Mike Minutes Mastermind 10/24/2023

Hey guest nation. Hope you're doing well. Let's go get started.

Just drop this into Facebook real quick. We're going to be catching up on questions that came in last week. Got through about half of them yesterday. Sorry, why is this not okay? There you go. Cool.

That's coming up in the next few weeks to be super cool. I'm really looking forward to it on Copilot where we have this feature where it's called upsells. And when a employee is at a job site, they will have the ability to tap a button and upsell a customer based on certain services that you want to have them see. And you'll be in permissions where you can change this and you'll be able to, they'll be at a click of a button be able to pitch the customer services that are needed on the property.

And you will have on the back end the ability to customize the text message or email that goes to the customer when that upsell is sent. We make sure only one upsell per visit is ever sent. So it removes the ability to send multiple.

And I think it's been super cool. You can basically tie in one click estimate emails to it. So you could have one click estimates going out for specific services, but then change the email to be an upsell type email that says hey, our, our crew just service your property. Here's what we think you need. Click here, get an estimate like it's, it's going to be beautiful. And then also from the dispatch board you'll be able to see any job that was sent out an upsell for that day. And then you'll be able to click on it little icon and see who sent it out and for what service. It's going to be awesome. So we are, we almost have it done but we're going to wait a couple weeks before you release it. Um, so there'll be plenty of heads up leading up to it and I'll do a kind of a launch video explaining how to use it. But pairing that with one click estimate emails is going to be like awesome. So and then two, you can really easily track you know which cut which employee sent them out. So you can just incentivize your employees like hey, you still get $10 if you literally sent one up with a tap of a button based on what services that customer needs. And you can, if you can block an employee from seeing the upsell button too from an employee permissions perspective. So anyways, really looking forward to it. I think it'll do what is most important for software and is like drive actual business results and it's like more revenue and more leads. And so especially when you're slower, you can just tell your guys like hey, I'm gonna work on the schedule. Use the upsell button. I've added a couple more in there for property cleanups, for weeding, for bush trimming, for Christmas lights, for snow plowing. You can literally add as many as you want. So really looking forward to it. I will give plenty of heads up but probably, probably at least in two or three weeks we want to get through bugfest next week and wrapping up some more stabilization, moving over to AWS, etc.

All right, let's jump into questions because there's still 13 to go through. It looks like present share screen.

And we're live. All right.

All right, first question from Dustin from Champaign. Couple of us are wondering where and how to apply for the coaching program. Yes, sorry, I'm several days behind on this. I know this. We went over this yesterday. Just go to the dashboard, go to academy, go to forms and you'll see coaching program application. It's right there. Max Harwood from burnaby. During Brian Fullerton's talk he mentioned his lawn company grosses 400k. How much revenue would you estimate his online business generates?

Oh, you're running me that pontificate.

I would guess around half a million, maybe 600, 000. I would just guess. There's obviously a lot of cost, like there's plenty of other costs still with your media side. But he gets a lot of sponsorships and that's really what would drive his result. That's why like I really didn't get a whole lot of money until the past three years because I didn't do any sponsorships. And so a sponsorship you can get money faster but like the long tail of getting customers yourself and selling your own products is greater. He does sell some design stuff and like his academy thing which I think is probably the bulk of his revenue or like the most profitable revenue. But he does do a lot of sponsorship stuff. So I would guess that amount.

And I would also guess that's about 50 profitable.

Those are my guesses.

Chad from Valparaiso, Indiana. I'm sending out the winter services email next week. Should I add to the cost verbiage in parentheses 1.5 times weekly mowing service? Since most of my customers haven't had the mowing estimate in two years and won't know the bi weekly cost.

I would probably just stick with saying that it'll be the same as your bi weekly mowing service. If you wanted to in parentheses you could put the dollar amount.

But I think if you said that 90% of people would be fine with it. And then the people who ask it's like hey, this is the bi week price. And the next question is like do you want to go to weekly? Like I'll do weekly winter services for the same price. But we usually try to save our customers money during the winter but still keep their property looking good. So we switch to the bi week and only do it every other week. So yeah, there's no right or wrong answer on that. I think it really comes down to like how well do your customers know what the bi weekly price is. If you want to be upfront and honest with that, I would probably put it in the emails. Depending on how many customers I would either do that manually trying to put the price in or you can make it where a custom field is in every single profile for like bi weekly price and then you use that number and just tag it in. Use the tag. Tim from Mount Vernon Is it possible to get every door direct mail format postcard pictures and text converted to the regular postcard size? Currently looks like there's only two that you can get put postage on and send to specific addresses. This work great for sending to recently sold homes and would like to have more options with different pictures than what's available.

Yes, this is not really every door direct mail. What you're asking for is a regular postcard because every door direct mail.

Is you're going to send it in bulk, right? You're asking for like a regular postcard and I think there's only a couple that even have that on there because it's very rare we use that. So you could submit something to Media Augusta, longer servers.com See what you have in mind. But it's very rare that people are doing specific addresses and putting postage on them. Sounds like you're using that directly which seems you working so you could. You could ask media if there's something that's very specific you have in mind. But we're not. You wouldn't use those designs for every door direct mail. And typically when you're doing everyday direct mail you want to kind of make a bit of a strange size so that because the price is the same on every door direct mail as doing a regular postcard size. So yeah. Feel free to email mediagustalongerstores.com though and see if there's something specific you need.

Or even if you wanted to, you could do a custom one. If you go to custom design, then it's like 50 bucks and they'll design exactly what you want.

Right from the dashboard. Joel from Lafayette. It would be great to send a one click estimate email with a custom link or code per client that can send to neighbors. So each of them automatically gets X office service when the customer accepts a service. Will COPA eventually have a referral program feature to automatically track and sign rewards for referrals? What are your thoughts on saying a referral program like this? Generally speaking. So yes, we have this in the, in the backlog for Copilot. As you can kind of see in just how you've been wording this, it can get very complex very fast and making sure that these actually tracks it correctly as well as people don't run away with these referral program things. I personally think that word of mouth in general, putting a dollar amount on it can be a little bit risky because I think when I give a referral to someone and I tell them about a service I'm using or a product, I am doing that for the feeling that I get that I satisfied this other individual or like help them in some way. As soon as now I put a dollar amount on that. Like I'm gonna give you 20 bucks if you do this. I put a value on it now. Like, well, it's not, you know, it's worth more than $20 when you just giving this referral when before. Because I didn't put a dollar amount on it. They did it out of like the fact that they were trying to help this other person. So I think sometimes referral programs get a little slippery. I'm a, I'm a fan of having them though, and I think they can work. And I've seen some people in their markets, it just really takes off especially when there's like HOAs and tight group needs of people. Like and they just want to like people are like, they're like Facebook Karens basically that are have connected to everyone in their community and they want to do a referral program. Like they're psyched out about that.

Yeah, so we, we do have this in the works. But the reason why a lot of CRMs don't do it is because it's pretty complex process in the back and actually track between two really just pieces of code and saying, oh, this piece of code gave this piece of code a referral.

So if they join with a different name, if they use a different email, just like tracking all of that is pretty difficult. It can be done though. And we do have it on our, on our list and we have it kind of mapped out of what we want to, how we want to do it, and then we'll have to customize it as time goes on. But yes, it is in the works. Not in the works. It is on the list. I would say.

Mid to fall to summer of next year is probably when it's going to actually be getting worked on. Kyle Tarvin, you mentioned multiple times to overstaff for the busy months this spring. We overstaffed our location by two plus crew members and were not profitable due to labor costs being high and inefficiency. Not so. Let me clarify. Overstaffing is if you are growing massively.

Because typically when people are in growth mode during spring rush, they the bottleneck of the 4L framework becomes labor. And so.

Assuming someone is growing very quickly, I would say that this spring we overstaffed our location by two plus crew members and we're not profitable due to labor costs being high and inefficiency. Not to mention, the crew during early spring was only working 20 to 30 hours a week. Because between everyone. Am I missing something or is this how it's supposed to go? Overstaffed for the spring months by two to three crew members, Everyone may get less hours and still be unprofitable to the high labor cost. You shouldn't. Just having more employees and them working less hours should not mean unprofitability due to inefficiency.

I, I am a big fan of shooting for your crew during the busiest months of the year. Only having to work 30, 30 to 35 hours a week. I, I do believe that's a good move because it means you can fire people if they don't show up. It means that you can.

Govern who gets the hours and it puts you in the place. You'd rather be in that position than them all working 45, 50 and you're begging people to come in on Saturdays. You're begging, begging people to work an extra job or two at the end of the day. And so I think it's better to be in the position of having more employees and having less hours so you have control. You have the ability to fire when stuff is going bad. You have all the leverage.

But having more of them should not make it unprofitable. It should not make it inefficient. That is only the case if they're not trained correctly, if your routing is off, if your pricing is off. But just by having more Employees does not inherently mean more inefficiencies.

Unless they're all inexperienced and they're all like kind of running haphazardly. But you know, it's either do you want haphazard workers working 30 hours a week or 45, 50 hours a week. That's, you know, your decision. So I don't think it has anything with over hiring, the unprofitability due to high labor costs. Because if you're giving a percentage of labor revenue and there's a fixed amount of labor revenue you can get done in the month, you're getting a percentage of that no matter what, assuming they're trained correctly, priced correctly, and they're able to get P4P.

So I would, I would push back a little bit on that and I would say that I don't think it's a bad thing to be shooting for 30, 35 hours a week because it gives you all the leverage. And that can change in a week when all of a sudden you need to fire two or three people or a couple people don't show up or they go on vacation or they move or whatever. So I'd much rather you be in that position. And I would also say that if you're having unprofitability due to having too many employees, it has nothing to do with too many employees. What type of employees are they trained? Do you have tight routes? Is your pricing correct? Because theoretically.

As someone goes into 45, 50 hours, they're typically less efficient than at 30, 35 hours. And so it's not really an excuse, oh, I had too many employees, therefore I was inefficient. The only reason you could ever argue that is if you bought more trucks for that and equipment, you now have this overabundance of stuff, right? That's definitely a point, but it won't. That is not what you're like. That's not inefficient. Right? That is, you have a surplus of assets and your asset capacity is so much greater than your labor capacity and where your revenue actually is. That's a different conversation altogether than I have too many employees, therefore they are inefficient. That's not that, that, that's not the case. You can though have too many employees and therefore be unprofitable because you bought all these assets. So having less hours should not lead to inefficiency inherently.

And so I think that I would address that first.

It is very possible that you over hired and they're pretty low level skills and it caused everyone's efficiency drop because you're trying to train them and they're, they're just not doing a good job. There's less yellow slips, et cetera. So that's when it's like, okay, maybe you did exactly what you should and that's get extra one or two guys but have an extra week or two of training before they actually were on the routes and spring rush was hitting. So that way when actually the rush comes, they're already efficient, they already know the routes, they already know what's going on and they're trained up. That might be the thing. Not saying that's what it is, but inherently increasing employees should not decrease in efficiency. It'll, it will decrease profitability because you have to buy more assets. But that's a totally different conversation.

Logan albers from Nebraska He Mike, last year was our first year offering winter services and we had around 30% of our recurring customers opt in in Columbus. You mentioned a previous master that we should assume clients have that opted out in previous years have already opted out for this year and we should send them a one click opt a one click to opt in. I understand why we would want to assume they opted out, but if we send the winter services email again to only the clients in last year, we're limiting the clients we can offer window service to in this case by quite a bit. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not opposed to doing that and just sending to everybody. I'm not opposed to that. What I was the statement I was saying there is if you're trying to be as careful as possible to not have to give a refund after the first month of winter services, you would want to do not send the opt out email to the people that have opted out in the past. But if you're okay with having one or two people not get the email and you have to refund them, I would absolutely send out the opt out email to everybody because there might be people who change their mind or they realize that last year it was really crummy having leaves sitting around their flower beds for three months out of the year because they didn't get picked up or branches after a windstorm and like yup, this is it, that's fine, let's just do it. So would it be bad practice to have everyone opt out again this year? The way I see it, we could send the winter service email to all clients and if there are a handful upset that say they opted out last year, we could just refund void their invoice just like the rest of the it rest that they may complain. I don't want to upset too many clients, but winter is a difficult time to find work, so every bit helps. Yeah, so I agree with you 100%. As long as this part you are okay with and that is okay with a couple people to void or refund invoices, then I would definitely just send to everybody because people do change their mind. And last year you seeded it for the first time. And it's very common to have 20 to 40% of old customers accept their first winter services because they're used to being off throughout the winter. Right now what's going to happen, I think this year if you send it to everybody, you're going to probably have more. An average around like 35 or 40%. Because what's going to happen is all the new customers from this year you'll probably convert 50 to 70% of them because this is their first year and this is like, oh, this is how it rolls. And they just kind of walk right into it. So that's good. I would just send to everyone. As long as you're okay with those few negative and a couple refunds and stuff like that, then you should be fine.

Vlad from Winter Garden. Is there a way to select all when bulk. When sending bulk email in copilot for one click estimates current you have a select each contact to add to the list. See attachment. We do not have a video tutorial on the dashboard for sending one click estimates either. Also there is a list. Okay, so let me just go through these one at a time. Let me just view this real quick.

Okay, so yeah, you're inside of the email tab. This is going to be going away, if not like very soon in the next couple days you'll want to send this from your customer list and just do a filter. So go to customers, select filter out whatever customers you want, select all and then click the top right button that says send and send email from there. That's how I do it. And we're going to be removing what you're looking at right now. This is because like the filtering is just fine in on the customer page.

Share screen.

Next one, we do not have a video tutorial on the video. Yeah, we're gonna get some more videos up on the academy for Augusta Nation to be able to see from command center directly. And so those will be coming up over the next month and a half. A lot of them. Also there's a list of inactive customers. Would be nice to have one for active customers Too. Yeah. So again, I wouldn't even use that. That portion you're looking at right now. Glad we're not even going to use it. It's going to be gone probably within next couple days because all the filtering that we added to the customer page can do what that used to do for you in terms of groups.

Teralac, Boone's Creek. If I'm late to work one time, does that forever break my ability to call a certain employee out on being late? I wouldn't say forever.

I would say that if they are in one late, one time late, after like years of coming to work on time, then yeah, you might probably lose your ability to do that. But.

Yeah, like, I would just not be late. Like, if you guys set two alarms in the morning, make sure you don't oversleep, make sure you're 15 minutes ahead of the 15 minutes before. Like, just do whatever you gotta do to not be late. That being said, I understand life happens, kids happen, et cetera. So what I would personally do is in that case, if you know you're going to be late, text your whole team. That's what I would do. In the past, if something ever came up or I was traveling, I knew I was gonna get back late to a meeting. It was like, hey, I am late. Here's why. My plane was 25 minutes behind and I'm speeding there as fast as I possibly can. I'll be three minutes late.

Then. Then I think it sets a precedent for like, hey, if you're going to be late, you better be letting me know why. So. But I think in general, if you plan correctly, usually you can be on time for most stuff.

Land Smith, East Tallahassee. Hey, Mike, I'm running into a similar problem to last year with retaining customers. I've seen us lose about 33 of our clients this year, which takes a decent hit on us as we are trying to grow. This happened last year to me as well. Even though I was doing all the work and doing a good job. What would be a recommendation how I can fix this or a way I can go about trying to win back customers when they decide to cancel? Thanks and appreciate all I did for the summit. In general with working agassination. Keep killing it. Winning people back.

Ultimately, this is much better fixed in preventative maintenance instead of trying to do surgery. So preventative maintenance is train your guys better. Better communication with the customers. When people have yellow slips and complaints, you get back to them faster. You fix the problems faster. That's the most. That's the best preventative maintenance.

And for every one person that complains, usually there's five or 10 that are thinking the same thing, but instead of complaining, they'll just leave. So when someone complains, yes, there are people in the world that just want to make your life miserable and are just annoying and like all the rest of it, but you want to also then take a step back and be like, okay, maybe they're being being weird and strange and crazy or whatever. But let's say that 80% of that anger and complaining is in other of my customers. They won't say anything. They'll just leave and they'll just say that they're going to do it themselves or they just need to cancel service for the year. But really it's like two months more mowing. Like so really it comes down to improving the product, improving the service.

Oh, you know what? I can do this in a destination. One second.

Give me one second. I will share something worth the wait. I promise. This is a very, very cool thing. I will eventually talk about this more, but I want to make sure this is a trend and not a fad. One second, I'm going to screenshot something. Give me one second, one second, one second. It's coming. I'm going to take this. I gotta drop this into Google Chrome now. I should be able to share this. Okay, this is Copilot Churn. Over the past month it was up at 11% and now it's down to 3.3%. So like, what did you change.

How we handled complaints? We celebrated them, we thanked the customer, we made sure that we tag people when there's a complaint and we have to work on it from a bug perspective. I'm going to drop this all back to your longer business. I'm just showing this as an example because like not any of.

No one's in copilot in a gusta nation that has been there for a year and can have this data. So anyways, down the road you'll be able to see this in copilot and be able to see exactly this chart right here. But all we did is hand how we handled complaints differently. For example, how you handle yellow slips, very important. And that is how fast you get back to them. Do you it is so important to get back fast to a yellow slip and then over deliver and like wow them and then thank them. Thank them when you get. When your crew goes there and it has to fill out the yellow slip, you thank them for giving the feedback. You thank them for complaining. Thank you thank you for saying something so we can improve our service.

So this, this top line is previous month. This is now our current month and it's on nice downward trajectory down more than half. And literally the only thing that we changed is how we are our internal.

Our internal mentality around bugs and how we communicated with our members. It's like next week we're going to have a bug fest where we're going to celebrate bugs and we're going to have everyone trying to find bugs and we're going to give cash away for finding bugs. This would be the equivalent of telling all of your customers, I will give you money if you complain and tell me what we're doing wrong. Right. So sometimes just, just changing your mentality around yellow slips, callbacks, complaints, knowing that a lot of them are quote unquote user error for copilot. A lot of our the bugs that are reported are user error and we fix them and we deal with them. But for the people who actually have valid complaints and concerns, they should be treated like gold because they are the ones that if you actually respond to and fix the problems, you will keep customers both, whether it be software or longer. It does not matter. It's both a recurring service that people can opt out of anytime with a click of a button. They don't have to call in, they can cancel their subscription. The same thing is true for lawn care. It's very easy to opt in and out. We don't have contracts. So if you're if when you have the friction to to cancel low. The thing that puts pressure everyone's pressure on is customer service people that want to sign contracts. I'm always like, well if you do great service and people don't want to leave, why would you need the contract? Like if you're going to do a great job, they'll stay. So I think sometimes just the mentality around yellow slips and callbacks, like I don't like it. I. I'm always very careful during team meetings for yellow slips to become very much like judgment and like corrective is like these are great. I'm glad we like you know what you really want to celebrate is when people on your team make a yellow slip for someone else on the team or themselves. That should be celebrated at team meetings to the upteenth degree because that means that we've like I'm just gonna use Copilot because it's so everyone. It makes so much sense. It'd be like us finding the bug, fixing the bug and the customer never Complaining, that is the highest level of like customer service you can have. And so yellow slips, yes, they're corrective, yes, they're by nature the quality, quality control for P4P. However, they are exactly the things that need to be fixed in your business in order to have better attrition, I. E. Better retention. So if you, if you want to know how to get better attrition or better attention and reduce your attrition from 33% down, look at every single yellow slopes and fix those problems. That is exactly what I would do. So I know just from being at the Bellingham shop once a week, I know what the yellow slips are. It is weeding, it is initial mows. If you could take those two yellow slips out and really nail those services, you would probably cut down 50% or more of your yellow slips. That means that that probably would almost decrease your attrition by 50% if you just solve those things. So what needs to happen? Training around how initial modes are done, training on how weeding is done. And when people call out each other on yellow slips before the customer complains, that is like to the best thing that could happen.

That that's really how you fix it. And that's really like ultimately if you're like I have an attrition problem, look at every single yellow slip and, and don't look at it as like this is a bad thing. They're complaining. And yes, I know it's like to get the punch in the gut like this is horrible. But if you actually look at it as like if I fix this, I will fix this other problem in my business and that is attrition. And I'm going to look at this yellow slip. I'm going to look at this complaint as a very positive thing because it's going to help me make my business better. And that unlock for copilot man, like it is in the math, like it's nuts. And what that does to a business over the course of a year or two is incredible. You do that. If you decrease your attrition by 50% over the course a couple of years without spending money on marketing, you could literally double your business. It's insane. Like just, just run the math of going from 35, 40% attrition to 10, 15% attrition like it's, it's nuts.

Matt from Delta. Hey Mike. There's a landscaper gardener in our town who reached out help needing help to fulfill her jobs. She is slowly retiring. She's a one person operation now and is getting Older and can't handle the workload or the request for work that's coming in. She doesn't want to hire employees either. We actually know her really well and used to work for her. She had a really. She has a good rep and an extensive network that produces lots of leads. How would you recommend we structure a deal where she provides leads or clients for us and we fill the work? Should we act as a subcontractor or take the client and pay her commission or something else? She's open to whatever and I think it would be easier for us to pay a commission and then have a direct relationship with the clients. Just wondering if your thoughts and what type of commission makes sense. And would you consider paying year over year commissions for a recurring client? We're talking mostly garden maintenance, property clamps, pruning, hedging, also small soft skate projects in the prod in the range of 1 to 10k per job. I would highly recommend not giving away your commissions on recurring clients. The whole reason you get into recurring jobs is that you keep the revenue. I would not give that to anyone else. It's also a pain in the butt to track. And then they also are like checking your work all the time. It's harder for them to trust you. I would do it based upon when a customer, they pay me a dollar and they pay an invoice, it came from you, I'll give you a dollar amount back. Doesn't matter if it's $10,000 job or a moan job, I'll give you a check. I would, I would recommend having a conversation around, hey, this is my customer. Acquisition cost is, let's call it 70, 80 bucks. I'm willing to double that. I'm willing to give you 120 bucks for every customer that pays an invoice with us and you sent them to us. That makes a lot of sense to them. It's really easy for you to track. You don't have to worry about like the long tail of what that looks like and keeping track of everything and running reports every month. It's simply like, did this lead come that gate? Tag them? Great. Every time I get invoice paid, run my tags. Oh, I owe you 100. I owe you five leads at 120 bucks a pop. There's $600, right? I'd recommend doing that. It seems like she wants to keep life pretty simple, so it's probably going to be most beneficial for her too. But I definitely don't want to give away the a commission on recurring revenue that Is like why we get into business in lawn care, landscaping and mostly mowing is because the recurrent recurring nature of it is as a beast.

Forest. How do you manage your time and not forget about things with so many different moving parts of multiple businesses? Do you use reminders app on your phone? What works best for you? Yeah, so I'm a reminder zap chunky.

So let me just see if I can share all this.

I'll just show you some of my stuff. Let me just make sure I can show all this stuff. Yeah, I think we're good. So.

This is my.

Reminders app. The top ones. So I have different categories for all the different to dos. The most important one is called this week's list. The stuff that has to be done within the next week. If it starts to exceed 10, that usually means I'm more doing a late night to try to catch up because it means I'm starting to run behind. There's more than 10 things on this week's list. I usually try to get through the entire week's list in this day, but there's things that can fall in that category that I need to get done this week.

So for example, like this week, this, this is where I throw random thoughts that come to my head too. So I'll be driving like oh, I should talk to so and so I'll put them in here. So usually by the end of the day this is filled up and then I work through it at night.

So there's a franchisee need to send a message to. We got new credit cards for copilot that I need to activate. These are like the most menial garbage stuff. This note, I just finished this one. I like to go over a short with the media team that I thought could use improvement.

I need to pay money into my Roth IRA before the end of the year. So these are like the most menial tasks that I can knock out in like an hour. And it just prevents me from having to get cluttered or like get sidetracked throughout the day. Um, I am going to be getting a virtual assistant. I'll keep you all updated on what that's going to look like. So I've created a 12 page document on exactly how I want everything to be handled in terms of responding to people. My inbox, everything. So I have two, two real checklists in my day. I have the this week list on my reminders app and then I have my inbox. My inbox is always clear.

If it is not clear, I feel bad. So.

Basically let Me just make sure. I think I can show you this, but let me just be careful.

Okay. I think I'd show this. So these emails come in all time. So this is the past 20 minutes. There's like several emails that came into my personal inbox.

And I make sure that I always am taking out spam. So I hate spam, unsubscribe from stuff that I don't want. And I've consolidated several of my emails so I only have it down to like a few now and I. You can just set up filters to get it all into one or two.

But. But if it has a little red blue dot it means it's not been opened. So right now prior to me having an assistant, I just go through these real quickly and, and make sure is this like do I need to look at this right? So for example, and I open like the most. Just came one minute ago. This is just a update on the onboarding styling for the P4P app. It's the ticket it's being moved from to do and into progress. Meaning that Will the developer is now working on this. I can get that in 10 seconds. I just know. Okay, I know where will's that in that project and then if it's not as important to me, I will make sure it's not coming in my inbox. Someone just rescheduled my appointment that I was supposed to have here seven minutes ago. So that's why I'm still going here.

Renewal of my URLs, the call notes widget. So like this is in code review. This is another ticket for copilot. So I go through all. I can go through 50 emails in like 10 minutes. I am going to have an assistant do this for me though because I don't need to say all 50. I only need to see 10 of the 50. The other 40 can be sent to me in a video, in a voice note and just summarize them all if I even need to see them. So I don't think everyone needs an assistant necessarily. But just organize like just stay organized. Like you should have a passwords document where every password that you ever come in contact with is in that document. I have one for every single business and I have a global personal one. So a global personal one has all my banking information. Everything you could possibly want if you got that document. Yes, you could steal my identity and take all my money. Great.

So that personal one then. Every business has a different Google Doc that literally has every single password and it's just either numeric it's either usually alphabetized, but if not, it doesn't matter because you control F and you just find it. So there should be another times that you can't log into things. You don't know where emails are at.

You don't know what's on your calendar. You don't know what you should be doing right now. If you have 10 minutes, you should be able to look at the reminders like of that. Those weird janky things I just mentioned. Like I won't get to any of those, but it prevents me from getting distracted throughout the day. And secondly, when I have 10 minutes, I'll knock out a couple of these, right? So if someone doesn't show up, if they're late for a zoom call, I'm not just sitting there. I am going to start knocking out the fact that I need to go into Fidelity and I need to, you know, put money into my ira. I need to send this franchisee a text message. I need to activate these credit cards so that we can use them instead of debit cards. Like it's just over time. Honestly, being busy forces you to have to do this stuff, right? And like the only reason I'm getting like, I hate the idea of having an assistant, but it is going to help me a lot. Booking, travel, like in part, I don't know if you can hear me. He has his headphones on. In part. I knew that I needed an assistant after our last trip where we had like four cities that we were knocking out really fast. And Steven behind me made a document of where I was supposed to be at every single minute of the day with travel time and like confirmation numbers of hotels and confirmation of like all my flights, confirmation of my rental car stuff, my hotel, like everything. And then told me when I need to be leaving places to get to the next place within amount of time. So I, it was so helpful. Especially when you have multiple meetings and you have travel schedules and you're doing that day after day after day and like you just get all combobulated. So when that happened and I realized, okay, we hit every single deadline, I never missed a meeting. It was fantastic. It's going to be worth me having an assistant now just to make sure that happens. But I think that like 90% optimization can happen and just like having reminders, app, having a calendar that you stick to and if it's like, oh, I work in the field, I'm solo operator, great. From 8am to 5pm you just block it all off on your calendar. Okay, great. From eight to five. I just know I'm working, feel great. But then it's like, what am I doing for five to six? What am I doing from six to seven? What I'm doing seven, eight. Oh yeah, I'm gonna have dinner. Okay, great. Slot that out. Okay, great. I need to catch up on estimates. Okay, slot that out on these specific days and all of a sudden you're like, okay, well when can I have, you know, date night? When can I go have go out with family? Well, great, let me look at my calendar and see when there's spot. And it's, it's like very based upon just the math. So I think that 90% of getting an assistant can be done way prior to being able to get an assistant. I've never had an assistant until now. Hopefully by end of the year I get one and I'll let you know how it goes and I'll have better. I can share my document down the road maybe once I perfect it, but I have a very clear document like how everything I want handled.

That I'm willing to pay X amount more for a non stop flight versus a regular flight. And how like I'm, I'm very cheap on my car, in my hotel. But like the plane flight non stop, let's go. Like I'm willing to pay.

So I'll share all that down the road once, once I kind of get as close as I can to being good and maybe it'll be helpful to somebody. Let me share this.

But yeah, hopefully that helps a little bit. Okay, last question for us. Is there a way to see how far down the list we are from being switched over to copilot? What's the process? Yeah, so right now the list last week we're getting everyone in from super and so. And then after that we will start working through the list of service autopilot people that were on the form. So we don't have like a live running tally of who's next. You will get an email usually a week to two weeks in advance of being ready for onboarding from Eli and the team for onboarding and they will let you know like, hey, this is the date that we have on the schedule for you and this is when we're going to switch you over. You'll have the call, you'll probably have some follow up with them in terms of you want to switch over clients or you want command center do it for you, etc. But you will know a couple weeks in advance and command center will reach out.

We got through them all. Let's go. But there's more, there's more, there's more. What do we got here? This is Dustin in Illinois with distributable cash. How does this work with debt payments? I'll be talking about my debt on a coaching call on how to attack it. But will this affect the GM's distributions and how should this issue be resolved? The debt was taken out on by the business before the GM took over. You just want to address this with your gm?

Yeah, that's a tricky one, especially if it was before they came on board. Because if they, if you, they took on the debt when they were gm, that debt facilitated growth and you're probably giving them some sort of like compensation based upon growth and like revenue too. So if they took on the debt with you with and you were. And they were with you, I would probably hold them accountable to true distributable cash. That being said, if they hop into the boat and you're paying them based upon current revenues and they're not getting the upside of growing the location to that size, well then now the debt really doesn't help them. It's just been your desire to grow faster that's caused the debt to be in place. So then I would probably, I'd probably pat it a little bit. Even if it was like hey, we're only going to take interest payment. That's probably what I would do in that case is like do interest payments. As it should be is considered an expense on the P and L. But we're going to take out the principal pay down out of distributable cash. I'd probably do that in this scenario.

Having similar issue that Landon has. Vlad here. Thanks for the advice, Mike. Oh, what was Landon's problem?

Sorry, I'm blanking. Forest, where did you learn to use the reminders app? I tend to forget about a lot of things throughout my day.

Forest, can the office staff add things? Reminded that for me.

For us. What calendar you use? Okay. I don't know who's answering asking all these questions but I know the answers. So on the reminders app, take a quick video on YouTube. Type in reminders app iOS it'll walk you through a lot of this stuff. You can share it. So for example, you guys probably saw. I saw. You probably saw CEO slash co. That's shared with Liz. So if she ever wants to talk about something, she'll just add it to the list. So we had a meeting last night. There's nothing to talk about. So it's at zero. But as we think about stuff will put it in there. Especially really helpful if you don't have a regular meeting cadence or if you have a regular meeting cadence, you can just pull this up whenever your next meeting is with that person. So if you like a weekly meeting with your GM or you have a daily meeting with your crew, like, instead of pulling stuff out of your hat five minutes before, you can just put stuff as you think about throughout the day and then you have it on your reminders that you just pull up. So, for example, a great example, actually, in a little bit, I'll be going over to Anytime Fitness. I'm not going to show it's inside because there's some personal stuff in here, but there's an ATF. So I go there once a week for like 15 to 20 minutes for a meeting. I just pull open up this. And you can see there's one thing on this reminders app. And so I'm. I just know there's something to talk about. I'll just open this up. I put this on like a week and a half ago and I'll just go over this one item.

At the meeting. So it just prevents the forgetting things. I personally hate forgetting things. Like it is. It drives me crazy. I get really mad and agitated and I forget stuff. Like if I Forget these anywhere, AirPods, if I forget anything, I get really mad. But it's the same thing. Like, I forget meetings. If I. I was like, man, I knew there was something I needed to do. What was it? I knew I was thinking it was important. It was important. That drives me bonkers. So, like, whenever I think of anything, it must go into the reminders app. Now, if you're trying to break, you know, trying to get away from your phone, it can be tough because, like, I literally do live with this thing in my hand because of this. It's like if I think of something, it goes in here 100% of the time. If there's a password, you never leave the passwords page without putting it into your sheet. Like, these are just like rules of engagement that will make your life so much easier. Because I hate forgetting passwords. I hate having to do two factor authentication or changing my password and clicking the forget password and going your email and all that garbage. Passwords should never be forgotten. They should be in a document, reminders. You should never forget those sort of things. It should be in a reminders app. It should be categorized. It's like, for example, you're mowing. You think of something, you need to talk about with your spouse. Either A address right away or B it needs to go into reminders app. Do you really think that if you do 10 of those thoughts at the end of the day when you're done mowing, you're going to remember those 10 things? No, there's not a shot in the world. So you can just clear your brain, think about more important things or other things as they come up throughout the day and be like more present. If you just put stuff into you and categorize it all, it served me like super, super well. And so between my Reminders app, my inbox clearing and my Google Drive being very organized, like everything that's documents like from the state licensing, everything should be in Google Drive and should all have folders. You should have an Augusta folder. You can have a personal finance folder. Like you should have max 10 to 15 folders on your main drive and then you click in, there's more, more folders. There's some of my things where I have like 10 layers, right? Like so I have all my keynotes that I've ever given inside my Google Drive and it's all organized, it's like very top, it's like media, it's like okay keynotes and there's like all the different keynotes. It's like Landscape Summit 2020, Landscape Summit 2021, Landscape Summit 20. I click into this, it's like Augusta franchise, Augusta franchise only. And then it's like public conference. I click into those. There's like notes for each keynote and there's a slide deck for each one and like oh, that's so organized. As you do stuff, just always think in terms like where does this belong inside the operating system of the Google Drive? And you'll never lose track of stuff. So it has very been very, very, very, very helpful for me. Could talk a long time about because it just really helped me a lot and I'll probably learn a whole lot and realize I have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about once I get an assistant. And they have way better solutions so I will try to pass those along as I learn them. Alright guys, have a great day. We'll see you tomorrow. Take care.