Mike Minutes Mastermind 11/27/2023

And we're live. Hey everyone, hope you're doing amazing. Let's go ahead and get this party started. Get this rolling in YouTube.

Let's see here.

This morning has been just short of a mitigated disaster, but such is life.

Essentially. Saturday night we were going to deploy everything on aws. A couple things we. Hey, we're just push it off till Saturday. Sunday night. Worked on it all Sunday. Sunday night. P4P server didn't want to come across taking too long. We couldn't keep the site down. So we're gonna have to do it tonight. Guess what? The one server that PPP was relying on inside of Liquid Web decided it didn't want to boot up this morning. Ridiculous. Slowed everything down to a crawling halt. The one goofball server. All right, sorry, I'm stalling as I get this link all set up for you guys. Copy Facebook.

So that was not fun, dude. When you call into Liquid Web is our old hosting service. And I called in and they were like, yeah, we're gonna reboot it. Like, are you serious? Anyways.

We should have everything by this evening into aws, which will be much better not to deal with these shenanigans.

So let's get started. So I do apologize if that created any sort of headache this morning. For about 15 minutes it was having an issue. Really slowed everyone down at command center too. So I apologize for that.

All right, it is marathon Monday. Let's see what we got for questions.

There we go. Oh, my settings have been fixed. Thank you. Let's go. All right now.

First question. We have five today. Christian from Wesley Chapel. Where can I find our franchise number?

I assume you mean like your location number that's going to be in your franchise disclosure documents that you receive from the attorney. It'll be in there. If you're on a coaching call, they can give it to you then as well. We have a number assigned to every single location, but we don't refer to them. We refer to everyone by their name, which is very difficult sometimes. I'm not gonna lie because we have like three or four some different locations names now. But we try to do that just so it's not like we know everybody. Numbers. I don't like that. Kyle Tarvin from Moore, Oklahoma. Multi part question typing. As I'm trying to wrap my head around my idea here, you have mentioned multiple times before that if you have an all star team member, you want to give them challenges and move them into new roles to keep them engaged, also to keep them on the team. Long term, how do you go about moving them into a role or business that one you may not necessarily need right now two. You may not be able to afford to pay them what they are worth in that role three. You may not have direct experience in I know you have started different things like built for business, home service, epa, etc to give team members latitude to grow and expand their wings. I guess I'm trying to figure out when is the right time to diversify and make up a new role or business venture for them. Strongly suggesting considering moving one of our current strong team members into a new startup business and allow them to grow that alongside our lawn locations. How do you just take the leap and start up something from new when is the right time? Okay, this is a good question.

The delineation between the ones that have been successful for me and the ones that have not been successful for me depend on whether or not they are close enough to the core competency of lawn care landscaping. So some of you might have remember from conference a couple years ago when we had it in Ferndale and we had a really really good caterer named Charity. She is like semi like distantly related to me, right? But she's a crazy good cook and she's also really good hard worker. So way back in the day I was gonna do Reset just like four years ago. Three, four years ago I was gonna do this thing called Reset and it was in part because I knew she would be a great operator, work CR and I figured, oh, I'd do this is way too far out. Core competency of lawn care landscaping and service based business. And it's very different. Now do I have skills in running a gym, et cetera? Yes. But as a franchisee, not as a franchisor or as just an independent, which is a completely different business once you've gone in. Like, because I own Anytime Fitness does not mean I can go start my own independent gym. I really, I really do believe that because I would not have all the systems and procedures they've given me and I would actually not have as much. Like there are so many times people leave Anytime Fitness and they're like, oh, I could do this by myself without having to pay, you know, 10 to 12% royalty. And sure enough, they don't do well. So.

You know, I, I thought hey, I have enough experience, the whole gym thing and 24 7, I'll take a great operator. Let's go. I wasted well over a hundred thousand dollars on that, mostly because I had to pay $75,000 to get out of a five year lease that I had signed.

So those sort of ones have always done poorly. The ones that have done well are the ones where it's like, okay, how can I take my current infrastructure and either speed it up or move people up inside the companies? So.

For example, like we got built for business was, was for Christian. Oh, he's gonna hear me. That's horrible. Vote for business was Christian. But then it was a matter of like he needed, he needed to be able to get more hours, make more money for the family. Their, their lives were changing in, in his family. So I was like, hey, I can accommodate this in copilot, right? I didn't, I didn't go create a new business vertical. There was just a position inside the company. So those are the ones that typically do the best and giving someone more responsibility, that one works well. Giving them a new position inside the company, that one works well. I have usually been tripped up when I go do quote unquote startup things. So I would be hesitant on that because that's usually the one I see people messing up on. And I, I did too. But for example, if I see someone who has a ton of skill, like I like, for example, with Chuck, like the biggest reason we started location this year, yes, we wanted to prove the executive model. Yes, we wanted to do make a lot of mistakes so that we can train people on GMs better. Also, I wanted to keep him and I knew he would not want to be a GM for the next 10 years of his life. And so.

You know, Corey, for example, like, I think within five to 10 years, like, I think he's gonna crush it in Bellingham and he'll make really, really good money and it'll be a matter of like, in 10 years he'll be like, hey, like, you know, he'll probably have a family and he'll probably be like, hey, I want to do something different and I'll probably have a spot to move him into the franchise or something like that. So I don't try, I don't like, try to go too far ahead though in terms of like, this is where I want these people to move into because I don't know what their life is going to change and I don't have any control over that. My goal is to build the businesses in a way that we can promote from within. And so far my track record has been that we don't, we don't bring people from the outside to fill, locate, fill positions that are higher up in the company. I always take from people from within. Will that change up at some point? Potentially. But ideally there are people inside the company are growing fast enough to the point when the company grows they're able to move in those those areas. So I would be much more looking at like general managers, regional managers and trying to move people up into that starter positions. Like we created a starter role simply because Connor is, it was an awesome gm. I don't really have the spot to move him into regional but he's going to be a great starter. He's going to get a bunch of locations under his belt and he'll probably move into regional manager position really easily because after starting several locations and we have other GMs are doing the same thing.

So the goal is like I want them to be on as fast a pace of educating themselves as possible and ideally I can move them up within the company.

Not only to retain their talent because I actually think it's in their best interest and then if it's not, I'll let them know. So there's been GMs I tell like hey you should, you should move along not because you're bad but because like we can't grow fast enough for you. There's other GMs where I feel like if they stay with us for five or ten years they make way more money and have a huge amount of notoriety that they could take along with underneath mine and Augusta's brand and they'll make way more money in the long like the 10 year term if they stuck it out. So just being individualizing, individualizing those plans of success for, for your team members is important and without knowing the person you're talking about specifically, I can't like give direct advice because it is very personalized in my opinion.

Jason Storts.

As you know we are currently using Jobber and looking forward to switching to Copilot as we are transitioning over. Should we use our existing Stripe account and just set it up for another business? Would all the card info transfer over if we do so? Thanks for your help Mike. Okay, so.

In the Copilot CRM Facebook group on the weekend I did a we call office hours and this came up. So here's the deal. Stripe has told us that if you have an existing jobber, yard book, etc. Account inside stripe and you want to move over to Copilot that you can connect using tokens. This the system. If you want to give that a shot, go for it. I would actually really really appreciate if someone was willing to go out and do this the reason I am not suggesting it is because I don't know the downstream effects of in a year when that card gets declined. What happens, what happens when that card get expires? I don't know what's going to carry over. And so this is why you have not heard me talking about this. Although Stripe has told us that can be done. I have not gone around saying if you're in Jobber, if you're. Because if it was I would probably target these people on Facebook and be like you guys can literally move all your accounts over and get all your paint, keep your payment information.

They have told us we can do that. I have not seen it happen for a year or two to where I'm like this is not in addition not gonna be any downstream bad term effects of this.

When it comes to chargebacks. Expired cards.

Overcharges on cards like non sufficient funds. I just haven't seen enough data for me to be like you can do this. So personally, what I've always said for the past several months as this has become more of an issue is I just recommend creating a new business inside of your current Stripe account. So you don't need to actually create a new Stripe account. You can just go to the top left, start a new business, do it as Augusta and start processing from there. And then to your customer, to your customers, you're going to literally send them in your invoice email a link that says hey, like make sure you set up this is what I would recommend your invoice email. If you're really concerned about this in the, in the subject you could literally just put like payment.

Method expired and they will open up that email, they'll open up that email, they'll go to the link, they'll put the card on file, they're not going to do it if you're not offering services throughout the winter. So just wait for spring for those customers and then adjust your automations to be a little more accommodating the first couple weeks to get that information on file. But I really believe that subject email an email subject that says payment method expired, please update is going to get a lot of opens.

And it's pretty simple to add. So to answer your question, according to Stripe, because there's token, the the customers are tokenized. Yes, you can do this. I have not recommended this and continue to not recommend it because I haven't seen the downstream effects of this over the next few years. And that's really what I need to be able to confidently tell you this without.

You know, in six months you, you know be like, yo, all of our non sufficient funds aren't going through. It's saying paid inside of Copilot, but it's not going through correctly on Stripe. I don't want that to happen. So I am reducing my liability by, by giving you kind of the PC answer which I just know will work. So.

Jason sorts Mike, I've been communicating with Stripe and they are saying we can use the same account but it depends on the CRM as to whether customer info will transfer. They seem open to helping that happen if it is, if it is at all, if it is doable at all. Here's my last response for them. Since you need to reach out the third party platform, what I can do is temporarily leave the case open for now. I'd like, I'd appreciate if you could keep me posted as to what you hear back from them. In any case, they're having issues along the way. You may advise them to reach out to us with a dual approach to expedite the resolution of your concern. Let me know your thoughts. Okay. If you have a direct person that's actually just said this, like an actual person, Jason, if you could email me franchisegustalongerservices.com I would appreciate it because we have been, we've had a hard time nailing them down in this last part and that's like a dual approach. They've more or less just been like contact support. And this is the problem I've had with them in the past is they tell us, they tell our members like oh, talk to Copilot and like, well, what are we going to do? Like it's two Stripe accounts. We need you guys to help connect. So if you have an actual person that you've been in touch with, please let me know. I know this would be helpful for people that are moving over and it. We've just, we've had a hard time nailing them down in terms of support. Like a certain person that can actually walk us through this. You could also potentially have like two customers and like test it out yourself. And I can actually like if you have a card, get it close to the limit, like make sure it goes it works correctly and move their account over from your old Stripe account to your new one and connect in the copilot, etc. So just in case they start talking about it's called Stripe Connect. So we create an account called Stripe Connect that basically allows us to connect our users with Stripe. So that's why? From Copilot's perspective, you just literally put your login information in and we connect it to your Stripe account. But really the money's actually going through our account at Copilot.

So they might start talking about Stripe Connect. That's us. And so if they need anything from us, let us know. But if you have their contact directly, Jason, let me know and I can see what I can do to set up a meeting or whatever we can do for them. But they've just been tough to nail down and actually get stuff done, which I understand. They're big.

All right.

I still have yet to figure out how to say this word through a city. Iowa. Let's go.

Hello, Mike, If A customer owns $4,200 in invoice, what's the best way to handle this? Send it to the collection or make a small claim? We have been sending her emails, texts, and phones saying that she is overdue, but she doesn't respond. Dated invoice is set to September 26th. Okay, so you're basically two months now.

If you have mailed it to her. So if you text and phone call, that's great. But if you can mail it to her or go to her house, I would recommend this.

The one way. One time I went to a person's house in person and basically said, like, hey, like, I'm not leaving until you pay this. And if you don't pay it, I'm going to be making a claim on your property. Like, I'll be leaving here and going to the city. So sometimes just going in person, that'll be enough.

Otherwise, you know, putting a lien on someone's property gets their attention, but usually it doesn't really make of an effect until they try to sell their property. So they. So a lot of times it doesn't do a whole lot. So that's why collections is usually the best thing that affects their credit score, which people need more often. Typically every time someone applies for rent, applies to rent a place out, buy a house, you know, get any sort of loan, that's when their credit comes into play. But that's why some people, even with going to collection, they don't care is because they won't care until their credit score is affected, and they won't even feel the effect of their credit score being affected until the next time they try to get a loan or something else like that. So, but, you know, a lean is helpful as a threat sometimes if you're going in person to their house like that usual, get them to Move.

So cool. All right, plan of action from the days mastermind. Jason, if you can send me that contact that you have from Stripe, I would appreciate it, especially if it's a real human being and we'll see what we can do on our end. We've just really had a tough time nailing them down. And I just. You have not heard me talk about it because I just haven't seen the downstream effects. And I don't want people have 2000 contacts in stripe that don't update credit card information, don't get non sufficient funds correctly, etc. I think that would be such a headache for me. I'm right now just telling everyone, just go get new credit card information. I have it connected through Copilot that way. How hard would it be to put a lien on in Washington state? I have, I have hard. I have had hardly anyone respond to collections all year. Contact your local city.

And every city is a little different even in Washington in terms of how, how to put a lien. Just search like your city name mechanics lien in your area and you should be have a good process for that. Typically like you go to the courthouse and fill out paperwork or whatever. Sometimes they did do it digitally depending. Every city is so different it's kind of annoying. So Bellingham, like where we're at is decent, but you got to go in person, you got to fill out the information, blah blah, blah. So.

And it's yeah, paperwork. Gotta love it. All right, I think that's all I got for today. I do apologize for any inconvenience this morning about for 15, 20 minutes copilot was just dragging along. So we immediately got.

To restart that server. Seems to be better now. Tonight we will complete that last server coming over AWS which will just give us so much flexibility. Um, they're just so much like it'll just be so much better. It's funny, this morning I woke up at like 4 or something and I look at the at Facebook and like literally there's two posts. One post is like when you slow down at Copilot, less features deploy like once a month instead of weekly. The next one is like just can't wait for job cost to come out. Just like eagerly waiting had like a picture of from the office of Jim like eagerly waiting to the through the blinds.

So I was talking to the internal team basically being like if you asked, if you asked, it was like what Henry Ford says. He said if you would have asked people what they wanted, he people would have said they wanted A faster horse. And they didn't because they didn't even know what the car could do for them. And so what I was telling our internal team is we need to be able to give the stability of the faster horse, I. E. More stable system, less bug, et cetera, but then build the infrastructure of the car so they can see how much it helps their business. Things like upsell features and job costing features and all the things we're trying to build. But because we've been moving so quickly and trying to innovate, like ie, create the car is we created issues with the horse. And so we've just said from the beginning it's going to be like that till the end of 2023. So as much as I have said that and I've been trying to be very clear about that, it still hurts when the horse gets crippled or, you know, has a spur in its hoof or something crazy like that. But that's kind of the direction we're going. Like this year we're this still the next four weeks, we're still really trying to get a lot in and moving really fast. And then we have launched Darkly Beta group ready to go for January.

And moving to AWS will just mean we're so much better, both faster and more reliable. And so for example, like this morning, we could have had a redundant server in three different time zones. So if one goes down, we immediately pick it up in another and it wouldn't even affect anyone. And furthermore, when you have redundant servers, the closer a server is to you, the faster your load speed. So if we have four servers across the US it'll massively impact your load speed if you would otherwise been far away. So for example, if there's a server in Arizona and you're in California, it'll be a faster load time in California compared to Maine. But if I have four servers across the US where it's all redundant, it'll reduce someone's load time like 30, 40% simply because there's more servers in the US that are closer to them them. And we're talking about milliseconds for every single page load. But you think about how many page loads you and your crew have every day, it adds up very fast. So these are the type of things why we're switching over to aws. So anyways, all right folks, have a fantastic day. Don't worry about aws, just keep kicking butt and big shout out to everyone that's really gone all in on winter services. I know some people are just selling them left and right and literally growing their book of business. So I'm super stoked about that. Augusta Winter Services has begun, and it's time to switch into that. That sales mode. So congrats to everyone that's just kicking butt. That makes me very, very happy, and I think you're going to see massive results if you can switch that mindset over the next couple months. All right, everyone, have a fantastic day. We will see you tomorrow on Tuesday.