Mike Minutes Mastermind 10/18/2022

All right, let's rock and roll. Hopefully everyone can hear me. Okay. We are driving on our way to the airport, but I figured we should definitely hop on and do a live, like, minutes. So a little bit fuzzy the video. Hopefully you can hear me decently. And there was several questions that came in, though, so let's jump into those. One quick thing I wanted to say, and that is, as we are ending the coming to the end of the year, we still have approximately, what, 75 days left in the year. I've heard over the past couple days, a couple of our owners just sort of, you know, you're exhausted, and you're kind of falling off the bandwagon of just staying dedicated.

I would really recommend everyone reach out to someone that's close by you and just touch base with them.

They've been growing a bunch. They've been trying to get a lot of employees, and it's been a long year. So please reach out if you're in that situation. But also if even if you are not, it's always very healthy to reach out to other people. And one of the things that I think is underrated is the amount that you, as a teacher or someone who is mentoring someone else get in that relationship. In that, you also solidify the concepts you're teaching to yourself. And so there's one thing to learn a concept, it's another thing to teach a concept. And when you teach it, a lot of times the concepts will become more clear to you.

Or you'll even synthesize better questions about the process by teaching it to someone else, because you'll find the gaps and the holes in what you're saying. So reach out to somebody else. See what you can do to help them or just. And connect with them. As we head into the last 75 days of the year, the difference between a great year versus a mediocre is going to hinge mostly on your last two months of the year. So keep that in mind. Also, one last thing, and that is yesterday. Today, Brad is going to post that link in the Facebook group. For the CPA side of things, I'd recommend taking advantage of that if you would like him to do your taxes for this year, there is a limited number of spots, and then we're gonna open up the public, if there's still room. And so there was some people that responded after the roundtable, et cetera. But what's very valuable is that call that he's gonna set up with you over the next several weeks in terms of strategy and looking at. Okay, what's your potential tax liability for 2022? Should you be focusing more on amortization or should be focusing more on section 179? You're going to be focusing more on section 179. If you're having a pretty profitable year and you're going to be trying to minimize your tax burden, you're probably going to be focusing more on amortization. If you spend a lot of money this spring on marketing, hiring trucks, equipment, et cetera, and you're not showing a lot of profit on the books. So that's the type of call that's extremely valuable from a strategic standpoint. That one call alone could save you tens of thousands of dollars in taxes. So I had one of them Yesterday with my CPAs. Same thing. End of year. Hey, where are we at? I'll have another one, probably December. I pay over $10,000 just to have the calls, let alone my tax returns are totally separate. So just the strategic calls with the CPAs I pay over 10 grand for. So it's worth it, though, because those will probably save you at least four to five times as much what you're paying for them. So a good CPA will save you a whole lot more than they cost. So whether it be 6 or $700 or whatever Brad is charging, I do recommend it highly. Just even if it was for the strategic step side of things, a good CPA and a good lawyer, as you grow, your business is extremely important. So. All right. All right, let's jump into questions.

All right. You guys can see this? Yeah. Did.

There it is. All right, Thomas, is our franchise dashboard edit your web page tab.

Am I able to request or see banner options or am I confused with something somewhere else? I'm unable to see anything else out of website stats for our site right now. This tab, I would like to have a fall fuel on our page if possible. This time of year. These are falling all around this. Yeah, you should absolutely see banners. Not on edit your web page, but I believe it's add to your webpage. I'm not looking at it right now, but let me show you the banner you're probably looking for because I know they have it on Wacom site right now.

Yeah, there's a banner. Here it is.

This is the banner.

So this is what I'm assuming you're trying to get.

So, yeah, these banners can be added. It's gonna be added to your site, though. So if I recall correctly, on the dashboard, there's a tab that's not Edit your webpage, but I think it's add to your webpage. I forget exactly what the verbiage is. If you don't see that, Thomas, for example, like there's no other options. Send me a screenshot longer service.com we'll figure it out. But it should be there. Everyone haven't heard that not showing up anywhere else. There's probably just a different tab inside the dashboard that you're not seeing. I know it's. It's not like the most intuitive thing of what tabs are, which it's just like it was tough for us to like categorize, you know, add to your site, change your site, subtract from your site, things like that. So I apologize for that. As we add more things to it, it'll become probably a little more clear as we go down the road. As someone in their forge with no real wealth built up yet, would you recommend buying the real estate dip next year or continuing pumping dollars into business currently at one location? I would highly recommend just sticking to the wealth steps that we talk about. And that is before you start investing in other asset classes, really focusing on the one that you. The financial pillar. Right. So it's never a bad idea to be. To be educating yourself on all these different areas of investing like real estate or stocks or things like that. But until you build up a financial pillar that's pumping out cash, there's no reason to be going elsewhere until you're trying to deploy that capital in a more efficient way. From a tax perspective.

Like, I had multiple locations before ever buying real estate. And honestly, now I'm selling the real estate because I see a more efficient way of using that money and a better return over the next five years outside of real estate, when. When the property, like one property I'm selling right now has gone up, we're selling it for almost 50% more than what it was a year ago. So 50 increase. I probably, let's just say it's 35 because there was improvements made. But that's ridiculous because typically real estate grows at like 2 to 4% a year. And so when you have that quick of an acceleration of appreciation, you know that you're at a top, like there's a bubble. So you either are going to sell it or B, you're going to wait another five to 10 years for it to be worth that much again. And so I don't think It'll be worth $2.7 million property for like, it won't be worth that much after the dip. For another five to 10 years as it recovers and comes back. Because that's just like the trend over the past 80 years of real estate. It's like 2 to 4%. So the question is, can you beat that investing your business? And the answer, as long as you do a half decent job, is yes. Especially after five years. The first five years of business is it's so hard to stay focused because you're like, oh man, I'm seeing like 15% return in the stock market. I'm seeing 20% cash and cash returns in real estate. All of that's fine and good. But after five years of building the business and you're actually profitable now, your returns are like literally 80, 90, 100% return on your investment. If you spent say $70,000 to get your business off the ground and then it just broke even for the next five years. But then year six and beyond, it started pumping off $100,000 in profit, your returns will be out from a percentage standpoint, will beat out any sort of stock investment or real estate portfolio. And so that's why in the steps of wealth, we don't talk about investing and diversification until step six and seven. So are we rocking a private driver today? This is the private driver, yo. Oh, here, this is Liz. She's taking a nap.

Everybody.

That's hilarious. Liz in a bad moment. Okay, next up.

Wait, sorry you guys. Here, we can do that again because they were on the smalls. There you go. There's Lee. Now you can see them.

Just taking a nap. And there's that.

Okay.

I cannot get out of expert mode on Google Ads. Do we still have videos in the dashboard available about creating ads while in this particular mode? All the performance max ads should be made in expert mode because they are not available in express mode to make Google Max ads. Please send me a. I know it's anonymous, but please send me a screenshot of what you're looking at because the Google maps Express. This is actually something I was working with someone on yesterday. They're like, I can't see Google Maps. I can't see. Or sorry, performance max. I can't see them anywhere. And the reason is that they were in express. They're only in the expert version of Google Ads as an option.

Oh, there's a big one. Okay, Dustin. We had an estimate come in for 141 properties Real estate management company. Almost every stop has multiple properties to take care of while we are there, including one stop that has 15 yards next to each other. Let's Go. I don't particularly like the idea of taking on one customer that has this much percentage of revenue and income. Thoughts? I also know a guy that used to do work for this management company and he was charging as low as $18 a yard. We obviously will not be charging that, but is it worth lowering some prices to close the entire thing? They also want a monthly price not for service, basically a 12 month contract. I cannot stand when a customer tells me how to bill or how to do something. But is it wrong for me to tell them we are not doing this? And it will be variable based on time of year and services for provided. I find it lazy when they can't budget and figure out how to charge their tenants for service. They want the following services for every property. Okay. I would estimate if, if we had this many.

Total would be roughly $350,000 per year. This would be based off minimum charge mowing yards. Thoughts or concerns? Yeah, so I don't know. I wouldn't say it's necessarily lazy on their part when they're as a property management company because they are looking for just the simplest way to bill and it'd be very difficult for them to track and keep you accountable to all your services on 141 properties. What I would recommend is basically I would have a meeting with them in person before doing all this work because this is literally going to take you half a day to figure out just the pricing for all of this. I would have a meeting with them like, hey, where are we at in terms of ballpark? Because want to waste your time and I don't want to spend a whole bunch of time figuring out these numbers because we are not going to be as cheap as your last contractor. And even though you don't know what the last price was, you just be honest about that. Like, hey, I know I will not be as cheap as them. We focus on creating a premium product for our customers and having high levels of communication. And honestly a lot of times that's like music to the ears because they're probably leaving their previous provider because of that, especially on that number of properties. So $350 per year, you're going to be getting at least one or two more trucks and a whole other setup. I would probably try to go cheap with those. But still you're probably going to be investing 50 grand in equipment and you're going to hire two more, three more employees, etc. So this is a big investment on your part. So having a contract on this sort of thing isn't necessarily a bad thing and it isn't the deal. Even if you did a 1:12 month contract with them.

Prices that you want and need to get the services done, assuming that you do that in a year's time, even if they don't, they don't renew, you're probably going to have enough work to fill the truck and equipment outside of their contract. Right. You'd probably do a little bit of marketing in 2024 if they didn't renew. And you probably fill up a truck's worth of going. Right. So you need like another 100. No, you need like another 150 customers to fill this up. 130, 140. So.

You know, it's definitely a lot of work because they have the full deal here, like gutters, bush trimming, core aeration, planting trees.

They want snow removal, the whole nine yards. Right. So it's a lot of work. And so I would just make sure that you're charging what you're worth. And I would have in person meetings with them. Don't just send them a quote on the side of the project, have a meeting with them and just say, hey, look, I don't want to waste your time. You're not the cheapest here. And so are you, are you getting the cheapest? Are you going to just be taking the cheapest bid? Because we will not be that, but we will be the best service for you and we will do the properties the the best in our compared to all the other bidders. So if you have a meeting with them like that and they're like, ah, yeah, we take the, the best bid and you know, the best bid means the cheapest, then you should be running to the hills because it's just not worth your time. Do not discount.

The reason I say don't discount is because the discount comes in the fact the amount of work and effort you're going to put in to this estimate as well as servicing this client, it's going to take literally probably 20 hours a month of your time just to answer questions. All these tenants will have complaints. That is discount in and of itself. If you're looking at that protective. When we go into an HOA now at the Bellingham shop, we will actually tack on a whole bunch of admin costs to the 12 month contract. Is it 10%? LV.

You think about 10%? They'll increase the price of an HOA fee if they're doing one in a 12 month contract because of just the time it takes to do admin time. So the amount of time it takes the office person more calls the command center, all the tenants call the board calls. They want extra meetings. So we actually, we actually go the opposite direction. We go up now because the headache that this creates. So hopefully I answered how much? Around 8%. 8%. Yeah. Got it. Logan. I'm sending out the leaves for existing clients one click estimate today to our recurring customer base. We have a one click estimate for all appropriate leaf cleanups to send to non mowing customers. Or should we just evocate the verbiage in the other one? Yes, there is a fall property, at least in a one that I put up about six weeks ago and it's a little bit more pictorial and it doesn't have anything to do with existing customers. So I would send that one from six weeks ago. I would send it to non recurring customers. And the one that I put up the other day, that's just mostly text. I would send that to recurring customers. Correct.

Thoughts on a private driver? Take me to rest. Oh man. One of our guys locally is getting his pilot's license. So the big joke was that we were going to start doing flyby estimates instead of drive by estimates. And then he was wanting to get his 50 bonus for a new customer. So he thought he could just take a whole bunch of postcards and just dump them.

And that would be his way of trying to get his bonus. So. All right guys, hope you guys have a great Tuesday. We'll see you all tomorrow and I think we'll see some of you equip expo. But I thought I'd do these each day. I might not hit 9:30 Pacific Standard Time each time, but I'll definitely answer the questions at least on a daily basis and hope you all have a great day. Take care.