Mike Minutes Mastermind 10/02/2024

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Mic minutes Mastermind. Let's get started with questions. Looks like there are.

Five came in today.

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All right, first question is from Tarot Eck from Boons Creek, Tennessee. When will our locations become more valuable due to decreased locations available? 3, 5, 10, 20 years? I think it's. It'll. It's already in a couple markets started to come this way, but I think it's going to be more like when we hit around three to 400 locations. That's kind of when I think it'll start really taking more root. But it went when you hit like for example with Anytime Fitness, I think they have 2,000.

But their territory sizes are really, really small. I think.

Man, I remember forget exactly what their territory sizes are, but they're really small because you can get some that are pretty close to each other, whereas we have larger territory size. So I think it'll be more around like that.

800 to 1,000 locations where we'll hit penetration. Like where like you will have to buy in essentially. That's when it'll really go off. But I would say you'll start feeling it probably in three to five years. Like right when we're like 300 to 500 locations somewhere like there. If I had to guess, Ter has another question. Do you think you would have done the same thing with any other business that you would have currently been in the in at the time when you didn't decide not to go medical? So there's window cleaning, pressure washing, something else and franchise it just like you did lawn care. Random questions. Lol. I haven't been on here in a while. Decide I just post something at least or what did you find? Is a good combatant to new shiny business syndrome? Getting bored, wanting to scratch an itch.

So in terms of other industries here, one second. Make sure my audio is up.

Cool. In terms of other industries, I think a lot of times we. It's just like our. We're primed in a certain way. So like I mo. I started mowing grass when I was super young for my family because we had a riding lawnmower. And so I kind of just enjoyed doing that. I kind of like took a sense of pride in doing it when I was younger. And then it was just like kind of.

One of our friends that had money, they. We did a landscape project for them, my brother and I, for like two weeks. And they basically said, hey, we'll give you $1,000 or we'll buy you a mower blower and weed whacker. So like if that wouldn't have, it wouldn't have happened. I probably would have ended up going to medical school because I wouldn't have any. I wouldn't have had anything to fall back on and we wouldn't have had the.

Experience in the industry. So I think most time it's like you kind of fall into it and then you just get really good at it. And I think for the vast majority of us in terms of business, it's just a matter like the inputs are the same as what's. The outputs are very, very similar in terms of whether you do window cleaning or you do mowing. It's like it is a service based business. Do you have good customer service? Do you manage people well? Can you sell? So it's the same skills. And then in terms of like what's a good combatant to new shiny business syndrome is like looking at the results of that and realizing like it does not work. So every time I've gotten into anything besides home services, it's like either A, a distraction, B, a waste of money.

Or just like an absolute time suck. And, and so it's like just get really, really good. Like all the money is made, I would say in the top like 5 to 10% of being the best in an industry. So just like focus on one industry instead of trying to be like decent at 10. That's what I found. Like the best real estate investors, the ones that make the most money, they've been doing it for 20, 30 years. That's all they do. They focus 100% of their time on it and they become very good at it. You can take the exact same properties and give it to an amateur. Someone that's like decent at real estate, done it for a year or two, kind of has, you know, wet their chops a little bit on real estate and they would turn that deal into like a average or underperforming asset. So I genuinely believe it has nothing to do with industry. And so anytime I've gotten distracted from home services and like it's just chaos and chaos. Not necessarily it's a bad idea. I think that some of the ideas I've had around, you know, things like Liz actually interviewed me and I think she was gonna post it this weekend and I talked a bunch about this. Like my different business ventures that went, went south or I quit, I should say like ketosis cups, like they were good. We shipped out 20,000 boxes and Covid came along and I canned it, but like that was a complete distraction. That's such a commodity. It could, could it be good? Maybe bioshakes, like, you know, the vending machine, that protein shakes, like, could have been probably, maybe reset mind and body could have been good and like profitable. Yeah, probably. It's a good idea. But like, it doesn't matter about the idea. It just doesn't. If you want to make money, if you want to make a business, it does not matter about the idea. It's just like, can you execute and can you stay focused on it? And if I look at any discipline, industry, et cetera, it's like people have been doing it for ten or more years. They just seem to have a better shot at winning. And I'd rather just like go really, really narrow and go deep.

So.

Terrell Eck from Boone's Creek, Tennessee. I remember hearing you talk about several times about the ebbs and flows of man going from projects to mowing. Sometimes one time, one, sometimes the other. This year for us, it seems to be property cleanups. Obviously being a smaller business, I would like more recurring mowing. It's more steady, more predictable, easy to train. But we have so many organic leads coming for property clips. How should I feel about it? With me and one employee, it seems that there's very little I can do to capitalize on on them. We already have 17k per month mowing, filling it to 20 to 25k with properties with cleanups already. Most of them need multiple guys to get in there and get the jobs done. Not one guy working for 20, 30, 40 hours on one project by himself cleaning up the yard. The approach that I've been taking this year is just to ignore them because I don't know what else to do with them. And yet the part of me that understands that we started with absolutely nothing and we are now getting these leads without even trying at all, makes me feel like it's wasteful and this opportunity is lost by not leaning into them. But seems like there's just really no way to handle them with such a small crew. Raise prices on the hourly rates on these new cleanups that are coming in and are going to keep coming into fall, into winter. I bet I guessed. Haha. Oh, profit mode is what we are in. Okay, okay, okay, okay. So if I was, if I misspoke or something, forgive me, but this is not, not, not the route. So when leads are coming to you and you offer a service, you take the leads because the whole purpose is getting new customers. And I don't really care what type of service the customer comes to me for. I just want to take the lowest customer acquisition cost, get them in the door, and then I can upsell them. And so like, if you want mowing, you're not going to sell a lot of mowing in the winter. So it's like it's pointless to be advertising mowing or waiting for mowing leads. Get the leads for property cleanups, take them. If they're literally falling on your step and falling into your lap, take them. Then your goal and objective is do the cleanup, make it profitable, figure out your labor so that you can book these sustainably into the future and have like, if they're falling on your lap like this, you can absolutely hire another employee. And their, their primary job is to do these cleanups. And you're like, well, I don't want to have to put one guy working for 20 hours on one. Well, like it's better than not having the job done at all, right? If this is a $2,000 cleanup that we can get and they're just falling into our lap, take them and like, well, they're not recurring. We'll take the money. Put it like take the four or five hundred dollars you're making profit on that job, throw it in the bank account, and the next spring you'll have more money to spend on marketing for mowing, if that's really what you're looking for. Like, I am indifferent as to whether or not the lead comes project or a one time job. What I'm focused on is get customers and if they're pouring in on you in one time jobs, great. Then it's like, how do we figure out how to sell them recurring services? How do we sell them a maintenance package? How do we sell them some sort of warranty where we're coming back monthly to check in on the project? How do I sell them a quarterly property cleanup?

This notion that we need to decide what our business model is going to be and then market to that only and not accept these other leads is going to keep the business smaller. Now will it potentially be more what you're aligning with what you're wanting in terms of business? Potentially, yes. But if you're trying to grow the business, and I would say if you want to grow profitably, this is the way to do it. Take free leads and make money on them and then take that money. And then when you, when it's spring rush, when you have the opportunity to market for another service, feel free to spend that money. But don't turn away bad leads. Sorry, don't turn away free leads.

I know you have one employee right now. I genuinely believe if you're actually getting this many falling in your lap, you only need one to two of these jobs per week right now closed to keep another crew busy, another employee busy. And I know right now you're like, hey, well, one guy working, it's gonna take him like you know, half a week, two, three, four day projects. Great. The customers rather have that than nothing. And so if you've just planned this correctly, you say, okay, we're gonna hire someone October 15th, and then you go out and find someone and all these leads that are coming next two weeks are gon booking them from October 15th forward. And all of a sudden you're gonna be four, six weeks booked out with fall cleanups and winter cleanups. And that's great. I just, I genuinely believe that customers would rather have the work done this week. Then you'd be like, sorry, we only have one guy available. It's gonna take them a few days. Like they don't care. Get the job done. They just want the job done. So like, I would not overthink this. If these leads are falling into your lap, let's just say you're getting four of these a week. It's like 15amonth. If you can close two of those a week, you will keep one, that one. That crew member busy. And guess what? You already have the truck. You already have the equipment. The skill set is relatively low. You get them started in the morning and then you check back in the evening. Do make sure your videos are really dialed in for the fall cleanup. For the cleanups when you're doing the estimates. But I would not be turning these estimates away. And if you're like, well, I don't want that kind of service. Get the, get the money. Have an employee make very clear to them, like, hey, this is how it's going to roll. You're going to be the property cleanup crew. There's going to be times when you're going to work longer hours and be times might only work 30 hours because I only get one 20 or 25 hour project for the week. I would not be turning away leads like that. I just wouldn't. I just genuinely believe you could get an employee, have them start October 15th, and by that time have be two weeks booked out with cleanups. Based upon what you've said, that money, if you don't want projects, stack the money and set it aside to sell them mowing services. Next year for marketing. And I also believe that if you sell them a recurring or sell them a property, if you can sell them other services, including a quarterly property cleanup. Corey from Bellingham. Good morning. Happy Q4 billing invoicing question. Do you have a good rule of thumb on how much should sit in outstanding collectible? I've been tracking this offhand for Bellingham throughout this year and day one after invoicing card on file chain charged. Two no checks for current billing cycle collected. We've stayed at 10% or less of total revenue outstanding since my learning moment this spring. The new automatic collections process has been great, but I don't want to take it for granted. Under 10% sounds great for me, someone at my level of knowledge. But that's a completely arbitrary benchmark I made up that currently sits over several tens of thousands. Should I be basing my tracking off the current business actual cash flow needs, or do you have any informed advice for me? Thanks. Have a good day. The real answer to this is anything, Any dollar that is outstanding is unacceptable. That's really, like, the actual answer here. And then we'll step back to, like, reality. But really it's like, I want a card on file, and when. As soon as I want to collect, I can collect the money or I have collected deposit prior to the job being completed.

I think in the book it says if you collect at. At time of, you know, when, immediately, that's essentially good. If it's. If it's going beyond 14 days, we have a service problem. Like, we're gonna have to turn off, stop serving the property. If it goes beyond 28 days, we now have a legal problem. And that's when you're gonna start, like, filing to collections and like, et cetera, et cetera. And so, like, I don't even want to get there. I'm actually thrilled by the fact that you have no checks for the current billing cycle. That's awesome, because even when I was there a few years ago, we. I still had to run to the bank. So kudos to you, Corey. So that's a huge step in the right direction. I would really scrutinize why there's tens of thousands of dollars still outstanding, though. Because if you take that money and let's just say you would have collected that last week, that would make Q3 look incredible. @ the Bellingham shop, for example. So the difference literally between having an incredible quarter versus a decent quarter is the fact that we didn't collect multiple tens of thousands, like, several tens of thousands of dollars. So you know, in reality there are people who, their car doesn't go through, their final payment doesn't, you don't collect it for a couple weeks, etc. Anything more in my opinion than 14 days overdue is massively unacceptable. You are paying like you, it costs you money. Like you could literally have a profitable business and go bankrupt. And that's scary. And so I genuinely believe that this is, this is not a matter of like what is allowable. Anything that is, that is accounts receivable is unacceptable. Someone owes you money for work that you've already done in their property and you don't have their payment information and you are hoping and praying that they send you a check or they randomly wake up and pay you on the client portal. Like that's just not a great strategy. And so we've made it specifically inside a copilot where people can't go into their client profile and turn off the ability for you to charge their card because it's super frustrating when you actually collect their card. You do the work and then you think you can charge them and now you can't. So they can't even do that now. So.

One of the biggest things that we're trying to look at is like how can we make sure that people can't even accept instant price forms without getting a card on file? Because this is kind of like the one loophole right now people can get in or you have to keep following up and trying to get the card. But. But I would say the lower the better is the answer and 0 is the standard. And so will you ever hit the standard? No, you won't. Like, like people, even if you have everyone's card information, they have non sufficient funds, they'll have expired cards, their card information is incorrect, their card got compromised, the list goes on and on.

But like the standard is zero. Anything above that is unacceptable.

Russell Kandin from Georgia. I've noticed that when a client is calling in to pause services for the winter, CC is pausing service but does not automatically start up for the next season. Would it be better to delete the remaining services for the season so that we don't have to manually reactivate all the services next spring? I like the benefit of putting in off season in the services, but we lose that benefit for the clients that pause early. Is there an easier way to pause services when this happens? Another way I've addressed this is going into the services and changing scene, changing the start date for the first week of mowing of next season. Sorry if this was addressed in an earlier mastermind. I have missed a few recently. Thanks, Mike. Yeah, maybe Liz, when she hears us, can clarify in the comments exactly how she handles that, how they handles the command center. Because I know this has been debated back and forth. There's like five different ways this could be done, but they have one way they do this. One thing that's a little more, a little difficult is when people call in, sometimes they are actually canceling services and it's not just for the end of the year. So what I would say so I agree with you, Russell, I. In terms of your current step, just make sure that the customer isn't actually canceling services. Because this is also a time when people do cancel quite often, not just for the end of the season, but like there's like, hey, we're done, we're going to cancel and then we'll call you kind of thing or you know, we're moving or whatever. And so in that event, just make sure that they're not doing that and make sure they're just pausing for the end of the year would be the thing. And then also you can search, I'm 99% sure you can do it on clients, but you can search by basically people that have a pause recurring service. And so then you could go in there, just reactivate the next spring if you needed to. But I will leave this to Liz because I know this is like there's been several ways people do this and a lot of it is just around like your preference. But it really is a matter like when command center clients is finishing out the season. Our goal is that the off season is set up in a way where their mowing service is going to start right back up next, next spring. So.

Ken Lynn, I watch many videos of how to follow up with estimates and that we should be persistent until we get an answer. We at least deserve that. But at what point of the customer or cut by what point of the customer or prospective customer ghosting us, do we give up or assume that the not answering is the answer? I've come across a few people that are upset. They said something like if I don't answer then that means I'm not interested. Yeah, but see, this is why we don't follow up enough. Like the reason I say keep following up until they say something is because the vast majority of us don't ever get to that point. Like 99% of people don't say this last line. And so.

Yes, one out of 100 people that you follow up relentlessly with will say if I don't answer it means I'm not interested. Where he says okay, no problem. Thank you. If you told me I wouldn't have I would have stopped calling. So I just don't see this, this, this answers being said enough for people to.

To actually warrant not giving doing follow up phone calls. And so if you were getting this for 50 to 60% of your estimates as a different conversation but I, I just know that this happens maybe one out of 100, two out of 100 times but out of those 100 times it's also three or four people that you consistently are calling. They're like oh yeah, thank you so much. Like I just haven't got around to open up my email or I meant to open up yesterday click accept. So like there's so many different it's like it cost me exactly $0 to hear this this information and so the lost opportunity is the other four or five people that, that are interested just haven't got around and contacting me or forgot to click accept or thought they did but they didn't etc. So I'm not really going after this person. They're, they're lost lead already. I'm, I'm going after everyone else that is not them.

Based on Terrell's questions, what made you decide on 5 mile radius? Why not 10 or 20 mile? I know there's enough work in a 5 mile radius but why not go larger for protected territory? Because people then they, it would take them way too long to get to profitability if they were starting from scratch because they're, their service area would be so large, their density would be so low and their P4P would not make sense for so long and they'd end up deviating from the systems. That's why like I started my location I usually started like a two or three mile radius and I don't even care about the other whatever part of my territory because I need, I know I want my crew as soon as they have a full route to be making above base pay. I want my marketing dollars to be boiling a puddle and not trying to boil the ocean. And so it's not a matter of like whether or not I think there should be a larger territory. It's a matter of a is there enough people, 100,000 people to build a million dollar business? And secondly from a starting perspective and a marketing impact perspective I just, I just know that like the smaller the territory people will get from 0 to 60 faster.

So alrighty. I think that is it for today? I hope you have a fantastic day. I had a nice little run with the IRS yesterday. Very fun. Very fun. Unexpected random fee came up. Bless their heart. Ruined half my morning. But we're back on top, so hope you'll have a fantastic day. We'll see you tomorrow. Have a great Wednesday. Take care.

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