Mike Minutes Mastermind 10/25/2024

Hello, Gustination. Happy Friday. Let's get started.

Alrighty. Oh, one second. Lights. There we go.

All right, let's start off with the questions already in here. Dustin has a question. Hey, would you. Hey, how would you upsell customers asking for our regular fall cleanup into winter service? We give them both the fall cleanup price as well as the winter service price. And I have had some video, I have made some videos explaining, yeah, so it's a matter of as long as the customer is willing for you to chip away at it, they don't really need the fall cleanup. But explaining that is important. Now, some people, they would rather pay for the upfront fall cleanup and then have their property maintained. So basically the math is if they're willing to usually let you chip away at it, they don't need the full cleanup. They save usually like 40, 50% of the cost of doing two cleanups. If they are going to have you do a cleanup and then maintain it all for the next three, four months, usually they are about the same price because then they're really only saving one cleanup. And if you explain that to people, it's like, hey, look, if you want it looking good right away and then we maintain it, it's not going to save you a lot. But now the property looks good all the time. Or is it more important that you save money? If it is get just know that we're going have to chip away at it over the next couple first couple months of winter services to get the, the property up to spec.

We have sold very few this way.

Which way? How are you talking about? We give them both the fall cleanup price as well as the winter service price. And I have made some videos explaining, yeah, like really it comes down to if someone's wanting a fall cleanup, I would say, hey, here's your fall cleanup price. And to prevent us from having to do one or two other cleanups the rest of the winter, let us just do winter services. And so like, that's why, like the canva document is completely editable because you can make the presentation to someone who wants a fall cleanup and just take out the initial fall cleanup and make it like winter cleanup and spring cleanup. Right? So it's like, do you want two cleanups or do you want us to come 10 times or 12 times and the price be the same, if not a little bit less. So yeah, if someone's doing a full out fall cleanup and then winter services, they're not saving as much. Usually. They're usually around the same price. It's when they if they're willing, if they're very price sensitive, that's when they get the benefit of you chipping away at it throughout the first couple months of winter services. This is from Guy. I talked to Dustin and Tanya last night and it cleared my question on this truck purchase. Thanks for the advice. Awesome.

All right, let's rock and roll. Present Share screen.

All right, we got five responses. All right, let me zoom just a touch. Whoa, not that much. Make this a little bit narrower. All right, we're in business. First question is from Ricardo. Could the media team make a door hanger designed for winter services where the price comparison can be edited? I feel like this would dramatically sales compared to the current door hanger design. Yeah, so they're working on this. Keep in mind all of the the design you see in Pro Shop can be downloaded in Photoshop. So if you wanted to make the edits right away you can.

They're going to have to have a whole bunch of different text fields and vistaprint's just not the most design friendly when you can start adding on your own text because you can't like move text boxes. So if you're really wanting to edit the tech the services I would probably go ahead and the Photoshop design and make go that direction.

The second thing I would say that the new design that they'll eventually have up is going to be like right now the current one has like weekly and bi weekly price. It's gonna be like hey, every two weeks here's your price and then you'll be edit all your services a little bit differently. So I saw this design. I agree it's just a matter of we always are trying to reduce the amount of text boxes in vistaprint because they just don't allow like you to drag a text box. So if you put like a longer text service name now it looks off centered for example and you can't like just move it over. So it's good for a simplicity perspective. But when you really want to customize something you kind of got to do it inside of you know, some sort of design software whether it be Canva or Photoshop, et cetera. So for now Ricardo, I would go ahead and use Photoshop. There's is we are going to work on that design and work with Photoshop to see like how can we make it where it's a little bit more customizable in terms of services but doesn't like go off the screen if you have a longer service name, etc.

Braden Morris just see how you Would approach this. Back in June, I had CC raise 85 out of 110 lawn mowing customers prices by 20%. When they did that, they put the new updated price.

The car note. One second.

New price. This.

Okay, I'm gonna keep going. I think it's just a misspelled word. When they did that, they put the new price.

In the notes. I'm guessing in the customer notes, but not on the customer profile. So as the year went on, the call notes went further. Oh, they put in the call notes. Got it. So now when the girl slowed down when customers called in to switch the bi weekly, someone at CC didn't see the new price change. Since it went down to the bottom, it was not in front of them on the customer notes. So a lot of customers have been charged their old biweekly rate since it was switched. That and not the new bi weekly rate. We have only figured this out because I submitted a new project for CG to set up someone on which services that I have for mowing, making sure all the prices are correct. When they went back and looked when starting the switch, they found this problem. Not sure where to go with this. Just wondering what you would do for this location. Now I know I have definitely lost money and to get that money I would have to go back into everyone that switched to biweekly and switch all the previous invoices. If I charge the difference, I believe customers will be very upset because of the mistake. So I would be careful about putting inside your customer notes. So I'm assuming what happened is you had the old pricing in the customer notes, the price increase happened, it went into the call notes and the customer notes weren't updated.

Personally, I wouldn't put pricing information in the customer notes because if you have a customer for five or 10 years, you will raise their prices three, four, five times. And so.

I have to see, I have to see like if this is in the customer notes, like if you're leaving, if you're leaving pricing the customer notes, I wouldn't recommend doing that because prices will change. And then also you want to have a running dialogue of like what the price has been over the course of time. So you don't really want to remove it.

What would I do in this situation? I would probably leave it for now. If there are customers that are set up on winter services on the at the bi weekly price that was the older price, I would probably just leave it. Then they come into the winter or into summer, you get them back on mowing and next winter get them back on the regular pricing. You can submit this as a yellow slip and then they'll actually dig into this. So yellowslipgustalongerservices.com they'll actually dig into what happened here.

I just wouldn't usually think that putting someone's prices in the customer notes is a relevant thing because you always want someone to go to looking at what is the current pricing is going to be what is on the schedule.

So some of this says to yellow slip. Who's this Braden something yellow slip@augusta longerservices.com and they'll like dive right into it and they'll give you like a very detailed answer.

And see, see exactly what happened and then like how to prevent it and then how to like how it could be fixed in the future or even fixed now. Don't like dive into it substantially.

All right. Mr. Anonymous, have you considered listing all locations ranking on the dashboard? I know some people think it's a way of giving everyone a trophy but being on the dashboard by being on the dashboard. But I think it would be beneficial for smaller and newer locations or people that are struggling to see they're not only they're not the only ones and potentially be a motivator. You could still do top 10, but I think having everyone listed in order would also be beneficial. If you do your coaching cards, you can see your rank in all of the categories. So the ones that are publicly displayed for everyone just shows the top. But if you do your coaching card, you can see what rank you are in, close ratio, what rank you are in, number of estimates and number of leads, et cetera.

So if you want to know that, you just got to. I'd be looking on the coaching cards, which is inside of the coaching dashboard.

So. Yeah.

Marcus from San Antonio yesterday you mentioned that new coaches will be will do their training in February, March. Wouldn't it be better have them do training in January either before or after conference? It would reduce the financial and time expense on the coach. I know it's a lot to have a conference and a training gun at the same time. What about a short course of the training? Yeah. No, in January. We've done it before where we've had owner training right before conference. It's just way too much.

I go into conference completely exhausted after four days and then it's just not good. So we aren't going to do this. Not because it's easier for us or for the coaches. It's, it is a matter of like quality here. I won't be as good for the, the training and I won't be as good for the, the, the conference if we do this. So you know, February, March, like it would be two months between conference and when they someone would come for training as a coach.

And there's also a bunch of changes I'm rolling out at conference and improvements and some things that we're testing for the franchise that I want in the training. So if I do the training right before conference, then we have conference.

There'll be stuff that's in that training that is actually going to be changing literally the next next week. So I want to record the training that all the coaches are going to be at in January and March and also have that on the academy. So it is like extremely exhausting. Like to do four days of training and then go right into the conference is is I would not be able to do that. I wouldn't be able to do it at a high level. There you go. Brenton, Utah do you think 2025 will be a bad year to raise prices due to recession? Do you think if Trump wins it will still it will instill confidence in people that the economy will improve and make them less price sensitive? I'm a very, I'm in a very conservative area. Have you ever seen a location raise prices quite a bit and their total revenue went down, although they were profitable overall? So when you raise prices, there's three numbers you're looking at right now. The percentage that you raise prices by the percentage of customers that leave and then the close ratio impact that is made. So all three of those things can be affected by like the general economy, like how far can you raise the price, how many people leave when they have a price increase and then what percentage of people are price sensitive when you give new estimates at a higher price? And so I believe that the right time to raise prices is when you hit capacity. Regardless of where you are in the depths of a recession, regardless of whether or not we're in boom town, if you are at capacity and you're wanting to maximize profit, we raise prices. And so I don't think any of these other factors play into whether or not someone should raise prices. It's easy to start thinking about these things, like, well, if I raise prices and then there's a recession or the new presidency or whatever. If you are at capacity, you have to lose customers in order to be able to service customers that are coming on organically without you spending any money on leads. The beautiful thing about having recurring services is that you will have some number of leads coming in every month, and that usually averages 50 to 60amonth across Augusta Nation. They just organically show up to the website and book services and ask for an estimate. In order to service those people, let's call them 30 or 40 new clients. Some of them are recurring some of their projects per month. They actually get accepted jobs on your schedule in order to serve them, you have to let other people go in order to be able to.

Not go over capacity, overwork your guys, or buy more trucks, equipment and hire more employees. So assuming, assuming you're trying to maximize profit, you will hit capacity and then raise prices. All these other factors is, is it doesn't matter, right? Like, so if you're like, well, let's play this out. Let's, let's assume that we go into a recession in 2025, okay.

You will probably not get as many leads. If you get less leads, you probably won't be at capacity, right? So let's just say right now you have 250 or 300 mowing customers. This is for everyone. This is not just for you. Brent, I'm kind of talking to everyone here. Let's say you have 250 or 300 customers.

We go into recession, 220 of them.

Re restart services. There's a whole bunch that cancel going into the spring because of a recession.

On that 220, let's assume that you're losing 10 of them a month just because of people moving, natural attrition, some people canceling because of the recession, etc.

Let's say every month you're getting five new customers coming in from leads. You're now in a net negative five customers per month, which means as the 2025 progresses. We're in the middle of our session. You've gone from 220 customers down to 200. Should you raise prices? No, we're not at capacity. Let's just call that 250. And so the alternative is next year we go into Boomtown, all right? 220 customers renew and you're getting 10, 15 new customers every single month, net. And you realize that within a matter of two months you are going to be above capacity, you raise prices. So like, whether or not there's a recession is inconsequential. What people are worried about is that if I raise prices, a, people will leave and then B, I won't be able to sell enough customers to replace the churn that is associated with higher prices. That's the biggest concern. I think this is overblown in so many regards. And you just got to get to the point where you're at capacity. Because if you are, you don't care if people leave. And so if you're, you have a massive amount of excess capacity, that's when I am a big fan of selling down the job, selling down trucks, laying off employees in order to get to capacity. Because it is at that point you can raise prices. So if you sell one or two trucks to reduce your capacity, you lay off one or two employees in order to hit capacity. And now all of a sudden, all your crew's working full time, all of your trucks are out in the field for five solid days a week, maybe even six sometimes getting work done. Guess what you do? You raise prices. You're like, well, no, I'm only at 220 customers. Well, we sold one truck, we let one of our employees go. And so now we can only actually. Our capacity is actually 220. So going in next spring, what actually happens? Instead of having a capacity of 250, we reduce the capacity down to 220. And where now we're getting 5, 10 customers a week or a month. And we raise prices immediately because we have to in order to take on those five or 10 new customers that are willing to pay the higher price. And I know that if I'm getting 10 new customers a month, that if I raise prices and 20 people leave within two months, I'm going to replace the churn of social with the price increase. And Instead of getting 10 new customers a month, maybe now I only get seven or eight because the prices are higher. And so my close ratio goes down. But I'm fine with it. Cause seven or eight new customers every single month is still going to make me right up against my capacity.

So it's a matter of I will raise prices and I will lose some percentage of customers. If I have a steady enough lead flow of new customers joining, I can predict how long it will take to replace the customers that leave. And so I saw your post on Facebook too. Brent's like, raising this in the middle of spring rush is a great idea because usually there's all these leads pouring in your confidence level that you can replace the customers who leave on the price increase is extremely high. Like, okay, last week got five new customers. The week before that we got eight new customers. This week we're already at six new customers. Okay, if I raise my prices and 20% of people leave, worst case scenario, I know I'm going to simply replace them within the matter of two months, and they'll all be at higher prices.

So you have people who leave and like the churn of price increase you have, how long will it take to replace those customers at the higher prices? And this is why a lot of times what I say is like, look, if you want to raise your prices to new customers first, that's fine if you, if you don't have the confidence, because if you raise your pricing on customers. So, for example, what I would probably do if I was you, Brent, and you're really. If you're really weighing this out is I would probably say raise your prices on new customers going the next year. Determine what your close ratio is. Make sure you're very confident. Okay. I'm still getting customers coming in. We're not at 55% close ratio, but we're at 45% at these higher prices. Great. I'm getting four or five new customers every week as the spring rush is picking up. Awesome. I know now that if I raise prices on all of my customers, I'm approaching capacity. I'm getting there. Whether I have reduced it by selling trucks and letting employees go, or if, like just simply the five new customers a week is getting it, get me to capacity with the next month or two. Now I have a lot of confidence because I've already raised prices. I know how long it's going to take to replace the. The turn of the price increase at the higher price to customers. Now, I'm a big fan of ripping the band aid off and just like raising prices on new customers and old customers right away. But I only do that if I'm at capacity. So if you're like, I'm approaching it and I want to kind of flip this location into profit mode, what you can do is raise prices of new customers going into spring rush, be very confident. And I would track how many new mowing customers am I getting every single week net. Right. So, like, you're gonna have some churn. Right. So, like, you're gonna have three new customers this week and five this week and seven this weekend. Eight this week. Okay, great. These are all at new, new, higher prices. I'm gonna probably be hitting capacity in three to four more weeks. Great. Raise my prices, knowing that's gonna make room for an extra 20 or 30 customers. But now I know that at the higher price, people are still joining. And then within a matter of four or five weeks, I will have replaced anyone that leaves in the price increase. So. And then to piggyback on that, because I saw Your, your message on Facebook there, Brent. I think if you, the guys are crushing on P4P and you want to make more, you're putting in this location to profit mode. You raise the price, you reduce the percentage on P4P and you're like, I don't know if I want to go down to 25 because that's a big jump down. Go to 30. Right? So if you're at 33, just go to 30. That's reducing the cost, your direct cost by 3%. If you, if let's say your profit margin was 10% for the year by you just making that one change, just moving from 33% down to 30%, you're probably going to increase your profits by 30% because you're going to go from 10% margin to 13% margin simply by reducing that P for P from 33 to 30% as a function of percentage sharing with the team. So if you do that and you do the price increase, that's what takes a 10% location into a 20% location. That's what takes a 6 or 7% location into a 15% location is doing both of those things at the same time. So yeah, it'll be very exciting like going, going next spring. I know it's like nerve wracking because you've never gone that direction in terms of profit mode. But like.

It'S just a, it's amazing. It's just, it's very exciting to be able to see that happen, especially if you've been in growth mode for a long time.

All right everyone have a fantastic rest of your week end and we will see you on Monday. We have a great team here at training. We'll post some pictures probably of their graduation and taking the test, et cetera. 17 of them today. So looking forward to it. All right, love you all. Take care.

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