Mike Minutes Mastermind 11/28/2023

Ladies and gentlemen, Augusta Nation welcome another episode of Mike Mintz Mastermind. Let's go and get started. Let me drop this bad boy into the facey book you are. There it is.

Bam.

All right. Let's rock and roll, folks.

What a day.

Present Share screen. And we're live.

Cool. All right. Kyle Tarvin from Moore, Oklahoma. First question. This is piggybacking off of my question from yesterday regarding moving key employees in a new position and business ventures. To give you more context, I've been seriously considering starting up a home cleaning company. Seems like a simple business to get into is basically or just selling labor like our lawn business. I have a single team member that I think would work well in the role. Yesterday you mentioned to stay in something lawn care related or service based. In my opinion, cleaning business would be too much of a stretch outside of lawn care because being in the home instead of outside of it. The reason I've started looking at other companies. Our work is drying up this time of year. We have been consistently putting our winter service and Christmas light door hangers but haven't got much interest. We do regular one click estimates and those have been dropping off too.

We basically have two weeks of the month filled with work and two weeks off. I like to keep my main crew busy this winter, but not but don't necessarily want to keep banging my head against the wall by trying to sell services. Doesn't seem like people want right now. I think I could get into the business for a few thousand dollars and see what happens. Am I being too optimistic? I'm just conflicted because I know we can make this profitable. But I don't want to divert too much resources away from growing our locations. Just tired of sitting around two weeks a month. Okay. All right, all right, all right, Kyle. I will give you my blunt and honest opinion. All right. I think this is a bad idea. I know enough about you, I know enough about your business and I know about enough about cleaning industry to know this is in my personal opinion. I could, I could gloss over this and like give the pros and the cons. But for you personally, I think it's a bad idea. You are not in the stage of growth and sorry, the stage of wealth for Augustus to start diversifying. That is stage seven. Okay. The reason that I made the stages of wealth is because I know that people do that outside out of order. They risk financial, psychological and emotional damage. That's just the truth because I tried to do cleaning too soon as well. We hit like 6, 700,000 annual revenue I was like, augusta Cleaning Services totally makes sense.

It does 100%. Just not alongside a business that's not in stage seven of wealth, which is diversification, which means you've got to get through the other, all the other stages, which the very first stage of wealth is grow the business to $500,000 in revenue. Okay, So I think you've probably checked that one off. Continue down that list. There's five other stages. I personally don't believe you're ready for that. You haven't had a spring rush yet that you've crushed. This is why, like at Command center, we only care about one thing right now. Crush the spring rush. That is the only thing we care about. Because until we do that, we're not going to offer things that we think we could really help a lot of the owners of a guest nation. We're not going to add more services. It's like, we must crush the stinking rush. And so.

I would recommend getting one year under your belt because this is the thing right now. You have this person in your mind. They might not be with you in six months. If you spend the next two, three months of your attention on starting a cleaning business, I'll just let you know that cleaning is also seasonal and it also perfectly aligns with mowing. Spring rush is the equivalent inside of the spring the cleaning industry. So you're literally getting the exact same demand curve. Right. It'd be different if you're like, we're focusing on something else that's very winter related, starts to make a little more sense. You are literally getting into an industry, cleaning, which is exactly correlated with mowing.

So I don't usually make hard to find. I don't think someone should do something. But I would strongly recommend you take what you've had in the past few months of like lots of profit, you have money in the bank and go crush next spring. Now this one person that you're trying to retain, whether it be, I would rather you pay them a little extra money this year just to retain them, not go spend three or $4,000 and getting started and then marketing dollars and then be in the middle of next spring rush and not be able to capitalize on your lawn care business. That should be purring because it's your third year versus now. Your split attention makes both of them fail. So I, I cannot, I have 99.9% certainty in my answer on this and I understand that not having work for two weeks is tough. I understand you're trying to retain one person, but if you do all of this and then literally in July next year, after going through a spring rush with diverted attention, that person quits because they can. Now all of a sudden you've built a business around one person in an industry you don't really know a whole lot about and you have now wasted a spring rush that if you would have just focused on the one thing, you would have done much, much better. So I like I am so confident on this answer. I cannot express just how confident I am because I did it myself. And fortunately within three months I realized I had made a mistake. And I quickly sold off the equipment and the van, little Ford Transit thing I bought and all the rest of it and got out of it. So I understand the logic on all of this stuff in terms of why you do it, but trust me, spring rush for mowing, for mowing and cleaning is almost identical. So I just got back from a pressure washing company and window cleaning company and their spring rush directly correlates with their mowing.

Kyle Freeze from Bloomington.

I see the three year program is a huge benefit to being part of Augusta and to my knowledge seems to really differentiate the franchise. Could you ever see a point of reason where that would go away, I. E. Not enough available location, size, etc? I definitely do not see it going away.

I see it being potentially down the road where that's the only way to join Augusta.

Because there will be limited space. That's probably five to 10 years away. But I do, I think 3F, like anyone that's gone through the 3F program is typically successful. They follow the systems the most, they have the fastest ramp up speed, they, they're just the best. And so it's way less headache for us from the coaching side. It's way less training and they're far more successful. And it's also like the most rewarding thing to see from an owner's perspective. To be able to see someone come up underneath you and then become an owner and then go like duplicate what you did for them, do it for someone else. Like I can't wait for the moment when someone from like Marcus's or Austin's or Nick's locations, you know, they come up and they become 3F. Like they like that. It might take several years. They got, you got built a team up from underneath you actually find people that actually want to do that, etc. But that's pretty cool. But I don't see it going away in any time soon for certain.

Kyle Freeze just to stir some fun and cause some trouble. Pick the better school, Michigan or Ohio State? Honestly, I haven't the slightest idea. All I know is Michigan's blue and yellow, Ohio State is red and white and I saw them for five minutes while I was getting my hair cut on Saturday. It sounds like Michigan won. Joel from Lafayette Last week you said you had said you had sent one click estimates out with Copilot. How are you filtering customers for these emails or are you just sending the emails to all clients? For November, I had to use Surface Autopilot to send out my one clicks because I didn't couldn't see how to apply the proper filters on the customer page in Copilot and expect I'll have to do the same for December. My November filter was to exclude Do Not Market clients and exclude clients who are already signed up for leaf cleanups or winter services. Could you show how you would apply the same filters in Copilot or at least how I can filter to exclude Do Not Market clients. So a couple things.

The best way to make sure you don't send an email to someone or do not market is take their email address out of service. Autopilot, Copilot, whatever. Mostly due to the fact that because if they have.

I have seen people still get these emails and then they get really bad and they call commands and are freaking out. So I I always say that the safest thing is just remove the email. Inside Copilot, we don't have an unsubscribe button that is going to change here in the next week where it'll add a tag to their account and it'll prevent emails from going to that person and it's something that you could add manually as well as.

It's automated. If they click the unsubscribe button the tag is added to their account. So. Oh there's your question. Sorry. In Copilot I added a do not tag. Do you not market tag? Perhaps there's a better way to mark these clients. Yeah, like honestly right now in Copilot the best way to do it is like take their email address out of the email box. But within the matter of a week or two, I'll say two to be concerned. But I think within next week we will have a tag that literally governs like emails will not be sent to this person that are marketing related and what we're going to do is that tag will only be effective for bulk emails, but it'll still allow transactional emails. So estimates and invoices will still go through. But anytime you do a bulk selection we will consider that a marketing email and it will not include the people that have that tag. So I'll have training on coming out this next week when it, when we launch it. But yeah, you're right. Right now we do not have like a do not market or do not disturb in copilot.

Hopefully you know who those are or you, you have a tag on them and you just, I would just take their emails out for now and then you could send out the email. So, but yeah, I apologize for that. We are going to fix that and by next week we should have it. But I like it because by doing that it doesn't block all emails, it only blocks bulk emails, which is considered marketing and still allows estimate emails and invoice emails to go through.

All right, let's see here. Do we have any. Oh, we do have questions. If you're in an at will state, can you find an employee without reasoning that no matter what overrides the handbook they're sent when onboarded? My reason for Ryan's individuals, we have had him for three weeks and he had, has yet to work a full week. He has called out a few times and was picked up for feeling sick. Yeah. So in your handbook it should state that not showing up is considered a no call, no show. And two of those happen. It's they're eligible to be fired. So at will you can still fire them, but if they come back and say you did it because of, you know, you know, race or sex or some crazy thing, you're going to have to say why? In the court. Like they will ask you why and you have to say why. And what you'll want to do is be able to point your employer handbook and say they never showed up to work on this day, this day and this day. And we put it on their profile. Here's where the evidence of that is. And that led to a releasing of the, the team member. So either a, you can tell the employee direct, like, hey, due to what's in the handbook, you have been released because of all these no call, no shows, or you can say you're not going to be a good fit, we're going to let you go and then only bring it up if it happens to where in court you have to bring something up. So typically the easiest is just to let them go, say, hey, you're not a good fit, etc. But I would definitely make sure, like in their employee profile, you've documented the times all that they have not showed up, no call, no showed, etcetera Walked off the job, whatever. And so then make sure that in your handbook it states very clearly that that's the case. That has helped me so many times when people have said stuff, it's like, we, we are not will state too. So we tell them, hey, you're not a good fit. We usually try multiple times to try to encourage them. We try to work around the schedule, whatever, but they just keep doing it. It's in the handbook that if you do it twice, it's eligible for immediate dismissal. And so then I just have to pull that up inside of a. In front of a judge and be like, hey, it says this. This is why we let them go. There you go. So, all right, everyone, have a fantastic Tuesday and we will see you tomorrow. Wednesday. I will be very happy tomorrow. Or very mad. But we will figure it out. AWS thing. If you want, you can look in the copilot Facebook group. I've made a video in there of what happened last night. Didn't affect most everyone besides Nick Davidson. Very sorry. You were doing snow last night.

In the US it didn't affect most people because we did last night. But.

Yeah, we live to fight another day. Have a fantastic day, everyone. We will see you guys tomorrow. Take care.