Mike Minutes Mastermind 09/30/2022

Hey, everyone. Hope you're doing super well. Sorry, my streaming platform is completely bonkers this morning. I don't know what's up. So this is probably not notifying you on Facebook, as it typically would. So I apologize for that. Hopefully figure things out on the weekend. Let's see here. Okay, let me. I'm gonna give it 30 seconds for everyone to hop on because it's gonna not give anyone notifications. Great, great, great, great, great, great. Okay, give me a second here.

See what I can do. Let's see if I can push this out. Yeah, there we go. Push that. There you go. All right, we're in business. Let's try to figure this out. Of course, my Internet is horrible, whatever that's for. Okay, cool. All right. I wanted to show a couple things.

I can pick this up. There we go. I was literally driving to Command center this morning. I saw this, wanted to share it. Let's see if I can zoom in.

So I just think it's kind of funny how the same person who's going to build your custom house is also going to do your leaf cleanups and mow your grass. This is a good example of just someone that's diluting their brand.

If you're going to be the best construction company in the world, don't offer lawn care. If you're gonna be this lawn care company, don't offer decks, siding, framing, drywall, new builds, custom housing, like, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

This. This. This will. This person will get a lot of work of random proportions, but they will not be able to ever create a brand that centers around one of these services that they can charge a premium price for. All right? And this is the. The endless hole that people dig themselves into when they do lawn care is like, okay, well, if I did landscaping, I can do these other things, and I can do this. I can do properly. I need fences. I can do sodden salts. I can do retaining walls. Oh, while I'm at it, I can do a deck. I can use siding. Because guess what? When you do retaining walls and you're doing a bunch of paver patios, guess what else they're doing? Decks fencing, so. Oh, Iot. I can do that, too. So this individual is a solo operator. They charge enough to probably get by themselves. They'll never be able to work themselves out of a job. They'll never be able to afford to employ other people simply because of this. So, just a warning. I know we're in lawn care specifically, but I see this all the Time in home improvement. It's like if I can fix one thing on the house, I can fix everything. Um, it dilutes your brand. Okay, I understand that might keep you busier or it might offer more revenue in the short term, but it dilutes your brand. And that is where I get very concerned when people start adding tons and tons of services. Is it dilutes your brand to where you cannot charge the premium prices that you need to charge, in my opinion, to be able to pay the employees enough to be able to keep, retain them and stay competitive as well as to turn a healthy profit and stay sustainable as a business business. So all right, I need to search for. Oh, you know what, here's another tip for you everyone. It's Friday. Let's. Let me show this. I did this at training. A couple people said they enjoyed it. This is.

I don't think there's anything too crazy on here. Okay, I'll show it. If I mess something up, whatever. This is how I organize everything. So this is my Google Drive. I guess I should switch this to education. This is educational. Let's go.

Where'd it go? This is how I organize everything. So basically I have every, every single email, every single text message, every single picture that I see or document I see. I'm always thinking about where does this belong in my Google Drive. So how I organize things is into all these different folders up top here. These are just the most recently opened. So like last night I was working on the course and figure out finalizing the state of emergency and we're testing it yesterday. Okay, you're not really supposed to see that. You'll see that eventually. These are the things down here that are short term or that I open up frequently or I'm working on currently. Those are the only files that are on this homepage of my Google Drive. Everything else inside a folder. So for example Augusta inside of this I have everything from work with ad agencies to test Facebook and Google Ads and see if we could beat them or if they could beat us. Everything to do our website, the convention annual one. We do command center stuff, corporate owned locations. So if I could go into here, for example, then I have every location that I own. And then I have, if we open up Wacom, then I have documents for them. Then I have the manager's compensation every single quarter for their profit sharing. I just want to make sure I don't share anything private.

I have inside of each of these I have.

Documents for the GMs for their specific location and I share these locations. That little man on there, that little thing, it means I've shared it. So I share this with the location, the gm, so they see all of their passwords, et cetera. So, like, if we go into Mooresville, for example, you got insurance licenses and for the team. So the team is going to be things like.

I think it's probably, yeah, GM stuff. And then you got projections in here, you got passwords. So this password sheet is for every single password that we have at that location needs to be inside here. The GM needs to update that. The regional manager sees that. And if I ever need something, I can go in there as well. So why this is in here, I have no idea. So things like that you can clean up real quick. But yeah, inside of the Augusta folder, there's a whole bunch of other stuff. Software development, franchising. So if I open up franchising, for example, I have everything from forms that were create for command center, FTD stuff, managers at command franchises that are for sale, individual portraits of everyone. Like, everything, everything in my life is on this Google Drive. If Google Drive goes down, my life stops. Like, I literally rather like not go to work than not have Google Drive work. If Google Drive goes down, we're toast. Like, if WhatsApp goes down, it stinks. But I can survive. If Google Drive goes down, I'm useless. I try to keep everything off of my computer, so I'd really recommend trying to keep everything away from your desktop. My desktop, let me make sure, is pretty clean. I just want to make sure there's nothing on here. Okay, let me share my desktop. One second. Gotta be careful with these things, man. Sharing. Let's see here. Share, share, screen. Share my entire screen. Yeah, do that. Okay, cool. So this is my home screen. I made a thumbnail the other day. That's why that's there. Here's the picture that I just showed you guys. Delete that. This is for the loan stuff. This is for someone who's trying to sue me. This is for the courses I dropped the files into for the guys. The thumbnail from the day that I downloaded so I can send it to the text group. And that's it. I got my portrait, my email signature, the ftd, because we update that quite a bit and that's it. I keep nothing on this computer. Same thing with my phone. I delete everything. No pictures, etc. If it's useful, it goes into the folder on Google Drive. It's been very, very helpful for me. And so I know, like, some of you like? This is weird. Trust me. It helps so much. Stay organized. I know I can pick up any device in the world and immediately access every document for my businesses. Immediately. Tax returns, receipts, everything. If it's valuable and it's not going to get deleted from my inbox, it goes into Google Drive. It's amazing. It literally changes my life. Between the reminders app on your phone and Google Drive, your life will never be the same. Telling you, man. All right, back to regularly scheduled programming. Stop screen share.

What is that? There we go. All right, let's pull up. Oh. See, this is exactly how it works. I can't show that. Okay, minutes. Here we go.

Pull this up. I have not responded. Oh, there's only four questions. I think that's an all time low. All time low. For the past couple weeks we've been riding high on like 10 and 15 questions a pop. It's Friday. Everyone must be tired.

Okay, mastermind, there we go. All right. Let's see here.

Just in the mastermind, you mentioned to someone not to buy additional trucks. Let me make sure you guys are seeing this. Okay. So why is it always like this? See if that's better. That's a little better. Yeah. Yesterday, the mastermind, you mentioned to someone not to buy additional trucks versus raising prices. For someone that just wants to run a super profitable business, would it not be wise then for my location to run solar routes next year? My take on it is that there will be an upfront cost of trucks and equipment, but it should pay itself due to the solos. Yeah. So being solo, having solo crews is going to be more efficient. Yes. I am balancing out the fact that I also know, Kyle, you want to start a second location. Getting an extra one or two trucks at a second location is going to have a better ROI than just buying a couple more trucks for your existing location. So your guys can go from. From two man cruise to one man cruise. The increase in.

In revenues and profits is incremental and really good for P4P and profitably for the business.

If you go from two man cruise to one man cruise. Yes. But if you're. I know your goal is growth. So that's why I specifically said that stated that yesterday for you specifically. I'm not remembering this part. Who I was talking about. It's very important to keep in mind who I'm talking to when I say that sort of thing. Right. So I don't remember who I was talking to say not to buy additional trucks versus raising prices. But if someone. I would typically say that if someone was not trying to grow as quickly and they really need to make their existing location locks rock solid and maybe take a year at those higher prices in order to be able to afford. Oh, I was talking yesterday to. It was Jeremy, that's who it was. So okay, Jeremy, that was yesterday. I said not to buy trucks. I said to.

To raise prices. Yeah, because ultimately if you're raising prices, you're giving the guy the P for P bump the same way that you would make them going from two man cruise to one man cruise. So that's what I was saying yesterday to him is raising your prices will do the same thing as giving them more trucks. And so I know that getting more trucks costs capital. Raising your prices doesn't cost you anything. They're not trying to rate to increase the size of that location. So that's why I recommended raise your prices contain demand so your, your profits go up without having to buy more assets. So I hope that makes sense. Remember that raising your prices doesn't cost you a single penny versus buying more trucks cost you more money in the upfront as well as in perpetuity for things like insurance, maintenance and fuel. Right. So when you, when you're giving those two options again, that location that I was talking about yesterday with Jeremy isn't trying to grow, they're trying to make two more locations next year. Those trucks would be much better used at those locations. Raise the prices at the first location so that way you're able to get guys consistently above P for P base pay. That's why specifically yesterday I said that that would not be my recommendation for everybody.

Oh, there's a long one. Okay, I'm going to put myself out there for a second with this question, but is a fear I've had floating around in my brain and I want help moving past it. Are there any precautions you take when a GM starts running a location in regards to protecting yourself, the brand and the business? Since they have access to the bank account, equipment shop, etc, it would be easy to strip the business of its assets and run it to the ground. In the past I had a lead guy that had access to everything. I ended up finding that he had stolen thousands of dollars for me over the course of the year before. Before this happened, he was one of the most. My most trusted friend and employee. Oh man. Dude, that stinks. I know it is all about finding someone that is on the same page as you and that is responsible and honest. But I can't help but feel like I'm opening myself to More pain if I don't protect the business in some way. Just curious as to how you handle this aspect. Oh, man.

Yeah, this is emotionally draining when this happens. So it's going to happen. Just embrace the fact it's going to happen as you grow your business.

And move on. Like, there's no point in trying to play defense constantly because you're worried about this constantly happening to your business. Hey, guys, give me a second. I'm gonna switch Internet and it should clear up my screen. Give me a second.

Okay, we're back in business. Hopefully that improves my Internet situation. I don't know what's up with Comcast today. It's like cloudy like that had nothing to do with it. We're not on satellite Internet in the world. All right. Anyways, this is going to happen, by the way. I'd say one out of three times it stinks to say it's going to be that much because you're like, oh, I'm going to become a better.

Employer. I'm going to better at hiring. It's just going to happen. People are going to take advantage of you. I would rather go fast by giving them the access to everything, right? So I would rather fall on the side of giving people passwords and access to bank accounts and all the rest of it and, and fail, falling short and, and messing up because I trusted them too much. Because the alternative is you don't give them access, they, you don't trust them. And guess who, guess what they do. They don't trust you. And they, they give you, you know, basically half of what they have in their tank. So I would rather ride my winners. In other words, the two out of three that are going to take advantage of the opportunity of being a manager and, and want to really ride that for a few years. I'd rather just fully trust them and let them run with it and let you know a percentage of GMs or people that I trust, you know, quote, unquote, stab me in the back or take advantage or whatever. And I've just found that's the best way to grow a business. It's not going to be the least, the most profitable necessarily, and it can really hurt you if it happens early in your business career. And that was really damaging for me when my third employee, I think my third employee sued me. And like, at the time when I settled for that, that money out of court, that was a lot of money for me. Like, it basically took me down to zero in my second spring rush. So it was very, it Would have been very easy to.

To not trust people after that and just constantly be living in a state of like, not trusting employees, not trusting the managers. And I still remember driving home, back from Seattle meet, because we met at their attorney's office down in Seattle to do all the paperwork and file everything and give them money. On my way back from Seattle, it was two hours. So I was basically telling myself the entire time, I will not allow this to change my perspective of trusting employees, giving them the ability to make mistakes on their own and giving them passwords and bank accounts and all the rest of it. So.

I think it's just, you grow business faster that way. Otherwise, you're going to constantly be the micromanager, you're going to be the bottleneck for everything. And if you watch the videos I made last actually on MBA for entrepreneurs, it's literally about this topic. And that is getting the point where you stop. You don't just delegate tasks, you delegate authority is two very different levels of delegation. I hadn't really, like, I've never verbalized it. I just been. I just was thinking about the other day, I was trying to draw some stuff. One of the franchisees had asked, had a question. I was trying to make a framework for them. And so it was like, look, it's one thing to delegate tasks, it's another thing to delegate authority. Completely different. Delegation of tasks is you are responsible for sharpening the blades. Delegation of authority is you are responsible for telling everyone when the blades need to be sharpened. Two total different levels of delegation. When you start delegating authority, that is the part where the people can really hurt you. And so I would start off in your business delegating tasks, and then I would move to delegating authority. As you get more confident in yourself and then realize you're going to have people that will let you down. That's just part of business. It's part of getting in any relationship is that someone's gonna let you down. You cannot let that sour your experience going forward with any other type of business or personal relationship, like, oh, like, I got hurt in business. Every business is. It's a scam. And, like, taxes are up to me, the government's out to get me. Like, real estate's a scam because I was in 2007, 2008, like, that just happens. Like, everyone that's saying right now, stock, the stock market is a scam. Like, yeah, because you've been riding the past eight, nine months when it's crashed. So.

Like a bad investment, a Bad business, a bad employee, a bad manager, a bad partner, bad relationship should never keep you from the next one. And so I've always been a big proponent of that. And yeah, people will mess you up. And I think the big thing is, like, what we're working on in terms of, specifically to your question is with the regional manager position that with Chuck's helping me with this next year as we start more locations, is how do we create systems where that's almost impossible? Because you can. You can do that. You can absolutely make frameworks and systems to where it's much harder for the manager to kind of scam you out of things or lie to you about certain things like efficiency, bank numbers, et cetera. So good systems in place should prevent that from happening. We've already debunked one manager at Command center because we were able to see they're doing things on the side and doing things, and we were able to tell them the owner, and weed that out. So again, when you're having someone like Command center as your intermediary, the more intermediaries between whoever you're delegating tasks to delegate authority to and yourself, the more intermediaries, the less likely that they're able to scam you. Right? So having someone like Command center, having a regional manager, they're accountable to having certain safeguards in terms of accountability and number tracking. So, like, they can't take money away because, like, you know where every dollar is going. And the reports say that things like that is what we're working on. So that way, as someone has multiple locations, it's impossible for that to happen. And you weed out lower performers a lot faster.

I have one crew complain they're physically wore out from mowing all week. They work 7 to 3, Monday through Friday. Is there something you could do and to try and compact combat this fatigue during the week?

First and foremost, Kyle, I don't know if you switched to P4P. P4Pmight help with this because they'll get their work done sooner. The same amount of work done sooner. So they would literally probably have Fridays off if you switch to P for P. Or they want more money and they'd start seeing, oh, if I keep working the schedule, I'll make more money. So again, PvP will help with this. But even the hardest part is when they're not making above base pay because it's like the spring rush and you're trying to get a lot of out, like needing a lot out of them physically. That's the hardest point because they're not seeing the results of their, their labor in the form of a higher paycheck. So P4P would be the first thing because then now they have the ability to work harder and faster, so they get done earlier. And so maybe you have, you only work till Thursday. And they, hey, the work's done, they got their paycheck, they're happy. Or they're like, hey, I want to make more money, can I come work Friday? That would happen. So I think you're implementing P4P now. That would definitely be the, the first thing I'd be looking at. And in terms of combating fatigue, it's just incentives. So think like P4P bonuses, moments of appreciation, and then there's a matter of like, can you take care of your guys a little more by whether you get, give them boots, like you know, actually light working boots. You give them better uniforms that are breathable, you give them ice, you give them snacks, whatever it might be.

So they're all just like the more tactical things.

So we sent out complimentary quotes for aeration and overseeding to all our existing moan clients. We sent out 85 clients for those who hadn't inquired about the service. Every single response was I did not ask for this.

Okay, Stop sending services I didn't sign up for. Okay? All of the responses have been negative. About 10 in a row were negative since we sent them Wednesday night. We haven't got any business off the one click of or the complimentary estimate, only negative remarks. I'm worried with 600 complimentary drive by we'll have, we'll continue to get more angry phone calls and negative emails. So I would not recommend doing 600 complimentary drive bys. I would not recommend doing that. I would only do ever do complimentary drive bys for existing recurring mowing customers because it's not weird for them to get a quote from you when you're on their property every single week doing services already. So I would never do complimentary estimates for like everyone inside your database. I don't think that's good use of your time or money. And yes, people will be annoyed. People are less annoyed when you're on their property already every single week and you literally email and say, hey, I was at your property on Tuesday mowing the lawn. I thought it really could use a co aeration. Here's a quote that looks a lot different.

So I'm not a huge fan of complimentary services or complimentary estimate. Like randomly a quote being sent to someone unless they're an existing recurring customer. That's why I always say get the recurring customer because if I get them there I know I can upsell them a whole bunch more. So I would, I would guess the people that sent these the 10 negative in a row is not recurring mowing customers. And if it is, you need to frame a complimentary your complimentary estimate email differently. It needs to be more a matter of I saw your property might need these services so I sent you an estimate that looks very different than here's the estimate proposal that you requested and they're like what in the world Right? So two things. Number one, I would only do complimentary estimates where you actually send an estimate to them without them asking. I would only do that if they were a recurring customer and I would make sure that your estimate email makes it very personalized in the framework of we were at your property, I saw your this service was needed. Here's the quote the secondary thing about the one click estimate email.

This part is fishy because you sending out a 1 estimate for correction to non customers should be a slam dunk. Like if you had 600 customers in your database and you send a one click estimate email out for core aeration I would expect you to have at least 10 to 151 clicks and we've never had negative remarks over those. So.

I would want to see what your verbiage was on that on that one click estimate email because it needs to be promotional enough to know that they know that you're not bothering them and then also needs to be a matter of like scarcity and like you're doing them a favor by reaching out in terms of the time of year. So I'm, I'm, I would imagine that the most of your negative comments are coming from the people who are not recurring customers and then I would be secondary wanted to look at that email and see like what was the verbiage? Was it personalized enough so that people cared to actually respond and think that you were reaching out and giving them value? Right. The bottom line is you want that one click estimate. You want any email to them to.

To offer value to them. That's the only reason why they'll respond. The Evansville question I assume he Talked talking about 600 components for snow removal as he the snow location and CC just set up snow as a location. CC did not set up the estimates for everyone unless they requested it on the form.

Oh Lee.

You know I think it's about corporation Lee he said it was for core aeration. So maybe Lee, if You could touch base with him about that. But I don't think it's for the snow because the snow you have to be checked off for command center to specifically set up those on that form. But it sounds like it is for core aeration, so. All right, that's all we got.

All right, guys, hope you had a fantastic day. Can't believe I showed you my desktop, my Google Drive. These are the most personal things I own. Let's go. All right, guys, have a great day. Oh, quick update.

First, first property went on the market yesterday morning, had a full price offer by the afternoon. Have two more offers coming in the day. Hoping we bid it up a little bit. That'll be nice.

And three more go on today and one more going goes on next week. And yeah, so that's the status of the real estate as they sell. I'll give you guys all the data. Like when I bought it, what I put into it, the equity, how much equity, we really get it, what we sold it for, all that fun jazz. We'll go over the negotiation tactics and, and how we sold. I'll actually show you the, the listings. So give me like till end of next week probably is when I think they'll all be pending offers and then I'll give you all the background and like dive really. I'll take a whole separate video, diving really deep into asking prices back and forth how to handle those with buyers. What we did to improve numbers on all the, the assets. It is definitely interesting to see just how much more I'm able to make on a 10 unit apartment complex that I've owned for a year compared to duplexes. Because duplexes are bound by the fact that you've got to really look at comps of other duplexes that I've sold, not just your cap rate. So your cap rate becomes much more important as a valuation mechanism as you get more units. So yeah, I'll share all the numbers, but it's going to be really interesting. Like I'll make more on the 10 unit apartment complex if we sell it. If we do.

Then the other five duplexes combined, four duplexes combined. And I've owned the duplexes for twice as long and the rents are higher. So it's just. Yeah, it's interesting. I'll show you guys on the numbers that we pretty eye opening I think and it just kind of confirms that I don't really want to go back into going into duplexes again. It'll be larger unit sizes that way. As you work on it, you make do value add and you increase the rents and you improve the management. Someone like Liz gets in there and just, you know, totally makes it way better that we get massive returns versus, like, you get like 10, 15, 20% equity over the course of a year or two. That's fine. Forced appreciation. But if you can double rents on a 10, 15, 20, 30 unit apartment complex, you double the price of the property. That's awesome. I love it. All right, guys, have a great Friday, have a great weekend and we'll see you.