Mike Minutes Mastermind 11/01/2023

Hello, Definition. Hope you're doing super well. Let's go and get things kicked off. One second. Here.

I am at the airport.

Five hour delay and like a six hour layover. So good times.

All right, let's jump in. Questions, questions, questions. Got eight questions today. All right, we'll jump right into those.

Present.

Garrett from Glendale. Context October KPI. Well, this is a very long question.

Okay, here we go.

Context October kgis39,000 revenue. Four team members including myself, Cole and I missed almost a week. All week this month the conference. $3,000 profit. 4K triple share Christmas light marking manual. 3. $3,500 in snow equipment. What you're trying to tell me it should have been 9 or 10,000 spent $700 on ad spend mostly for Christmas lights. 128 cent 48 estimates accepted. 37% close ratio and 97% labor efficiency. Two weeks booked out and you have $14,000 in cash. We are basic services command center. So I'm doing all the admin tasks that command center doesn't do on basic service and all the essence. I completed about 20 budget hours in September and about the same in October. I feel like this definitely hits profitability. I have seen increase in selling projects and snow removal as that has been my main focus the past two months. We had about 30,000amonth in recurring revenue. That will drastically decrease even with winter services as 6% of that was from fertilization and weed control. Question.

I feel like it would be most profitable lay off two numbers this month and drastically reduce capacity in my head. I really would like to keep everyone on throughout the winter and I would try. I keep trying to convince myself that if I sell enough and advertise enough, I can sell enough snow, Christmas lights and cleanups to make everyone busy all winter long. Ultimately I feel that if actually the new emotion about wanting to lay off team members it would be way more profitable to just call an eye and just start pointing jobs higher and raise prices on snow accounts. We're only two weeks booked out right now and I have started dropping EP dump fees and reducing reg hours. I don't want to get into the cycle of filling schedule as that doesn't lead to any profitability. I'm a little frustrated with myself but we don't have more cash at hand. But we did triple over last year. It was mainly between Q1 where we dug ourselves into a pretty negative hole. Q2 and Q3 profitable. Do you agree with my assessment? The biggest way to profitability is drastically reduce labor capacity and Charge more. Any advice on how to go about laying off team members and setting up them up for success this winter with the best chance to retain them for this coming spring. So the thing is, if you actually look at your numbers in terms of profitability, you're not, you're not doing bad. You're probably around like a 24, 23% profitability. It's just that you spent on assets and marketing, right? Like if you take out $1700 for marketing, $4000 for the truck, $3500 for the truck repair and $1000 for the Christmas light magnitude, like you're literally doing.

More than that, like 12,000. So you're 28, 29% profit margin if these things if you didn't have to buy the truck, you all this marketing etc, this is why gross sucks cash. You're buying more equipment and you're having to spend money on marketing to get more leads, right? So I don't actually think this is a problem of oh, you need get, you know, drastically reduce labor capacity and charge more. I do not believe that. I also know that you're actually doing.

I also know that.

With 97 efficiency rating, your guys could take skinny on the budget hours or projects if you got them. I would also not assume that they all want to work full time throughout the winter. What you could say is like hey guys.

Hours are going to be starting to get caught for under a week. Doubt it's going to be more. 25, 30 hours. If you wanted it 40, just let me know. I will let you.

Have a specific date to come back in February, launch next year and you'll be amazed at how many people will be like 25, three hours. That's totally fine. Especially in the winter, especially when it's really freezing cold. Most people don't mind. I was shocked tonight. I always had the same thing, a lot of pressure myself to get everyone full time hours and thought I had to cut a whole bunch of people in order to give some of them full time hours. And I realized they don't want full time hours during the winter. So I would not make that assumption without talking to them. And I would just make it optional that hey, if you leave and want to get something full time because can't do it here, you have a guaranteed spot to come back. You'll be amazed. One or two of them will leave and then bam. There your cruise now fully.

Tim from Mount Vernon. Why don't we try to get reviews? When I look up businesses on my phone, that is the rating Review show. Just curious.

A whole bunch of reasons why. For example, like I think Yelp actually not be on Google's or on Facebook's or sorry on Apple Maps soon I think Apple will replace with their own system.

Yelp is so skewed in terms of the way they do their advertising and they are honestly in my opinion chopped up by being on Apple Maps. If they are to take, they get taken out from Apple app map, Apple Maps. I think they become extinct within 24 months.

So I wouldn't like make a long term strategy. Also, they are notorious for.

Making you continue to pay to keep certain like reviews off. I'm just not super in support of that business model. I don't think it's long term and I think customers can kind of see through it too. If you go to any business in the service industry, Yelp is always their worst spot for reviews because what they do is they will like really, really hurt the ones and they'll call you like, hey, like got these reviews. And they of course will say that you can't pay to get them taken away, but that you can absolutely pay to make them be hidden.

And I know that because one time we got, we got like five or six batteries that at the Bellamy shop. So I was like, oh, we should like focus on doing that. So we started making customers, got a job done, we asked them for a review on Yelp and we had like 20 hidden reviews on Yelp and every single one of us is a five star review because we had asked customers to give us a review.

So is that right? Maybe. The thing is I just feel like a lot of times the people who leave reviews on Yelp are like, if people leave a whole bunch of other ones, that would be. So I'm not opposed to it though. It just, I wouldn't necessarily want, I don't want it to be ranking high because I don't have any control over it. And that's why the Bellingham shop we cut ties with it is because I didn't want those other reviews being shown. So we just made sure we didn't push any of our customers their direction. After getting like 20 or 35 star reviews that were taken down, I was like to get this.

Glendale context. Oh wait, you already submitted this one.

Nick from Raisel in Copilot. I hope the feature would be a live tracker of lifetime value on a client profile that updates after every service and something next to it telling you how long they have been with you. It would help in making decisions whether or not to Link some clients or script with others based on their lifetime value to that point.

I agree. That'd be fun.

I don't mean it's a good idea. It's good. We're not doing that now. But I. I agree. 100 I think that you are the Franchise Advisory Council. Next year when we start opening things up you will have some sway. We have a pretty nailed down roadmap. I just gotta stick to it. But little things like that. Like we got the one the other day that we're gonna get done.

In the front of the home. The reason that one's a little tougher now too, FYI is there's several reasons.

Because that's not technically lifetime value. That is like to date value. But lifetime value is technically you take the percentage of attrition, multiply it by the average annual value and then you get your lifetime value. So the problem with that is it doesn't become useful for probably a few years. And so with Copilot being so new and none of our users being more than a year old, what that means if I make that feature tomorrow, we spend a couple months building it. Not a single user will have any benefit from that for at least 12 to 24 months. So I'm not saying it's a bad idea. I like it. I think it's good. But what we can do is build that in a year and a half and as soon as we launch it it's immediately valuable to everyone inside the software. So sorry I was a little abrupt there. Didn't mean to. Just giving clarity as to what went through my head. Connor from Evansville, you're going to copilot. What do you assume the attrition now that most are going to require a card on file or update cards Possibly poking the bear on people who were hesitant.

Okay, let me keep going. It's hard enough getting people to update credit cards, let alone us to charge their car on some of their of the grandfathered people. Just wondering what this will look like if we have to. Even if we have to even that much more on the offensive coming to spring to potentially gain another 20 or 30% during this transition. I think you're talking about like.

Your senior traditional now.

Okay so first off, we aren't requiring anything. You can turn this off at the company level or the individual customer level. So you can turn this off if you want to grandfather people in. Like you said, you can. You can turn off credit card requirements, you can make a global setting, but then you can go into the individual customer and Change it if you really wanted to. So just to be clear.

I do think if it's pitched correctly and now with a much more simple client portal.

Easier for them to enroll in auto pay. And.

In a few weeks we're launching another update to the auto pay and it's going to make it even easier. And they don't, they will not have to log right now. They don't even have to create a login to put an auto pay now. So no login required. Also.

We're gonna be making it where if they take a credit card off a file that it doesn't allow that they have to either put another terminal file or add a bank card. So it prevents a lot of things that have been issues in the past. Like still to this day there are probably dozens at least I would imagine 40 to 50 calls a day in the command center are just people just confused. They can't pay their bill, they can't get, they can't log in, they forgot to credit their password, they forgot their password questions, things like that.

So I think just by making that whole process simpler, they don't have to require, they don't have to log in. It's really simple to turn on autopay. I think you get more people in, but don't rush it. Don't. If you have people grandfathered in, make it a requirement. In the middle of spring rush when you're drowning in work faster than you do it so you don't feel the pain if a couple of them leave. If you do it now, you'll feel the pain like no one should be making a bunch of changes now. If you're scrounging for work, don't make a bunch of changes because you will be way more reactive to the two customers that freak out. Do it in the little spring rush when you're drowning in work. And you could care less if you lost two customers if you've got 20 others that you can't get back to.

How are estimate videos being handled in Copilot? I have not found a video instructional or functionality for the software yet and wasn't sure if this is a pending feature. Appreciate that.

So you can attach videos to an email. So that's what Cam center will do. Or if you're sending out your own estimates, you can attach an email, a video to a an email, but you can't right now touch a video to a job. It's still just pictures. The reason for that is because we do not have the one thing that I really liked about Zooper was their ability to take a video and compress it and attach it to a visit. We are going to try to do that same thing in Copilot and I think we have it done by next spring rush. So right now we'd still just use WhatsApp and do our. You know what, we've always done the service autopilot, but.

In the future it will have the ability to compress the video and attach it to a visit and to a customer's profile as well. So I'm just trying to think.

Just seeing. One second. I'm seeing if you can, if we can attach a video to customer's profile already. I don't think we can. But. But I'm just checking one second. Open my account.

All right. Make sure.

Okay. Yeah, no, we don't have video yet. So no videos yet like I was saying. But down the road we'll be able to attach the videos to the customer profile as well as visits. But the compression tool being baked in is the hard part. And so we have not got there yet. But our goal is to have it done before next day.

We have a client who last year, as soon as it hit June, she would switch to bi weekly and this year she did not. She just emailed, very upset that she has been weekly all season, even though she was under the assumption we're supposed to automatically switch back to biweekly based on her preference from the prior year. Yes, should have. Yes, she should have been looking at bill and a certain level of responsibility following her. My question is, should we be saving these customers preferences year after year to avoid them dropping? Will this be easier doing Bill tie? I feel like we should do. I feel like we should do. I feel like we should. But I would like to hear your thoughts on this and how your panel with longtime clients at Bellhead. People want to set it and forget it. And if they are in their eyes being punished for that, it sort of repeats our selling proposition of being easy, hands off service. Yep. So we have it on our list because like right now you can off season. So it's really easy and copy that. But what it doesn't allow very easily is to change frequency middle of season. So we do have this on the feature roadmap and that is to be able to, when you set up a recurring service, do like weekly for a certain amount of time and then to buy weekly during another period of time inside of one recurring visit.

It's more complicated than it sounds, but that's what we are trying to do. It will Be easier than having to do what most, most of us have during the past. You set up a weekly service, then you cancel it when you start a bi weekly fee or you have to change it from weekly to biweekly. So in the past it has been harder to this yes, we will make it where it is simpler. I would not count on that being done by spring rush. It might be, but I wouldn't count on it. What I would say to this specific customer is hey, we always want to be an on call service. We don't have contracts and you can call a cancel or change your service, date your schedule whenever you want. Now, do you want us in the future to always have these certain months as bi weekly? Because we require March, April, May to be weekly. If you want we can just make it where in your profile we were going to say from June, July, August, September, whatever is bi weekly. Would you like that? That's probably a way to get around this current situation. And then in the future you would have to either a set this up as weekly and then bi weekly two different services or have it where you change it at a certain time. You have a reminder for example like on June 1st that this person, you change their their service from weekly to bi weekly. You could do that. But we are, we do have it in the roadmap to have it where on one recurring service you can change this. And I would not advertise that. I don't want that to ever be the case. I would rather it be where they have the flexibility to change it because this is what's going to happen. You get a season. I know there's specific seasons in our market. We go into June, it's really wet and if you skipped a week it would be so tall. Middle of June, it'd be insane. So then they'll get this response. Why would you not come when weekly it still needs it when you told us like last year so that that would be also the response you give it to the case. Sometimes in June it needs it like it is raining, sometimes it doesn't. Like we want to make it more customized to you. However, in the future we can adjust it and we'll make sure it's in your profile. ET.

All right. Would be possible to see train to sell people on winter services when they want to stop service. You know, this would be a great way to keep customers over the winter. Yes. When someone calls in to stop mowing. We do pitch winter services when someone's calling in to cancel to cancel mowing. Typically they're not in the mood to be talked about services like they've made up in their mind they're not getting any more services because the person that is canceling early in the year typically is not the same person that wants winter services. The person that goes like, goes all the way to the end of your mowing season is typically the type of person that wants to always looking good. They still want the leaves being chewed up during the last month of mine season. And those are typically your highest value clients. Now, are there some people that when we do try to talk to them about services, they do convert over? Yes, but very, very, very small. Because they're calling in, they want to quick call this, cancel their services. And we start explaining with the services telling them, hey, it's bi weekly, it's the same price, saves you money, makes everything look great, save you from having to do a spring cleanup. They don't care. They're the same person. They're just trying to skimp on that last few weeks of cuts. Not the person that is also wanting to make sure their property looks dialed in the entire winter, typically. So they do do that. I hear them doing all the time this time of year, explaining winter services, talking about the advantages of it for the customer. But most of the time the customers that go all the way to the end of the season and then you stop are the same ones that want to be doing winter services and they are the ones that are happy to keep going. Typically.

I'm sure Luke could get probably better ratios on like, you know what those averages are of how many people accept. But based on what I hear just auditorily through Transcender, there's. There's not as many as you might think that are willing to cancel a month before you stop moving season and also.

Continue keeping their property looking good all year round.

I had a couple updates, but I'm not gonna do them because.

Yeah, let me do these, these announcements tomorrow or the next day whenever I get on here next because I forgot to do in the beginning, I typically do them. So I'll do the announcements tomorrow and appreciate all of you guys. Take care.