Mike Andes leads a short mastermind meeting with announcements for franchisees. Key points: congratulates a franchisee on opening a second location and outlines plans to build systems (GM training, regional manager structure, incentives) to scale from single to multi-location ownership; announces an imminent removal of the 'estimate type' field from the website estimate-request form and replacement with an optional video upload to reduce confusion and centralize estimate decisions at Command Center or the franchisee. Also notes ongoing backend/dashboard improvements.
Chapters
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome. Doing a little bit earlier this morning, a couple announcements. I think there's quite a few questions that came out, 12 of them. So first announcement.
Congrats to Dustin Biernick getting his second location. Congrats to him. I know there's quite a few of you going to be starting your second location next spring. So as always, just really make sure you touch base with Lee. Go over those different numbers in terms of the second location, the population, the market size, how to set up your GMs, et cetera. I promise everyone that by this time next year we'll have a really good system for going beyond two or three locations and going to that 10 marker. I was talking with Chuck yesterday as now he is full time with the franchise and working with me as a regional manager. And we're really starting to cement those systems for your gms as you start to try to replicate faster. So we're working on that already. Really trying to create better incentive programs than just profit sharing alone for GMs to incentivize growth the first year and then profitability after that. Really trying to cement the ability to be able to know and have very good metrics around starting location and recouping all of your cash within two years. That's always the goal because that means you have a 50 return on equity, which is leagues ahead of most franchises. One second.
So that is what we're working on and again by this time next year that will be really cemented. So you can do multiple locations. We're going to be looking to start between two and four locations for me over the next in spring. So I think it'll be a good stress test. And then I'll have eight locations next year to really test that working GM model with the regional manager at the top.
Estimate form changes. So let me show you this real quick. When I hadn't made this decision, it's not been yet enacted. But on the estimate request form on everyone's site, we are making a change. Give me a second.
I do not want that one. I want this one. Okay, so this is the Wacom site. So, so this part right here, this estimate type thing, there's two thing issues we're seeing right now. Number one, people are changing this back and forth from having project based estimates like with schedule and estimate. They're changing that like literally every week based upon when they feel they're busy.
Which is fine. But that constant changing back and forth is messing up things because someone will schedule estimate in person for two Weeks from now, but then by then you've turned off your in person estimates and then people are submitting yellow slips to Command Center. Was like no, like two weeks ago you had this form on and we're allowing in person estimates. And then the constant changing back and forth is just, just becoming jarring too. And then the second more important reason is that what we're finding is regardless of what people put here, the franchisee or command center are using your wiki to determine what type of estimate type needs to be done. Which is the right way to do it, right? So if someone puts, you know, mowing services, but then here they put in schedule an in person visit. If this comes to Command center, guess what? Command center is still going to do it over the phone and sell the job because we know that mowing is done that way and you'd be unhappy if we scheduled an estimate in person for mowing job.
So what we're going to do is we'll remove this completely, this estimate type part. That way it is up to Command center or if this form is coming to you, the franchisee, you then decide is this an in person estimate or is this a drive by estimate? The reason is because regardless of the type of estimate at Command center, we're still calling the customer. So even if this is going to be a drive by estimate, we would still take this estimate form, give the customer call and let them know that we got the form. Are we sending an estimator out and kind of how the process is going to roll? It's just the best way to make sure we get communication with the customer as soon as possible.
So I think it's.
A replicative step in the process that is not needed. And then what's going to be replaced by is an optional field for them to drop a video into if they would like to add more context. So the reason is because right now there's this upload a video of your yard. This part here is going to be like, hey, this is an optional field and you can add a file of video here if you would like to add context. But we are going to remove this estimate type because no one's really listening to it. What's happening is these are coming in and then franchisees and Command center are basically using your wiki to determine what type of services you want in person estimates for versus just over the phone or drive by, et cetera. So that's going to be changed probably within the next week, estimate type will be gone and this will be simply a matter of seeing a video attached or not, which is 95% will not. And then you get to decide what type of estimate type is there. That just prevents any sort of confusion. When a customer says, well, I request an in person estimate, but they just put mowing. And there's no way in the world you want to show up for a mowing estimate in person. And that's in your wiki, right? So it puts commands in. It's like, well, the customer wants this, but in their wiki it says this. We're going to remove that completely. We already know we're going to be calling the customer no matter what and confirming that we got the quote and telling them the next steps of the process. And that was be much more smooth. So again, looks like the Bellingham shop utilized the backend dashboard to add on this property cleanups banner. There's currently three options for the banners. All of the backend dashboard for the website will be just constantly improved and updated as time goes on.
Let's see here.
Last thing I had, I was listening to Interview the other day and it really helped. It clicked for me a little bit, especially as a lot of, a lot of locations and owners are starting their second location, which is, which is pretty cool. I had the. Someone said this and I was like, you know what, that's really true. And.
It'S never been like a problem of mine to like look at our owners in a destination. Be like a comparison in terms of. To me, I've never really had that. But what they said was really interesting and that was you should expect the people that are coming behind you to do better than you. Because if you're sharing good information, they should theoretically be able to get around the obstacle that you came.
