Mike Minutes Mastermind 11/25/2022

Hey, everyone. Hope you're doing super well. Happy Black Friday. All right, let's jump in. I remember back in the day when Black Friday meant something. Nowadays, it's like we've been doing Black Friday sales since November 1st. So. Okay, couple things. Something I'm working on right now. This is just a project. This is a side project.

So don't hold me to it, but I am working with four people in Bangladesh right now.

And what I'm working on doing is something that we've always tried to figure out, or a lot of people have tried to figure out software. And that is basically how you.

Property and the square footage of the lawn without having to do it manually and doing it through a manual process of dropping pins. And there's definitely softwares out there. I have to switch WI FI networks. Give me one second, guys.

And we're back. So there's softwares out there that basically try to scan properties from satellite and then using the topography, figure out what is grass versus concrete versus the roof of the house and come up with a square footage based upon that. Very, very inaccurate. Because you have things like fields that start to get drawn in as grass. You got concrete that starts to be counted as grass. You have sheds and outhouses. You have. Flower beds are considered sometimes grass. And those. So they're very unpredictable. We've tried this multiple times, different softwares and testing it. And you have a. You have like 50% of your. Of the. Of the quotes come back accurate, and the other 50% are like, way off, way off. And they do a pretty good job of properties that are in, like, track neighborhoods, but outside of that, just absolute garbage.

So you can't have 50% of your estimates being like, not just off by $5, but like, off by $50. You can't have it. And people get mad because now they're getting a bid for $100 per week of lawn care when they should be like 40 bucks. So can't do that. You need to have like a 5% margin of error basically for it to be an acceptable use case. And 5% is typically usually around like a 3% when you are doing it manually. And the reason there's still errors because satellite images are old.

People mistake certain areas for grass, et cetera. So my thought was, I was thinking about this the other day. I was like, why would we try to figure out spending hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars trying to build a software to figure that out when we should just do it manually? And that is go get the data and Make a database out of it. So my test currently is how much does it cost for me to take a market and manually have people in Bangladesh.

Scrub data and literally do the measurements for us. So that way when someone goes to the ask for a quote for mowing and they put in their address, it says, oh, this address in our database based upon that square footage using the rate matrix, here's their prices and we know it's accurate. So don't hold me to it because I don't know if we're gonna be able to do it for everywhere. And I don't know what the numbers are yet, but I'm testing it. But I have a feeling.

For a few thousand dollars for each of our markets, I could probably get the.

Grass square footage and perimeter linear feet, the roof square footage and the perimeter for. For Christmas lights, the concrete, I. E. The driveway and the sidewalks square footage and perimeter, which also helps with things like pressure washing, edging, etc. I think I can do that for our markets for a couple thousand dollars max. So I am testing it out. I'll let you know how it goes. That's one piece of it. Then you got to build it where it's integrated into a software to where when someone puts it into the website, it actually checks the database. And that is a fast system. So that's a whole different level. But I'm working on it and it's something that I'll talk more about at conference. But I'm testing that currently so because in Bangladesh you get people to work for like two to five dollars an hour and they are thrilled to have the job they were up with with me last night and throughout this morning. So like they're literally available 24 7. They must have like notifications on to basically every time I text them, within seconds they're online and they're talking to me. So we'll see how that works out. Okay, let's see how this goes. See here, I think there are some questions that came in.

Cool. At conference, I do plan to talk more about my.

Sort of here we go kind of my vision of what software can be do and, and how. How we will play a role in that and kind of show them more.

Broader view of everything. Because I know I've said in the past, like in 10 to 15 years, software is what we're going to be focused on at conference. I'll go exactly over what those things are because I do have a pretty good idea of what. What needs to happen is just do we have the money and resources to actually make it happen. So be a lot to be said at conference. Was CC open yesterday? American Thanksgiving tried calling and kept ringing. Yes, it was closed a couple weeks back. Lonnie put the schedule on the Facebook group. However, we made a mistake and that is we didn't put where it automatically went to a voicemail. It just kept ringing and I apologize. So someone would have to stay in the line for a minute or two to get a voicemail. So I apologize are bad in the timing frame of Thursdays, it's supposed to keep ringing like usual and people pick it up and now it's like three to four seconds max. So we dropped the ball on that one. I apologize, but we were closed yesterday. We were open today.

What do you make of the threat of environmental policy changes? This could be things like local water restrictions, limits on gas powered equipment, restrictions on the number of residential lawns that can exist in the municipality because they are unnatural and a source of waste watering. I don't really worry about it because I can't control it. So whatever policies come down the pipe. Basically, just as they come down the pipe, deal with them and hopefully exploit them and hopefully do it in a way that it actually like the more restrictions that come in. So typically more government regulation leads to.

The rich are getting richer and the poor getting poorer because the rich figure out loopholes and getting around it. So like I'm not opposed to making random stupid policy changes because there's gonna be people that will get wiped out by them. So for example, if they say no gas powered equipment, there will be people that just can't handle figuring out how to switch and pivot. And if there's only a certain number of residential lawns, there will be people who have pivoted way from mowing it into residential property maintenance and blowing off and weed control and other services. So I just can't control environmental policy changes. Therefore I do not think about them at all.

That is the answer to that one. Okay.

Did you celebrate Thanksgiving? How is the world still working? It was a holiday. I love holidays because no one else is working. Okay, I think that's all we got for today. What a short day. Now you all can go Black Friday shopping. All right. Hope you all have a great Thanksgiving and I really can. As I'm getting ready for conference, I just can't wait to see you all. So please come to conference. As I said before, if financially it's a struggle, especially in your first year, I understand you're pumping things back in on your coaching call with Lee or Chuck, please demonstrate that need. We want to make sure you're able to be there if you want to, so I look forward to it. All right, guys, have a great day. Take care.