Mike Minutes Mastermind 11/16/2022

What's up everyone? Hope you're doing super well. I'm just gonna drop these YouTube links in here real quick. Give me one second manually now.

Why is it not doing it? All right, let's get it started.

Quick update. I am at Service Autopilot conference, also known as Service Edge. One thing you all might have noticed is the sister company now of Service Autopilot is Field Edge. Field Edge is not Service Autopilot, but they're now very similar. Field Edge has a lot of H Vac companies.

And now they are both being. They're owned by Explore, which is the company that bought out Surface Autopilot a couple years ago and also owns Clearance and is the company that is basically trying to package a conglomerate that will likely go public in the next 12 to 24 months. They're going to go public this year and then of course the stock market went kaput. So yeah, it's been good today. Today was fine. John Patojnic spoke. There's a Navy SEAL guy that spoke. It was really good.

I asked him if he could come to our conference and he said his speaking fee was $20,000 plus traveling expenses. So I said that a little out of our budget.

And what else we have today? I had a bunch of meetings. So I had a bunch of meetings with people from Service Autopilot. It's gonna be very interesting. Tomorrow morning, 7:30am.

I have a meeting with their C suite executives, some of their top people since they have gotten wind that we are leaving, which is totally fine. They've been trying to like suddenly be all nice to me. So.

It'S gonna be interesting because I just left downstairs where they're having kind of a meet up and things at the bar and their C suite is hammered. Hammered. So I'm gonna be sharp. I'm quick as a whip. Tomorrow morning at 7:30am, kind of get the most sleep I have in probably a week and a half. But.

You'Re very interesting to see how negotiate at 7:30am after that. Anywho, they don't, they don't even, they, most of them have never even met each other in person. This is like because they're all over the country. So I don't know. I have my opinions on it. There's literally like not to throw them under a bus, but I think they fail in user engagement and creating community. And so when I hear essay four, which is like four years ago, maybe five years ago. It's five years ago. Yeah, five years ago there was about 600 people, maybe lots of energy. It was awesome. There's no more than 200 people here and by the afternoon of today, like within three hours there was less than 120 people in the main conference center because everyone just went out into the hallway and talked like after Jonathan Patosnik, the Navy SEAL Mike Callahan. I'm just sorry. It's the worst conference I've ever been to.

This is a good week on how not to have a conference because they've never met each other so their team is cohesive so they don't introducing people. Mc doesn't know the person coming up like it's just anyways it's a good good thing for me to see prior to next week when we start our weekly meetings getting ready for conference and how not to have a conference. Very important. All right. Jumping to questions. We got.

See here but lots of productive meetings in terms of.

Meeting people. Mike Callahan, Jonathan Patosnik, I met with him today. He's helping. He's giving me a lot of good advice and I'm going to share some of that at our conference together with you all on the Thursday morning that he is helping me with. So very helpful. All right. Joe Dilmore. About a week ago I started getting very late notifications from service Autopilot. I have a client. We sent an estimate for a leaf cleanup on Monday the 14th. We actually scheduled and serviced the property yesterday 15 Mercy 11pm last night I got a notice from estimate was complete for this client. It's been happening on and off for just over a week now. At first I thought I was just hitting some wrong buttons. What's happening over and over again? I checked the history and it's possible I did, I did anything this client's I'm guessing you say you meant it's oh, it's impossible that I did anything. This client's account that could have triggered this. It has been nearly two days. Is anything was done with the estimate side of things? Is anyone else seeing large lays in their notifications? So I personally have not seen this but I've also been out of town for the past week traveling. I have heard about this happening from other service Autopilot users and they made a notification about this. They were working on this inside the Facebook group. If you're not part of the Facebook group for service Autopilot I recommend it be on there.

Put notices and stuff like that. It's usually a day or two late and usually if it's a big issue we have already had to figure something out. But I did see Several people saying that recently but I have not actually verified if that is a system wide thing. Unfortunately when people say stuff like that on service all by they'll usually cam the comments. See it's hard to see if this is like a system wide thing or if just someone had a, you know, their automation is messed up. So it's happened before though where there'll be like a few days or even a week where service all their automations let's go out late. So I don't have an answer and I apologize. All right. For biannual cleanups every six months, do you inform clients before you arrive at the property? For each scheduled cleanup we always send them a welcome email before the first visit. But we haven't been sending out any reminders about future visits. No issues so far but I thought I should ask. So I would assume you're on your second visit, right? So you did your first and you get your second one. Now you're kind of rolling. Hey great. This is the thing when people move they do not remember to call their landscaper on a six month service. They will remember to call you and cancel. If they're weekly or bi weekly by every six month service there's a very good chance they're going to forget. So I would say if you're not going to contact them and confirm service I would make sure you put a note on your on the job for the crew just to make sure like someone's living there. Does it look like there's new owners, something like that. Because my only word of caution, especially going from winter to spring, typically that's when I would be kind of watching for it. But you know, I agree you don't want to be. What you don't want is you don't want to be where you have to send them an email and then they have to confirm it. What I would do just like much more of a notice and it's not even a reminder. It's like this. This is an automated email. You can make it sound automated. If you want to make it manual, say this is an automated email. This to remind you that your service is scheduled for X.

You could do that.

But I would just keep rolling with what you got until you have problems with it. But that's the likely problem you're going to have is someone has moved, passed away and literally you do the service and then you're left basically having to pay for it because the person actually owns the house now, didn't ask for that service. And you know if you have the car on file from the previous owner. Potentially you get money still, but then they're going to be unhappy. So I don't know. I would say if I would. We don't do this. We typically just rely on one click estimate emails to ensure that they click. They want the service and then people get in the habit of clicking on every single email which is nice. And we know we got to go get get the new update one to them, but. Yeah, Logan. Oh, there's a long one. Mercy. Ooh, fun. Okay. Two weeks ago I talked about our fertilizer tech. One second. Make sure you guys can see this good. Few weeks ago I talked about our fertilizer tech that I wanted to terminate. I talked about him being late to his shifts, not being part of the team culture, etc. Regardless, I fired him Last Monday the 7th after we got through our last round of fur and as we're slowing for winter. I knew he would be upset about fired, but as I've been, as I've been his first and only employer, I assumed that he would leave on okay terms and use me as a reference on his resume. I was quite wrong. Yet when you fire someone, it'll never go good. Never ever, ever. Don't ever count on that going well. Since I fired him, I've gotten an accusation from Ocean of alleged hazards in the workplace and unsafe chemical stuff. I know for a fact this is just retaliation for firing him. On top of that, yesterday I got a call from the Nebraska Department of Agriculture when I take samples of our ground and document our shop. Fun stuff. I'm doubtful I'll be subject to fines from either organization, but it's a massive waste of time. Yes, I 100 agree. I'm sure that was not that was his goal. Yep, it is. My question is, is there anything I can do to stop this from happening? I'm not inclined to talk with him about it because this will probably make it worse. Should I just roll with everything coming as a result? I don't want to get calls from the IRS or EEOC after. Yeah, so don't worry about this stuff, man. This is part of business. There is. There's not a week that goes by that I don't get threatened with legal action now. And at first, like it was a big deal for me, like I would lose sleep over this stuff.

Until you see something on your desk that is saying you are convicted or you are guilty or you must pay a fine, you don't react. This is again part of the high highs, low lows. If you let these lawsuits, threats, you're going to departments as you grow, as you get multiple locations, as you go interstate or you go outside the state and you start doing multiple locations.

Just going to get this stuff all the time. Like all the time. I got someone yesterday threatening me over. What was that one?

Oh yeah.

Threatening me. We fired them and Sorry. Yeah, we fired them and they basically were claiming that I owed them all this money and they reported me to the irs and they reported me to. Who else?

Who was it? I forget. They reported me some other department and guess what, maybe they're right. I don't really care until I get a piece of paper that says I need to react to it. Don't let this stuff get. Get in your get you all ruffled up. We had to go through the same thing. It was likely true green that was reporting our local shop.

For the same thing. So Department of Ecology came out and then the. What's called dosha, Department of. We don't have osha. We have DOSHA in our state. So they came out, they did the whole spray thing. Look, at the end of the day.

The pain of just thinking about it was more than the eighteen hundred dollar fine I had to pay and eighteen hundred dollars.

Solutions. So we had plenty of evidence that we would do not need it. And so they just kept bringing down the fine until finally I'm like, Look, I'll pay $1,800. Just get out of my face. Because I didn't want to go to court. So they kept bringing the fine down because I kept realizing that they didn't really have a whole lot of grounds to stand on. And then basically they said, hey, you pay the eighteen hundred dollars or we go to court. And I was like, okay, great, I'll pay 800. $1800 and then we'll upgrade our licenses. So like, don't let this stuff take your time or ruin you emotionally. It just, it's going to. I know the first few. But if you haven't been sued, if you haven't had legal action against you.

Come to grips with the fact that it's going to happen. All right? When you fire someone, they're going to want to take retaliation. The state will always go towards that of the, of the employee. They will always like immediately open up a case and the case is going to look really, really horrible to you. We just got convicted of retaliation for, and racial discrimination for my location out in Connecticut. So of course the state sends you these long things that all these things you got to change and you got to have meetings and all this garbage. So shout out to Felix, got all the information, documented everything from the firing and sent it back. Like, don't let this stuff get to you, all right? This is the roller coaster of being entrepreneur. You can't let affect you. It affected me. Like I'm saying this because it affected me a lot at the beginning. When you fire someone, you're so emotionally invested and they say stuff, don't go back to them. Don't say things. You have to. You have to learn how to control your emotions in those moments, like the other day when someone's convicting me of, like, fraud, basically, of course I want to say stuff, but I say, you know, now that you have threatened legal action, I would ask that your legal counsel contact our attorneys and that almost 95% of the time will shut up anybody that has legal counsel if they say they have legal counsel. Hey, I'm going to take. I'm going to take you to my attorneys. Let me be very clear. The vast majority of people in the United States, consumers and business owners alike, have no idea how to take someone to court. They have no. They do not have a legal counsel. They do not have a lawyer. All right? And the reason you know that is because if they're complaining over a thousand, two thousand, three thousand dollars, and they're going to take legal counsel and they're threatening to take you to court, they're stupid. They have no idea what they're doing. Because just taking you to court with legal counsel will cost them at least four to $5,000, at least. Just for a general attorney to come into a court case, you're looking at four to five grand. So don't let legal, like, when seeing things customers like the Karens of the world, like, I'm going to talk to my attorney. I hope you're looking forward to talking to my attorney. When they threaten like that, what you'd say, you say, because you threatened that we're going to go ahead and step back. If your legal counsel would like to contact our attorneys, we can give you their contact information and then drop it. And what I would recommend everybody do during the off season is go spend yourself 100 or $200 and go talk to a local attorney for 30 minutes and introduce yourself and say, hey, if I ever have problems, I just want to introduce myself, talk to you a little bit, pay you a little bit of money and create a relationship to where if I have a problem, I can email you. That's it. And you don't Email them. When someone threatens you, you don't. You email them with legal counsel or when the state department reaches out to you. When someone threatens you, don't waste your resources. Don't even waste your sleep over it. You write a nice email telling them back that they're going to threaten legal action, that they can contact the attorneys and that's it. And 95% of those threats will go away. Like, I'm not joking when every single week, I'm not joking when I say every week that goes by I am threatened with legal action or am actually sued or. Or I'm contacted by a state department about something around employees or the business or whatever. And to date I have paid two fines. One the 1800 dollar one. And then the one that I paid. Oh, sorry. Three. Then the one that I paid way back when because I fired someone because they were. They got sick and I was trying to be nice. I didn't know that you can't do that. That's considered really bad. I was trying to be nice when I didn't want him around as my. My very first non. Friend. Fire. Big mistake. Had to settle outside of court with that third one.

Fired this person. Glad we did. They retaliated and basically said that. Sorry, they accused us of retaliation because they were pregnant. So again, when you fire someone, especially if you're in a. No.

You have no resource. What's it called? Sorry, I'm retired. But you don't have to give it a reason. Why? Don't give a reason. And if they. Then the state comes back to say we need a reason. Just say performance. That's all you need to say. All right, don't get like, well, they did this, they said this, they text me this. Don't get into that garbage. Just say they're fired, you're done, you are no longer needed here. Ideally you've given them some sort of warning and either in writing or an email or recorded that said they had to change performance and they don't. But if you just want to fire somebody, do not get in a back and forth text message battle. I see this all the time when I look through different court cases. When they get really ugly, it's text messages back and forth and people start saying things and they start mentioning names and people and what happened and it gets really ugly. So fire. Fire people very quickly and based upon either a, we no longer need your services, which you gotta be careful with that one because they could potentially get unemployment, which again, I don't care.

And secondarily Like, I would rather pay someone's unemployment issues than have them be a bad fit and secondary. If they haven't worked for you for three months, it's likely it's not going to affect your rates on unemployment. Okay. Because they take the quarter, the last full quarter. So if you haven't worked for less than three months, it's probably going to affect your unemployment rate anyways. Even if it does, let it be.

Now that unemployment is not crazy like it was in 2020 where people could get crazy amounts of money. People have to take such a massive cut in pay to be unemployment. They're going to go get another job. They just are. There's plenty of jobs out there, so fire quickly. Do not get in a war with someone. And I think I got this.

Logan says he's had the same thing with service. Appa. We got a batch of emails late last night for jobs. Yeah, sorry. Okay, so it seems like it is several people at least inside Augusta Nation. I've seen it sporadically inside other essay users that are mentioning as well. So I think they're working on it. So maybe tomorrow morning I'll ask this question when they're all on their hangovers and try to drill deep on some of their technical difficulties. It'll be great. So meeting them in the lobby. They wanted to go for dinner and I'm not the type to get hammered. I don't drink. So anyways, it's been happening for you for about a week. Oh, great. I don't know who this is, but. Okay, I'll bring it up tomorrow with them and I'll be talking.

Maybe. Maybe. Yeah, I was just about to say this. They're probably not working on another drug. Oh, no, I was gonna say that. I was gonna say maybe that's why there's so many bugs, is because they work on it when they're drunk or in their head. Hangover. Oh, man. Oh man. I think I got all the questions right.

One, two, three. Yeah, let's go. Cool.

All right, well, we got done for the day. Daily mastermind complete. If I don't get to the mastermind on a daily basis, it really is because, like, I physically cannot do it. So I'm glad I was able to get today. Hope you all have a fantastic Wednesday. I'll see you tomorrow at some point. Probably not the regular time, but I will likely not be in most of their conferences stuff tomorrow I'll just be mostly working and then having a couple meetings with several of them throughout the day. You'll have a great. Rest of your day. Evening. I'll see you tomorrow.