Mike Minutes Mastermind 12/05/2022

Oh, wait, are we live? It says we're live. We're not having trouble connecting.

What in the world?

This is life. But we're not.

Go live.

That is weird.

Okay, so I am live, I think on one platform. It still says you are scheduled to go live is beyond strange.

See here. Okay. Yeah, this looks like I'm live on Facebook, but not YouTube. I don't know what's up. That's so strange. Okay, I'm just gonna keep going even though it says I'm not live. And if it drops out, let me know.

That's so strange.

It literally says scheduled right now. Here, I can show you.

And then I'll jump into things. I got a couple things I wanted to go over. Look at this.

Yeah, I know everything's live, but it says scheduled. I can't see it. See that? Scheduled, which means it usually is not live. And it says I should be able to push a button. So let's go live. All right. Anyways, let's jump into it.

We got a couple things. Okay, now it's live. Okay, now I can see everything. Sorry, there's only certain things I can see when it's actually gone live. Okay. I was thinking on the weekend about close ratio. A couple things, obviously, a couple of ways you can improve your closed ratio is number one, you can. Or, sorry, you can.

Improve closures, obviously by lowering your price and by following up faster getting estimates, the. The customer faster, etc. I was thinking, like, well, why is that the case? Like, why if we actually tear it back, ultimately, customers want things faster and cheaper. Okay. The reason they want things faster and cheaper is going to think two things that we are willing to do anything in life for and most spend most of our life striving for is, number one, to make money, and number two is to save time. These are the two things that are most valuable for most human beings in addition to more personal relationships, things like that. But money and time. So it makes sense that a customer, if they value time and money, they want things faster time and cheaper money. And so how the biggest indicators and the biggest factors that go into close ratio make sense that it is the faster you get the estimate to the customer, the sooner that you get them on the schedule, the sooner you lock in the job. That's time. And then money is going to be the other side of the equation of the close ratio, that is raising or lowering your price to adjust for how many people are accepting. So this is kind of a mental gymnastics. I was thinking about last night and that Is most people infinite, Infinite time and money would be make most people happy. So what do they do? They try to optimize for that in life. That is they try to save time and try to save money. And that's why if you can get things faster and cheaper to people, typically you'll win in the market. And so if you're wanting to improve your close ratio, get the estimates to people faster, don't make them wait for the estimate. Don't make them wait three days after you met them for the estimate to get the quote. And secondarily, if you need, if you need increased close ratio, obviously price is going to be an indicative part of that. I would add one to that though. That is follow up, which we kind of tie into time. And that is you want to try to take time out of the equation of them making a decision by following up with them and improving their time to time to close. So just a thought I was having last night. All right, sorry about that rough opening. Streamyard is being a little strange because they rolled up webinars last night or last weekend. All right, questions? Let's roll this one Present.

By the way, there was a couple people that seems like they changed their address on Google, their Google listing and it wiped all their pictures. So if you've done that within the past week or two, it looks like you might want to check your Google listing and if all your pictures are gone, upload.

20 or so that you can find. We have added this morning the media team has completely redone.

Oh, it's there on the dashboard. Yeah. Yeah. But as of this morning, we deleted all the accounts out and redid them all to make sure that everyone's going to be posting just fine. But you might have lost all your photos. I don't know if it's a policy that Google's interacted or if it's a glitch. But if in the past couple weeks you have changed your address on Google listing, I would recommend that you just take a look and make sure that your pictures are still intact. So.

Forest, do you pay yourself a salary for other locations besides Bellingham, or do you take an owner's draw a few times a year? How often? Yeah, so as they grow up, they get older. I just increase my distribution. That is a monthly draw. So for example, Mooresville is starting their second year. So I did, I increased my monthly draw on that one to 2,000amonth. And then I took a draw at the end of the year like because there's extra cash. So I just Basically see their cash balance and like, when do I bring money over? Especially when you're not trying to grow the location. Any cash in that bank, like you want to deploy it usually against other things. So you bring it, do an owner distribution then. But I'm more, much more into the monthly. I like to think of them, each of the locations as like a small little investment I get a little trickle from. Not like I'm trying to get 20 grand here and 15 grand here. I'm more or less just like I want to get $1,000 a month. After that first year I want $2,000 a month. The next year I want to move that up to 3,000 and 4,000. Every single month. Every single year I'd be moving that dollar amount up and I just want that monthly. It's like, it's literally like paying rent. That's what I want to think, how I try to think about it. And I'm trying to get different units. I'm just trying to copy and paste that. And then at the end of the year when there's a high cash balance that is above what they need for working capital, which you should determine what that is. For example, you could say it's one and a half times a month earnings, uh, you could say it is 2x or 3x.

Expenses. You could say it's you know, 5x the average payroll, whatever number you've hit, determine. And if it's above that. Okay, I'll take a drawdown. Right. So I think the other day I took an extra draw. I forget. I think I was going to take more, but I couldn't do the transfer on the online account. I had to check, so I might have to look at that. But that's what I do. End of the year, just take out whatever money is in excess of what they need for working capital. But typically you're not going to have that problem until end of year two. Just because year one you're trying to grow, grow, grow. And even year two you're growing usually like year three, you really start to like, okay, let's take some serious draws and year and then have that monthly. I'm much more in the monthly. I put that monthly recurring revenue coming back to me. So.

After watching yesterday's Mastermind, I noticed that on your Google my business page, your primary category is landscaper. Mine is lawn care provider. Does difference in traffic on your website. Can you please scroll back through your services offered so I can update mine to match you? You can look at anyone's Google just Look them up. I would just personally go through your, the list that Google's suggesting for you and just ask them, do you do the service? No. Yes. No. Yes. Whatever it is, you will literally need to do that every month or two because Google Ads stuff in there now. It's based upon user generated content as well as it'll screen your website and and think, oh, because it said this word, we're going to put all these other 10 services, it said the word landscaping. Therefore we're going to add hardscaping and pergolas and fencing and all this other stuff in there. So you've got to go through it occasionally and screen it out.

So I don't think this is going to make a big traffic change. What you likely this is likely being done is by two things. For example, in your state, being a landscaper means a big deal. It's like whole contractor, the whole nine yards. Also on your Google local services, you have to determine those two.

So it depends on what kind of jobs you're getting. I wouldn't say it's a big deal though because it's going based on your keywords and you can change those services that you offer. Here is my Google page.

Okay.

That'S fine. So you visit categories. That looks good. If I was you, like landscape designer. Unless you're doing hardscaping stuff, you might want to take that one out and see if there's something else that you could add in there. But it just depends if there's even another service that you would be interested in.

Offering instead of that one.

Are you able and willing to show your year to year to date? P and L for Command Center. It would be really interesting to learn from and hear your comments. Are you willing English here? Oh, for Command Center. I'll probably talk about this at conference.

Yeah, all I would say the first quarter of 2022 is ugly. So now our goal is basically just to limit losses during the winter. As it is with all of our businesses, it's just that we can't get creative and just start making up services. At command center we only get what comes in. So the same way as you all get less busy, we actually get even less less busy because you start taking services back and so our revenue goes even deeper down. So we just really try to figure out that ebb and flow of demand. But last year we just didn't know. We just weren't good at projecting that. And so January, February, March, we lost well over $200,000. But we'll do a lot better this Year.

Yeah, I'll probably show that end of the year, like end of year stuff and a conference.

Any updates on status or headquarters main building up yet? Yeah, right. I wish. We have all the materials literally sitting there. We are waiting on one piece of paper from the county. We have all our subcontractors ready to go. We have all of our materials purchased. I literally have money in the bank ready to pay for all the invoices. It's ready to be paid for. We just need a piece of paper from the county. And we live in Washington state where everyone likes to hug trees and there's currently a 6 foot, approximately 6 square feet of wetlands in the middle of 5 acres that has put this year long monkey wrench into this whole project. So.

Yeah, I have no comment. I'm trying not to think about that at this moment in time because I cannot control it. I literally emailed the mayor. I emailed and he said, hey, this has nothing to do with us. You got to talk to so and so. So I talked to so and so, which is a representative. So anyways, I'm trying but ultimately this point I've already renegotiated some of our leases that are ending in spring and basically trying to get them to just be month to month. So that way we can hopefully. I'm thinking really realistically it's this time next year that we're moving in because we're not going to move in the middle of the year. There's just no way we're going to move command center in the middle of the year. So. Cool. Any other questions that came in? No, I think that's it. All right guys, have a great Monday.