Mike Minutes Mastermind 10/30/2024

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Another mike Minutes Mastermind. Let's get started.

Couple quick announcements. Liz made a video or a post on the Facebook group. Now, if you have Connecteam as a growth model, you can now submit your yellow slips via Connecteam in addition to the usual way. If you like that, that's totally fine. Or if you're a solo model and you don't have access to Connecteam, you can still submit to yellowslopgustalongcareservices.com however.

Make it easier. If it is easier for you on Connecteam, you will have a yellow slip chat. So again, that video is on the Facebook group and Liz made that yesterday, the day before. So cool.

Rock and roll. I have seen a lot of people message me the past few days as people are ending their mowing season end of October.

That we have seen a really, really, not just substantial, a massive improvement on the conversion from mowing into Winter Services. So I'm not going to take a victory lap on it yet or share all the numbers until probably like middle of January because I want to see a couple billing cycles because again, some people will not see the email, they will not watch the video. And so but across the board, we're seeing about a 50 to 100% increase in the conversion rate using the new method of showing the video, really trying to text them, talk to them in person using the methods we've talked about in the past in terms of closing and selling Winter Services. So that's awesome. I do believe, based upon, even if the historical cancellation rates stay the same, that we will double Winter Services revenue this year, which is awesome. That's awesome.

All right, let's rock and roll.

Bo.

First question is from Russell Canton. I lost a dispute to a client. He now disputed his latest charge. Latest charge as well. Obviously, I want to drop this client. My question is that if I accept his latest dispute, instead of fighting it, can I still send him to Collections? I just don't want him to want to have to wait another 30 days for the bank to make a decision on the dispute before sending him to Collections. I send him to Collections now. Yeah. Like, it seems like you learned your lesson. Once someone disputes a charge of yours, don't take them as a client.

It's the, it's the consumer hack to basically get their money back anytime they use a credit card. And it's, you just basically never win. Unfortunately, you just never win. Like, I, I've, I think I've won maybe one out of 10 of these, whenever I've had to dispute them, I can go back and forth. So a lot of times it's easier just to let it go. You know, submit the invoice, submit the estimate, etc.

But don't count on winning it. And in the future, if someone disputes a charge and you know you did the work and they're just being whatever, I would not do service for them. Also in the future when disputes arise, how do I get the information from Copilot saying that they authorized the credit card to be charged and that they entered the credit card information? In this case it wouldn't have helped since I personally put his card in after talking to him on the phone. Thanks. Yeah, you'd probably take screenshots on the client portal so you could actually go into the client profile, click on the client portal link, go into their payments and like screenshot the fact that's encrypted they that that information is there, they can see it, they can remove it, you can put the show that there's a delete button etc.

If you want to give it a shot. But again, when people dispute, remember they are they are the customer of Visa. You are a third party. The Visa MasterCard they want to keep the customer happy. They just do because that's their customer. So.

Red Deer we sent a one click estimate for snow removal. Obviously Alberta has a large amount of snow and this year the snow is later than usual. We usually book up by October 15th to November 15th but lost a client that was about 15 to 20% of our monthly revenue on October 24th. So we are trying to make up for that with the snow being later this year. When I set up the email links and sequence automations, I tested vigorously on myself through email and text. We included an unsubscribe button on the bottom in the email template and set it up so we receive an email and text when a customer clicks on the one click for an estimate or unsubscribes. The question is we are receiving a lot of automated emails stating customers are clicking on the one click but also unsubscribing at the same time. This was maybe on the high end. 5% of 1 clicks sent out this point for reference. There are approx 550 customers in our database. How do you deal with this? Do you still spend, send an estimate or leave it as they unsubscribed? I'm not sure the proper approach and do not want to get a bad rep for bombarding them for marketing text and emails. Additionally, we have only sent one other one click last month for aerations and probably received 2 to 4% unsubscribe tags added. Okay, so.

First off you don't need to add the unsubscribe tag to an email if you're doing a one click customer because you're using mass marketing. As soon as you send any email with more than two people in it copilot automatically adds click here. If you would like to unsubscribe from marketing emails that's automatically added. So having two of those at the bottom might be leading to a higher increase of this. Also.

Your automation might be tracking anyone any click. So they might click on that link which is a merge tag, but they could also click on the link that is a one click estimate email. You'll click here to get an estimate. So it might be triggering both of those. So either one. So you might be getting two texts or two emails based upon that trigger. Feel free to book call directly with ATC and they can actually look at your automations that you've set up around this. In general we're seeing this a lot on emails and that is like just a lot of things getting clicked on from spam filters. So you'll send an email and immediately if you get like 10, immediately get 10 clicks like within a matter of a couple minutes, you pretty much know that these are spam filters that can like go through emails, click on stuff, make sure things aren't malicious, etc. I would say to avoid a lot of this, reducing the amount of graphics is helpful to get through these spam filters.

And making the text very simple in the email, like one link max, not a lot of pictures, don't do videos, etc. That can help. I would say something like this, what I would probably do is use text more. But I think what might be leading to this highest unsubscribe rate is first off probably your first couple mass emails and second, and some of those, those contacts haven't been contacted in a while. That might be the first thing. Second thing is if you're adding an unsubscribe link you are doing that means that there are two showing up. In order for us to be compliant, we have to add a link to unsubscribe for those mass messages. So if you send one it's automatically going to be added. So yeah, that would be my. My first thing is like first off don't add two. As soon as you do that it can, it can trigger spam alerts and People are more likely to click it. It's going to take away from your one click as well. Secondly, your automations, how they're set up might be tracking any link clicked, which means it could potentially be triggering both of them at the same time. And then third, I would look at, if I send an email, I'm going to reduce my graphics, make it very, very text, very, very simple, not have images or graphics or videos and then see how that goes in terms of the click through. I'm going to use text the vast majority now because having an indiscriminate like an incorrect click is as annoying as I'll get out. What you might want to do if you get a click and you're like you're hesitant on it, you just text them like hey, saw you got the estimate and or the email and we're looking for a snow quote. Just want to confirm your email. You could do that if you wanted to to prevent any sort of issue there, you know, down the road with instant quotes for snow. That's what we're going to want to use for this because then then they actually fill the form out and they have a massive intent to buy and you can put pricing in there if you want to. So yeah.

So I know there's like a lot I threw at you there, but I'd start with each of those. I'd work my way down through that kind of list I gave there.

Pete from Virginia Beach. Hey Mike. Before Augusta we had a pretty good gig doing junk removal in the off season with our old business. I recall you being not supportive of junk removal and we got away from it as it stays in the systems. But with the advent of Christmas lights being okay, can we get your blessing to revive this off season fourth quarter saving hustle. I hate looking at our dump trailers and trucks sitting. Alright, so if I said junk removal is bad, forgive me, I didn't, I didn't intend to to poo poo on it. Well, I was probably inclined to say that about was if you're starting a junk removal business, it correlates your demand exactly with lawn care. However, if you can, if the long tail of of demand for junk removal is high enough that during the winter you can stay busy, do it go, go for 100% especially if you just one click estimate, email your customers inside of your database and get them on junk removal. Big fan. What I probably was saying, Pete, was more a matter of like doing a totally different brand that during the spring has just as much of a spring rush as you're mowing. But if you're just going to do it during a period of time using one click, estimate emails, contacting your customers, et cetera. I'm a fan. So if I said that in the past.

First off, I did not understand just how bad Q4 was and secondly, I probably was more inferring that you are starting a totally separate business that has the same demand curve as lawn care. But if you're just going to do this service during those four months, I'm a fan, so hope that made sense. You know, if you can use the same trucks, dump trailer, etc. We'll talk about this at conference. A bunch like I have like listed 50 to 15 different services that could technically be, you know, what some people are doing as Christmas lights could be could replace. With this it is simply a matter of can I use the same trucks, the same equipment, the same employees to do an adjacent service and can I only do it during that Q4? That's the challenging part. So as long as you're just doing it during that time, I'm a big fan. So Mr. Anonymous, you mentioned something in the past about having a Nash Nationwide vendor that could install vinyl wraps for franchisees. Have there been any progress on that? I can order pre printed custom wrap for my truck for just over a thousand dollars and install myself, but every wrap shop within a two hour race of my location wants to charge five to six thousand dollars to print and install. This is for a full wrap, okay? Full wrap okay. To do a half wrap and have Mako repaint the truck, it would actually cost me $500 more per truck to go that route using local wrap shops. Do you think it's worth trying to wrap a truck yourself, being somewhat handy? Or is it paying the price of another truck worth having someone else install it? To be perfectly honest, I've never even looked at the install process because I know I would mess it up. Now if you can get it for a thousand bucks and spend a few hours or a day doing it, let's say it's $2,000 of your time, etc. Maybe you have to replace it in a couple years because you put a couple bubbles in it sounds like you can get three of them for the price of someone else installing it. So I'd probably go that route and take the risk.

I would say very strange. Like your paint cost must be through the roof because a half wrap should be a lot cheaper and then the paint shouldn't be that much. Again, I know there are markets where the paint is abhorrent, and this is why we did the full wraps to make this as an option.

I don't know who this is. I don't know how handy you are. I'd probably watch a video on YouTube like, hey, how hard is it? If I have the heater thing, can it kind of get a lot of my mistakes out? Is it worth being frustrated over for 24 hours? Is it worth. If I can make sense of, okay, does the wrap last three years? I have to redo it again because I get wrinkles in it and I'm not great. Might be worth it. Also, the gradient of the wrap makes it really, really accommodating of dirt, debris. And if you mess anything up because it's already kind of a staggered padding, kind of that grunge look. So if you make a mistake, it's not going to be a huge deal. So balancing all those things out would be what I'd probably do. In terms of nationwide vendor.

They are basically like, so Lee's working on it. However, what we're seeing is they make their money on the install markup. So what they do is they print off things really good deal. And they say, okay, you're so and so's going to be an installer. They're not the installer. They mark it up as a subcontractor. So we're finding that a lot of times their prices are not even the same. They're a little bit more. It's more the convenience. So it's on the back burner. But it's not necessarily a priority because we're not seeing them beating prices and they're marking up the installs. So I would definitely look around because I've seen it. We are sometimes traveling to one city over can half the price on this stuff.

And I'm really surprised that the paint with a half wrap is actually costing more. Again, there are some markets I know where painting this truck alone is over three grand, which is insane. We can get it for a third of that. There's some places that are 500 bucks. So it's just so all over the place. And I apologize for that. So you know, when you're looking, it's like, do we do paint? Do we do the full wrap? It's going to depend on, you know, really what's painting look like in terms of your area. I would watch one YouTube video and you might be like, yeah, no problem. This is an easy breezy for someone like me. I'm not super mechanically inclined. I'm Going to mess it up. And it's not worth me being frustrated for three days. But if you can do it in a day, pay a thousand bucks all in, it's two grand. Save yourself three or four grand. Probably a good deal, especially if you do it during the off season.

David. Okay, I don't know who David is. There's a lot of Davids, but we're gonna roll. Hey Mike, I've heard the owner from my location. Okay, so this is an employee. Sounds like. Okay. Hey Mike, I've heard the owner from my location talk about the idea of two different type of people in the business. People who are good at starting businesses and people who are good at managing businesses. My understanding there are two different people who are good at different things. Can you elaborate on these two and what their strengths and weaknesses are and how they should be involved in organizations?

Okay, so what he's probably talking about, David is probably talking about general managers. Because we have starter GMs and we have working GMs. A starter GM usually loves the process of growing the business. Getting sales, doing door knocking, follow up calls like get more estimates, close ratio is high. They like to talk to customers and there's other people that they don't really like to talk to customers much. They don't want to be pounding pavement, doing door hangers, running ads, doing tons of leads. They just want to operate the business. They want to run team meetings, make sure everything's done efficiently, dispatch and schedule the jobs and, and the leads that come in are usually organic. You know, there's people seeing the trucks, not as much advertising, not having to do door hangers. The location is already established. So determining which, which you are, you talk to your owner, see if, if you love the sales side, you'd probably be a good starter. You'd love to get the location from 0 to 500,000 in revenue. That's a, that's a very different role than someone that is going to grow the business from 500,000 to 750,000 over the course next few years as you just optimize pricing and you optimize your route and you're not marketing and you're not pounding pavement and doing door hangers. So different skill sets. Some people like to merge into, from sales into operations. But we've, we found that usually people like one or the other and handing it off to a working GM that is in the business doesn't have to know how to do sales or refute rebuttals or objections is sometimes an easier lift for someone that's out in the field to move into. Hope that clarified a little bit. David also asked. Sorry for a bit of a simple question, but how do I get an audible account set up for my location? Is it something through Augusta or do we just set up ourselves? If it's through Augusta, who should I reach out to? Thank you. Yep. So, um, it is not through corporate, but if you set up an audible account, you can share the login information. So like for us, we just set up one random Gmail account, named it what we want it for around the audible program and then we give that to all of our team. They haven't closed this loop and we have tons of people on our current.

One and we've never had a problem. The only problem you're going to have is sometimes if people listen to the same book, it can jump around the spots of where you're at in the book. But as long as you coordinate that, it's not a big deal. You can click undo when it jumps to a different spot. I want to get our locations. Modesto and Tracy. On P4P, is it possible to do sending a base pay at $18 when most of them are currently in the range of $20, $23 hourly? Are there any strategies and tactics to get the guys to buy into the system? Yeah, so I'd highly recommend it sounds like this David GM down in California. So you can switch them over. If you know your base pay needs to be 18, I would assume then that you're charging like 76 to $80 per hour. If you're charging more, you might actually be able to have a higher base pay. So I would highly Recommend watching the P4P training from initial training. It's on recorded on the academy. You can search it and I talk about the three step process. If you need to actually lower base pay, what that process looks like, that's going to be running the trial, running where they can do either or and then making everyone votes on whether or not you switch to P4P. The timing of when you do that is really important in terms of that test. If you're lowering people's base pay. Also we talk about the 25% rule, which means if you're doing $18 per hour, you need to be charging more than at least $72 per hour to the customer because that's 25% of your hourly rate. Now I assume you're probably like 90 or $100 per hour. So you might actually be able to get away with like a 21 or $22 per hour base pay. Again, your base pay needs to be high enough to be able to attract talent because most people only understand that language. They don't understand pvp, they don't understand bonuses. So you're going to have to speak their language at the hourly rate using the base pay. But then the incentive once they're here and how you retain them is with that performance pay. So watch that segment again. I know, David, you haven't made it out to training yet, so a lot of this will become clear once you are here in person for that training. But highly recommend at that size of business, when you're managing multiple locations, most of your day is just micromanaging team members that are inefficient and you can reduce that and eliminate it by having a system that everyone gets paid more the harder they work. So it's not easy, but I highly recommend it. Mr. Anonymous is the media team going to make EDDM materials that match the door hangers?

Is the media team going to make EDDM materials that match the door hangers? I'm guessing you're talking about winter services. I'm guessing because they just posted on the Facebook group new winter services.

I don't believe they have any for specifically winter services because they don't have instant pricing. So I'm assuming you're talking about can we do a every door direct, like Postcard, for example, pitching winter services but without pricing. I'm guessing that's what you're talking about. If you want to send them an email and request that they can see if they can get that done. It'd just be a matter of them reconfiguring the current one design they've made. But again, it's not going to have pricing. So it might be a little more difficult to sell winter services because customers don't have that pain point. They usually think they need a property cleanup. So if it's presented correctly though, it might be helpful. It's going to be a lot of customization, so it's going to be a little harder to make as, you know, full presentation without a price. Because the whole advantage of the door hanger is like you sell the price of a low cost per service every two weeks is what gets you into winter services. So but submit to them, they'll talk about this and see if there's something they can do.

But I think for the vast majority of us, like Wind Services focuses, converting mowing into that and then we have the ads to be able to actually explain this.

Or the door hangers to use pricing, same thing. So. But feel free you can submit that to the media team and see if they'd like to do that and they'll talk about the debate whether or not this is going to be effective and if they can reconfigure the door hanger in a more generic way for, you know, a postcard, for example.

Matt from Salem, Oregon, how many miles have you flown this year? Are you on track to fly? I have no idea. Too many. I do not enjoy flying and I sympathize for everyone that's much, much larger than I am because I'm small. So it's like really not that bad. But it's bad enough. So for everyone that is, you know, six feet and above larger than I am, broader than I am, I don't know how you can fly. So I'm just thankful I'm small.

Is the unsubscribe link automatically added to bulk text or. No, there is no such thing as unsubscribe link for text. But if they type the word stop it will automatically prevent any text messages from ever coming through to them again. So if you want to look this up, just go to the help articles inside of Copilot and put in text or SMS or stop. I think it's unsubscribe. That's what it is. Unsubscribe from text. There's an article that walks you through this. Basically, if they type the word stop, it says you have been unsubscribed and if you would actually restart, I think it's like type the word start in. And so if they ever go back to that text thread, they would see that they have to click start again and it will prevent any text messages from going through to them. So that article spells all of that out in the help article of Copilot. Hey Mike Corey from Bellingham, I've noticed that on some of your recent YouTube videos the title has been changed shortly after the video is uploaded. Out of curiosity, is the is there driving this? Yeah, we can tell pretty quickly if a video is going to perform well or not. A lot of times we know just based on the topic it'll do good. But within the first hour if it's tanking or like in our, you know, lower 5 or 10% of our videos, then we usually change the title just to help try to improve click through rate.

But yeah, the videos that aren't turnarounds just don't get as many views. Like we're happy if they get over 20 or 30,000 views, whereas, like, a good turnaround video will do over 100,000. And so, so usually, like, the lower view ones, it's just hitting my new audience, my existing audience. It doesn't go out beyond that because it doesn't. It's not entertaining. So we'll play around the titles and thumbnails a little bit more. You'll notice there's actually three versions of a thumbnail, because now inside of YouTube Studio, you can easily test out three thumbnails automatically. And so there's three different thumbnails. And then we can only change the title, though. 1. Like, there's only one title, so you can just change that one time. So we play with it, especially if it's not a great performing video. All right, everyone, have a fantastic Wednesday, and we'll see you tomorrow. Take care.