Mike Minutes Mastermind 10/21/2022

Hey, everyone. Hope you're doing super well. Let's get started. We do a quick, quick mastermind this morning. There's only one question that came in, so I want to go over that one. And then I want to go over another topic. And that is territories. How leads are determined between.

Growth and solo operator models and what you can kind of expect if someone gets close to you. So let's go ahead and open up.

There was one question that came in. There it is. All right. Does command center monitor email in real time or do they check it only a few times a day? They only check it a couple times a day. And the reason that they do that is because we don't want to literally just be sitting there twilling our thumbs and charging by the minute. We want it to be when we go in there, there's things to do and that there's time to clock. If we're checking it, say 10 times a day, there's a good chance we're wasting probably about eight to 10 minutes just going in and out. And so that's eight to $10 times 20 times in a month starts to add up. So we do it twice a day. They have the whole checklist for the morning tasks and a whole checklist in the afternoon tasks. And on that is the email and the whole. There's a whole department now around just the email. So that way you don't have as many hands in the cookie jar when it comes to answering your emails, et cetera. So that is the long and short of that question. The one thing I wanted to go over really quick, though, is the. One second, let me move this down just for the sake of having fun.

When you have leads that come into command center and you have a solo operator and a growth model. We were talking about this with one of our locations that we kind of have the tightest cluster of three franchisees. And this is when it's extremely important that you talk to the franchisees that are next to you. And I'll explain why in just a second.

What can happen is, keep in mind. Sorry, I'm trying to address this on my lap so it's not like looking at my nostrils.

Keep in mind, if a lead is outside of your service area, it is not guaranteed to come to you. Sorry, it is not inside of your territory. It's not inside your legal territory. It's not guaranteed to come to you. It's going to go to whoever calls. Now, the challenging part is what happens if I have an existing customer outside of my territory? And someone comes along and is marketing in that area and it's outside of my territory, we cannot guarantee it's going to come to you. We cannot guarantee that it's going to go to whoever picks up the phone. Now, the challenging part, the confusing part, is when the customer that is outside of your territory and someone else markets to them and they call and they're like, oh, yeah, you know, I already have you doing my lawn. And then what happens? The command center searches you in the database, searches that customer in the database, and find that they are an existing customer of another territory. And that is where we have made some mistakes in terms of giving that lead back to the franchisee. That doesn't happen. What should be happening and what we're going to make sure continues to happen is if it's outside the territory, the guaranteed territory, it is going to go to whoever calls. That is who that lead will go to. And it's a counterintuitive experience for the customer to have to be switching between locations. And this is why it's so important to communicate with other owners and delineate what areas you're going to have and what areas they're going to have. Because if you do that, there's never going to be a time when you have a customer way outside their territory, but inside someone else's service area. And you know, service areas can overlap, that's totally fine, but territories cannot. So what happens is when those service areas overlap, it's going to go to whoever calls. But again, you can prevent any sort of error in that because it will happen. Error will happen. And I cannot guarantee error outside of your territory.

I cannot guarantee lack of air outside of your territory, because this is the situation and that is a customer. An existing customer is. Hey, for recurring services, they call in, they're confused why their fall cleanup is now underneath someone else, another territory or another entity. Or they're like, why am I giving you my email? I'm on mowing service. And when that. When the command center hears that, they immediately, oh, let me go check your. In your database. They check the database. Oh, yeah, I see here and now that lead is going to someone else. That's going to stop, and it really needs to stop. However, I can't guarantee it's going to happen every single time. And furthermore, I would say this is why you need to talk to owners. This is. There are plenty of owners that have talked to each other, communicate. Hey, everyone on this side of this street or this highway, you can have everyone on this side of the street is mine. And then what we're going to do is we're going to make sure that we change in our database the customer information. So that way Command center never is confused by us having customers in one area and yet they're calling from a different territory. All right, so I know Connor had mentioned this the day him and Hugo. Hugo is a solo operator. He has a growth model. They had a conversation and it's not always necessarily fun at the beginning to address it, but if you do it, you'll never have an issue afterwards. And I was like, here's the line. Everyone on that side, I'm just going to give them to you. Here's all their lead, here's all their information. I delete them out of my database so there's never confusion. And hey, everyone on that side, give those to me. And then that way they're in my database and there's never confusion that way. There's never. This is the one issue we keep seeing being the struggle, and that is when you have an existing customer way outside of your territory and then someone else is marking there with a growth model or solo operator model, but their service area is in that market and they're marketing to them. That lead is going to go to whoever calls. Now, I just can't guarantee that because it does get awkward for Command center when the person's like, I'm already a customer. And then we're searching the database and we do find it. So the way you can prevent that is get them out of your database if they're not in your service area or if you've agreed to the greed with another owner. This is where we're going to draw the line. You're going to have this area, I'm going to have this area. Because again, the territory is the only part that we guarantee and it's only part I'd recommend staying inside of. But if you're going outside of it, I cannot guarantee you're going to keep those leads. So hope that made sense.

Oh, man. Way to represent on the push up challenge. Let's go. Hugo and I pretty much adjust our territories to fit what areas we wanted. That's what I'd recommend. Right. Like obviously the territories, the guaranteed territories don't change, but the service areas are the ones. We're having some of the issues right now with people that just have not communicated. And so what's happening is one person's mowing their lawn and then someone else is marketing to that customer and getting them for fall cleanup. That's fine. But if you don't have a guaranteed territory, there is no guarantee that that leads into yours. And so.

The, the ultimate thing is communicate with the owner, communicate with each other. Like, hey, so we don't have this issue of me putting doing the corporation after you, just mode or vice versa. Here, here's the line. You keep everyone on this side. I'm going to take them out of my database so there's no confusion at command center. And then same thing for your area. So that way we have very clear delineation and this never happens. So that is 100 my recommendation because the territories we can control. But we do allow you to operate out of your service area. And I know that's somewhat counterintuitive because most franchisees would not allow that. We allow this. So that way we don't have wasted leads. You don't have people calling in that you could service.

And that you could make some money on, especially when you're growing. But I would just recommend don't go so far outside your service area. It's going to create more and more gray areas as locations get closer to you. So hope that made sense.

That's all I got for today. Today's the last day of the GIE Expo Equip Expo here in Kentucky. So I'll be back in town Sunday and yeah, that's it. A good show. Great talk. The other day I posted the whole thing on my YouTube channel and there's a lot of fun. Thanks for everyone that came out and represented the brand and I really appreciate it. So you all have a great weekend and we'll see you on Monday.