Mike Minutes Mastermind 11/20/2023

Hello, Gust Nation. Hope you're doing great. Happy Monday. My throat is a little messed up. Had a lot of talking last week at training. Then on the weekend, I had to make, like, 40, 50 videos. So let me turn up my microphone. Let's rock and roll.

All right.

The. Why is this not showing up?

Sorry? This is not showing up in Facebook like it should be.

All right, well, we're not gonna have the link on Facebook today, it looks like.

Why is it not opening up a live event inside of the Facebook group? Did I do something wrong?

Sorry, guys. This thing is so messed up. Okay, I'm just gonna drop this here. All right, let's rock and roll.

Questions? Mastermind. All right.

Okay. Wow, that took forever using that long. Okay, well, we got 12 questions today. Marathon Monday is back in full force.

All right, let's get started. You do this. That should add that back in there. Cool.

All right, first one's from Eric, Largo, Florida.

Are the thank you, first service postcards. Not on Pro Shop anymore looks. Looking for the ones I sent along with envelopes when I first joined the franchise. Perhaps they never were on the Pro Shop, but I thought I saw that one point. You'd have to send me a picture of which one you're talking about. Thank you, first service.

I do not recall which one you're talking about. Sorry about that, Eric. Send a picture to media augustalongerservices.com they can double check for you, though.

Eric from Largo, Florida. How has the command center team felt about having Max's help? I'm sure it's been a relief for the rush parts of the days and catching up the weekend with tickets instead of voicemails, but I imagine it is a little bit different picking up a call that Max has already started. Maybe it has been more seamless than I think. Yeah. Like, we made sure that Max either completes the call or immediately hands it off to command center. So.

Max answers the phone. If it's like, oh, I can't handle this, he simply says, great, let me go ahead and get that to the department for you. And they immediately are transferred to command Center. So it doesn't actually, from the customer perspective, they don't. They just think that they call in someone, answer their call immediately, and they're transferred to that correct department. And so.

Command center rarely has that problem. The only time there's ever, like, a bit of an awkwardness is if they do us. They complete a lead, and then at the end of the call, they throw some random monkey wrench at it. Like they ask about the franchise or do something that Max can't figure out and he can't figure out why, how it applies to the lead. Sometimes, sometimes that's when it's like, hey, let me go ahead and transfer that department. Because they've asked a question that like out of the typical sequence of asking questions, that's the only time right now you can really, really throw Max off.

So when that happens. Andrew from Delta Mike, with the heavy frost the last few days, what is the best way to handle lawn mowing this time of year? Should we have the crew go by our mowing customers and do cleanups in the morning instead of mowing the lawn? Or should I have an extra job booked for the crew can start then go mow lawns later in the day after the frost has lifted?

Yeah, ideally you could have later start times. The problem with right now is you're going to be running into darkness. And so in the perfect world, you would have sent your.

Opt out for your winter services. And so it'd be a matter of like, hey, if they get to the property, it's full of frost. Like hey, trim the bushes, pull some weeds. Like just transition into winter services. Now would be fine and, but otherwise, yeah, like I. In the perfect world, you do that. But honestly, we will still cut lawns in the frost.

Like unless it's like literally looks like snow. But we're still gonna cut the lawn.

For us. We know like right now it's the reason there's frost this time of year. We know it's gonna be a nice warm day. So typically we're okay. You get into some trouble if you get like a heavy rain and then it freezes and then some like ice can kind of damage it. But we've always just, we just know, we don't, we don't ever stop.

Again. This is our market, so everyone just keep that in context. Kyle Tarvin, Oklahoma. With the passing of Coven, it seems like there's a lot of stimulus money being thrown around. Besides erc, are there any other Grant Simmons program we should look at? Not anything specific. I saw you able to get yours, your erc, your money.

Kyle, so that's awesome. Good for you, man. But really nothing specific? No, that money, like that's like a, that's like two and a half year old program or two year old program too. So it's not necessarily new, it's just you kind of gotten the very end of that ERC money. That's good.

Alexi from Stanwood, the Evergrow Marketing presentation is now missing from the Louisville conference video playlist Cure if it was removed for a reason or if it's just a pickup. YouTube says one unavailable is hidden. Now.

Send an email to mediagustalongerservice.com I I know I looked at last week so I don't think it's hidden. We definitely didn't hit it hide it for any reason. Number two, most of our yellow subs are from recurring gardening full maintenance service clients. It's hard to keep those customers. We are charging 85 an hour and the customers expect great quality which we cannot deliver. Do you know of any locations that do great with gardening services? Is there a secret sauce? I don't think I can guarantee the quality without personally being in the field. And I am on a trajectory of discounting the service. There's a lot of demand. I can sell the service. We cannot execute it. Well I would. I would really make sure that your guys are on P4P and yellow slips start to really really hurt. If it means if and even if you charge so much on it like you charge say a hundred dollars an hour for that well now all of a sudden the guys can make really good money. But if they're making yellow slips it just cuts them really deep. So I would probably go the direction of raise your rates on P4P. The guys now are super incentivized but if there's yellow subsidy they have even more gouging coming from their P4P. So I wouldn't discount the service that's for sure. I would go ahead and if you think you tons of demand you can sell it raise the rates so that your guys just Crush it on P4P but then when they make mistakes and they have to go back and there's callbacks it's going to really really hurt them.

Alexi says Sorry it looks like the marketing video is still there. Good. Yeah, that's what I thought. Number seven Dustin from champagne.

So I was thinking over the weekend which is generally dangerous but I was wondering when we should lean into marketing the cool stuff we offer for.

To non customers. I think the main thing I'm alluding to is our instant quotes on our website for mowing. Is it worth creating a video tutorial on marketing that shows this offer prospective clients it could be up be and fast to not lose attention but format like a mastermind or copilot university videos with screen share. Am I overthinking this or are we just hoping someone stumbles on that portion of our website and Utilizes it. I think we overthink this part because, like we are, we think it's really cool about how we get the estimate form and it's instant. Like, business owners would probably think it's really cool and comment how awesome it is. Customers that need the service, they are simply going to choose the path of least resistance and they're going to go to the service. They can get that service for them as quickly as possible. And we just hope that we do that. I don't think advert, like promoting how we do that is important. Like, I don't really care how the chef in the back is preparing my food. I just want to know that when it comes to me, it's fast and it's the best stuff ever. Like, I just want to be like, that was so incredible. I don't go back because the way that they cut the onions, I go back because the taste of the food was amazing. And so I think we've got to focus on the taste of the food being amazing. That is the service that is getting them very, very quick. Faster than all of our competitors answering the phone immediately. I think we got to focus on all those things because that's why people will come back, that's they'll sign up for our service. It's not going to be because of how we get that done for them. I don't know why.

But I don't know if this is going live correctly. Sorry, I just have zero viewers. Like, this is not working very well. I don't know what's going on.

Okay, well, I'm gonna finish these out and then hopefully it's recording at least. It's super weird. Okay.

I don't think, I don't think think it corrected created the live streams correctly on YouTube and Facebook. Dustin from Champagne. I'll be switching one of my locations to Copilot this week and I'm sure I have more questions and I'm sure I will have more questions in regards to your recommended settings, but this is the first one. There's a section in Copilot where you can tack on late fees to invoices. Would you recommend doing this without follow up process? I did this prior to joining Gusta and magically when someone gets charged a late fee on their second or first invoice, it would rarely happen again. Thoughts? Yeah, I, I'm. That's why we have late fees in there and we actually base an overdue invoice based upon having late fees. So I recommend having late fees. Ideally though, you have the credit Card requirement to where they can't even accept the estimate without having a card on file, so it should eliminate that more.

Hudsonville. Nick Davidson. Hey, Mike, I'm experiencing concerns with our current pricing strategy for commercial accounts. I've noticed we're losing estimate acceptance due to our increased budget and man hours, resulting in higher prices. Unlike residential accounts, we have fewer estimates to gouge our close ratios. So I'm relying more on gut feeling and conversions with these customers. Given that our team spends several hours on site for big jobs, reducing travel time and considering adjusting our budget hours to lower our rates, this might impact our pay for performance system, which we aim for $85 an hour. What's your advice on this? Should we reduce our man hour rate to retain customers or maintain our current pricing except the potential losses on customers? My instinct is lower prices, but I'm. I appreciate your guidance on the best approach for your. For our business, this is the time of year where we are negotiating new and renewals of contracts. Yeah. So I'm okay with contracts if you are staying at a project for more than three hours a day. Typically that's when I'm like, hey, it's okay to bring your hourly rate down. Now bring your hourly rate down or decreasing budget hours. Same exact thing. All right. The reason I would potentially go through the extra hassle of having a secondary rate for commercial work is the fact that your budget hours, you want them to be accurate. You don't want your guys to know that you're like skinny on all the budget hours for commercial work. And then like on residential, there's lots of time. You don't want that. So I would recommend if you're shooting for 85aman hour for residential and you're like, oh, like we've got to be lower on commercial. Great. Do 75 or 70 or whatever you think you got to do. I think you can do that because you have less drive time and there's less.

No wasted time driving around on commercial jobs. I think you can afford a lower rate, but I would recommend adjusting your rate and not adjusting your budgeted hours because you want budget hours to always be accurate so the guys trust it. Oh, there's a picture. We got a picture, folks. Let's see what this is.

Oh, man. Gotta love it.

All right, let's see here. Share.

All right, next one. Augusta Long Care, Modesto. Can you please list the GM job dues at Bellingham location? This is all inside of the Google Drive on the academy. There's a document for general managers and lists off what they should be doing daily, weekly, etc. For trying to figure out profit sharing percentage for our Tracy locations.

Job duties GM's current Sally current revenue 11,000 should the digital cash. What should they distributable cash. Yeah. This is all inside of the academy. There's two videos that walk through general manager salaries and and how I set my locations as a benchmark. Potentially highly recommend watching those. It'll answer all these questions. It also has a checklist of all the duties that are required from a working GM, a starter, etc.

For at the end of what months do you recommend doing distributed cash? I typically like just doing fiscal quarters. So that would be, you know, the end of March, end of June, end of the.

September, and the end of the year December. So that's usually the easiest in terms of distributions because fiscal it doesn't change. Super easy. Good stuff. So, all right. I don't know why this stream was not working. Like, literally one person was in here, so I hope that recorded it at least. And I'll put it up in the Facebook group, but Facebook's been super weird today. I don't know if their servers are down or something, but I wasn't able to live stream in there. That's probably why. So we will see you guys.

Yeah, I don't know what's going on. All right, I'll. I'll just post this video, I think as a recording. We'll see you guys later.