Mike Minutes Mastermind 10/26/2023

All right. We are in technical difficulties. I don't know why these black bars on the side of my screen, but I'll fix it later. Okay?

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Much better, Much better, Much better. Yeah. I still don't know why my camera's doing that. Okay. All right, let's get started. Quick announcement. Something we've been working on for quite some time. And we are hoping to have it out in March before spring rush or as spring rush is getting started.

And that is the ability to have Sunday basic service at command center. This will really help with the backlog that comes typically on Tuesday mornings and leads to sometimes delays in the spring rush for estimates going out.

And tickets being addressed for max from Sunday. That backlog is usually pretty debilitating, especially in the heat of spring rush. It can take us a while to get through it. And so.

It'S been really. It's always hard to get people to work on weekends. Sundays is even harder. But we have figured out the system and what kind of is making all of this possible is something we've been testing for really two years, but extensively the past six to eight months. And that is having a Filipino aspect and team members at command center. And so what's really cool is all these individuals are extremely educated, usually master's degrees and above is what we usually hire. And they are extremely. They're better English than I am and they're awesome. And furthermore, they really, really value their job because over there, their unemployment rate's about five times as much as us in the U.S. and so we can get them for significantly cheaper. And they never miss work. They love their job. They're willing to work overtime a lot during spring rush, and it's needed. And they're phenomenal. The challenging part is, and this is what two years ago when we did virtual was. Our challenge was managing virtuals is extremely difficult. And so.

That'S always been the challenge. It's not necessarily cheaper for us to have virtual because of that. It takes a lot more management, a lot more one on one, a lot more oversight and quality control. And so. But we really, really tapped into it. It's done very, very well for us. And the quality of candidates are phenomenal. And so what, you know, in our market here, if you're going to pay someone 20, $22 an hour, you're basically entry level versus we can get that caliber of individual over there with having management over here with about the same price and cost to Command Center. So it's been super beneficial. That's what's going to unlock the ability for us to be able to have Sunday hours hopefully by March and April of 2024. So really excited about that. And.

Yeah, it's, it's been, it's been much, much better the past six months compared to two years ago when we did it. And a lot of times a lot of it was we did virtual in the US and we went through 50 people and maybe 15 of them worked out well in the long term. It cost horrible amounts of money to train them all. And then you find out that they are just running the clock, they're not doing good quality and et cetera, et cetera. We're learning all the things that you have to do to kind of have quality control and make sure people stayed on task. And they had, they made P4P and the list goes on. And so we've really been able to crack it. It's been really, really solid for us. I think it'll be a thing that allows us to really crush the next spring rush and having that ability on Sundays to be able to at least on simple services be caught up. It's good. Remember, Saturdays and Sundays is not full service. Full service does require the entire team on deck in terms of scheduling, email, all those other things, connect, team chats, et cetera. But when it comes to basic service like getting estimates sent out, estimate estimate request forms being processed, chats from the website being submitted and processed, voicemails, AI chats coming in, those are all basic service stuff that's handled on Saturdays and Sundays. And during the spring rush, especially when we come in on Mondays, there can be upwards of 6 to 700 contacts and leads that have come in that we're behind on. And it's really, really tough. And we've just. To be perfectly honest, we can't get anyone locally to ever work on a Sunday. It's just almost impossible. And so in order for us to get around this big, big bump, this is what we've done. We've been testing this for a long time. I'm super confident in it and that's, that's allowing us to do this. So pretty excited about it. So that was that. All right, let's jump into questions.

All right. As a no namer, if you do not have your.

Built up and have just had a hard time doing this with you, recommend us getting a winter job on weekends or nights to help build up that war chest and get it taken care of even quicker. Oh, I think you war chest. Oh, you just forgot. W. Okay, we're good. Cool. Yeah, like my first year I that's when I worked part time at the gym as a personal trainer. So I don't think it's a bad thing, especially if you have under 8, $9000 a month in revenue. Not a bad idea to go get another job because if you go out and spend the money on marketing, you're probably going to spend all your profits just on getting more customers. And it's really just a way of staying busy and adding to your contact database which is optimally going to increase the size of the business. But in terms of like getting cash to like make a living, sometimes it is what you got to do during the winter and I did that for my first year. My first winter is I worked at the gym as a trainer.

Ken from Michigan, what are your future plans for co pilot for non augusta users? I have had, I had quite a few people at Summit ask for certain features. Then Equip Expo I had a few people stop me and ask if you were going to offer things that they wanted. Yeah, there is a gazillion different options and features that can be in a CRM.

We listen to every single one and we do consider every single one that is submitted to air traffic control. And most of them I hear about if they know, the team now knows kind of like where the direction is going and which ones are not off the table. But they usually run them all by me every few weeks we call Feature Fiesta and go through all of them. But that being said, we can't get distracted because everyone has their own 10 pet features they want and that their current CRM doesn't have or that one CRM does have, but the other one only has a couple and they want well. So it would be an unending treadmill of features if we don't have a clear direction of where we're going. And so the clear direction is pretty outlined for the next year and a half until the end of 2024 at least probably into 2025. And I will be getting most of my feedback from inside of Augusta Nation. And in terms of like, okay, here's these big things are gonna take us three months to develop which one's most beneficial to visual beneficial to Augusta. And so if there's anything like even yesterday we had immediate command center with copilot and like their issues or problems are always prioritized. So if people are wanting to come along for the ride, awesome. I happen to think that that sort of strategy will lead to the best product and other people should hop on the on the bus. But if they don't want to, that's fine. It's a product we need and even over the next few months the stuff we're going to be able to do because we have control is going to be really cool.

Kyle Freeze from Bloomington, Illinois does anyone actively sell or market winter services to new customers? Any success? If so, a lot of our discussions revolve around winter services just being a tool to keep recurring money coming in the door to cover expenses and such. But I'm wondering if using cheaper methods of marketing it and throwing a wider net net I. E. Instant quote door hangers could really help us grow into the winter as opposed to just maintaining. I think this may be very market dependent, but just trying to grow through a season where my mindset is in defense mode and customer acronym cost is at its highest on average. I also think that this specific type of customer that would accept would probably be our ideal type of recurring customer and would love our Augusta systems be some of our best customers as a result. Yeah, I agree with this. 100 I would I would recommend anyone that has the is slowing down during the winter months to at least try this out and put out a thousand two thousand door hangers. Infinite prices for winter services.

I think it's a great idea or even just door knocking because it does require a little bit of explanation sometimes. As I'm talking about this I will talk to the media team.

Door hanger selling winter services that has legs. We will create something and put it up on the vistaprint Pro shop hopefully in the next few weeks. That's a good idea because I think that everyone should do this. The ideal thing is the reason that you could do this without door hanging is do this to your existing customers, right? Like sell, you know, do the opt out form to all your mowing customers but then everyone else, the other 95% of your database that doesn't have mowing set up sell them hard on winter services. That'd be huge and I do think it is very market dependent. I think some people could probably actually really sell quite a bit of winter services, especially in markets where it is more temperate. But you know if you're putting snow snow stuff in there, you can still do it. I I'd just be very interested to see how that how that does and what is the conversion. Because hey, if you can make the math make sense and you get one customer out of every two 300 door hangers to sign up for winter services you could absolutely keep growing the business. Like if you just Think about like, okay, I do mowing. Great. Let's pretend I didn't do mowing. And my, my whole business was winter services. Oh, that's a different frame. My whole job, like, it's not the time to slow down. This is, this is go time. This is the time for me to go and sell people on winter services. That looks very interesting. Very, very interesting.

Brian Connor from Augusta, Georgia. What is the standard policy for pay deduction when a team member walks off the job and quits halfway through their mowing route? Would it be a good idea to have it in the company handbook that all bonus dollars would be deducted if a team member quits without a notice? We do have that in our handbook.

And that if someone quits like that, every. All their, the P4P for that pay period is on the table. It's a bonus. They're not entitled to it. So that being said, I think typically if someone quits, we usually just pay it up, pay them out. But if it's, if you really like it was. There's a specific issue here. Especially if someone quits and they were like rushing through jobs, making yellow slips and you know you're going to be picking up all their slack. Definitely I'd be taking their PPP off the table. But yeah, it is in our handbook and that is, you know, bonuses are basically if you do exceptional work, if you're quitting without any sort of notice, that is not exceptional work. You don't get a bonus. Your performance is low, therefore your performance dollars are nothing. So as long as in your handbook you should be fine.

I would have a secondary method of protection that is like, okay, well all these jobs for the day are, now we're going to hold that as a yellow slip against him. Like, I would probably do the math of it just for the sake of legalities be like, okay, all the work on the remaining week I'm going to hold against his yellow slip. Therefore all of his bonus dollars are gone. So. Hudsonville. Nick Davidson.

Hey Mike, I've been going over. I've been noticing some overlap between our automation in the copilot system and the actions of command center. Given our predominantly commercial client base, I've built strong personalizations with our commercial customers. I want to ensure our communications are streamlined. Recently I observed an instance where an accepted estimate for snow removal services triggered an automation email discussing landscaping and said this match. That mismatch can be confusing to our clients. I've created custom snow plowing templates which I believe be more appropriate in such cases. Can we look into this and potentially customize our. You can customize them 100%. The ones that are set up in there are very. There's like two different routes. It's mowing and it's projects. So if you're doing snow you can absolutely go in there and just customize it 100%. Additionally I like to understand if Command center can use custom templates or if they can Only use the 1 set ones Refining their this process will be beneficial for us. It is up to me to create custom automations per customer. To be honest I haven't done anything with automations yet and I'm dragging my feet until most of the bugs dust settle. Yeah, so.

Yeah, so Command center when they set you up they have the generic ones that we create but you can absolutely customize them and what I would do because they're not sending them out manually is you know, set up ones for snow plowing services that trigger separately and then you can create your own custom template however you want. So that would be my recommendation. You are going to need to get into sequence automations to actually make that delineation between different types of services.

And the items and services will become a dropdown here in the next few weeks to be able to make it where it is. There's not as many items and services I understand right now like you can. It's so easy to add items and services by just typing in estimates. A lot of people are getting a lot of them stacking up so I recommend using the dropdown instead of just typing into estimates. As a side note we're going to lock that up so it's more of a dropdown. That being said, you will need to get into sequence automations to delineate specific services for.

How the automations are going to be triggered. So but you can absolutely do that like 100%. You'll just have. You'll have to go in there and do it yourself because right now it's sending. It's like all project based work is going to be the project based one and all the mowing one is going to be for mowing. Feel free to set up a call with ATC as well. It might be worth waiting for that drop down. Nick, if you have already governed services that you don't want to mess up or something. But if you set up a call with ATC they can walk you through this too if needs be.

But yeah, absolutely you can customize 100%. We make it where you can customize whatever you want as long as you don't change the process of command center because then they'll get confused. But if they're like accepting an estimate for example, and you're like, hey, if it's a snow plowing one, I want a separate type of email automation going out. Just have to set up another automation sequence. Yeah, ATC can help you walk you through that. Vince from Medicine Hat Hey Mike. Using the 4L framework, my biggest bottleneck is liquidity. I recently raised our snow removal prices on existing customers by 20% and plan to work in the field with the crew to save costs on labor. This is my first year tracking attrition. So far we have 30% attrition on last year's clients. After adding some new clients, I'm currently at 75% capacity of our snow removal route. My question is, should I be quoting these higher prices for incoming clients or should I lower my rates to fill capacity? Our spring rush for snow is typically November to early December. Thanks. I would filter capacity and then raise rates. It also comes down to at 75 capacity. It sounds like you're just going into your spring rush of snow, meaning that you might be able to keep your prices the same and still hit capacity within the next couple weeks. You only know how many. Like like if you're at 50, if you're at 75 customers now and you only have space for 25 more, if you're really confident next week you're going to sell at the higher rate all the way up to the 100, then I would just stick with that.

I would not.

Try to lower my prices, fill the capacity. And then now you're middle of November and at capacity you need to raise prices again. But you've let all these people in a lower price. So your confidence level of going from 75% capacity to 100 capacity in the next month or six weeks is the factor of whether or not you would actually lower prices now or not for incoming new customers.

Ben from Arnold Hey Mike, we had a guy quit during his mowing route this week and demanded that his work co worker take him back to the shop and due to this the route was unfinished. As a matter of principle, if an employee walks the job and quits, do you think we have the right to deduct his entire PPP bonus? I'm tempted to deduct everything given how you handle it. Yeah. 100. I updated our employee handbook so it states if an employee quits without giving two weeks notice or gets fired, they forfeit any people from your bonus accumulated. Yep. 100. Ours is the same thing. Sadly, the handbook he signed was original and we forgot to give him our updated. Yeah, so just give me yellow slip, right? So all the rest of that revenue for the day. That's a yellow slip you got. It wasn't finished, so deducts all his people, all the P for P for that. I just make a big yellow slip for that last day.

Cool. All right, that's all we got. I'm gonna try to fix this crazy black bar is all over. Don't know why it's happening, but have a great Thursday. See you guys tomorrow. Take care.