Mike Minutes Mastermind 10/27/2023

Hello, Guess nation. Hope you're doing super well.

Doing a little earlier because I have no time till this evening, so I'm just gonna do this now. All right, let's rock and roll.

There was something I was thinking about saying. I didn't write it down. That's what I get. One second. Let me mix here, see if I write it or not.

Okay, it'll come to me in a second. All right, let's go and jump into questions. Let me just drop this into Facebook real quick.

While I'm thinking though. I did make a note on the Facebook group that we are going to make door hangers and every door direct mail campaigns inside a pro shop for winter services. Kind of dawned on me in the middle of yesterday's mastermind. Shout out to.

Kyle Freeze. Which is I don't think his last name correctly, but I know who it is.

Shout out to him. That question yesterday about the winter service really triggered something for me. And I was like, okay, think of it in terms of instead of us being lawn care people and we do mowing, think of it as like our only service was winter services. And like, you provided a service to customers that during the winter you'd take care of their property to make sure that if they were out of town, if they're on the holidays, if they have a second house, if they have family coming to their house for the holidays, that everything looks great. That seems like a pretty valuable service to me. So instead of us being like, oh, it's the slow season, maybe you go on the offensive and you're like, I'm selling winter services. And you don't even mention mowing. You just sell winter services at the price that you would otherwise for mowing, using door hangers, every door, direct mail, et cetera, and you could grow. Now, have I done this? No, but it makes a lot of sense to me. The same way that people go hardcore during the the season for Christmas lights or snowplowing, et cetera. It's like it's just another service and they switch gears. Why can't we just do the same thing for windshield services and actually go into the offensive mode?

Novel thought. I really like it, though. I think that there's a market enough for it. If 40, 50, 60% of our mowing customers want that service, yes, it means that there's probably gonna be less demand than mowing, but there could be a third or 40 or 50% of people that still want that service. And if they're sold to, it makes a lot of sense. Think of it like this. Everyone always thinks of us like the customers doing us a service by staying on winter services. But think of it like this, if you're a homeowner, like, hey, for 50 bucks every two weeks, I'm going to come to your house and clean up the entire outside. That's not a bad deal.

A few several weeks ago, when I was looking for people to do cleaning, the minimum charge is usually 100 to 150 bucks just to show up. And they'll work for less than an hour. So I think it's very fair. It's a really good deal. And then once you get them on winter services, you can convert them into mowing because you already have that price and you're going to roll them right into weekly and bi weekly services come spring. So I really, really like that idea. And it's not like it has never occurred to me, but it was definitely a frame shift of like, what if we were Augusta winter services? That was our business. And it was like, this is now the time to go all in versus, oh, mowing season's done. I'm gonna kind of like just chill out for a bit and hopefully get some cleanups here and there, et cetera. Well, why can't we just keep doing what we've always been doing is focusing on recurring services? Again, I'm not gonna say this is work gonna work because I haven't done it, but it was a good frame shift for me. So we're going all in. Yesterday they did a photo shoot for it to do winter services around gutters and all the rest of it. Shout out to Zach and. And.

We'Re going to put together some cool stuff. So stay tuned. We'll spin it up as quickly as we possibly can and vistaprint. We got to wait on them to get it up onto the pro shop, but we will get those done ASAP because I think it's a really good opportunity for the next, like three to four weeks as people are finishing up their mowing season.

All right, let's roll into questions. Let's see what we got. We got three questions. Let's go.

Connor Hutchinson. Oh, by the way, Connor, starting 75 hard. If everyone wants anyone wants to join, feel free to drop jump onto the Facebook group. He has the full list in there. I think last time they did a WhatsApp group. So, you know, just saying tis the season, good luck during going through Thanksgiving and Christmas. That's gonna be a tough one. All right, question. What makes Dr. Kashi a credible coach? Is it his lifestyle? His nutrition business or that he has coached other large companies before that allows him to charge thousands to work with high level people like yourself and the Hormoses. Okay, good question.

Let me think for a moment. There's a couple reasons why in a more generic coaching perspective, I am looking for people that have been around interesting people and have seen interesting things because they will give me a different perspect.

And then in terms of what makes him a credible coach, he does have a lot of actual like certifications in terms of areas that are like, outside of business. So he is an actual doctor.

And he has a frame of thinking about stuff that is difficult to actually find because of what he's gone through. So he lived in a cave for months and worked out with Olympians that did wrestling and.

Not jiu jitsu. It was something else. I forget what it was. Martial art. Martial arts. He would train with the Olympians in a cave in the Middle East. So like crazy experiences like that that give him a different perspective that I'm not going to go over there and live in a cave. But you know, those sort of perspectives are interesting and they are rare. And because they are rare, they cost a lot typically. And so, yeah, it's just really interesting to see not only myself, but the people that he teaches.

Just start to use his frameworks for thinking through things. And like, he's a big believer in defining things and like words mean things, etc. So. But what makes him credible is typically the results of the people he teaches. Like Liz has this saying that she got from a book that is like, you're not a leader until someone you lead leads someone else or something like that. And so when I look at the people he's taught, they all have really good results and they have done really awesome stuff. So. And they all attribute a lot of their or some, some portion of their.

Learning to him. So that gives him credibility in my mind. On C Suite, you told me it wasn't necessary for him to have a coach. I'm blessed to have these masterminds and Chuck right ahead of myself. But didn't you mention you wanted someone else that has and thinks differently than yourself most of the time? I would guess the person above you would think pretty similar. If you're looking at someone ahead of you, you can often see, can see only see the levels they've unlocked. What if you want to go bigger and have a larger vision? Can others outside your close circle help unlock faster growth? 100%, yeah. So the answer to Lee is is very contextual because I know that Lee is self aware enough to, to ask for feedback from other people. So like I know he's in a group of guys that like he will actually bounce stuff off of them and ask things about personal life or like what they're going through and what he, what they can improve or like what they might be not seeing correctly. And when he goes through a tough time like he kind of bounce, he has, he has that core group of people.

And so the question has to be asked though. And the reason I talk about having someone just above you and just above you could be five to 10 years ahead of you. It's just contextual, right? I just don't think it's super helpful for someone starting.

You know, their first business with no employees to be talking to a Fortune 500 CEO and trying to get advice from them. Like they're going to have good advice obviously, but contextual to the size of the business probably not super applicable. And so if you actually want to get results versus just having like thought provoking discussion, then you want someone right ahead of you that has the exact roadmap and roadmap and within the past several years has gone through exactly what you need to be able to figure out.

But the part about getting people outside of your close circle, that's the part where self awareness comes in. Because most people think that they have plenty of self awareness, they have plenty of ability to look at themselves from a third party perspective and pick themselves apart. And honestly most of us aren't great at it. And so I've had to, I am trying to be better at taking constructive criticism from third parties that I feel like don't have the full perspective. And that is a, a muscle that is, is learned and, and not to get defensive about it and to like take the constructive criticism and then like study it from like a.

From a investigative perspective instead of put pointing the guns towards each other and like fighting and like that could be fighting in the form of comments or on social media. It could be in the form of backbiting. If you're like working internally inside of an office or management or internal team, it's like let's debate the idea and let's pick this thing apart and assuming that everyone's intentions are pure. And so that is a helpful thing. And that's the part that is really helpful to have a coach. And I don't think it needs to be someone of extreme high degree that you're paying a gazillion dollars for to have that person. Unfortunately Most of us are, and I put myself in that category, are pretty hard headed when it comes to taking people's advice. And so sometimes paying someone for advice is helpful because it lowers the inclination to push against their advice. It just like that's why you go to an event that someone pays two or three thousand dollars to get into. Typically the event goes better because the amount of attention that everyone puts and the value they put on being there is greater than the person that showed up for free. And so it's actually a big reason why we continue to increase the price of getting into Augusta is not because I need to make more money. It is a matter of the quality of candidates that come to us are just better and better and better because they put more and more emphasis and value on the systems inside of Augusta because of that initial price. So we just have someone just joining, um, they're going to be big. They're, there's two of them that are like million plus already when they're, when they're joining.

And having the higher price tag gets people that are serious. They, they value more understanding P4P and being around people that are all implementing it. They understand the value of being on these masterminds and they value it far, far more than someone that I was like oh yeah, like let's just waive the fee. And those are the type of people that unfortunately when we first got started and I had the lower fee, they don't show up to masterminds because they do not see the value the same way that the person that is willing to pay for it. And so sometimes when it comes to coaching, just paying for it is actually the unlock to your own psyche. Being like okay, I'm going to unlock this guard against taking information and constructive staticism. And then it breaks through. Um, because when you are paying for something you are willingly accepting that feedback and you can turn it off at any moment. Whereas if someone just shows up to your, your desk and is giving you constructive criticism, you're, you're forced to work with them. Like you have to be on the same team versus a customer relationship of having a coach where you're paying them. So if someone is so mature that they don't have to pay someone in order to listen to them, you can probably get a buy without having a coach. And, and I worked on that a lot and I was able to do some of that the past few years. But I'm still hard headed and I still think that my ideas are special and so it is helpful to pay someone and I'm doing the same thing for learning about technology and things like that. It's like yes, I could keep doing this, but I'm not. If I can just like set aside my own pride and ego and let someone else pick apart my business.

I am willing to pay for it just so that I actually listen to it and do it. And I value their opinion. Garrett from Glendale, Colorado well, it's a long question. All right, this coming Tuesday I'm meeting with a guy that I'm good friends with in my area to start working on a deal to buy him out.

He is moving across the country soon. He went out on his own three years ago and bought part of his list from his old boss. He had about a 1 mile radius in the middle of my service area and his pricely pricing is slightly higher than mine.

He does about 140k per month per year solo sometimes with the helper for mowing, aeration, fertilization and a little bit of residential snow. He's already in copilot and runs similar to how an Augusta does. That's actually pretty helpful. As in copilot. He is a friend of mine, so it's not like I'm just trying to lowball him. Okay, that's a good data point. Thank you for letting me know. We've been talking for almost a year about this now and I don't think he has anyone else interested. My plan is to offer to pay 20 of each recurring MO until I pay him 200 per recurring mowing customer. That way we have we are both incentivized to have customer stay and I don't have to front a bunch of cash, which I don't think would be wise. I want to get a list of all assets he owns, his website, his Google my business, his contacts, his recurring customers and client come out with a large number to show him how much of a business he has built and then offer to buy just the client list, contacts, Google, my business and maybe a website for a total of 200 per client. I don't think he wants to sell his truck trailer equipment center, but I think it would be a good way for him to see how far he has come in the past few years. I'm worried if I just told him I can pay him 15k he'll be disappointed. That being said, he told me he bought the list from his old boss three years ago for 2 to 3K. Do you have any thoughts or advice on this? I feel like I should plan on half of the clients leaving, but it does feel like it's in the perfect service mix. Good pricing and the middle of our service area with affluent neighborhoods almost more than anything. Adding to our database will be huge. He got a thousand people added to our. We got 1,000 people added to our database that I bartered for another landscaping friend of mine this spring, which brings us almost to 2000 in our database. One clicks have been our best source of marketing by far this year. Okay, you're thinking about this very well from a lot of different angles. So. Good question.

So this is the. Throws us all through a little monkey wrench is the fact that you're a friend of his. I know it sounds horrible, but it's a big data point because if you're trying to get the best deal and you're optimizing for dollars and cents here, it looks very differently how you're going to attack this. So if you. Let's just say you were not a friend and you were not trying to do what's in his best interest in terms of like, making sure he has money. And it sounds like you want make him to feel good about the business he has built so far. And it sounds like potentially he's disappointed in some way that he has to leave this business. So assuming that's all off the table, this is what I would do if I was trying to get the lowest price out of this. Um, I would say, okay, let's work together on what the value of the business is. Let's start off with truck boom. Equipment boom. Trailer boom. What do you think the value of your website is? Boom. Value of. So if you, someone had to buy your phone number, what do you think that is? Boom. Okay, what, what do you think the. The list of all your customers are? Boom. What do you think all the office equipment and other gear and like miscellaneous tools. Boom. Just list it all out and guess what's going to happen. He's gonna probably when it gets to the list of customers, like, oh, I don't know. And you could be like, well, you bought it for like 2 or 3,000. So you think it like, dou. Yeah, okay, great, great. Six or seven thousand dollars. Boom. You just keep going down the list. Then at the end you say, I think you're gonna make the most money if you sell all of these things individually. And then it's because it's gonna be harder. And if you're, if you need to leave quickly, you're not going to be able to find a buyer that wants to buy all of this together. So do you agree that it probably, you probably make the most money if you sold all of this stuff a la carte, because these valuations that we just put down are all really fair if they're individualized. Finding someone to buy all of it together is really difficult. So what I recommend is that you just try to sell all these a la carte all differently. You can sell the trucks and the trailers and the assets on Google Facebook Marketplace if you want to. If not, you can take them with you. So then it's a matter of, wow, you have a business worth $95,000.

Cool. I think it'd be tough to find someone that wants to pay 95 grand because they want to have to take this whole business away from you. And they're basically taking out a job because, you know, it's just you working. So why don't we do this? You sell all the trucks, equipment, other assets if you want to, I'll buy the, the customer list and take care of it from you for you. And I think that's going to give you the most value for the, for the business. That's what you would do. And you'd probably get the, get this list for a lot cheaper.

Now, it sounds like you are not trying to lowball him. You're not trying to get the lowest dollar amount, so you might attack that differently. But that's how I would do it. Especially because, you know, this right here that, you know he bought that list for 2 to 3K. So if you can just say, hey, look, let's say it's double the value, triple the value. Great. It's worth six to nine thousand dollars. Okay. You just put that all in a list and then you buy that one thing from him.

That's how you get it for the cheapest.

Or you could do your. Your strategy too is also acceptable. It's probably going to give him more money. And if he trusts you and you trust him, that would work fine. That typically does not work if you don't, if it's not like a friend relationship. So I'd be okay with that one. And it's still a good deal if you're able to get the $200 using the 20% over time, as long as they stay with you, because then what you're going to end up paying is probably about $150 per recurring customer, because some people will leave. So I'm okay with that deal, the one that you've outlined. But if you wanted to optimize it better, you'd probably get the first one, Kyle Tarvin. Have you ever hired someone for your management team thinking that they were a great fit? Then they end up doing or saying something that make you question everything about them to that point. Maybe I'm being too critical. Maybe I'm trying to make imperfect people perfect. Maybe I'm reading too much into it. Well, it's very.

Admirable that you would actually write these last three questions because I do believe that is probably the case and it was the case for me prior to having to work with more people. You got to realize that everyone's different than you and that people that really grade you the wrong way are sometimes helpful to have around.

Because.

They can A slow you down if you're the type of person that moves too fast, B, they can challenge your opinions and beliefs from an angle that you didn't think of before. However, there are times where that person, if they don't back down, you will have to let them go. Especially if they are not willing to also compromise. If you're willing to compromise and you're willing to at least hear people out, take different angles and perspectives, great. But ultimately there needs to be alignment in a management team. So if, if for me, for me, the line that gets crossed is if someone has different opinions, they say something that's strange or weird, whatever, great. But as a manager, you have relinquished the right to go to everyone on the team and start behind the back of everyone else on the management team and saying stuff. And so someone in my opinion, that goes from a management team and then goes to frontline team members and start saying things, it'll create instability in the team because now they, they see a, a divided management team the same way that when kids see mom and dad fight, they start to feel uneasy and insecure because their leadership is now at odds and not on the same page. And so there needs to be united front for management team, in my opinion. And it creates instability for everyone that they are leading if there is not. So having people in management that are contrary to your opinions or say things have different angles and things very positive if they take that outside of the management team, I have very low tolerance for that because it will create instability for other people that have all the information that they do.

So in terms of them saying every for you to say that you question everything about them up to that point. I think you're probably being too critical though. I think that if someone says something that's so out of character and so insane, the first thing I'm going to is give them A benefit doubt. Maybe life is really tough for them. Maybe, you know, their spouse is really against them. And like I try to go benefit of the doubt. If this person has picked up slack for the team and they do not create slack in their position, I give them a lot of leeway. And so it's like for example, if someone, if someone shows up late to work, for example, I really don't really care if they have been working 12 and 14 hour days to pick up the slack of the team during spring rush. I really don't care because it is a matter of that person is sacrificing a lot. And I am willing to sacrifice the idea that I want everyone on time. I am willing to do that because they are picking up slack and they are not creating slack. However, if the same person that yesterday is trying to get out of the office early and then the day before that they wanted a three hour break to go for a doctor's appointment. The day before that they wanted off early because it was a nice day and they want to go for a hike and then they're late on the fourth day, I have a problem with that because they're creating slack and they're not picking up slack for other people. And so I typically want to look with context when someone acts way out of character. And I have had people.

Say very, very, very hurtful things that I would, I would typically fire people over. But because they were of the caliber of individual, had a track record to give and sacrifice for the team, I took those a grain of salt and realized it was probably just a hiccup on the, a blip on the radar and I would have to address those things later on. But in the moment, I'm not going to jump to the conclusions and question everything about them up to that point. That's a pretty.

Drastic conclusion. I would say.

If someone has a good track record, I give them a lot of rope and I give them a lot of, of like always just thinking about, okay, that came across really, really bad. But maybe they just didn't mean it that way. And here's how. Maybe they actually were trying to be really positive with the way that they said that or they didn't infer, like it comes across really hurtful. Okay, maybe that's not their intention. They're actually trying to help me. Like if you think about it from that perspective, you might be less inclined to question, quote, unquote, everything about them up to that point. If someone has a good track record, like I am willing to work with this person and I'm willing to give them some grace when they do something stupid because I would hope that I would that they would give me the same grace. And as if I make a really big mistake, they say look, that was dumb, that was really stupid. But based upon his track record, I know that he's looking out for me and that he wants what's best for me. And I'm not going to quote, unquote question everything about him up until to this point. The same thing is true like when I've made mistakes and they continue to make mistakes with all of us in augustination.

It is here one second, let me just delete these out. Then boom.

The same thing is true for myself, right? Like when I make mistakes it's like.

It is only hurtful if people are like you are hurt. You, you like if they question everything about me because I make a mistake, that's hurtful. Whereas most of the time when I make a mistake, the vast majority of Augusta nations like hey look, he made a mistake. It's obvious he's, he's not only asked for forgiveness but he's based on his track record. He tries to do what's best for everybody. And so that is like a healthy relationship. The same thing is true when someone from command center gives reports and says so and so is not showing up to their estimates and they are not responding back to us. Like I don't immediately jump to the conclusion they're trying to hurt the brand of a Gusta Nation because if their track record has been that they' supporting Augusta Nation, they're supporting other members, they're trying to be on coaching calls, etc. I have no question, I'm not going to jump to conclusions of questioning everything about them. So track record is important I think.

Question I have like 1400 people in my database and constantly get between 5 to 21 clicks. Why are mine so low compared to others I hear get 80 to 100 when they send out a one click estimate in a similar market and size database.

I have never heard of anyone getting 80 to 100 with only 1400 people in their database. Let me be clear. We get 80 to 100 at the Bellingham shop, but we have I think 12000 people in their database recently. Service Allpod's only been sending it out to about 60% of people, Lisa, and it's been the past few months. So let's just call it 7000 people. But we'd be lucky to get that that many clicks. So if you have 1400 people and you're getting 5 to 21 clicks. That's pretty good actually. Honestly I think timing is important. What services you're offering when also important. But in terms of what you're saying is your current 5 to 20 clicks is actually pretty good for 1400 people. If you're able to close 80% of those because you just dial, you dial in your follow up process, you go talk to the person, etc.

You know, let's call it 10, 15 jobs can fill you up for two or three weeks. Right. So timing is important. But.

I have 1300 and usually get only five to 10. The most clicks I've ever gotten was 20. Yeah. So I think this is someone else. Let me just triple check.

Yeah, this is someone else. Great. So first one was Cameron, next one was Connor. Yeah, it's very common at 1400 people to be getting 5 to 20. That I would say that's very standard and 20 would be very a lot. Thing is as you get for example like that's why.

Sick just blank Garrett. That's why Garrett just said that buying those thousand customers has value. Because if you have a thousand customers and you know that every time you send a one click estimate, well 12 times a year you're gonna get, let's just call it 10 clicks, that's 120 clicks in the year, that's a 120 leads that, let's go 50% close ratio. That's 60 jobs a year you're going to get from just getting those thousand contacts. That's why keeping the contacts, keeping them warm and then making sure you're sending out the one click estimate almost consistently, et cetera is so valuable as the company grows. And that's why you become more profitable in years 3, 4, 5 typically is because you start spending less money on marketing because you now have this database that can bring in leads.

So.

All right everyone have a fantastic Friday, an awesome weekend and we'll see you guys on Monday. Oh, I think Liz will announce this later. One quick thing. We are adding a texting department at command center over the next couple months since everyone's going to have it inside of copilot. Right now only about 15% of Augusta Nation uses texting from the other platforms. So we're going to create a texting platform. Liz will have more updates on it but it'll be a positive thing. Good. Inbox inside of the Copilot recently we made changes so you have done and then a different inbox categorization of messages that are in progress versus, like, completed. Anyways, that's the last thing. All right, everyone, have a fantastic day, fantastic weekend. I'll see you on Monday. Take care of.