Mike Minutes Mastermind 11/18/2024

Hello, Augusta Nation. Happy Monday. Let's get this party started.

I'm going to go ahead and get you started on questions. I didn't see in the Augusta Lights, the Christmas hub for WhatsApp, that some people were having to re verify their Google account when they added Augusta Lights, Augusta Lawn Care and Christmas Lights on their title or their the name of their business. So I'm keeping an eye on it because it wasn't making us do that originally.

So sorry about that. Bit of pain to have to do is two and then you lose search engine optimization and ranking when you're not posting on the Christmas lights one for nine months out of the year. So I'll be monitoring it and seeing what the best course of action is. Um, I would probably say for now, if it does require verification when you try to change the name, they're saying you can change it back and then it's fine. You just cancel the change and then just maybe change the logo to Augusta Lights and then change the first image to be like a Christmas lights house. A house with Christmas lights on it. That's probably the move if you're trying to like go low like first step and not have to go through the whole process of starting another one, reverifying it, keeping two of them up and then them competing with each other on on ranking. So I will continue to monitor throughout November and December, but that is the current status of the Google Lights situation. All right, let's hop in.

First one is coming from Forest. Hey Mike, I have a question about how to become more hands off in the business. I'm so used to go, go, go that I'm struggling with becoming more hands off in the business. Over the past few weeks I've spent more time in the office scheduling, routing, dispatching, replying emails, send estimates, etc. And I don't like it. I'm a very active person. Slowing down is not in me and never has been. If I'm not going, I feel like I'm not accomplishing anything. I guess you can say I have no patience in part. Any tips to help with this? I'm pretty bored. Thanks.

Okay. Few things.

One.

Is you're not stepping away. You're not being hands off in the business. When you're doing these other things. Scheduling, routing, dispatching, replying to emails. That's not hands off. That's just you switch from sales to admin, so. Or you switch from operations to admin. You did. You basically moved in the admin role. So you were not. This is not hands off. Just realize you are not an admin person. I could have told you this before. I think most people around you would be able to say you're an amazing salesperson. Good ops, admin, you're not going to like admin. It's not for the person that wants change. Every single thing and processes changing and constantly evolving and growing someone that's good for admin, like systems like procedures, they're like tweaking and modifying and adjusting and refining the processes. You are not going to enjoy that. So it's good to know yourself and know what you're good at and what you hate doing. But this is not hands off in the business. Hands off in the business looks like admin. The things you're currently doing being delegated. Now, I would say that being profitable for at least a year in profit, profit mode will help a lot with this. Like earlier this year, like the cash crunch that you had in, I think it was January and February was extremely acute in part because you were growing, adding more services, adding more complexity to the business, et cetera. And you're trying to get the office ramped up and all that. And so.

Realize that sometimes a good business is boring. And then how you distract yourself, I. E. What do you do in the meantime is many times things that give back to other people is a really good strategy. Help other people be active in the WhatsApp groups, the coaching program, et cetera, to be able to help other people. It's a very good mechanism to be able to let some of that nervous energy out and that creative like I want to grow and expand, go help someone else do it. They're in that phase. Whereas you might be in going into profit mode and instead of creating more havoc in the business by constantly changing things, you actually just need to hire someone to be able to do the systems op system optimization. And then you need to step back a little bit and mostly focus on more executive role type situation.

Switching from founders to CEO is a very difficult transition.

It's a very different skill set. And so if you want to run a big business, I. E. B CEO.

You'Re going to need to delegate those other tasks and then you're going to have to figure out what you need to do in the meantime to scratch the itch of innovation so you don't mess up everything for everyone else by trying to constantly make new new businesses, new changes, new services, growth and expansion and different areas just cause a bunch of havoc. I would wait one year if I was you before you grow anymore, I would focus on profitability because it'll give you the settledness to not feel like you need to be constantly moving because the business is profitable. You have general managers that stay with you for a solid year plus your locations. Um, there's money in the bank throughout January and February. You fix Q4 collapse. So doing those things will help the. You don't feel a nervous energy. And then if you ever feel that way, I would have a, an outlet for that. And helping other people is a very, very helpful thing.

I think this is probably still forced. I guess you can say I'm addicted to growth. I get it. I know what you feel like. This is founder versus CEO. And as you go past a million, this is a very common thing. It's like a 2 million, 3 million dollar business with a founder mentality can become unprofitable very quickly when what it really needs is a CEO to run it as an executive to have people in place to delegate you. Sending out emails and estimates is not going to be a great use of a CEO's CEO's role in time.

Mr. Anonymous, we've had a few customers mention they're getting frustrated trying to reach a human at cc. I know you discussed this before. Would it be possible. One second, sorry. Possible. Where did it go to have some sort of say, representative speak with one of our agents instead of the customer having to figure out how to navigate Macs? I know he was supposed to be pretty smart in regards to getting the customer over to CC if they ask, but it does still seem like we have people not able to figure out how to make that happen and hang up. Instead this prompting a text or email from the customer asking for us to call them which could have solved if they were able to get through the first time. I have no idea what's going on the back end of Mac so I just figured I'd throw some feedback out there. We've been getting. Yeah, this, this is super helpful. Um, there is a form on the dashboard. Feel free if you wanted to fill us out and actually give us these customers names because we will go through if they. If you have their phone number we'll actually go through and actually listen to the recordings and like why did they get frustrated or something? Because honestly there's so many triggers as to why Max hands a phone call off. Would it be even if they. If you can't understand them like so if there's bad connection or there is a.

A lot of times it's a dialect or like a. They have a certain. What's it called therefore it's hard to understand them. If he's not very clear, he will immediately just say, great, thank you. I'm going to hand you off to that, to that department.

If they say human, if they say anything regarding a human or transfer me or anything like that, it's very quick and it feels very native because like, great, we'll get you to that department. So they come right to command center. So I would love to hear these if you actually have specific ones. I don't know who this is, but if you fill out that form, we will actually pull these up and figure this out. But this is also, if they ever hang up, we are calling them back right away, like immediately. So there's never a time when someone actually hangs up that they are not going to get a call back from command center. And this has happened less and less because each time that happens, we're trying to diagnose why it happened and figure out how we get them to a rep as soon as possible or just in general, what is Max doing that's frustrating them. So yeah, hope that made sense. Coach Connor, you mentioned every spring that we should be trying to fix the business or systems that the only. That, that the only.

Okay, one second, let me reread this. You mentioned every spring that we shouldn't be trying to fix the business or systems that the only.

Thing I'm guessing that matters is getting the work done in sales. Okay, I'm guessing like spring rush. What are some of those systems that you see most common within Augusta owners that would be a good use of our time and energy over the winter? Example, we will do about 550 this year and honestly love the 500 to 800k model. So I'm thinking one of the main things I can do is make sure all setups are the same. Efficient, simple services and focusing on replacing projects with mowing this upcoming spring. Great. This is awesome.

So in the middle of spring rush when you're completely maxed out and you're in profit mode, you do not have time to do an in depth pricing analysis of all your customers because you are at capacity and leads are pouring in and you raise prices across the board during the slow season, if you have time, this is a great opportunity to actually look through some of your customers. And yes, you could put on a spreadsheet. Sorry, yes, you could put them all in a spreadsheet. I think there's a lot of value in literally just selecting all your current customers and starting to click through them. Because when you do that you're actually going to be like, I guarantee you one out of five, you're like, oh, man, they, they, they'd be a great upsell for this right now. I could get them lights. Oh, I wonder if they are on services. Oh, they're not. Oh, they, they stopped service in like September. I'll contact them real quick. Like you have the time. Because again, if you have, if you don't have money, we usually have time. And if we're not pumping out estimates throughout this season, this is a great time to be able to spend time on these sort of systems. And one of the biggest ones is pricing. Because when you're in profit mode, you raise prices when you hit capacity. Great. It'd be really excellent if when you hit capacity, you already know what your price increase is going to be and who it's going to be to. So that would be like my number one thing. All the things you mentioned here are great simple services. I would, I would. It's only been a couple months. It's been P4P in terms of tracking yellow slips. But I would go back and look at all your yellow slips and figure out where do I cut? So, like, is there certain services that we're making a bunch of mistakes on? Is there certain services that I'm making mistakes on and makes up 2% of my revenue? Oh, maybe I should cut that. But it's really profitable. It's 2% of your revenue is not going to move the needle. I see this all the time around simple services like even like reseating or top dressing. It's like, yes, it's profitable. It makes up 2 to 3% of your revenue. And you had five callbacks in the middle of your fall cleanup season because of it. I'm not saying I'm not getting three seating, FYI. I'm just making it as a, as an example. But this is the time to be able to do that. If you have the time to actually go through individual. I know you could do a spreadsheet, but when you do spreadsheet, what you, what you start, start to be blind to is where that customer is at in terms of. They're on a map. How long have they been with you? All these other aspects that as you just click through them because you have the time to go through a hundred or two hundred of them, you have the time to do that, to customize. How am I going to price increase? This person. What is my upsell going to be like? Having a strategy around even what upsells you're going to pitch your customers going into spring rush and when.

Super cool. Making your dialing in what your email and text strategy is going to be for 2025 in terms of your monthly emails. As we know there's like a 0.3 to 0.5% of like email links getting clicked when they go through spam. It makes it a little messy. We're trying to trying to figure out a way around that so we can still do one click estimate email. So I haven't given up on it yet. However, you might want to just go more of a text approach. Hey gonna send them and instead of having the it click here and it's a one click estimate they click here and it goes to which some of you may or may not know every single one of you have. Augustalonkerservices.com yourter name/estimate. That is a straight form with no other information around it in terms of the website that goes directly to a form. That could be a great strategy for now. Use text only. No pictures, no video. Keep it super simple and then I'm driving them. That link is now going to that estimate page instead of a one click estimate email for example. And you can create those templates now and get ready for all of 2025. Coach Connor has another question.

We did a 20% price increase this past year starting June 1st. There were probably about a dozen customers who paused before June 1 and were not on our list of customers. Do a price increase and command center restarted their services at the old pricing and at the old budget hours. What is the best way to go about this or is there just simply going to be individuals that will fall through the cracks?

I don't know if they they're on an off season or if they're just paused. If they're paused, that'd be difficult because you would you. What that means is you need to go back and like change everyone's pricing that's even paused for that to work. Well I would just raise them, you know, first thing in the spring. You know, if you have an off season where they pause for the summer, for example, you want to make sure that when you do a price increase you adjust all of those. I'd say probably to be honest. Connor. I'm sorry I always call you Connor because you say Coach Connor.

The.

Probably the best way to do this. I would say.

I would probably say when you do a price increase, just do everyone that's also paused just in case they restart services and they're at the new prices I probably wouldn't send them an email because they're gonna be like super confused. But I would put the new prices on there. And so when they call in to come in and I want to restart my services, there's a the new prices are there and then you could put it in the customer notes. So it's sticky for command center to see. But again, you're kind of spending time on someone that if they've paused, services usually aren't coming back. So it is a little extra time. So.

I would say for these ones, I would probably just go ahead and raise prices. When you're creating the strategy around your next price increase when you hit capacity, these would be the first people you're raising prices on. Because if you have a strategy around it, let's say there's 10 or 15 of these people, you're probably gonna do them within the first few weeks of spring rush if you hit capacity and then maybe three or four weeks later once you get 15, 20 new customers. Okay, now I've got to raise prices again. I'm going to raise it on everyone else across the board. For example, Thomas from Clinton. I need hiring advice. One man show right now, nights and weekends until I go force and full time on March 1st. The day I finished training October, I received an unsolicited resume through my site from someone that seemed like he'd be a 3F higher prior army sergeant sergeant currently in charge of five maintenance workers at a large school system and very familiar with Augusta and Mike and he's again he found my site and submitted resume within about a week of the site being live. I told him I wasn't hiring till March and he completely was okay with it. I intended on hiring some March 1st and considered putting up a job ad in February or January for time the first March 1 start date. SEO and Google Business Profile are cranking though and I've got some more more work than I can handle on weekends. Would it be worth interviewing and hiring someone, hopefully him early to have a helper on the weekends so it become a full time position in May March? If this guy's as good as his resume makes him seem, would it be worth interviewing hiring way early with a March 1 start date to get him locked in of sorts? Any thoughts would be appreciated. Blessed to have what I consider a good problem. Yeah, great problem to have. If you're getting leads right now, I wouldn't expect those to slow down a ton because your site' to continue to rank, you're going to get Google reviews Et cetera, et cetera. So I wouldn't like anticipate a huge slowdown if you're still getting leads now, especially just a couple weeks in. It's just like how aggressive do you want to be? I would probably be addressing him first like hey, are you okay with weekend work only? Are you okay with slowly easing into full time until March 1st? He might be okay with it, just depends on his situation. But it might be worth asking. And he'd be like, yeah, I'm fine with 15, 20 hours a week helping on the weekends and if it moves into two or three extra days a week and then I'll move into full time in March, that's fine. So I would definitely talk to him 100% someone that good. How long should I be waiting for Google Ads to start spending money? It's been four days and Google hasn't start spend anything and I'm wanting to spend $15 a day. I usually wait at least a week before I raise the alarm bells and call into Google. And if you call into Google, just make sure you have that code at the top right hand corner. That's what they're going to ask for. So I usually wait a week because sometimes it takes a day, sometimes it takes a week. It is kind of hit and miss.

Nick Hudsonville Mike, considering the theory of innovation diffusion and the balance between early adopters and late adopters of technology, what's your your perspective on franchisees integrating AI into tools like QuickBooks for accounting, billing and operational processes? Do you believe the potential competitive advantage of early adoption outweighs the risk of unrefined systems? Or is it wiser to let the technology mature and adopt once best practices are est? How do you see this playing out specifically for Augusta franchisees, given the emphasis on systems and efficiency in our model? Wait for copilot. I hate waiting on my bookkeeper to reconcile and see where we are at. Really? Yeah. So like there's a lot of this already baked in. So for example, in QuickBooks, like this is what command center does a bunch creating rules and then you just make the rule where it automatically puts that type of transaction into the category. It can reduce your time spent on categorization by probably 80, 90%.

So like I think I paid, I want to say like 90 bucks for them to do my stuff last night. Yes. Time at command center. But like I have 15 categories and it's super simple. There's not a ton of debts and a bunch of bank cards and credit cards all, you know, a bank and you have a credit card, and it doesn't take them long, and they reconcile my bank with my bank and my credit cards. And so I know it's a solid balance sheet, but I think that, like, AI already exists. It's already scanning the transaction and seeing where it thinks it should be at. Create rules, do them where automatically applies them, and you'll save tons of time. So AI has already been in so many of these pieces of software for so long. There'll be other pieces of software that will brand themselves as. As AI, but it's already there, it's happening. It'll be a slower integration, I think, than most people think. I'm not, like, in any rush to do it.

So.

Yeah, as it comes, I'm looking at all of it. It's just a matter of what actually is going to make us more money. It needs to be very clear.

Just submitted the core. Oh, I got that one. Yep, I got that one, too. Oh, you got it. All right, cool. Looks like we've got all three of them. Sweet. Perfect. All right, everyone, have a fantastic Monday. I'm gonna go to an interview with Tommy Mello, so that'll be interesting. I have a few questions with him about organizational structure, general managers, salespeople and how they do things, their diversified locations, because they have it all broken up across the country. So that will be interesting. Looks like I'm losing Internet. All right, guys, you have a good one, and we'll see you tomorrow. Take.