Mike Minutes Mastermind 11/28/2022

Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing super well. Let's go ahead and get started. Let me just drop this in there and Facebook and put it here.

I hope everyone had a great long weekend. Drop this in here. Sorry. Boom. Okay.

Hope everyone had a great weekend. I always like long weekends because I am able to get caught up on stuff. I was able to go through my inbox and unsubscribe to a bazillion different spamming emails. It was fantastic.

Quite a bit of recording for the MBA course, which I haven't done in months. So it was a great weekend. I did a whole bunch of calls with some people in Bangladesh developers. It was a very, very productive weekend. I am feeling fantastic. Let's go ahead and get started.

A quick note as I pull this up for the questions. I think there's a few that came in.

If you have questions for me during the week and things like that, it is the best way to just leave the question on these masterminds. It really is. The only reason I say this is I probably had about 15 emails and responses throughout the weekend that were all just general questions that could be answered in the Mastermind and just more efficient. Because everyone else can learn from your question when I answer publicly versus if I'm doing one on one. So I don't mind answering 101. I always do. But just remember that if you have a general question that's like super personal, like you're going through something with your health or your marriage or something like that, just ask it on the Mastermind. Everyone else will benefit from it. If you're thinking it, probably 100, you know, at least 10 other people are too. So just more efficient form of communication for me, honestly. Um, so I would appreciate that tremendously. Instead of texting me, put it on the mastermind so that everyone can learn from it and I can give better responses in, you know, 20, 30 minutes versus trying to quickly text you while I'm driving or send you a voice note, et cetera. So, all right, let's jump into these. And I don't mind answering one on one questions. It's just, it's just not an efficient form of communication when they're general questions that everyone could learn from. All right, this is from Garrett. I'm starting some ads as leads have slowed down. I am realizing that even though I'm focusing ads on less than 3 mile radius, there is a lot more people in that area than I realized. Should I further reduce ad spend to fewer zip codes right now? Next spring should I only advertise in one zip code. 25% of recurring work is in this zip code. 25% of these other two zip codes. These other zip codes. Other zip codes where Thomas and I share yard space, but that's where Thomas's service area is. Other zip code is where my Google, my business verified address is. Okay, why is the reach on Google performance max 10x larger than the population? Okay, let's go ahead and open up these pictures. Let me see if it's worth trying to change this all around. Okay, I see you're just making graphs of this information you shared with me. Okay, that's good. Then you show me a map of Denver and those zip codes and then you show me the area inside. Okay, I gotcha, I gotcha. You're looking at the every door, direct mail radius for your numbers. Okay, one second.

Okay, and then you're looking at the Google reach. Got it. Okay, so I don't have a great answer in terms of the reach for the postal codes. That being said, keep in mind that when you put the zip codes inside of Google, it can include people that are there permanently. They're people that travel through because it's anyone inside that area. So if people like, are around it, they're usually going to get sucked into that zip code because they'll drive through it, they'll go to work in it, they'll go to the gym inside of it. And if there's ever a time when they're inside that zip code, they're going to get marketed to. So keep that in mind. There's ways to prevent that from happening in terms of your targeting. And.

Yeah, I don't have a great idea as to why it's 10x larger than the population. I would imagine it has something to do with it is drawing in everyone that's like been in that area, worked there, ever been there at all. So you would need to tweak your targeting a little bit and I would need to probably look at it to see exactly how to do that. There used to be, I know there used to be a way to be able to do targeting only homeowners and people that lived in the area. That no longer is a way ability. You can't, you can't do that on Google anymore. And so with all the privacy stuff and stuff in Congress, we're only going to get less and less tools for targeting. Honestly right now, and this is why TikTok is doing so well on their ad platform right now, is because they're new and so they're unre, it's less regulated. But like I still remember when the whole analytic Britannica, Analytica whatever thing happened with Facebook and all of a sudden they drew back on all of their targeting. Used to be a target by homeowner, used to be a target by income, used to be a target by renters. Like just a whole bunch of really cool stuff that you can't do on Facebook anymore. Same thing's going to happen with Google. But there are ways to kind of nail down on this stuff of why the population is so high. So just you look at your targeting and just see if there's ways to, to reduce that. And without looking at yours specifically, I can't do that. However, you could send me a video of you making this ad instead of just a screenshot of that one spot and I'd probably be able to say, hey, tweak this one thing and that'll bring it back down. Just the people living in that area. And I can't, don't quote me on this, but I think there's still a way to quickly do it and that is people that live in the area versus visit the area versus whoever have ever been in the area, etc. So I would have to take a look, a little closer look at that one. Sorry.

But in terms of what you were asking here, should I further reduce ad spend to fewer zip codes right now? I think the vast majority of us during the winter should.

Again, depends on how much money you have. But if you, if you don't have an unlimited supply of money, I would be looking at keeping powder dry during the winter and really focusing on farming the customers that you have, trying to upsell existing customers, one click estimate emails, a lot of that sort of thing. I'd be focused on that a lot during the winter because this spring you're going to want to keep some powder dry and we'll talk a lot more about it at conference. But it is going to get harder to get customers this coming spring and it's going to go to the best marketers and the people who are able to market during the spring versus the people who literally don't have enough money. And so a lot of people are going to be discouraged this coming winter or coming spring because in the past they literally threw up any sort of door hanger, any sort of ad and they'd get customers because like demand was so big and there's just a great economy for the past 12 years.

But now that's not going to happen. It's going to Go to the people who have great websites, who actually convert well, who have good copy on their ads, et cetera. So I would really try to keep your power dry. You're just going to have a higher impact during next spring rush if you can keep your marketing dollars for the spring rush. I know it's counterintuitive because you get to spring rush, you're so busy, it's like, well, I'm going to turn my ads off. So I would prefer in the perfect scenario that you gauge demand and realize it's gonna be crazy during spring rush, you higher up for that period of time. But now you focus on how do you be the most profitable? Because Instead of paying $150 customer acquisition cost, why not wait till spring? What do you have for 30 or $40 customer acquisition cost? And those are like real numbers. That's what it looks like. And so.

North Bend, I feel, I feel I've been very. I've been unproductive. Once the sun goes down, I've thought of getting some sort of jobs that I'm getting something done in this. What comes to mind for how I can move the business and P L forward in the evening? Yeah, like, I feel the same thing in our area, you know, it gets dark at 4:30, 4:00'. Clock. Whatever it is. Yeah, it's depressing, dude. In terms of the business, it's a little different. So like, I would say definitely work out during that time. You'll get yourself another three to four hours of really being productive even after it's. It's dark. In terms of moving the business forward, that would be a very general question. Whatever's gonna move the business forward in the day is gonna move the business forward at night. Whether or not you are personally able to be productive during that time is the variable. And I would say really it's gonna come down to monitoring food, sleep and exercise, the basics. So if you need to, I would suggest working out as it's getting dark to get your second. A second hit of dopamine and get re energized. So for me, like, if I eat or work out, I have another three to four hours of unlimited energy. I wouldn't say unlimited. A lot of energy. So if I ever need to push through, I just need to work out or eat in the evening and I'll be fine. So it just kicks all your chemicals back in your, like everything just goes back into overdrive. Especially as like you're. You're actually doing against your circadian rhythm. Because what's supposed to happen is it gets dark, you get tired, we don't have lights and computers and gyms to go to and you go to bed. And so this is what you know, people, scientists would argue about why our sleep schedules are so messed up is because we can stay up all night and have lights and all the rest of it. Totally true. However, if it's getting dark at 4 o', clock, you're not going to go to sleep. So what you might want to do is say okay, after work guys are going to leave. I can't work outside at dark anyways. I'm going to schedule to go to the gym around that 4, 5, 6 o' clock and I'll give me energy till 9, 10 o' clock easily. Like if you really work out hard for 10 minutes, all the chemicals in your body are right back to like 110% optimization. Like the same way as like it might be artificial. All those chemicals in the form of you did not actually get sleep, but your energy levels get re, like immediately re engaged. So if you do, if you do the 10 minutes of like hard high intensity interval training at 5 to 6 o', clock, I guarantee you have 3 to 4 hours of energy and then whatever productive is being done during the day for the biz is typically what needs to be done at night. So just.

So I've been talking to some franchisees in the colder climates and other than winter services, what could you would you recommend spending money money on during January, February we are at capacity for our crew can handle for snow removal. In the past we have just laid low during the winter. We also often get rain, snow that will freeze, not allowing us to do leaf cleanups. The business doesn't need the cash but any extra would just go into into growth in the spring as well as give our crew hours.

So this is the thing. When you talk about winter services, there's a wide variety of things they're talking about.

So what I'm assuming you're talking about is you already have winter services set up. There's no need, there's no more like you can't turn on winter services. You're already doing it. That's what I'm assuming you're talking about here. And so January, February is always tough because you can't really do Christmas lights. People are typically burnt out from the holidays and they got their house ready for the holidays if they cared about it. So you know if now you're really starting to wheel it down because if it's freezing and you can't do leaf cleanups. Again, even more of a, of a drag. So obviously if there's equipment maintenance that can fill up a little bit of time. But you're talking like a day. I always hate when people are like we're going to get the trucks ready and they have three trucks and it takes them a week for their whole crew to work on it. It does not take that long. I'm sorry. If you're going to spend an entire week for three or four employees on a couple trucks, you should just go hire a garage to do it. Like an actual mechanic that knows what they're doing because they'll get done way faster than you. But if you're like just tuning things up and it takes you a week, that's ridiculous for a couple trucks. But all of that to say, yeah, you just gotta get really creative, right? So for example, even if it is a matter of like putting ice melt out, right, you could literally do something where if there is just freezing happening, you could send a one click estimate email for putting salt down in people's driveways. And you don't need any fancy machinery, you just need a spreader and someone to put that out. You could do that. That's already part of winter services though. So your recurring customers are gonna be taken care of. But remember, that's a very small segment of your database. So your whole database, like a lot of times it's hard for us to.

This actually helped a little bit when I got away from the business daily operations is that we actually added a lot more things to the winter services list because I wasn't in it. And what happens is when you're in it, you don't recognize what problems you're solving for the customer. What I mean by that is because we every single day get in our boots and massive jackets and head out to our trucks and go work. We fail to realize that the average customer is 67 years old. They're putting on their nice, nice designer brand shoes and walking out to their nice car and they're going to experience different problems just in that little walk. Things like the steps being salted, things like the bushes not on the driveway. Like these little things that we don't see as problems because just of our everyday life and we are used to working versus them. Frozen. Anything frozen is an issue. For example, you could literally sell winterization of properties very simply. Things like putting the foam caps over the faucets. If you're in a freezing freeze is coming up, you put the foam things on the faucets put the foam things on crawl spaces. You could check the downspouts before a freeze. You could like there's a bunch of stuff you could do. It's just a matter of where's the problem, can you fix it? And then use your one click estimate email. I would not recommend using a lot of marketing dollars. There's no reason to try to convert a cold customer into a warm customer using marketing when there's low demand. Especially in a market where the economy is not doing well. Like people are trying to save money right now. They're not trying to find ways to spend money. A year, two years ago, people were looking to spend money. They're like oh my word, I have all this money, I need to spend it on my house. That's not going to happen anymore. So you've got to really take the existing customer base that you have and, and figure out what problems you can solve for them and get creative. And if you're just trying to give the gut crew more hours, you're not necessarily trying to be super profitable. Things like winterization of property is extremely valuable. I wouldn't go down the route of winterization of like bank owned properties. I have yet to see someone that really enjoys that unless they are by themselves. If you're solo, great way to stay busy during the winter is winterization of bank owned properties. Get with a property preservation management company. It's fine. Usually for solo operators when you start getting employees, it goes down downhill very quick because you might not get paid if you don't take one picture out of 200. So I wouldn't recommend that for the vast majority of people. I would focus on how do I take the couple thousand people in my database and sell them more based upon the problems they're having this time of year. You could literally have like you just got to get creative. Like.

Remember you have trucks and trailers too. So it's like for example, after Christmas holidays people's trash bins are like overflowing. You could literally just offer a service of hauling stuff to the dump for them one time. Is that gonna be a great money maker? No, but it'll probably keep your busy your guys busy for like three to four days. Just it's just how desperate are you to keep the guys busy and keeping in mind that you want to make sure there's plenty of time between when you're sending those type of emails versus a spring rush when you need people to click on those emails. You don't want to oversaturate your your list as well, and making sure that they're targeting needs that they actually have is important, so that way they don't unsubscribe from your email list.

Hi. Hi, Mike. I'm curious to know what, what would a bigger company like brightview think about this market here in El Paso? We're in a border town, cost of living is low, and we're in the desert. We don't have any huge companies that do lawn care here. Just curious to know if there's a reason and if that reason would be based on market research, since they have the means to spend on that. Thanks. I obviously don't know specifically why brightview hasn't come into El Paso other than that they do focus on full service, like everything that, that the property needs. And in El Paso, there's no grass, there's less irrigation compared to, like, if there's places with lots of grass. And so they're going after those type of markets. They.

They aren't right now based upon, I'm seeing, because I listen to earnings report reports, they're not super interested in starting new locations. They're buying people out. Like, that's what happens when you go public. You get a bunch of capital and then you, you'll buy people out. Like, so when Brickman and them came together.

And merged, then went public, that was like the big thing. Now they're worth billions of dollars. They take, you know, 4 or 500 million and go buy out other larger competitors just so they can see growth on their P and L because faster to do it that way. And so that's what I see them doing a lot of. But yeah, because you're a border town, you kind of limit somewhat of their, I, I think their desire to come in your market because they're not in a central, central place. You can draw more from labor. But I would say that's bigger. Bigger part of it is there's not the big money makers in your market like they would see in other areas in terms of more lawn, more irrigation, more chemicals, more snow. Like they make a killing on snow. So that's me. My, my guess, I have no idea. So cool. I don't think there's any other questions that came in. All right, everyone, hope you have a fantastic Monday. You have a great rest of your week, and we'll see you tomorrow. Take care.