Mike Minutes Mastermind 10/22/2024

Good morning, Augusta Nation. Hope you're doing good.

Happy Tuesday. We have new owners here. Training. I think there are 15, I think 15 people, 10 new locations getting trained here. This will be our last one before February and March, which those ones are going to be packed. So in February, March, we'll probably re record. The media team will re record all of the.

Initial training. We were going to do it this time, but I know there's a few things changing.

End of this year. And so I want that included in the recorded training on the academy. So at least once a year we'll record the entire thing. And what's cool is now with the new dashboard, it's all transcribed and searchable, so it'd be helpful. For example, this training is the first one where we'll have the four stages of profitable size of business. And I want that included on the recording so when people search back in time, that's accurate. So that has happened this week. I might be a little bit less frequent this week on Masterminds just because of that, but that's the reason why. What else we got here?

Okay, maybe I'll bring this up later. This is not necessarily an announcement, so let's just move on. And I might add some education at the end. We'll see.

Present. There we go.

There it is. Goodness. All right, there we go. All right, let's zoom in a little bit here, folks. There we go. First question is. First question from Mr. Anonymous. PB picky backing off of Garrett's question yesterday about his employee. You think Garrett. I got. Glendale, Colorado. Oh, that was the employee. Okay, got it. Yep. You mentioned you currently have team members that have said bad things, done stupid things, etc in the past and you chose to forgive them and move on. Would you be willing to share some examples and how you rectified the situation to. To where it works for you and the employee names redacted, of course. I'm more so interested in the scenarios and your mindset around this.

Okay.

Okay, let me think. Give me a second.

So the biggest thing is, if someone's going to do something really off the charts in private, I'm going to give them a lot more grace than if they do something publicly. If they do something publicly in front of the team, then everyone's waiting for a response and no response can be confusing to people because then they're like, well, why did you respond in this regard? Very harshly in this regard? Not at all. And then you have to get. You explain. You have to explain yourself a bunch. So usually if someone does something kind of weird in public to the, to the team, for example, like being late to a team meeting. That is an example of like everyone knows they were late versus someone saying something kind of stupid to you privately in a one on one.

And you just realizing that they're going through a really rough time personally or things are happening in their life, etc. And giving them some grace, that's different because I think that if you, if there are public things happening, you have to be much more consistent. Whereas if things are happening privately, you can be a little bit more sensitive to the scenarios that are happening in their personal life. And that's going to be misinterpreted as oh, that means you're really, really worried about public image and like how you look and look in front of the team. No, I need a standard that, that is upheld that everyone knows and it's not confusing. And so if someone does something privately that's a little weird, I try to deal with as much as possible one on one realizing that people are individuals, especially if they have a long track record of having behavior that is counter to this negative behavior. If someone's brand new, the team, they've been with me for a year or two and they do something crazy, I'm probably going to judge them by the book. They're not going to get a second look if someone's been with me for a long time, they're just going to get more.

Grace. To think that maybe they're just going through something. And if you can start with that as the default and then uncover stuff down the road, it's helpful. Like yes, we want to be fast to fire, but don't be fast to fire someone that's been with you for years, supported you in every single way, worked around the clock, done, gonna above and beyond. You don't do that. Like in my opinion, maybe I'm wrong. But again, if things are done privately versus publicly is actually a big deal because your team that is say new isn't going to know why a certain person got a little more grace after saying something way over the line publicly. And so you're gonna have to make more judgment calls or like bring it up, et cetera. So I would give more grace privately. I would say for those of you who have general managers, I would allow a free space in a one on one for them to be able to give you feedback.

Things they don't like, etc. So that way if they are going through a rough time and they just need a vent, they can do it without damaging or bringing the team into it.

So I started. So vague, but there's. There's a lot of really good people, and that if they support you for a long time, I'm going to give them more grace. And I would hope that if someone's been with me for a long time, that if I do something stupid, they give me a little bit more grace, because they've seen a track record of success. They've seen a track record of, like, trying to do the right thing. And then when you fail once, it's like, okay, I'm going to give him grace. He'll get back up. He'll make the right decision down the road. And so, like, if I expect that from my team, which I do, then I should be able to reciprocate that for someone that has had a very long track record of success. And when I say success, I mean, like, they're on the team, they're supporting the vision, supporting the mission, they're going the extra mile, et cetera. So, Matt from Salem, Oregon, is there anything I or we can do to help out with the conference? Is there a dedicated team for the prep that we could coordinate with? Thanks. Yes. So there is a dedicated team. They've already started reaching out. Matt, I actually think you might be on the list here in the next couple weeks to potentially talk to.

So we are bringing a lot more of owners of Augusta into this. So the morning Bible studies workouts, the individual sessions for, like, people doing over a million dollars, the sessions that are for people under 24, I think it is. These are all going to be ran by Augusta owners. And so our goal is to change level professionalism in the industry, and that needs to supersede me. And so we need to. We're going to keep incorporating more and more of the owners inside of Augusta in, like, breakout sessions, the workouts, like I said, Bible studies, et. So some of you have already been contacted. Some of you will be contacted. Please don't worry about reaching out. We know everyone would love to help, and I appreciate that a lot, but they're pretty selective. Like, they know who they want, and they'll reach out to you if they want you to participate. So it's always just tough. Like, I know there's so many people, and there's so many of us could help. And so our goal is to try to, like, maximize the service area. But even if we only get 15 or 20 people to help out, that's only 10% of a gusta Nation. And so we're trying to increase that surface area because if you join Augusta, like, in general, you believe in our concept of changing the level of professionalism. And that means giving back. And so I know everyone wants to help and I really, really do appreciate it. And so we're trying to increase how many people can be involved in that. But they will reach out to you. The team will. And I do believe, Matt, they might be reaching out to you here pretty soon because we wanted to add in a kind of boot, boot camp style workout on one of the mornings that was optional for people. All right, Mr. Anonymous, now that you have sold your NC, NC locations, what has happened with the truck accident and the lawsuit? Any new developments with that? Yeah, it's very much pending because I will likely settle out of court. I got to kind of be careful what I say. I can't talk about this, but we will likely settle outside of court. It will not be as big of deal. No one got seriously injured. It's a matter of just like sufficing the attorneys that they've hired. Like, you know, when you drive down the street and it says like, you know, call this lawyer if you've been injured. Those are the type of people that we're dealing with. So they're just going in, they're trying to make as much, you know, billable hours as possible, rack things up.

And they got nothing to lose. So you just gotta, you know, make sure you're defended and make sure you got LLC set up correctly and everything. And so it's definitely proven to me the importance of having good insurance and having good this thing. Even if I would have had higher liability coverage, etcetera, they still would have been trying to go after me. So it's one of those things where it's like, oh man, I should have got better insurance because I usually go a little bit cheap on insurance. But ultimately.

They would have just gone for a higher limit and then continue to try to sue me. So really the cost to me is the, the, the defense, like my attorneys, that's the real cost. So. But I'm on like three other lawsuits right now because usually if someone, if a location gets in an accident, they somehow circle me onto it. So then I have to bring my attorneys in. And then it was crazy. We have, we have one location where someone in their city trademarked the name of their city, somehow got it through and.

And they know it's a frivolous lawsuit to come after our location, but they're doing it simply just, just because. And they know that if they make enough of a headache that they'll change their entity name and so not changing their. I think you. You can always be Augusta Long here of city name but they're going after the fact that their entity name is named after the city which is so weird. Anyways I get circled in on those lawsuits so it's very fun, you know. Very fun. I don't think I've ever actually. Let me make sure I'm right here. I think I've ever lost. I've always. So there's been a couple times I was in the wrong and I settled like back when I was still learning how to deal with firing and I settled outside of court but I've never had to go to court and then lost whenever I've gone to court. We have won in general by the way. If you get into lawsuits, don't go to court if you think you're going to lose. That's just my two cents. Don't go to court if you. If you think you're gonna lose. Only go to court if you know like there's absolutely. This is bulletproof. I have so much evidence to pound on these people. If it's gray, don't go to court. It's just my two cents. Just settle outside. Trust me once. Once attorneys get their hands on things, they like to tear things up. So okay, what's it got here? Forest? Does it matter what website we purchase domain name? If we were having lawn care build our website. Okay, so Forest is doing a starting a pooping scooping branch. So he's having lawn care web design build his pooping scooping now Forest. I'll go on record saying I think this is a distraction that just my too little sense but I know a lot of your customers have that and you want to add it in. Cool.

It does not matter where you buy it. You can buy in GoDaddy the there's a, you know hostgator there's a whole bunch of other sites I recommend GoDaddy I like GoDaddy a lot. I use it for all my domains. I have like 50 or 60 in there easy to buy from web your email from there. It's pretty straightforward. So I would use GoDaddy and then you'll keep that name even though long care web design home service web design will be building your site out for that. So I forget it was like poop scoop soldiers I think very close to another trademark. Be careful. Be careful of that name. I saw it come through be careful of that name. But I know now that you have the couple locations and you can have more, you're trying to do like, the poop. Excuse me, for the whole thing. Great. Just be careful. It's a low ticket item and service area is extremely important. So not opposed to it. You can absolutely do that inside of Augusta Lawn Care. It's outside of lawn care landscaping. So you're okay. But just be careful of tripping over dollars for pennies. That'd be my only, my only recommendation. The reason I say that for us. And again, I'm not saying you should not do this. Please don't take it as that. I'm saying for everyone else, what you want to compare when you have an opportunity like an additional service to add on is are you solving a problem? Right. And so if you look at home services and lawn care landscapes specifically, the biggest problem we have, in My opinion is Q4 collapse. And so the question is, does this solve that problem? And if it doesn't, I don't think adding more services is a wise thing to do. The reason for that is because if your time, energy, money, marketing dollars, et cetera, was spent on, on the core thing instead of the additional, would you have a better return? So, for example, this year, I'm going to use this as an example for us. Please don't take this, like, personally. I'm not saying you should not do this. I'm just using an example because you had the question. So, for example, if you're going to do, let's just call it $2 million between your two locations this year.

And then let's just say you do the poop, poop scoop thing, and over the next 12 months, you make $150,000, which would actually be a ton, because the average ticket for poop scooping. Here we go. Lots of jokes. Is very low compared to the vast majority of Augusta Lawn cares, between 1100 and 2200 dollars per revenue per client, per customer, per year. And I think that's gonna go up dramatically this year because everyone's so much more focused on Christmas lights and winter services. I think we're gonna start hitting up 2,500 and above per customer as an average, which is great. My, this is, my thing is if. If you focused on all this time, energy, money energy going into this, this scooping thing into your general managers and into your current operations, would you go from 2 million to 2.5 or 2.6 next year? Would. Or if you focused all this energy into like, okay, I'm going to optimize for profit. I'M going to raise prices, I'm going to cut out services and I'm going to do $2.2 million next year. But we're extremely profitable this year. I think that energy time towards that would probably be better spent. But again, I'm not saying you should not do this. I understand the logic. You have a lot of customers now between the locations and you're trying to do that. The people that like you're already annoyed but them having poop all over the place and it's like I might as well make money on it. So I'm not opposed to it. I'm just saying be careful of the fact that it'll take time to set up. So get, go get the domain set up phone numbers, set up email, like all this stuff that takes time. If directed towards your current operation, would it lead to a better result? Because you only have 24 hours a day, you have a finite amount of money, a finite amount of energy. And so if you funnel it towards one thing, usually you'll get bigger dominoes to fall if you push that towards that one objective versus like starting a whole bunch of dominoes and seeing what works. So I'm not saying that you should not do it for us and you make two, $300,000, be pretty profitable on it and do it across. As you start more locations, you keep doing the pooping, scooping and it's a great little upsell. Awesome. Also you have one of the leave amount of Q4 collapse in Augusta Nation because you're in California. So you might not have the problem of as much of seasonality. So let me just put asterisks next to everything I said there. But I think for the vast majority of this you're going to add services I'd be looking at does this solve Q4 collapse? Does this solve the seasonality problem? Because that's the biggest problem in our industry. And and for someone like in California, Texas or Florida for example, you have a little more leeway for something like this because you can mow year round, you get projects year round and force. You don't have, you know, your revenue doesn't drop 90% during the winter. So just gotta give all these clarifying. It's so it's very dependent on who's asking, where they're at, etc. So. All right, I hope you all have a fantastic rest of your day. We will stay in touch and we'll see you. If not tomorrow, we'll do Thursday. Love you all.