Mike Minutes Mastermind 11/04/2024

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to the Mike Metz Mastermind. We call this Marathon Monday because usually we have a lot of questions. Let's see how many we have. We have nine. Marathon Monday has lived up to its name, folks.

All right, we will jump in momentarily. One second here. Make sure this is set up correctly.

Cool. All right. I put on the Facebook group, highly recommend you come to summit this year. Again on the dashboard there is a conference tab goes through the whole three day schedule. It's a full docket for gustination because we have all of Thursday that's just us and then we also have a Saturday evening topgolf event. So make sure you're there. Highly, highly recommend you get charged for two tickets anyway. Well, you get charged 500 bucks and includes two tickets no matter what. So I just recommend you being there. There's gonna definitely be the most announcements and releases that we've ever had on that Thursday. So if you can be there, I would highly recommend it. Dustin says hurt. Hey, you mentioned on C Suite that you would change what you are doing. The business is based on who gets elected. Curious what those changes would be.

It's hypothetical at this point.

So I think that I'm mostly just interested in interest rates. And so.

The stock market also will react differently based upon which one gets in. And so like I will probably adjust some of my cash allocation and, and.

And then interest rates is really a matter of like where am I pointing people to get financing? So am I. Is this another year of hey, hit profit, lock down, raise prices because we're high interest rates, high inflation or is, are we going to have some sort of austerity and we're going to have low inflation of 1 to 2%, etc. So.

Yeah, when it happens, Dustin, I'll give you, I'll give you a heads up. How's that sound? Because at this point just kind of like, you know, it's anyone's guess who's gonna win tomorrow or this week or whenever it happens. Cool, let's jump in.

Boom.

Cool. Yeah, you'll want to be at conference. There's some really cool stuff.

I really, I'm horrible at having secrets. So me knowing what we're talking about and then not being a share though with all of you stinks. But in the, in the, in the interest of making sure everyone shows up and wants to be there and it's super exciting. I'm not gonna say anything. Okay, Mr. Anonymous, the five year deal to roll the franchise fee into another location for free. Could that Be used multiple times. Like after five years at location number two, that could be rolled into a number three. So if you. If you pay for a location at year five, you get that credited towards your next location. Since you haven't paid anything more, you wouldn't get that to roll into anything else. It's. You pay it once you get it back to you. So it's a give back program. Whether you get it back in a credit at five years or back in cash, and I will literally give you a check probably at conference at 10 years, that's up to you. But it wouldn't just keep rol. It would just be like you get it back towards another location. So. Good question.

All right, Pasquale from Iowa is this design look okay? Please see the image below. Let's see what this design looks like.

Let's see here. Share this tab instead.

Okay, so you're wanting to basically put on mowing cleanups and landscaping. So I. I don't really want this design. The reason is because that Max is the old version, and we're really trying to move to the new version. So take a look at the. The current designs. I know you integrated the green and the black and like the. The decals, but if you could just change Max's face to be the one that's currently on the design, you're good to go. It'll look way better. By the way, you could actually put Max's face here, too and make it bigger if you put it right here. So. Because it's always a little scrunched up behind the wheel well. So if you put Max's face here, look at.

The full wrap design. I would try to shoot for that. So I would probably put his face right here. Or you could move the Augusta part back because you got plenty of space here. And then put his fate. Put his face here. And that would be the half wrap. So close. I don't mind you putting the mowing cleanups and landscaping, but let's try to keep it standard with the face of Max.

That would be my feedback on that one. Hope that made sense.

There's several reasons why we want that image instead of the full body.

Where does I share? There we go. That, that, that. That full body one's just too small. Like your face. The face of Max on your truck is going to be like, probably six inches by six inches, whereas I want that face like two feet by two feet at least. So people can really see it and it sticks in their head more.

Number three, Mr. Anonymous. One common denominator I see in people who grow successful teams, companies, families, etc, is that they aren't afraid of hardship or uncertainty. Please correct me if I'm wrong. It seems like the more hardship or uncertainty they face, the more they thrive. I have noticed a theme with myself that when I face hardship or a situation comes up, I don't know how it will turn out or if I have the capability of handling it. I tend to freeze deer in the headlight style. What makes a person freeze like this? And how can I work on becoming more default action oriented?

Look, if you've seen it before, it doesn't take a whole lot to take actions that are successful. So if someone has been in that situation 100 times before, we call it resilience. We call it. What's the word you used here? Like, in the face of hardship, they seem like they're thriving. If they've seen that same hardship a hundred times and they finally figure out after 63 times what to do the other 37 times, looks like they're a hero. So sometimes you're just at the beginning stages of reps and they've already conquered that level. Right? So to you, you're trying to figure out level 19 seems horrible. Feels like you're dead. You're, you're, you're deer in the headlight style. They're in level 65, and they to you seem like a God because they look back at level 19 as if it's easy. The thing is, in five years, you'll be at level 53 and you'll look back at other people at level 19 and be like, oh, man, if only I could share them, all the skills I've attained. And the only reason you gain those skills is through reps. And so the vast majority of people you look up to or people you say this, they simply have more reps than you. Not more time, more reps.

So gain the skills. The only thing between you and where you want to be, the only thing between, you know, deer in the headlights look and being resilient is is skills. And those skills are obtained through reps.

All right, Anthony Agudelo. By the way, Anthony, I've heard some very, very good things about you. I just wanted to pass along do the grapevine hearing great things about you. I would like to charge a minimum amount per month for my commercial snow plowing accounts in New Jersey in case we do not get any snow for any given month. Maybe a monthly charge that would be applied as a credit to any actual work provided during the month or if you have a better idea on how to do something that would guarantee some income and help recover all the expenses for the preparation of the equipment and being available 247 for three months. Currently we charge a good rate, but we only make money if we get a few storms. Otherwise, it is hard to cover all my expenses. And I'm getting wrong. I am getting worried with the changing weather patterns. Thanks for all the advice. Okay. Oh, wait. Sorry. I apologize. Anthony. Different Anthony. I got Anthony's mixed up. We now have a couple anthes inside of Augusta Nation. Got the Anthony's mixed up. I apologize. But okay, now I'm zeroed in. I know who we're talking about. Okay. I was like, New Jersey. Okay, I got you. So there's two ways you could do this. One, go the Winter Services route where you can you tell them, hey, look, I don't want to charge you if there's nothing happening. Instead, I'm going to charge this, this same month, same monthly rate. I'm going to come every two weeks and do all these services on your property. And if it snows, great, we'll also take care of it. That's the first route, Winter Services. The second route would be like, hey, you're going to charge this amount per month if there is no snow that will get credited towards a spring cleanup, for example, or something like that. You could do that just to make sure you have the steady cash flow. But then if there's no snow that falls, they're covered on the back end, too. If you feel bad about that or if you're having a hard time closing jobs and people are saying, like, what if it doesn't snow? Then I would use that route. But I would personally go after the Winter services part where I know that revenue is going to be mine. I know I'm going to have work regardless if it snows or not in terms of my crew. And if it gets dumped on snow, I still have that revenue coming in. It's more consistent.

So hopefully I answered that. But I have seen some people, they say, hey, if you pay us, you know, 500 bucks a month and it doesn't snow, we'll credit half of that fifteen hundred dollars towards future services or like mowing or something. And some people that seem to work well to get past the objection of like, well, what if it doesn't snow? So. And when they still have that recurring revenue. Anthony Agadello also asked, should we connect this fee to Winter Services in any form?

Should we connect this fee to Winter Services in any form some of this locations. We only do snow for them. We are not in charge of their landscaping work during the growing season. Gotcha. Okay, so now it's like you've kind of taken winter services off the table because they have other landscapers that do work. Okay, got it. So what I would probably do, I would incentivize the winter services from a pricing perspective. But then I would say, look, if we do come, if we. If you pay us those three months, we're on standby, etc. Half of that money, if there is no snow, will get credited towards future services.

That might be something you want to say. Again, I would only do this if you're getting a lot of apprehension of people wanting to sign a three months during this period of time because they're worried about not having snow. That's the only time I would even consider this. I'm assuming that's a been a problem recently for you. Jameson from Springboro, Ohio. Hey, Mike. Hope you're doing well. I was listening to Old Masterminds and you said it typically takes about three years to find your cohort inside of Augusta. What does that mean? Oh, I. Do you still think this is the case? And what do you think the best way to find this group of people is? Thanks. I think you meant cohort. Maybe you mean like your initial group or maybe like you're kind of like your core group. Maybe that's what I was referring to. I don't know exactly what you mean by cohort. I'm guessing you mean like your core 5, 10 owners, you know, really like to communicate with. Nick Reed is working on something really cool around this because I know sometimes you don't want to post something on Facebook because it's like very, very minute to a specific service. So Nick is working on something really cool in terms of WhatsApp groups that you can. You can select which ones you want to be in. I know all of us are in a lot of WhatsApp groups or I guess people have been in Augusta for a long time. Probably in too many face WhatsApp groups. That's fine, don't need to be them. But especially for new people, be able to say, okay, I want to be in this. WhatsApp group is for this size of locations or multiple unit operators or this is my winter track. I want to be in this group. So we're working on a few different things and should have announcements here in the next few weeks that's going to be much more facilitative of finding people that are that you want to be connecting with coming to conference. You'll get in a lot of these groups probably already that exist. So feel free definitely to reach out to them. Also, I know now almost every group coming to training is all getting on a WhatsApp group and that's been pretty helpful.

Which I think tomorrow by the way. I don't know. That came in October. Your first training, your first onboarding call with Nick and Command Center Brian is going to be tomorrow evening. So just a reminder there, Mr. Anonymous, we are scheduled to get a few days of rain this week. We have been rained out today. We have been rained out today. However, have winter services scheduled this week. If we cannot get to but maybe half of our list would you go ahead and skip whatever winter services we could not get to and come back in two weeks. Like regularly scheduled on our off weeks of winter services, we have cleanups and Christmas nights scheduled. So really cannot push off any winter services not completed in the next week as you're already full.

I would really try not to. I really don't like to get off of the schedule with winter services.

It's raining. I'm guessing it's dumping rain because if you can just get out there on the property, like if there's that much rain, there's probably branches and stuff to do. So I try to do that. But if you can't.

I guess worst comes the worst. Yes, you'd have to cancel those and then pick them up in two weeks again. But that could be thousands of dollars.

Revenue and I don't want to leave that out there if at all possible. Um, what I'd be doing whatever I can like whether it be doing the Christmas lights and the proper cleanouts and like fitting jobs around it like all the other winter services. Like try to do three or four winter services in the morning, do the do the light installs and then do two or three in the afternoon just trying to get through them. I'd be trying to do that if possible. Coach Connor. So I'm asking this mainly because I have no idea when is a good time or bad time to buy a house. We have a hundred thousand dollars equity in the home. We're going from about a 200k home to about 350k. Our current house is a fixer upper that we built equity in. Long story short, I always feel broke even though we have more money in the bank than before. I don't know. I don't want to feel like we are lifestyle creeping which it would be but my wife really wants the newer home. How do we know it's good personally, business wise, etc. I don't think our payment would go up a ton, maybe 200 to $300 per month, because the equity and down payment would. Could put down.

Okay.

There'S no really like good or bad time to buy a house in general. If you look historically, buying house is a good idea. The reason it always typically goes up is because of inflation. And so unless you think we're going to go into a recession, it's usually a good time to buy a house. Now, if you hold a house for a long enough period of time, it always is a good decision. Historically, the only way that would change is if we have a big change in population so there's less people coming to the United States. Say, for example, we deported a bunch of people and the birth rate dropped dramatically. Now all of a sudden we'd have an excess of supply, that is houses on the market, than a demand of people needing houses right now. In part, the reason why, like blue states or larger metro areas, their values of the properties are so high is not necessarily because there's more people, because especially in the last few years, you've seen people move to more suburban areas. The reason so expensive is because it's so hard to build new properties, I. E. Bring more supply onto the market. And so when you reduce supply, you increase price, especially when demand is also going up. That's why it's so much more expensive in a lot of these areas. So, for example, like California, it's almost impossible to build stuff. And so because of that, whatever inventory is currently there, the value would go through the roof. And so that's why traditionally it's been very, very a good investment to invest in real estate in the United States is because we've made it more and more difficult to build. Now, if someone came in and slashed regulation, for example, and allowed home builders to build way faster, cut times to build from 12 months to 6 months or 3 months, etc. You would probably see a slight softening in some pricing because there'd be more supply. I don't think we'll ever build enough homes in the United States to match the supply or the demand that's there for new houses. Therefore, we will have a pressure on prices to increase. If we go into a inflationary environment having assets like stocks or real estate, it will get buoyed by the inflation. So even though inflation has been hot the past few years, stocks have gone up, real estate's gone up, et Cetera, because those are also assets. So when the cost of everything goes up, guess what else goes up? The cost of other assets. So in general, having your money in assets, that's why it's a good reason, good thing. And I said this a few years, a few years ago at conference, I said, look, there's a tax being charged every time you save a dollar and that's the cost of inflation. Whereas if you put that money into an asset, if you have inflation now, the cost that the value of that asset goes up with inflation. So the biggest protection against inflation is owning assets. And some people like, oh, that means I should buy more trucks outside of COVID Trucks go down in value. They depreciate, they do not go up in value over the course of time. Show me, you know, a 1990s truck and it has gone down in value. It has been beat up. Assuming it's been used, like assuming you haven't put it in a garage, it's gone down in value. So buying things that appreciate value with an inflationary period that I believe will have to go into to pay off, to reconcile with the debt, it is my opinion to stay inside of assets. So it's not a good or bad time. It's a matter of how long are you going to keep the house. Because if you're going to keep the house on a long enough time horizon, there is nothing, no time in history when saying buying a house is a bad idea. Next question is, what's the cost of the capital? And so if you get interest at say 8 or 9% on a house, that could literally be twice the mortgage compared to a 2 or 3% mortgage in terms of debt. That being said, when you have a 2 or 3% interest environment, that usually means the there's tons of buying going on. That's what happened in 2020 and 2021. The market ripped mostly because everyone could buy a house for so cheap in terms of their rates. And now what you have is lock in. So people don't want to sell their house because if they're going to sell their house, that means they're going to be losing a 2 and 3% mortgage and have to go get a 7 and 8% mortgage. And so they're going to go get a bigger house for twice the price.

In terms of their monthly. Because people, people buy a house and their cars based upon their monthly expenses. They do not buy based upon the valuation of the home. And when you look at underwriters and loan officers, they're looking at what Your monthly spend is and whether you can afford the monthly payment. So.

Yeah, so that's why I get concerned because I look in the car market and I can see a lot of these problems starting to brew there. And eventually that will trickle into the housing market. But right now no one's moving houses. The difference between a car and a house is the house can last way longer. A car, eventually you have to let go of it. And so if you're underwater, it becomes relevant much more soon in the economy versus with a home. You can keep a house for 50, 60, 70 years. And so you can usually just wait out any sort of economic turmoil or if you're upside down on it for a bit, just hold it for a while. My first house up in Blaine, I was upside down for the first year and now it's like doubled in value over the course of the past like seven, eight years. Whatever it is, I was underwater for the first year. Like I put more into it building and remodeling it because I stunk at remodeling when I first got started, didn't know what I was. I just over improved it. And so in terms of is this a good time to build a house? You have a hundred thousand dollars in equity. If you have that on a $240,000 house, that means you have like a 35, 40% equity. You know, that's pretty good. It's not like that's huge because you can only take down to, usually depending on your bank, 10 to 20%. You still need to retain that much equity just for a home equity line of credit. So technically you could probably take out 40 or $50,000 out of this house in a home equity line of credit. So you actually have a ton of like liquid equity in this home. But if you're trying to sell it, keep in mind usually when you sell, you're losing 10% of value just in fees. So real estate fees, inspections, improvements, all the other things that go into a house, taxes. So just keep that in mind. I'm not saying it's bad or good to buy a house. That's not my point. It's just a matter of keeping those things in mind.

Hutch says any chance P4P could have public leaderboards or the ability to show other locations.

For multi unit operator owners, I believe it would be a powerful tool to give more social proof to new team members that P4P works by seeing a leaderboard of all locations location that owner owns. As a GM last year, I struggled in the beginning to get the team to believe P4P was legit. I do the math, play your videos and and do all I could. But at the end of the day they didn't believe it was a thing that would could consistently be achieved. We had a hard time hitting PvP before we got to about 100 clients. Chuck shared some screenshots from Mooresville at that time for me to keep for me to show the team which helped a little. Also keeping a location in the 500 to $800,000 range only gives you a few guys to compare to. I know I get competitive and I would enjoy being able to say I have ranked in the top three of 25 team members last month versus I was the number one performer out of four. The latter doesn't seem nearly as good in my opinion.

This is a fantastic idea.

It just doesn't impact enough users for us to make this a priority right now. I know is going to move the needle the most is making sure that P4P is actually put inside of Copilot. So that's going to be a big focus in 2025 for us.

And then I would say for now Connor so. So for example I know all the locations inside of of of P4P.

There's only like two or three owners outside of Augusta that are multi unit operators. So it'd be such a small amount of people and I would have to do a security thing between all these accounts. So I'm not gonna do it now. I agree this is a good idea. So what I would probably do coming out in next weeks we are doing weekly and monthly leaderboards as well as the ability to send you a report. You might want to just consolidate those and put in like a and in some sort of a broadcast. So for example in WhatsApp you can do a broadcast list instead of a group or you can make a group where people can't post. You can make it where only admins can post. So you can make it kind of like a bulletin board essentially where you put all the employees from all your locations on one but then there's no commenting allowed. It's just you. It basically be your way of like doing a company wide message. I highly recommend this. Whether it be a broadcast list which is just simply going to be a message to all your team or more of a message board where is a group but only you post. I would probably do that. And then just pick your top three from all your locations so there shows that social proof is there. And then like shout out your top three person across the entire, you know, five locations. I would recommend that for now because yeah, sharing all between gets really, really messy from a security perspective. I know it seems like a simple move, but from a sharing data across these different accounts it gets like very complicated. Especially because down the road I want money to flow through these accounts. So it just changes the whole nature of how we have to do the security.

So I hope that made sense. It is a good idea. I completely see where you're coming from. It's just the, the, the number of users that would use that is far less than the number of people that will really benefit from us integrating like complete like in one product. P4P and Copa. And I again I asked everyone kind of keep that on the DL. No one else knows that we're going to do that. And next year I need, I need to roll that out properly.

I only told everyone here because Memphis that it really came up from the owners and it's something that from there we started talking with engineers and we are planning to do that in 2025.

Connor, from someone who has fallen for all the lifestyle creep pitfalls, you would be wise to remember that the mortgage isn't the only thing that goes up when you purchase a larger home. Yeah, man. You know what's gone up a lot recently is home insurance and property taxes. My original mortgage, mortgage for that little house, my first house that I remodeled. Let me try to remember all the math. Okay, so I bought it for $95,000 cash. I put in, I want to say like a hundred and one hundred thirty thousand dollars to remodel it.

And my mortgage, I got a hundred. Sorry it wasn't all cash because I got a hundred and sixty thousand dollars mortgage. I think now I owe like 130 something on it.

And.

My mortgage originally was $930. Now I'm paying 1200 something per month because of insurance and property taxes go up. So essentially it's gone up like 30% my mortgage. So it does creep. You're totally right here. The fact that my mortgage has gone up 30% on a fixed rate mortgage. Mortgage. What are we doing, people? What kind of a scam are we talking about anyways? All right, that's all we got for the day, folks. Love you all. I'll see you tomorrow. Have a great evening. Take care.