Mike Minutes Mastermind 11/16/2023

Doing hope everyone's doing good. Happy Thursday. We are in day three of training here for the new team members. Oh, yes, my flag.

Big flag. It's gonna be for an announcement today.

Very nice.

$7. Not a bad deal, honestly.

Let me just copy this link over. This morning I was thinking about it. There's this bug in copilot right now, and it's kind of like when you go to a lawn mowing job. Sorry, I'm just copying this link while I'm talking. Go to mowing job. Customer calls you afterwards and says that you, like, dented the side of their car or scraped their siding. And you. They send you pictures and you're like. Like, it could have been us, but I don't think that would have been us.

And then you go, like, investigate. You're measuring the size of your tires and your zero turn. You're seeing where the deck, if it could potentially even hit the fence at that height, all that sort of thing. So we had a bug in copilot this morning. It's like several users. Basically, if somebody. If a customer responds back. Back to them via text message, it starts to send them a message every two minutes. We have nowhere in our system where we tell it to do that. So we're like juggling between Twilio and our system and seeing what patterns and, like, there's no pattern to it. So you're. I could be our fault, but I don't really know. So that's the feeling I've been getting. This morning. It felt very similar to the first time when that happened when I. Someone sent me pictures of a scrape sighting, and I was like, I don't know if our tire's that high. I'm out there measuring my tire, trying to find whether or not it's our fault. So anyways. All right, why is this not there?

We are digging. Currently. They're all on a zoom call trying to figure it out over there. I'm sure that. Sure, George will figure it out. All right, what's happened?

Okay.

Present Share screen. Boom.

See, why does it make me do this twice? Now I gotta add this to stage. What in the world?

All right, let's try this again.

Minimize. All right. And we're back. All right, first question is. Thomas, Littleton, CO 001. Can you instruct on how to readjust the mowing prices on our new upcoming website feature? I may want to adjust them throughout the season. Absolutely. Just resubmit the form. So every time we get a form request, we will go through it and change Stuff. Excuse me. So if you want to change terms and conditions, you want to change pricing, you want to change the pictures, all of that good stuff.

That can be done by just submitting the form. Again, Lee had a really good.

Idea the other day, and that is that when people hover over the picture, it can toggle between Arial and the front of the house. And again, you'll be able to choose all those images. So we're seeing if we can do that without slowing the site down a whole lot. So Tory and the team are working on that next couple weeks. Joel from Lafayette. How did Tim find a new location for Mount Vernon? Did he use a Craig List Facebook ad like the one in the dashboard? Reach out to owners of potential properties 101? Something else. Yeah, I know he did Facebook and Craigslist. I see what he's always used. Basically, he found a farm. The guy had a spot in the back there. It has water, it has power. And the guy originally was gonna do like three or four hundred bucks. I was like, dude, just pay him more. Pay like five or six hundred bucks. You want it to be worth something for the guy.

But should be a good spot. And. And all the debris. He's just saying, okay, burn all the. The clippings in one spot and everything else in another, and he'll manage it all with his big equipment. So kind of ideal.

So.

Joel from Lafayette, what's the purpose of expanding to Australia? I thought there was a reason most of Jim's mowing franchisees didn't have employees, such as high costs or labor rules that made finding and keeping employees harder. If this is correct, is there a plan for August to overcome this hurdle in Australia?

Yeah, that was my first initial inclination. And that's what I thought going into going over there last year and going through Jim's mowing training. What I found out is it has nothing to do with that because there are big businesses, they aren't as frequent that they get big because there is more regulation over there. But what I found is their system at gym is not built for scaling. It's just not. Every call must come through their call center. But they don't do any customer service stuff at all. They just make tickets for the franchisees. It's either you take a lead or you create a ticket. There is no take payment, accept an estimate, create the estimate, do pricing, none of that. And so the reason for that is because they charge their franchisees by the lead. So anywhere between 15 and $100 per lead, they are charging the franchisee so they require like it is like extremely strict on you must not share other numbers besides the. I think it's like a six digit number they have for all of Jim's group everything. So it was interesting. It's a good, it's a good model for solo operators because you only usually have 5, 10 leads a month in their system. So I've talked to a lot of their owners, they are thrilled, thrilled to get 10 or 20 leads a month.

Whereas a lot of owners in Augusta get 100 plus. And the reason for that is because we facilitate going through so many different avenues of getting the lead and then command center can take all aspects of leads versus over there. Everything must go through the phone, everything. And so.

I just think their technology is way behind and it's not built to scale because every time customers call into the office they're literally just going to be told, okay great, I'm going to make a ticket and so, and so will reach out to you. And then as a franchisee you just get a text message from their internal system. It's limited to like less than one sentence, like 160 characters. And I just did not find it useful for scaling. And so when I talked, I talked personally, I spoke to their, to the top 10% of their franchisees came from in person at their headquarters and I spoke to them and I asked them to raise their hand if they had employees and less than 10% of them raised their hand. So like literally I would vengeful believe less than 5% have employees. So it's built for, it's built for people that are owner operators and it would be, I would consider the solo operator model at even a lower extent because like you, you can't scale it because you're penalized to get more leads. So anyways, I just think that it's why the reason I think it'll do so well over there. Everyone in Australia thinks of franchising as like that's how you start a business. You don't start on your own. They're very much like trained on, follow systems, procedures and get into the franchise. That's why there's 2,000 franchises of Jim's mowing. So I believe that I can take over there and very quickly get 5 or 10% of their best operators that want to scale up but can't inside their current system. So I've Talked to probably 50 to 60 of their owners.

Directly and then probably a couple hundred indirectly. So I kind of have a pretty good grasp of how the system works. I Obviously went there for training. I saw talk to Jim and there's no bad feelings with me. I just feel like if they're high school, we are college, right? So like it's like you graduate from them, you, you learn the mowing, you learn the actual work and then you graduate to something. You kind of scale the business because no one there like works on the business. They just don't. It's not even a thing. They don't even like train it really.

So I think it'll be a, a great opportunity for us. It also is a way of solidifying the brand in North America because people will take us way more seriously like as even after today. Like the reason I'm making this post, I'll be perfectly honest, I told the leadership team this. I said the reason I'm making the post now, even though we won't have anyone here till probably July, August next year for training for Australia and like operations will literally be in a year away from now. Is everyone in the US and Canada like, oh, like this is legitimate. And like because. Because it to. To pass international franchise law is extremely difficult. And so the fact that we were able to do North America and then we're able to do Australia means like we have things buttoned down and everything's been audited multiple times through and through and like everything is kosher. So it'll be helpful. Just from a brand perspective.

Do you think it would be possible for us to make or get winter service? Yeah, the door hangers are available on the pro shop. It'd be potentially a super good marketing strategy during the winter and also build up some extra mowing clients from the upcoming springs and thoughts. Landis? I agree 100%. Yeah.

Blanking on his name. So sorry. Champaign, Illinois GM. I'm just totally blanking. I apologize. I know your face. I love you. Yeah. They're on the pro shop. He had the idea a couple weeks ago. We made them as quickly as we could and then the vistapurp put up on the pro Shop. The only thing that we're still waiting on them is to be able to change the picture. If you wanted someone shoveling snow, but you have full customization of services and everything on there. So it's on there. Highly recommend it. And then even yesterday in training the owners, the new ones that we're here, I said there's no reason why we can't think of ourselves as Augusta Winter Services from now for the next few months, if you're in the winter and you have an off season and Think of this as your go time. This is the time to sell, baby. So if you're in B.C. by the way, in Washington state and you're listening to this, today is your day to send winter services email. I guarantee this is the best day to send your winter services email. The reason for that is because it was super cold last night, got a really heavy frost. And then today and tomorrow there's not a cloud in the sky and it's going to get warm. So highly, highly, highly recommend if you're in B.C. canada or B.C. canada and then Washington state on the west coast, send your one click email today. You'll get your best results. If you wait another week, people are going to start canceling. Even if we wait over the weekend, people are going to start canceling. And right now with the, with the weather, the way it's going to be today and tomorrow with it being warm, it'll be perfect. So I would highly recommend that. What I'm always looking for is like two to three weeks before the end of the mowing season. I'm looking for a time when I, I don't want people to cancel because like right now, if this, this heavy frost that we just got, the grass is going to stop growing, it's going to stop growing. The grass is not going to grow anymore. So you need to send it out now. Because you send it out now while it's still warm outside and be like oh, like, okay, like yes, the bushes still need, there's still weeds growing, the beds, et cetera.

Any idea when copilot or clicks will be fixed? What's or clicks? Who is this? One second.

Cameron. Any idea when copilot or clicks will be fixed? Oh, I think I'm assuming like one clicks.

I thought yesterday I used it. So if you're having a problem, reach out to AGC and they can take a look at your account.

And make sure that they, that your account set up correctly. But I used it the other day, so yeah, submit to agc. They can take a look at your account, make sure your links are all set up correctly and if there's a problem, they'll make sure it gets fixed asap. So thank you all very much. Have a fantastic day. See you guys tomorrow.