Mike Minutes Mastermind 11/21/2023

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Hey, guest nation. Hope you're doing super well. Let's go and get things started.

Boom. Copy. If you always wonder why it takes me a second here is because I can't paste any links until things are live. So otherwise I'd be much more prepared on Facebook and YouTube. All right, we are back. Facebook is now live, allowing live streams again today. So we are back in business. All right, I just bought a thing on Amazon to make these way better, so I don't forget.

Which screen I'm presenting because it doesn't do a great job internally here. So next week the masterminds will be upgraded because I'll have all the questions right here and then I'll be able to still see what I'm actually presenting. So. All right, let's jump into it. We got questions. What have we got today? What have we got today?

Present.

See, that's it right there. Let's go. Cool. All right, four questions today. All right. Happy Tuesday. Let's rock and roll. Let me make sure my audio is good, though. Very good. Cool. All right, let's go. First one is from Mr. Anonymous. Dun, dun, dun. How are estimate. How are estimates calculated for CC Bill? If I send an estimate myself and. And if I set up an estimate myself and send it, does that count as a charged estimate on CC Bill? Nope. So we. This is. I don't know who this is, but like way back in the day, we charged a flat fee for every single estimate. The problem was the people who did a really, really good job of following the systems, they had to pay the same amount of people who did a lousy job and took way, way longer. So we wanted to incentivize people following the systems because if someone follows the systems, we might be able to do the estimate in a third of the time that it would take if someone's doing a bunch of humble jumbo and all over the place. So it is not by the estimate, it is by the minute. So if you send one out and we're not spending time on it, you don't need to worry about it. I would also say, though, however, sometimes when you get into try to do like one off little things like this, you might create more hurdles than anything for command center. In other words, if you're going to have them send out your estimates, let them send out your estimates. If you're just bopping in every once in a while, like every day you send out one or two and let the other four or five be set by command center. You can actually create a bigger bill for yourself. Because when they go in there they're going to get a notification that they need to send an estimate. They're going to go in there like why is this sent? And they're actually going to be like make sure it was sent. They're going to see who did it because they immediately think like oh, someone on the team sent it and then didn't like mark it off on our, on our system because we keep track of every single one they have to label their name on. Every single estimate's been going out and so they're going to do a little bit of self diagnosing and that's going to take time. So I would recommend either let Command center do them or you do them. Yeah, obviously there's one off times that are just way, you know, fringe that you might send something out. But I would, I would tend to if I was you to preserve wasted time at Command center is like either they send them all out or you send them all out. Trying to like help them by just sending one or two here and there could actually create more headache for them. Therefore higher cost for you because still by the minute. So it is not what it used to be back in the day which is like a per estimate fee because some estimates they can set out in two minutes, other estimates the exact same. But someone not following the Systems could take 10 minutes. It's not fair that the person that does it in two minutes has to pay, you know, what used to be $6 for the person on average. That is way outside the systems. And once we did that like estimate comments got way way better. So the number one way to reduce your estimate your estimates cost at Command center is estimate comments being standardized and fall in the system.

Max Harwood from Burnaby in my area properties are small. With the new mowing request form it would be fantastic. Have some smaller properties.

Depicted. Can a smaller stock image be added to each section on the form?

Oh, I see what you're saying. There's three options to every single one. There's also going to be aerial images added as well.

But like what I would recommend is let me think.

I, I see what you're saying. Like the large for you is like probably outside your like you don't even want to do it. What I would probably do is like keep small the one that you want do medium as like the smallest of the mediums because there's some pretty small mediums honestly in there. And then the large one you just make that one like really Big and have that where it is, you have to go out and visit the property and you can do that inside the form where just like if they click on large, it makes it where it's still just a regular estimate. And command center is going to either do over the phone or they're going to send you there for an in person quote. I would recommend that if you're really concerned.

Because otherwise if you make your large where it's like literally 5,000 square feet, you will not get anyone to accept outside of that.

Yeah, because there's three options right now. There are going to be aerial images, so you could pick from those as well. But I would be careful about making your, all of your properties look too close because you're going to have people click on the large when in reality they're actually a small. But like, because the house. The problem with the pictures right now is people are looking at the house and a lot of times they forget like, oh, like we're measuring the property. So what I would probably do if I was using Max is choose the smallest house in the images as a way to kind of like bring that buffer down. Because a lot of people when they look at the houses, they're looking at the size of the house. Unfortunately, we're going to be making it down the road where the aerial image and the front image kind of switch like this so they can see both. But we're not there yet. But I would just be careful about getting them all to be really small, like 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 square feet. Because to the person just quickly glancing at it, you want to be really obvious. And if the large ones are like way too big for you, make those where you have to go. Do a drive by estimate would be my recommendation. So really it's like small, medium and then anything that's large, you're going to just go through the regular estimate process.

Kyle Tarvin from Moore, Oklahoma. I know you follow up and closely watch a lot of your franchisees and what's going on in their businesses and their personal life. I'm curious to hear your answers. Do you have any critiques for things you see I'm doing nothing. Any feedback to get me to the next level? Looking for honest answers even though they're painful to hear. Wow. Okay.

This is going to create a trick over pull down effect of people asking for this, which is fine. So okay, Kyle, because you have asked for the bunt, honest truth. Here it comes.

Pause for dramatic effect. Okay, so I would say.

You need to look at it you need to have projections for. From your. For cash flow because you are running the business in a very.

Reactive state when it comes to cash. The reason I say this is because four months ago you were saying, you know, you don't have enough cash. You know, things are really, it was May of six months ago, sorry, super tight on cash. And you're really trying to like, we're down to pennies. And then a couple weeks ago, because of the ERC money that you got, now it's like, we got tons of cash. Like, what do we do? Like, the quote was flush with cash. I would create projections of cash that you need and really determine what distributable cash looks like in the business to prevent the reactivity of having cash or not having cash. And by having that, you will probably not have as many cash problems. And the downside will be protected because there's a really good problem to have when you're like flush with cash and you're like, where should I spend it? I want to protect the other side, which is, what do we do when there's not enough cash? So I have a plan in place for that. I'd also make sure that you have enough cash over the winter to prevent that from happening next spring because that caused a lot of headache. But all of this can be prevented by having projections. Knowing what you're going to be spending in terms of having the second location, like you did this year, project the fact that you're going to lose a gm project these things so that when you're flush on cash, you spend less of it because you're actually projecting what you're going need in the future. So that would be my honest critique.

Oh man. I think that's going to lead to other people asking, which is totally fine. I'm happy to give it. All right. This is also from Kyle. Hypothetical question. Looking for your thoughts on how you would go about this or if you would entertain this, let's say Chuck or Lee to move somewhere along the east coast next year to be close family. You don't currently have any competing locations back around this territory. You look in the market he is moving to and think it would be a great market to grow and set up multiple locations on the road. You'd ideally like to keep this person a long team, long term. Would you entertain setting a location for him to surround as gm? My thought process on this is that if I thought the person was valuable enough and you know, you could run the location without your 247 oversight, I didn't want to lose them. The market, they're moving to a solid and I had the money. Yes, I would do that. Curious what your thought process on this. The reason I'm asking is this could potentially be a situation for me down the road. If you could break down on why or why you wouldn't do this is great. I would really be careful about doing this too early in the stages of wealth. Like, yes, I would do this, but also right now.

If a location doesn't do well and I have to close it down or, like, it's not the end of the world for me. I do think a lot of people would jump to this in their second or third location, and that would be catastrophic. You know, if I started my 10th or my 20th, this is not a big deal. And I would just be careful about saying yes to this because people are going to hear that and be like, oh, like my. My really good employees moving to the other side of the world. I'm going to go ahead and like, let them start a location for me. I would give you about a 5% chance of success.

In that. In that event, if it's like your second location, if you haven't already worked with a lot of GMs, you haven't. You don't have a backup for that GM, you are walking down a very precarious road. So. But yes, I would personally, but I also not depending on that location, the success of myself financially.

And I can withstand a location that doesn't do well financially. I think a lot of people would hear me saying that, and they're like, oh, my second location could be remote. Highly. Do not recommend that.

So to answer your question directly, yes, I would. Um, I don't think most people should.

Until you're like, it's stage six or seven of growth. Robert from Modesto. With this week being Thanksgiving and the team being out of town for Thursday and Friday, what's the best course of action for the clients on those days? Some people just take Thursday off. Back in the day, that's what I used to do. Now I think they. I don't know if they did it. Valium shop. Sorry, I don't know. To be honest, I think they're coming back in on Fridays. I don't know. It really depends on the workload. Like, if you're only booked out a week or two, I'd probably give the guys off. If you're like, really, like, behind, you'd probably have to come in on Fridays and do like, catch up for the. The last Part of the, of the week, the challenging part for us is always like we're usually wrapping up mowing that week and if we, if we don't service the customer well on this week, they'll cancel before the end of mowing season, which is next week. So we're always kind of careful about that. That's why we try to take care of them. Because if we push them off to next week, that was probably their last mow. So every single location is really different in terms of taking the customers, taking care of the customers. You know, most of them are pretty forgiving. I would probably, if you're trying to just do Monday through Wednesday, I'd be canceling, I'd be canceling your project. So you can move everything from Thursday, Friday back to Wednesday. And most people are okay with that because they want their property looking good throughout the. Throughout Thanksgiving when all their family's over. So most people aren't going to complain if you come a day or two earlier than usual because they want their property to look good over the next few days. From a recurring maintenance standpoint.

How do we get the one click estimates from dashboard to edit them? How do we get the one click estimate dashboard? Liz put that in the.

Facebook group. She will listen to this and she can comment on this specifically, but I know she put it on the Facebook group. In terms of the document for you to be able to edit those.

Robert. I did. I just did not schedule work for Thursday Friday. In terms of projects, I only scheduled winter services during the week in order to get our regulars in and push off one time projects. Very cool. I'm guessing that is from.

Connor. All right, cool. Very cool. All right, that is it for today everyone. Have a fantastic Tuesday and we'll see you guys tomorrow.

I will do live masterminds on Friday so I'll probably do one even on Thursday. So feel free to keep putting questions and we'll keep answering them. All right, guys, take care. Have a good one.