Mike Minutes Mastermind 11/02/2022

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Wednesday Mastermind. I'm super excited for today because I have this new fandangle gadget that's gonna make these masterminds better. And that is a secondary screen. Check this out. Now I get to see my questions. And what's really cool is it doesn't need any power. I just plug it in USB C directly into my laptop. Which means I can now. Whoa. It just spun around on me. Oh, I changed something up. Oh, mercy. Of course. Come on. Yep. Messing it up already. Okay, here we go. Okay, jump into some questions. A couple things don't really have written down, but I wanted to say this right now. If you are slowing down and remember like I can't overemphasize just how important it is to realize and have a number in your mind of what your capacity is. Especially if you only have a one to three trucks, know what your capacity in terms of revenue per month is. Shoot towards that number at all costs. If you start to go below that number, that's when you start cutting out cutting out dump fees. That's when you start cutting out.

EVs. That's when you start reducing budget hours and just like filling schedule. If you are not finding work and your butt and your your close ratio is under 70%. That's a big, big red flag because it means that you are simply giving up. Because for every incremental hour of budget hour above what you need to just cover your expenses is like way more profitable than the first few hours of your work week. Right? For most of us you need let's just use numbers 40 budget hours just to pay the bills. That means that the first few hours you actually in no profit like you're just trying to cut cover your bills up into 40. It's after 40 that even if you reduce the price of from 40 to 50 budget hours, even if you reduce the price, it's significantly. Wait a second. Did I do something wrong?

Oh mercy. No, don't do that.

It's significantly more profitable those hours beyond that so you have way more margin to reduce price. So if you need to cut cut your budget hours and estimates and cut prices for above that what I need to cover my fixed expenses and my capacity that num. That work in between that number. Those two numbers is where all of your profit is, right? So you have the ability, when you're just trying to put work on the schedule and keep your guys busy, you have the ability to be able to reduce price during in this window. If you reduce price over here in these first 40 hours, you're going to start losing money, right? But if you can at least fill that up, great. But anything beyond between that number, let's say 40, let's say I have two or three trucks, I can do 80 or 90 budget hours. Everything between that is the profit of the business. And during times when you slow down is the point which you can reduce price and still be okay in that budget hour window. So if you're trying to, if you're struggling for work right now and your close ratio is 20, 30, 40%, I'm sorry, you need to be following up the day after. You need to be taking a look at your estimate comments and making sure they're very refined. You make sure that you're getting two estimates within 24 hours and then the estimates are being sent to Command center within 15 minutes of you leaving that property. So that way within a couple hours they're getting it. If you're doing it late in the evening, it gets there in their inbox the next morning, you're following up with them within 24 hours. Like it needs to. Everything needs to get compressed, Everything needs it sharper. Everything needs to get more disciplined. When leads are coming in like a fire hose in the spring rush, we all can afford to be sloppy with showing up to estimates, getting estimates sent out in time, following up with estimates, it's like always let the automations do their thing because I have a bazillion more leads coming in tomorrow. When lead flow goes down, that is the time to sharpen up every single aspect of the sales process to increase, increase close ratio. Don't just think you need more leads. Everyone's default, like all leads are down. Leads are down. Like no, no, no. If you have, if you had 50 leads, let's just say during the spring rush now maybe that's 10 leads that you're going to get per week. Okay? But back in the spring you got sloppy and you were only closing 30 to 40%. Now what you need to do is you need to get sharpen everything up and get 70 to 80% close ratio by making sure you get the estimates right away, making sure that you follow up with them. The estimator does over the phone within 24 hours, you get the notes into command center right away after the estimate. Not like, oh I'll get tomorrow or get tonight, get them right away. You can never hurt your close ratio by getting an estimate to a customer faster. All right? And if you're literally a matter of like I have no work on the schedule tomorrow. It is a matter of every single job you are on today. You need to be looking at and giving an estimate to the customer you need knocking on their door saying, is there anything we can do? Like, like every single customer that you know, knock on the door, okay, Mr. Jones, we got some time this coming Friday. I can go ahead and put you on the schedule for a leaf cleanup. If you'd like that. I can send it over to an estimate to you within a couple hours and we can get schedule for you. Like, that should be every single mowing customer. It should be every single job if you don't have work on the schedule. All right, so the scent, the scarce, the sense of urgency, and the sense of discipline on one's ability to push yourself on the sales process over the next four months is the determining factor of whether or not you can break even, make a 10 to 15 profit margin, or you lose 30 to 40%. That is like literally the three things I see more most owners do. And I get it. Your first year, if you're brand new, I give you a little bit of leeway during your winter, right? If you're, this is your very first year, you start at zero this past spring, your first winter's tough because you don't have that established base that you can tap into of hundreds of customers in your database. I'll give you a little bit of slack. But after that, it is simply a matter of now that work comes down and leads come down. I now need to take every single lead as my, like, my life depends on closing this job. I don't care about the price. I need to get this job closed, period, end of story. Do I need to go back to their property after a follow up call? Like, oh, well, I called them back next day and went to voicemail. Okay, great. Show up to their property. Show their property. Say, hey, Mr. Judge, I printed off and just wanted to go over it with you. Like, there's just the level of urgency for an operator is the determining factor of whether or not you are 10 to 15% profitable. Because that's, that's good during the winter. Give me 10% profitable throughout the next four months. That's actually really good. Okay. Or break even, which typically happens. That's very common. Or if you literally lose 34%, like negative 34% revenue or profitability during the next four months, this is the determining factor. Your, your level and sense of urgency around selling every single job and then taking every single project that you're on and trying to upsell them every single mowing customer and knocking on their door. Mr. Jones, I noticed you need some the leaves cleaned up, the bushes are overgrown. Why don't I go ahead and get you an estimate here within a couple hours and we'll get down the schedule. You then literally type up the estimate, gets it back to command center, they send it out and then you're picking up the phone. Hey, Mr. Jones, got it sent over to you. Let's go over that have if you have any questions, next time we come to do lawn, we'll knock that out. Even if it's a two, three hour little cleanup. If it's an eight, ten hour cleanup, let's get it on this week. Let's block a whole day off, right? So I just consistently see the sense of urgency for the job and the willingness to be able to be disciplined around the sales system is the determining factor of who books jobs during the winter and who is able to make it a profitable winter versus literally losing your shirt. Right? Because what happens is if you start going below that 40, in this case, this example, start going below that 40 budget hours, everything over here just loss, right?

Our close ratio has gone down dramatically to around 15 to 20%. Even after lowering hourly rate, we removed EVs, cut fees down to cost. We still have room to lower hourly rates about $5 an hour, but are holding on that until absolutely needed. We also have materials that we have not lowered either. Thoughts on next steps?

Who is this? Sorry, give me a second.

So I got to refresh. Sorry. This has, this is meaning in context. Who this is. Okay, Thomas. Great, cool. So what I would push you on, Thomas, is think back to this past spring, early spring, when the start was happening too is this. Nothing was closing. That mentality of what we did that those first those weeks, which is like, okay, great, you're going to take every single job and you're close it. I don't care if you show up at the customer's property again. I don't care if you call them. Like until a customer gives you an answer of yes or no. You have the full right to harass them if needs to be to get an answer. They had you come out to their property, do all this work to get them an estimate proposal. They just. You deserve a yes or no. All right? And it literally I've gotten to the point where I've tried to sell people. It's like, look, I'm not even. I'm not trying to sell you. I just need a yes or no. I just want A decision. Right? And this is what I push for. Even at the gym, when we come to people's like working out. It's like I told my trainers, if I'm gonna pay for, for people like ads to get them in this door, I want an answer. And I don't care if they say no. But any like un. Like no response leads is. Is not an option. Is not an option for, for estimates to be inside of your estimate list. And they're just, they're just pending for months because you just didn't hear back from them, is, is ludicrous. You, your goal should be within seven to 14 days. Every single estimate has a decision, either a yes or no. And you're okay with no. And you can tell customers that be like, look, I'm okay if you don't want this. I just need to know and I'd like to know why, right? You had. I came out to your property. We talked about everything. Why. Why can we not go forward? Right? They have a need. Why they get the decision from them. Don't allow estimates to stay pending. It's crazy. You, you spent time going to their property command center, spent time getting on them on the phone or doing mapping. You've invested at least 5 to $25. Well, actually, if you spent like an hour on the property and drive time and all the rest of it, let's just say it, every lead, you're spending at least 10 bucks. Even if it's a call over the phone, let's say five, ten bucks, all the way up to 100 plus of your time. Why would you not make sure that every single estimate has a decision of yes or no? And that means calling the next day. That means calling them again. That means showing up at their property. The printed off estimate, the ability to get your. Your estimates. Like I thought if I was restarting and I look forward to next fall when hopefully I have the time to actually start one from scratch. What you will see me do is I will not allow estimates get to seven days pending will not happen. If an estimate has gone past seven days, the likelihood of an accepting is almost zero. So I will harass them from days three to seven. And days one, if I don't have any work on the schedule, I will be calling them. And day two, if I, if I still need work on the schedule, I will be going to their house, printing off the estimate and talking to them in person. You've got to get a decision. All right, so this, this right here, you've done everything in terms of price. This is just further indicates that price is not the determining factor in most of our customers buying decision. What the reason that they are not accepting this is because there's no sense of urgency or scarcity due to the fact that their grass is not growing, the bush is not growing anymore and the leaves are the only thing that look bad in their yard. Okay, there's no sense of urgency. The 15 to 20% that are getting accepted are the ones that want likely want their leaves cleaned up, but they're not worried about their bushes growing, the Lawn isn't overgrown, etc. You've got to create the urgency and get a decision by not allowing estimates to be pending inside of your, inside of your estimate list.

Do I need to get separate insurance for cleaning out gutters? I don't want to call my insurance company and then cause a red flag. Also, do you have an opinion on how to clean gutters? Lately we've been getting a lot of requests for gutter cleaning. And after we've been doing it by going under the roof and blowing it out and pouring a few gallons of water on the spout. I'm a bit nervous about this method. I don't want to damage the gutter. Yeah. So blowing them out. Just be careful. Like you said, you could literally one screw that's hanging up like an old gutter falls out, all of a sudden you have to repair the entire thing and like replace it. Be careful about that. Two, you do need to talk about with your insurance agent. You don't have to say I'm thinking about doing the service. Just say if I was to add gutters, what would that, how would that change my premium? And then just say based upon that, I'm going to make a decision as to whether or not I add the service. And that's easy. Most of the time they're actually going to say it's not going to. They don't have a direct impact. It's. They're going to say it's like how far in the sky are you going to get either Are you going to 20ft, are you 10ft, et cetera. So for example, like our insurance we were allowed to go up to, I think it's 15ft our bodies. And so that means we can do first level gutters, like first story gutters. We will not go in the second story or beyond. And so that's typically I would recommend just because usually your insurance is negligibly higher. But again, talk to your insurance agent. It's not worth trying to do it. You getting hurt or your employees worse off getting hurt. And then there's no insurance and gets very, very ugly, very, very fast. But typically the insurance premium gets very high as you go higher off the ground because if someone falls, it's way bigger of a deal. So for us it wasn't much of a jump to get the first story, which is like 10ft typically. So the max you go is seven days before just market loss. I would not just market loss. That's the whole point here, right? Like I want a decision, right? Like if I'm busy, like during spring rush, I always mark things as lost. Say after 14 days. That would be my recommendation. Unless the customer specifically says I need to wait. But like before I market lost, I am going to harass them.

And I use the word harass very, very loosely. But I'm just saying like you, you have the right to call, show up with their property, all of the, all of the above.

But the fact like the worst feeling in the world to me would be marking estimate that's lost. Mark marketing estimate is lost when I have not heard back from them. That is like you are wasting money. Just straight up wasting, wasting money. So that's when it's like if you're, if you're not crazy busy like spring rush and estimates are not just falling in your lap and you're overwhelmed, you should be calling the day after as the estimator. In addition to what command center does, in addition to the automations and the email and the text messages, all of that separate, you should be calling the next day. If you don't get an answer, I would literally show up the next day with a pretty estimate, go back their property and go over it with them in person. How do you charge for gutters? We just do it by budget hours. Again, most of our clients have winter services and that's when they get their gutters clean out during the winter. But if someone like has a big tree during fall, lots of leaves in the gutter, that's when we would actually do an actual charge for it. And we don't get on the ladder and look at their gutters. So we typically go pretty high on budgeted hours. We just assume they're all filled up and then we do budget hours based on that. Okay, we're going to try this new fandangle machine here. I get to look at my questions over here and I get to see my live stream. So I can see questions that come in here. It's fantastic. Look at that. And I can see what you guys see? Oh, wrong one.

Look at that. It's a beautiful thing. It's a beautiful thing. Okay, Max, question regarding online marketing. When you visit certain websites, ads for the website will continue to appear in your Internet browser in the following days and weeks. Google Ads do this automatically with people interested in our services or do we have to set it up in the ad? Yeah, so.

Yes. So when you do a Performance max.

Ad, or if you do a Facebook ad or whatever, what you're looking for is they're going to go after certain keywords and certain sites that people go to that contain that keyword. Right. This is what indexing is. So when a site gets indexed, it's basically Google scrub it. And basically, okay, what are the keywords and the themes of this website? So if people come here, come to the site, we then know what ads to show them when they come back to search or they go to YouTube, et cetera. So, yes, this is happening. And that's why you visit a one website that is selling bikes and all of a sudden you are getting YouTube ads, Facebook ads, and all of the above for bikes. That's what's happening. So what's nice about Performance Max is you're able to put the videos, the pictures and the search all in one spot. So that way it is regardless of where they go after. Look at that. That they're going to get hit.

How will the transition from service autopilot to zooper work? Will all the information be transferred from one system to another? Who will do it? Or do we have to manually input it all from scratch again? And what type of training will be available? I want to use the system that is best for us in the long term run. But we really struggled learning to use the system. We are not computer people at all. Every single time we have one minor problem. It literally takes us an hour of watching the video for a few seconds at a time, switching back and forth step by step to learn something simple. And now that I have service file under control, I'm having nightmares about going through all of this over again. What is really the best for us? Smaller locations. I would say if you are on service autopilot and you are smaller.

I would probably switch to zooper asterisks. If you feel now comfortable in service autopilot, I would not change. The whole goal here is that everyone switches software one time. And my commitment is that within the next 12 to 36 months, we will have something that I own a good stake in that we have control over. So personally, like Someone asked me this yesterday. Are you going to switch bill shop over? I'm not. We're going to stay on service autopilot.

That being said, we will onboard large locations into Zooper after January because they're the features will be done. And even after what we did yesterday, I hope it puts fire underneath them to get these features done sooner. They will get them done. It's just I don't have the confidence that we can test it. I would, I want our locate my locations to actually go through them first, figure out the kinks. And I just wasn't confident that's going to happen by January. But in terms of you, Joe, specifically, if you're comfortable with Surface Autopilot and it was a big learning curve, zooper is about 20% as hard. It's way easier to learn. Okay. But if you have already learned service offline, you're now comfortable on it, I would stick with that. Okay. I would not switch over for the sake of you now figuring out the current system. Because otherwise I felt like for you, Joe, for example, is like it took you so long to learn it and all of your time mental energy is focused on learning a software when it needs to be growing the business, it needs to be sales, et cetera. And so if you figured out service offline, you're now comfortable with it, stick with it. If you're still floundering, you feel like half your day you're just trying to figure out the software. Probably good idea to move over to Zooper. In terms of training, we have all the training on super in January. We will create training around specifically the transition from service all about to Zooper if people want to do it. Okay. So I would probably recommend that everyone, before making a final decision on this is come to conference, hear the CEO of Zebra talk and then have that separate room. Or if you wanted to do your switch over, you could literally do it with Command center behind you on over your shoulder. And we have a process for that. In terms of what information comes across from Surface Autopilot, basically everything besides your job history and credit card information and job notes. Right. So office notes come across, client data and information, stuff like that comes across, but not the job history or the job notes or the credit card information. So I would only switch over if you are having massive issues with service off. Hut still Joe, because you don't want to be wasting that much time on learning a software. There will be a learning curve on Zooper, but it is a third of the learning curve of service autopilot.

Yesterday's mastermind, you spoke about acquiring a stake in a software company so Augusta can steer the ship when it comes to CRM development. How do you balance this with a lesson learned in Jim's mowing where they have over invested in technology. What is the middle path that you envision? The reason Jim's mowing? They haven't over invested in the software. The fact is that they have a closed off system. It's only their franchisees that use it and so they don't have the money required to actually make it a great piece of software. That's why it's at least 10 to 15 years behind.

And so what I would be doing is buying existing software that's already to the public. So that way the cash flow of that would allow us to still stay on the cutting edge. But the ability to control where that software is going is what I'm looking for. That is that's what we need. And so.

All I can say for now is I'm in conversations with a lot of software developers. A lot of these different companies I've done demos now on, probably about 15 of them.

Have a pretty good understanding of why they aren't innovating. There's not a single one to my knowledge that is founder led that's really innovating. They're all owned by private equity, they're all a numbers machine and the numbers are great. So I would really love to be able to control one. It's just going to cost a lot. The franchise won't be able to afford it. So I will likely buy it myself or buy into it so that we can control it from Augusta nations perspective.

And do the integration like, like I said yesterday about with, with the phone, the live dashboard for the employees to see how much money they're making. There's just so much I want to do. Like there should be like a very good close ratio dashboard. There should be all the things I just talked about. I would love to have a. How long does it take to close estimates? That should be a key performance indicator that we always are looking at. And I just don't have the control inside these CRMs to be able to tell them like look, we have all this data like we're just starting to do with P4P and we only get clock in and clock out times. If I had everyone's invoicing and services I would be able to tell you like hey, these are the services you should cut. These are your most profitable services. These are the ones that cost you the most in your P and L, these are the ones that cost you most in your balance sheet based upon your debt. Like you can do all of that with the massive amount of information inside of CRM. And no one's doing it.

But I'm not going to start trying to invest on our end software to plug into say something like Zoopar Service Autopilot when that can be rug pulled from me. And that's what Jonathan warned me of.

The other day. So in terms of, you know, the Jim's mowing thing is what, in my opinion they got 10 years behind because they just use their franchisees. You're only limited to, you know, they probably make, they probably spend a million or $2 million a year on development when it needs to be 4 or 5 million to stay up with what has been a 10 year lapse now in technology for them. So yeah, we would just never be able to afford to go internal. And that's why I don't believe in creating internal only system because you just don't have the funds to stay up with development.

You just don't. You're not going to like unless you're just going to take the piece of software and just fix bugs and maintain. But if you're actually going to innovate on it, you need cash flow.

Hey Mike, what would be the benefits of switching from Service autopilot to Zooper? Our location size is three employees in the winter and going to grow to seven again in the spring. We are on basic service and, and don't have any obvious issues with the essay except for maybe pricing. I would stick with Service autopilot then. Especially if you're going to seven employees. Take a look at what Zooper looks like in January and February once the dispatch board is fixed and maybe you consider switching. I would not Recommend it at 7employees if you're growing, you know, Alex, you go, I think you're around 40, 50 this, this year per month in revenue. If you go to seven, you're going to be up 80 plus thousand a month in revenue. As it stands now, Zoo doesn't handle that and that's why we're kind of allowing people to stay in service. I think it will though, I know it will in January and February. It's just a matter of I would not make that switch right now and I'm going to have a good, a better picture of what a timeline looks like when I could potentially have a control of something. And then we'd have a. You just have one switch, right? And then because I Have control. There's just so much. We can make the transition easier. We can just do so much more. And that's the goal. So I would personally, if I was you in your case, Alex, I would not worry about switching. I know the pricing is dumb as a result. I know that. And news alert. It's going to get worse.

So next year it's going to get worse towards the end of the year. So we will. My goal is that if, if they double prices or whatever, they are going to do that. There's an option that command center already knows. We already have training for it and it's. We already have the integral, the ability to move you over if you want it to. Right? But like right now, like next month or next spring, at seven employees, you're probably going to be paying.

Probably 500, at least $600 per month on service autopilot. It's probably 30%, 40% cheaper on Zooper. So you know, it's a consideration. But at $200 savings a month or $300 a month savings, I don't think it's worth it. At $80,000 a month in revenue to make the change.

I have an employee that would take the liberty into his own hands of moving the schedule around Mercy. Say I had the route already made in orders 1 to 10. He may flip flop 7 and 9 or skip 5 and save for tomorrow or skip the last day yard of the day to be done by 3:30 and home by 4. I've explained how it hurts p repeat and our efficiency. How to express without sounding like a dictator. It's a benevolent dictatorship. You have to tell them what to do.

Okay, I just keep reading. How to express without sound like a dictator that they do not have the ability to adjust the routing without expressing it to us that something may need to be changed due to construction or hill on a heavy dew morning, not the best time, etc. Also, do you think it would be better to have a cut off at the end of the day and everyone make Friday's lights, Friday's light and if they get done early, they do and if they don't, they don't. Sort of giving the illusion to high performers of a four day work week without making a four day work week the norm.

Okay, a lot to unpack. Number one, if someone switches things around in their their route without telling you, that's grounds for getting fired. If they stop, if they don't stop doing that. Now if there's actual reasons like construction, other things like a hill on a heavy Dew morning, et cetera, that's one thing.

But they're just randomly moving things, are not getting jobs done at the end of the day because they just want to be off without notifying you. If that continues, we would be firing them. Ultimately what it comes down to is you having the backup to be able to fulfill that position if you have to pull that card. And again, no standard is a standard until you fire someone over it. Otherwise it's just a suggestion. So if you don't want people to do this, you will. You will have to fire over it to make it the standard. Otherwise you're just suggesting that they get these certain jobs done. You're suggesting that they get those. The bottom line is they're not probably going to understand the PPP and the efficiency side of like leaving the last job on their route. Cause they want to get off, you know, a little bit earlier when they, what they don't realize is tomorrow, now they're going to spend 45 minutes round trip driving out to the one job left on that route. They're not going to necessarily understand that. That's why it's like here's your route. You follow this route. Unless you specifically get permission to do otherwise and not. And failing to do that.

Is grounds in our books to let someone go because. Oh, here, sorry, I didn't read your whole question. Just a couple of thoughts with this. So I'm open to pointers on making this better, going next year with a larger crew. Also, this employee was let go for many reasons, but this being a driving pisser offer. Driving pisser. Oh, I see. Okay. So you let this employee go. Yeah. So when, if you let someone go over this, you need to make it very clear to your team. So they do know that is the standard and it can't happen because it's like impossible to be a scheduler. Scheduler and dispatcher. If that's happening, it's like impossible to efficiently do that because then you're waiting for every single crew member to get back before you can route tomorrow's jobs. You need to be able to, when they have two or three jobs left for the day, still be able to run tomorrow's routes because you know they're gonna get them done. So.

By the way, this part.

Don'T feel bad about that. That's usually the most efficient businesses until you're past 10 employees. Once you get past 10 employees, then you're gonna change the way you're gonna lead because now you're, you have mid level managers and you have other people that you as a leader trying to be accountable for. But until that time, you are this a dictator, Right? Because when we look at the stages of growth, if you're in stages two, three, and even sometimes in four, you are the octopus with all the tentacles and everyone's like, oh, it's so bad. No, that's just what the business needs in order to be profitable at that stage. Because you can't afford mid level management, you can't afford people to take things off your plate. And so you need to be the octopus that is handling everyone, everyone that is somehow attached back to you. And so the only way to make that an efficient model is for the octopus to be able to dictate what happens with every single tentacle and some random tentacles, like doing its random own thing. Guess what you do? You cut it off. Otherwise the business just becomes extremely unprofitable.

Facts don't care about your feelings. Okay, how did you become use this from John. Yeah. How do you become so good with budgeting money? I hate budgeting, by the way. I feel like that's my only flaw, not being able to budget my money. I have read books, I've listened to podcasts, and also watched a few YouTube videos. Nothing seems like it's clicking. I feel like if I don't get things right, then I'm just setting myself for disaster. As soon as I get money, I just spend it. I think SMH stands for smack my head, right? Hey, Stephen. Smh that stand for smack my head.

Shake my head. Okay. All right, great. See, I'm not up to date on these things. Lately I've been really hard on myself about getting this together. What are your thoughts? Okay, so I hate budgeting money, by the way. Well, I would try to if budgeting doesn't work for you, because it works for some people really, really well. The envelope system being really disciplined or sort of being really maniacal about where they spend their money, having envelopes or categories, budgets for every category of spending. That drives me nuts. It hurts my head. Just if that's the case for you too, I would try replacing budgeting with just discipline. And discipline is something that is a little bit harder to force yourself into. But if you have it, it's it. You don't have to always be like, how much money do. Like, there is no permission required from your budget to make a purchase. It's just a matter of, do I need this purchase? Will this purchase make me more money in the future? If it doesn't, it needs to be Questioned. That's the synthesis of every single decision. Like, okay, if I am spending $70 on this lunch, right? Is this $70 and making more money? No. Okay, great. Is the joy I get out of the $70 spending on this lunch greater than the $70 being spent in my business that'll lead it to growing? That's the question. Like, every single decision comes, comes through and then it's like, okay, well, do I need to get the nicer car? Do I need to get the nicer truck? Do I need to get another piece of equipment? Does this make me more money? And being ultra disciplined about it.

Like, I would still consider myself somewhat frugal. I've let myself go on like eating out, for example, and having two residences. And now I got a nicer car. But besides that, like, there's no spending. Even last night I bought a new pair of pants and it hurt my soul. $27 for a pair of pants. What is this world coming to? Like.

Every single. When I'm making the purchase, it's hurting my soul because it's just a matter of like this $27. If I can invest this into my business in five years, I believe it's probably worth 300, right? So when you start thinking all the time, what's the present value of money versus the future value of money? That becomes a big deal. If you really believe that you can spend a thousand dollars in your business on marketing and turn it into, let's just call it 50 grand of new revenue. And on that 50 grand, you are 20% profitable. So that's 10 grand. That's a 10x multiple. A thousand dollars spent, $50,000 revenue, $10,000 in profit. You start to really start. Question, okay, could I somehow save a thousand dollars a month on my rent? Could I not get the nice tires and put that thousand dollars towards marketing? Okay, like, that's the synthesis. Constant discipline will usually be out a budget because otherwise you're constantly asking for permission from the budget. And so who's to say that, okay, I have in my eating out budget 400amonth, I'm only at 200 and it's the last month of last day of the month, I can splurge. Okay, how does that make any sense? Just because you came up with an arbitrary number for budgeting, but for some people, that number that those numbers do work. Well, it's just like frameworks in their head, right? I hate it. I don't like spending time on it. My time spent on the budget is like wipes out any Efficiencies gained. Right. So now I have my personal expenses down to about $2,700 a month. If I can make $2,700 a month, we're good. Everything beyond that I know I can just throw into the businesses. And if I can get below 2700, let's go. It just means I have to cut out some things that I do enjoy, which is eating out. Currently I love eating out at least twice a week. Okay. Plano USPS Direct. I think you mean every door. Direct mail. Could. Can it be considered long term marketing plan? It can be in some markets where it's working really well. You could make it your long term strategy. Typically it's a higher cost and it's very hit and miss based upon the weather literally of the day and the timing. It's. It's harder versus Google. You only pay if someone's looking for it. Right. So it's usually a little more stable of an outcome on Google. And you can track cost per click, you can track cost per lead, et cetera. A little easier than direct mail. So typically I see people use it in the beginning in very targeted neighborhoods and then they move away from it, excuse me, as they have more money in less time to do the whole like packaging, sending it to the post office, all the rest of it. And sometimes you'll get duds. You'll send the entire thing. I'll get like no calls because it rained the day that they all delivered and no one was looking at their mail and they threw it all. Whatever. The next week could be perfect for it because the sun came out, it's the middle of spring rush and everyone's thinking about their grass. Right. So it's just a balance there. I wouldn't say it's a bad marketing play though because it's the most targeting, most targeted form of marketing because you can go down to the neighborhood and next door. Used to be really good at that and now no longer is.

Yeah, I'm gonna work on it. But it won't be easy. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it, Jonathan. So you know, you're not alone when it comes to budgeting. It's why, you know, the vast majority of people live paycheck to paycheck. That's the vast majority. Why people go into credit card debt is because it's not easy. But it's like anything, once you create habits around it will very much help you. For example, you might, instead of doing budgeting, you might just do categorizing. For me that helped way back when because I was going to school and I knew I made X amount on mowing lawns on the weekends. I knew I had to spend X amount throughout the week on gas and things. So what I would do is I just. I use this app called Tiny Scan. So this is how I do it. And I still do this to this day. This Tiny Scan, it's a little app here, my phone, I have all my businesses up top in folders. And based upon the type of credit card you can scan it. I scan a whole bunch for, like, bank documents, IRS documents, etc. What's cool is, let's say, for example, I'm making a purchase for, on the American Express for the franchise. I'd go into here, okay, there's all these receipts I would push, plus I would keep it on single. I'd take a picture, it'd be attached. And what's cool about that, that one action alone could be enough for you to just start tracking and seeing how much you're spending. Here's one thing. Open up a free Wave Apps account. This Wave Apps, it's cheaper. It's. It's free. And it's basically, you can connect your bank accounts and this is personal side, obviously your business, you're doing QuickBooks. But if you're struggling with budgeting, personally do Wave Apps. It's free. And then run your personal credit card and bank account through that and kind of run it like a profit and loss statement. See where you're spending all of your money, right? You can categorize every expense. Meals, insurance, you know, kids stuff, you know, clothing, whatever it is, and then do that for six months and see, oh, like, wow, I am spending a lot in this area. Just that alone starts to, like, change your whole mindset, right? And if you don't like the time to scan thing, the way that you can literally attach this receipt like we would in QuickBooks, run your personal finances like you would a business have a P and l have a balance sheet. So I literally do this. Still to this day, I still have a QuickBooks account for my personal expenses. That's why I know 2700 is what I need per month to make it by, because every single expense, and no one else does my expense category. I do it because I want to know what that number is. And as long as I can keep that number low, I'll be able to keep investing into the businesses. Right? So hopefully that was helpful. All right, guys, have a fantastic day. Happy Wednesday. I'll see you tomorrow.