and what the information I was using last time, Nick, was the fact that two years ago, two and a half years ago, on a coaching call.

We talked about going into debt for all the equipment that you bought. So although you might be saying, hey, we didn't like grow or get in more, you're still paying for, if I remember like $70,000 pieces of equipment. I don't know if I don't remember if you bought two or just the one. But like, if I remember correctly, I was like 12 to $1800 per month, which again, we made sense of it and stuff. But remember I said like, remember this is going to keep you from being profitable for more years because you're increasing your fixed expenses. So little caveat there. After listening to your reply last week, I let him know that I was leaning towards not moving forward with the merger. Taking your advice to give myself a couple more years to see what I can do. He then Upped his offer o and said that after three years, if I didn't think I made the right call, I can take back ownership of the lawn and snow contracts, including all the new growth. To me that seems like a no brainer. Get paid 100k per year to learn from someone and leverage their network to grow and then have the option to take it back 100. Let me know what you you think particularly about the option to back out after three years. P.S. his goal is not to have me, is not to have me GM so he can live in Jamaica, etc. Oh no, this is the part.

Okay. His goal is not to make meat June so he can live in Jamaica, etc. He and we have big growth plans. Okay. Oh man.

The only thing I can say.

Is that.

Every partnership look looks good going in and 95 of them are not good.

Like.

There'S 110 ways for me to rationalize taking on equity, taking on equity investors in Augusta, selling out pieces of copilot, taking on other founders, taking on people and giving away equity to team members. There's a lot of of evidence and positive things that would support me. No one thinks about the downsides because guess what, we're all positive people and we like to think about the upside of all opportunities. And instead of trying to tear apart simply all these things that you're breaking down and rationalizing, you're thinking very rationally. Fantastic. Let's just step back for a second and look at the math of how few partnerships work out. Okay. The fact that he's giving you a back door to get out of this relationship, in my opinion, states that this relationship doesn't hold a lot of weight. Okay.

Like again, I understand from all angles this looks like he's giving you a sweetheart deal. Understand? And it could very well be true. The math is not on your side. And unless you're going to gamble with a what in what I believe is a 1 in 20 chance of this working out.

I would bet on yourself more. And if I remember correctly, if we run the math on this, you, you get 30% of the of the profit of the business. So at 30%, this business would need to do approximately $3.5 million in distributions every year, which means at that size of business, if you're taking 10% of revenue as distributions, you need to build this to 30, $35 million.

To be able to get that because you're only you own 30%. So the question is, is it easier to grow with him to 35 million? So from I think He's, I think combined you guys would be like at two and a half or something like that. Is it easier to go from 2 and a half to 35 million and therefore hit your goal of 1 million per year in profits? Or would it potentially, potentially be faster and have more control of the outcome if you grow to $5 million in annual revenue and you take million dollars home? I'm not making that decision for you. And I think the part right now that is, is.

Comforting to you is that there's someone else along in the journey. And that is why most partnerships happen. The same reason why it's a really bad idea to get married to someone to death do you part because you are lonely. Because that is a temporary feeling that will not last the next 60 years. It will lead to some sort of breakup. The same thing is true for business. You feel lonely. I'm not talking to you Nick specifically, I'm just talking in general generalizations. You feel lonely. The path of least resistance is to be able to get a partner. And the same thing that is true with, with a, a personal relationship in terms of marriage is a true, true with business relationship. This is forever and it is legally binding. And they, someone can say that they, they'll let you take three after three years. They can take that all ways to home and you take their word for it and whatever.

But when partnerships end badly, that's not how the things are being talked about. It's not like oh yeah, just take all of your people back. Well now it's going to be like, well we bought other equipment and trucks and like what's the valuation of those? Well now you're going to have to pay X amount to get those back. And now it's like, well now the employees, they're all split between two different people. Like it just doesn't end this way. And in the perfect euphoria, like perfect world of business, this is how partnerships would work. People say what they mean, they mean what they say and they do what they say. And that's just not how it works. And so I would simply take all the rationalization and step back and look at the percentages. And what you want to compare that against is what is the percentage that you will be successful. And if you believe that your percentage of being successful with that partner is greater than your likelihood of being successful in by yourself and getting to $1 million in profit per year, then you should go with that partner. I personally think feel like that is a massive gamble that someone at your age shouldn't be taking my opinion, people will point to the 1 out of 20 partnerships that go really, really well and last a lifetime.

They're like, well what about Paul Allen and and Bill Gates and what about Jeff.

Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger? Okay, great. Fantastic for everyone. I can point out 20 that I get contacted by a lot that say it's not going well and even the ones that it didn't it that it worked out for every single one of them have come to points where they almost broke up.

You're going to see a video come out on Monday where I did, I went to did a turnaround at a company that had a partnership and it is really, they have a very strong dynamic, very, very healthy. But a year ago, two years ago, they almost broke up and it was like yelling and screaming and crying. And this is the part that was said behind closed doors that we don't have a camera on. And there was a lot of really harsh things that were said. And I'd say In that case, nine out of 10 people would have broke up in that relationship. They didn't because fortunately they went to high school together and the one kid was bullied and had a lot of respect for the one person that didn't bully him in school and that was his co founder. And so they stuck it out. That doesn't usually happen.

So I'm not pushing you against it. You simply have to ask yourself what are the percentages of success of hitting $35 million in annual revenue with this person versus hitting that goal at say, 5, $6 million in annual revenue yourself? Will it be lonely, lonelier yourself? Yes. Will it be harder yourself? Yes. But what is the likelihood of reaching that goal comparatively? So I know I didn't like give you an answer, but I just unfortunately every single day deal with partnerships and it's never a question of like, they are so great. I'm just wondering how I can give them more equity. It's not like that.

I don't know how long average marriage lasts, but I guarantee you businesses business partnerships don't last half as long. It's just difficult.

Anyways. Mike, Athens, Tennessee I have a few questions regarding Copilot. I'm in the Facebook group under my business page and was wondering if you would rather us post in that group under our personal profile or is it okay to post under our business profile? Either way, totally fine. I don't really care. I think everyone in Copilot is very aware that I'm building Copilot for Augusta. And so if people from Augusta are in there. They're gonna get it. So I don't. I don't really mind either way.

Mike, Athens, Tennessee Will we have a client portal link on our webpage for Copilot? Maybe one day. I don't think people really enjoy having a username and password. I think they would rather just go to their last email that had corresponds with you, click on a link that is an estimate or an invoice and just go directly into their profile without having to log in. But down the road there would likely be a client portal login but not right now. I do believe that most people do not want to log in. They want to one click instant access to their client portal.

Is there an update on the new logos for trucks? I think you said we may have some new ones coming soon. You will have to attend conference on Wednesday. That is when the big revealing will happen.

I. I'm horrible at keeping secrets, but yeah, on Wednesday at conference we will show what those are going to look like and I think everyone will like it. We'll have several different options based upon price and it'll really help with all markets.

To give different options based upon what design best fits their market and truck styles, etc. And keep everyone much more uniform. So I'm really looking forward to it.

I think that's it. All right everyone, 25 minutes. Not so bad.

Nick, we all love you regardless of your decision either direction. We support you a hundred and ten percent.

And I hate to be negative but I try to be pragmatic and I think you are not betting enough on yourself. And I do think that in moments of weakness and loneliness, making a long term decision can be detrimental. And keep in mind we talked specifically about when you chose to go into debt on some of these trucks and the big piece of equipment. That's why you grew so quickly. We remember we talked about this that you will grow fast if you go out and buy the tractor and the trucks etc. But that fixed expense of 4 or 5 $6,000 a month is going to keep you unprofitable for several years.

I just do believe that if you go for the next couple years and you go from 7, 800,000 to 850 to a 1.1.1 and now you pay that equipment off and now you're running a 20% margin business in a few years that 200,000 to $250,000 of profit annually pumped back into the business is what allows you to go from to 1.2 to 1.6 to 1.8 like that. And I just think that's going to be a more fulfilling journey than doing it with someone else. That right now everything is rosy. But you are a minority stake ownership right now. He doesn't want to move to Jamaica, but that could change very quickly. And he can do it because he owns the majority of the business. And you can't guarantee that someone's life doesn't change. And I guarantee one thing, it will, because life happens. And so just keep that in mind.

But we support you either way. We want what's best for you. That's ultimately the decision I want you to make. And so if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me personally on that one. All right, guys, take care. Have a great day. Have a great weekend. I'll see you on Monday.