Mike Minutes Mastermind 11/19/2024

And we're live. Welcome, Augusta nation, to another Mike Mans mastermind. Let's get this party started. Happy Tuesday.

Get rolling here. I know I did have one. Coach let me know they submitted a question, so I know we have at least one. Let me jump into.

Okay.

Present. Share screen. Let's rock and roll.

All right.

As always, the form. The questionnaire is in the description. If you don't know where it's at, always feel free to submit a question there. Ricardo from Alexandria. Hey, Mike. I got a con. I got contacted by an agent selling an industrial lot. I've attached the flyer he sent over. A current tenant pays 3,500amonth, which is a lot. Is just a parking lot, but a container can be placed there. Etc. Don't think I'll go for it, especially since they want to sell it off. He told me to be asking for 1.9 million, which is insane. But if they go to lease it and pay that $3,500, I think it'd be worth it since it's located in the center of our territory. And in the next one or two years, I'll be looking at shop space for the truck. Except. Etc. What do you think? Not sure what to spawn with. Okay, so this is a picture of the listing. So $3,500 is not cheap. It's also in a very.

Urban area, so, like, it's mostly just parking. It's not like you have street.

Access. It looks like there's, like, an advertising opportunity here.

There's an industrial lot. I don't know if this is, like, a good street or not, or if you have, like, fence the whole place in or if it's already fenced. But $3,500 is not cheap.

At that rate. If you're doing less than 800,000, like, man, I'd be really trying to think about, like, k, Do I up my insurance and then just have the guys take the trucks home?

I think at that rate, that is a lot of money. 3, 500 is a lot. I really. I would start thinking about that.

Like, my Mount Vernon location. I think we do 500amonth. It's out on a farm. And for the Bellingham shop, we started at a thousand dollars a month for the first five years. And now he's ramped it up so now it's more expensive. It's like three grand. But I would never have got it for three grand originally.

And I honestly, like, as soon as I start getting above that $3,000 marker, as we speak, I start thinking about, okay, But I just pay more insurance and make this a benefit for the guys and have them take the trucks home and take some, you know, $3,000 a month, that's $36,000 a year. Let's say someone wrecks a truck every three or four years still might make sense. So that's a lot of money. It is in the center of your area. Sounds like, you know, I know you're market enough, Ricardo. Like real estate is extremely expensive. It's also very hard to find. So I just be careful. Just know that as soon as you start leasing or buying a piece of property, you're getting into a different business. You're spec, speculating if you're buying and if you are in a long term lease, you are also speculating that the owner's not going to sell this property from underneath you and then you're out looking again after spending the time, money and energy to get into this property. So I just be careful. That's a lot of money. I'd be looking for something cheaper. Even if you do need to drive in a little bit further or even giving it to my crew in the form of, you know, the trucks just going home and then we dump, we meet at another more generic place if the location is smaller now as you grow in size, because I'm talking about your current size, Ricardo, where you're at now, just a couple trucks. When you start getting a little more four or five trucks, that becomes something maybe you think about. But I would be careful at one or two trucks to be thinking one, two years down the road. In one or two years this property could be sold and now you don't have the property. So we don't want to completely engineer the business as it currently stands for what is going to be a need in one or two years.

All right, Dustin from Champaign with winter services, how important is it to pin the price close to the mowing price? We are hanging door hangers for winter services and we are averaging $67 on each door hanger for most neighborhoods, which is our new bi weekly rate after price increases. What we found in Bloomington the last two years since our offseason is so long, November to March is that generally by mid February, March there's not much going on, going on in the way of cleanups and the grass not growing yet. So we are not start, we cannot start that service up. This is partially why we include snow into ours as our demand when we need service to hopefully take the place of two to three events as we usually don't do much work by the end of winter services anyways. I found this a lot with winter service in general and that's after it snows. You really don't have much to do until it mo. The grass needs mowing unless there's a windstorm because usually once snow comes, it kind of like any leaves.

Any sort of growth of weeds, it completely stops. You sometimes have a little bit of cleanup of our bushes, like split open, things like that. But a lot of times there is that gap, so. Good point. Let's keep reading. Another thought I had was to start hanging door hangers with the weekly rate for bi weekly services. This will ensure we have work for all 10 visits, lowering the cost more than we already are, which would likely increase credit ratio but require more services sold to fill the schedule and decrease profit which really I'm not our goal with winter services anyways. Between our both. Between our both locations, I think we can safely say the biggest thing out things standing in our way for selling winter services, selling more winter services is the education behind them and teach the customer how and why it is such a good deal as we are pretty much the only company in either location that offers a year round service. Great to be the only one, but a pain to educate every customer. Thanks for your input on this. Excited for conference. Sounds like announcements around our winter track are coming. Yeah. So.

I would, I would experiment with this in terms of your pricing.

It's gonna be tough. So I would probably do door hangers. I do like a thousand at one price which is your bi weekly and a thousand at weekly and neighborhoods that are very close to each other on the same day or two. You gotta keep these variables the same otherwise this is a horrible split test. So same same timing, so around the same day or two, same area. So very, very close neighborhoods. You can't have it where they're completely different demographics. And I would test, okay, if I do 67 versus if I do 49 for example, what's the difference? How many more leads do I get? Is that worth it to be able to keep them all during winter and then just convert them into weekly? Right. So you could just. All you'd have to do on the Canva document price thing is like hey, your bi weekly winter services price converts into your weekly mowing price. That's fine, I'm not opposed to it. So it comes down to testing because to your point, let's just say out of a thousand door hangers you get three new customers at the higher rate and then you get two. Sorry at the lower rate and the two customers at the higher rate, which is that bi weekly, you're gonna make more money doing the bi weekly, not only like gross, but like profit. So I would test this before I do anything and I think this would be very, very area dependent in terms of that price flexibility. So test it out. If you all of a sudden do eight out of a thousand and then you do two out of a thousand, now has a real conversation. Maybe we just go ahead and do bi weekly services at weekly mowing rates for winter services, that's fine, just change it in your pricing doc and that would not be a problem.

Strictly hypothetical. I think this is the one from the coach. Okay, background. My wife and I have two locations, two GMs. I am the owner of the newer location. Okay, so this just so everyone knows this is written on behalf of someone else. This is what was a coach that was asking this on behalf of someone else. So that's why it's written a little bit strange. It looks like background. My wife and I have two locations, two GMs. I am the owner of the newer location. One location will end at 400K almost out of the wilderness. One location will end closer to the 250,000. Both locations are strapped for cash close ratio and attacking lead flow via door hangers and relentless follow ups have been lackluster. My focus has been on both locations. I feel my resources, my time and my GMs time could be better allocated. Do you see a restructuring? One person focused on operations and one focus on sales could be beneficial going into next year. We need to capitalize on the spring rush and capture as many mowing customers as possible.

Okay, so this is what I think is going on. This is tough because I don't know the GM very well and exactly the specifics. However, this is what I think is happening. What I would recommend. I think I've recommended this a couple people in the past and it's worked out pretty good when I feel like they probably jumped into their second location too soon.

And so we are getting, you know, we've seen this a couple happen a couple times. Lee has. And so now when people are starting chomping at the bit for a second location, we're like, hey, you should probably get through the wilderness before you think about doing a second location and making it, putting it into profit mode. So we define this a lot better. But in that first year or two, there are a couple people that did it and I saw what happened and I'm assuming it's one of these individuals. So what I've seen work well in this situation is this. We need to get one of the locations into profit mode, which is above $500,000 as fast as possible because it's going to fund the location that is literally entering the wilderness right now. So you have two locations in the wilderness. Bad news that you will be cash trapped. I don't need to know your profitability, I don't need to know your hourly rate, I don't need to know your gm. All of this to say you will not make money in these two locations at these sizes. This is what I would recommend doing. I'm going to guess that your general manager is not great at sales and this is not any shade on them. It is a matter of they are probably a great operational GM and a working GM and a great working GM that's good at operations is ideal for once a location has passed $500,000, leads are coming in organically and they're raising prices. They aren't having to do ads, they're not having to do sales, they don't have to do door knocking, they're not aggressively having to follow up because there's just so many leads coming in and just the organic leads alone are enough for you to be able to keep raising prices. So I would Recommend this in 2025. I would take sales on as the owner. I would make my general manager the operational GM for both locations. I would combine the two for six to nine months. I genuinely, genuinely believe that both of these locations will could like, I think your, your 400,000 location could easily get to 550 and I think your smaller location could easily get to 400,000 in 2025. And then in 2026 you put the GM back in as a GM of one location so they can stay focused on operations because they're going to spread, they're going to split very thin operationally trying to manage both locations. Especially if one gets to say 400,001 gets to say 600,000 like it's almost a million dollar business, they're going to spread very thin. However, they will do a better job at that then try to do sales and operations of a $400,000 business. And so what I would recommend in this case is you take over sales. I'm going to go out on a limb and say you're the better salesperson. And this is again, there's no shade being cast here. This is a matter of like, I've just seen this enough, I know it's going to happen here.

Most general managers are great at operations. They're not as good as the owner at sales. So you come in, you take over all sales of both locations. Yes, it's going to be more drive time. Yes, it's going to be a pain in the butt. And yes, your, your, your GM is potentially might feel like it's a demotion, but if you just get on the same page with them. Look, watch this. Like, hey, your operations, you're going to everything with the field, the crew, the equipment, etc. I'm going to do all things sales. Our goal is get this location 400,000 to at least 550 and then in 2026 we'll be able to turn the profit knob on. We're not buying any trucks, we're not buying any equipment, we're not hiring any more people. We're going to make it profitable and you're going to be the GM of that location as a working GM where you won't be as responsible as much for profitability or sorry for sales. Because if you can get another 150,000 on that of revenue in terms of new sales on that first location, you can throw the profit knob next year and at 550 then in 2026 make 600 or 625, but be very profitable. And so you would then stay with the secondary location, grow it from the 200 this year to 400,450 next year. And then you would do the exact same thing in 2026. You take the secondary location, get to 550 to 600, you throw it into Prof. The 2027, you'd be probably finding a general manager for that second location. So the challenging part is gonna be next year because you're gonna have to do sales across both and then you're gonna have him do operations across both. I feel like if you both are on the same page in your strengths and weaknesses and like how this is going to work, this can work out really well. He will make more money in 2026. 2025 for your GM is going to be a bit of a meh year because you're trying to grow at both locations significantly, like a lot. There's not gonna be a lot of profits. But if he can.

First location back to him at 550 to 600,000 because you would have fixed the sales part and then he can step in and just optimize it operationally and make really good profit sharing. So you're gonna have to get on the same page because Next year will be difficult to do that.

But I genuinely believe you are the better salesperson and I genuinely believe that your general manager will do better if you only. If he only has to focus on operations and doesn't have to focus on sales. And right now you're trying to do both. He's trying to do both and just. It just gets messy.

Marcus from Alamo Ranch, any holiday media for vistaprint coming out on or already on there would like to send out some thank you cards for all clients for this year. There's some thank you cards on there on vistaprint, like the like letter type situations. I have a few. I don't know if they're holiday things themed, but I know they're Max themed. So I know some people. What they'll do is they'll put cards, photo photos of their family in those cards. And like the holiday card has whatever on it. Feel free to use that. I don't think there's anything like, there's like writable letters inside there that are holiday themed. But you could always just use the Augusta Mac stuff, like him putting stuff on the lights, putting the lights up, putting the star on the tree. There's several of those. You could use him shoveling snow. Whatever you wanted to use in your. Not Alamo Ranch, you're not doing snow, but you could put Max putting it on the tree and then just make it on whatever card stock you wanted or letter. That's totally fine. That would just be the Max assets inside of the. The logo folder of the dashboard.

All right, everyone, I hope you have a fantastic Tuesday. We will see you tomorrow. Yeah, we'll see you tomorrow. Take care.