Mike Minutes Mastermind 12/05/2024

Hello, Augusta Nation. Good morning. Sorry, I sent out the text and I got distracted.

All right, let's jump in.

I was distracted. With some inspiration. I made a story on my Instagram. Very important stuff, you know, good stuff. All right, what does it say? It says.

Oh, dread every minute of your work life or lose sleep because you're passionate about work. Pick your poison. All right. Oh, there's another part I put in there. Sorry. It says, pulling all nighter won't kill you. It'll likely get you closer to your goals. Okay. That was the thing I had to type up real quick. Okay.

See what we got for questions today.

I know when I put those comment those things on stories, people get all reactive to it. It's trying to bring a balance to the other 10,000 people. Talking about how, you know, don't work too much. It's like, okay, yeah, that's correct. But that will not get you very far beyond the average. And so if you're looking for outstanding, extraordinary results, you will likely have to do what everyone else is willing. Not willing to do.

Okay, am I actually set up correctly since I rushed this? Give me a second.

Okay, we're in business, folks. Let's rock and roll.

Okay. When I make those stories, it's so funny, the comments, because people can DM you if they. If you do stories like that on your thing. So people get very, very, very triggered.

All right.

Panama City, Florida. Hey, Mike. I'm scheduled for franchise training in February, but wanted your input on hiring. I plan to have two guys in the field for spring rush. When should I start the hiring process? Also, should I consider over hiring to prepare for potential turnover or increased demand? What are some options for me to nav? I would say go ahead and start, you know, put up a post in your. Your Facebook page. Make it like a job ad. Don't spend money on it yet, but, you know, share that. In some local Facebook groups, I would do an Indeed ad, but do it for free. Do a free posting. Don't need to put money behind it. You're months away from now. But if you. It doesn't cost you anything. And if you can get some good leads, cool. So I would be doing free ways of gathering.

Applicants right now and screening them. And if they work, if they are phenomenal, then I'm going to be offering a position for months from now. And if they're not phenomenal, I don't need them. So. And then as I get closer, when I start getting four, you know, six, four, three weeks out from when I really need them in the field. I'm probably going to start spending money on those ads to make sure I get eyeballs on it. Alamo Ranch, Texas Marcus Mike, you mentioned the six week and two week stride method for focus and productivity in your business at stage one of growth. What areas would you suggest I focus on for this method? Stage one of growth, what areas would you break? Oh, I see. Okay. At stage one of growth comma, what areas would you suggest I focus the method. Okay, great. So I would take the, the. If you're in stage one, the very first stage of growth, I would look at those stages of growth and if you're in stage one, I would look at the four or five things I put in the very end, like focus only on these things. And I would be, okay, great. So next six weeks I'm only going to focus on this one. For the next six weeks I'm only going to focus on this one.

That's what I would do. Because again, if you did those four or five things, six weeks each, you're literally looking at four to five months to be able to essentially conquer that stage. And if you did that for every single stage and you literally just took the stages of growth and like the documents that you get at training and look at what says what you what what to be focused on and you take that.

It'Ll be yeah, super helpful. By the way, that has been updated. I'm 99.9% sure updated that to reflect the new stages of growth. Since we've added in the 1.5 million plus 1 versus the 800,000 stages of growth, I have updated that document. I've changed some of the wording too. I don't like using shoulds, so I put in there like not what you should be focused on, but something like something else. Dr. Cash, he calls it musturbation, which is using musts and shoulds in your language immediately makes people defensive because.

They don't want to be told what to do. So it is a suggestion is based upon what has served me well. It's not shoulds. Anyways. Moving on, Max, Harvard for Burnaby. I'm going to submit a couple questions. Here's the first. I'm considering earning an MBA. There's a reputable university near me that offers one. The investment isn't massive. 30,000 and there are scholarships available. The largest cost would be the time. But even that isn't bad because it can be completed in one year full time or in up to four years. Classes are during the evening weekend and they have designed the program for more mature students, so there's a lot of flexibility.

To add some broader context. I've handled the infield responsibilities of my handed off the infield responsibilities of my location to a working GM and I'm handling only admin tasks, invoicing P4P dispatching, follow up calls, marketing, etc. My time commits are generally low and I have a ton of flexibility with my schedule. My location will finish this year at around 380,000 revenue $90,000 profits. Also, my family was able to relocate to another province and purchase a home with my parents drafting my housing expenses from 2000amonth from rent to $1500 for mortgage utilities. Great job dude. Max, that's awesome dude. Most people talk about this sort of thing and they never actually pull the trigger. You did it dude. Super proud of you. Super proud. Getting back to the MV question, I am planning to read through some of the syllabi to see if the courses offered make sense and whether or not they will improve my business acumen. There is also the potential upside of meeting people programming or interested in business. This might be the most valuable part. I know it was in the other schools I attended. Do you have any thoughts on the advantage and disadvantages earning an mba? I would want to make sure I am expanding my skills. I don't care about having the certification or letters. Okay. That's very important this last part here. I also want to make sure the institution isn't affected by the woke mind virus which is sadly the case for a lot of higher education in North America. Oh wow. Okay Max, pulling out, pulling out those verse. Okay, cool, cool.

Okay, so let's take aside the last line because good luck with that if you don't care what the certification or letters behind your name. I don't know if there's a lot of value in an MBA to be perfectly honest. Like so I have. I've gone to business school and did this exact same thing. The first two years of Augusta I took night classes at Western Washington University. Very similarly. It's like a, it was like a 30 minute drive from my house. It was from 6pm to 10pm in the evenings on Tuesday and Thursday.

For two years and I was year round so there was, there was no summer break.

I think you will be disappointed by the level of skill, the passion for business in the class. Most of the time MBAs are going, especially the evening ones are people that have more experience. However, they are usually executives from large companies and they it's part of their comp package to be able get the MBA and they are checked out. Like I just realized that half my class was there to check a box and just get past the class to get the letters behind their name and get the certification. So I have found that to be the case many times with these evening MBA programs. There is going to be people that came out of business school or their entrepreneurs coming back to school like yourself, that are awesome. It's just very small. You will find 90% of the of the material either redundant, repetitive, or.

Not applicable to small business. And what I mean by that is an MBA is trained to basically create the next executive for a Fortune 500 company. And so levels of accounting that you will never need to know unless. And the thing is this, if you build a business big enough to be able to to need that level of accounting, you will have an army of CPAs and accountants. Like an army. The level and details which we went into, like, I forget most of the accounting stuff I went to because. And the legal stuff because I will never think about that. Never. I, I. The positive part about this, Max, is if you're gonna build a massive, massive business, I'm talking over 50 billion, you are going to have these operations in your business and you'll have have a clue of what they're talking about and be able to dialogue with them. So like I can dialogue with CPA or an attorney a little bit better probably because my mba, that is an advantage. I would say I could probably get most of that learning by hiring an attorney or an accountant for 500 bucks an hour on upwork and learning from them in that regard for 15 minutes and 20 minutes and asking questions. When I hit roadblocks in my business from a use of time perspective, that has been my biggest hack. So as I'm figuring out some stuff for Augusta, like I will go on and I will hire the best, like I'm talking $500 plus per hour people to be able to talk to them for 15 minutes, talk to them for 30 minutes. And this is a hack that I think is more valuable than talking to, getting information from, from professors that the vast majority have never owned a business. So it's a matter of like, do you want to get music lessons from the person that's played in an orchestra or the person that has been in the audience for years and years and years and knows all the theory but never actually performed? And so it's just a matter of like, which one do you want? I think a lot of times I see entrepreneurs that go Back to school, they feel very weird because they know what real life is like and they got to go compare it to like the theory versus. I think what is more beneficial if someone's going to get an education is get the theory and then go do it. And so it was super helpful. I'm not gonna lie. When, you know, when you're learning things in MBA class and am I able to apply them, like literally the next day, it's pretty cool.

But I think, like, I generally believe that the MBA for entrepreneurs course would give you 50 to 70% of what you get in a four year business degree. I do believe that. And I literally went through all my notes from my MBA classes and that's what that, that's what that course is. So it's distilled. It's not, you know, I'm not doing citations. I'm not going making people do letters and articles. And that's what a lot of it was. It's like, okay, here's this theory, here's this concept. Now let's go write an article or a case study or do a project about it. It's like, I just need to know the top part. And so that's what like the MBA for Entrepreneurs course is, is this distillation of all those topics. Now if you like the nitty gritty. Nitty gritty details and Max, you might be a candidate for this. I know just from some talking with you, you might enjoy the theory and that's fine. So I would just, I would just go in with, you know, eyes wide open on that case. I would probably try to talk to some entrepreneurs that went to this specific school and went to this specific program to see like, what were their thoughts if. And they had to have previous business experience, not just being a manager at a business and not demeaning that in any way, just a matter of.

What you're looking to get out of it. Max Harwood from Burnaby. I was listening to a Scott Galloway book that mentioned Washington does not collect income tax. Maybe my terms are off. Please. Correct. Has this been advantageous for your business operations? If so, how. Thanks for answering my questions. Yes, it does not collect income tax. If it was, I would be more inclined to move. But there are six months of the year where Washington is the best place to live from a weather perspective. And you can travel once a month on turnarounds to get out of here during the winter. So it's okay, we make, we make do. But yeah, no income tax. Cool. But there's a lot of there's quite a few states that don't have income tax.

On a state level and the highest is like I think California like 13 and then like New York's around 12 or 10 or something like that. So some states have like 4, 5, 6% but I wouldn't say it's like a determining factor honestly. If Washington state was a small tax I probably wouldn't be moving honestly. Garrett from glendale, Colorado we should finish this year at $600,000 this year peak month this was 70,000 this year and lowest month was $19,000. January.

We should sustain about 50k this month this winter with snow removal. So by keeping summer revenue around $65,000 month we should be looking around $750,000 this coming year in profit mode just by way of price increases and reducing service area. We need to need to be in profit mode this coming year to build up cash reserves. I have run things too tight the last two and a half years and monthly debt payments are about 2.5 thousand per month. Okay, very very good to know. I think that after coming after this coming year in profit mode we want to quickly scale to 1.5. I want to go to the first location to location larger and aim for that $1.5 million size. I already have a GM that has been with me since we started 2.5 years ago. He's a savage. He handles operations and is producing revenue 90% of the time. Other than that he fixes equipment and does routing. I handle sales and some admin office and produce revenue whenever I can. I also have a team member that has been with me for 1.5 years and she has said from the beginning she wants to become a gm. Her current skills are beyond her her position but I think more development is needed before she could rent a location. Her strengths are maintaining a high quality standard.

And relations and customer relationships. I see her less as a working GM just.

Just knocking out budget hours and her skill set more focused on client relations. I have told her that this coming spring I'll start to introduce her to more the office and estimating side of the business but that it would only be part time during the business season when I need to help and when I need help and that she still needs to be in the field next year.

My goal is to continue to train and develop her skills and help her further in her career. I think she is more motivated by the challenge of taking on higher level actives, reducing physical stress and manual labor rather than financial motivation. Is it a bad idea to create an Assistant office manager or assistant general manager title for her next spring. How far would you recommend taking talking to someone about their assertion assertion within the company and training them? I thought she could handle the office tax full time at 1.5 and I can slowly introduce some things this year so she can hit the ground running in 2026. Full time in the office. Yeah, like I'm not opposed to this. I think I would be very, very clear that if you have an assistant a second, well now third overhead position in the business, you are not in profit mode. So that's a clarity. But this probably was required to get to 1.5. So if I was you, I would take your method. I would reduce like your promises of how many hours she's going to be doing these other tasks that are admin related during 2025. A lot. Like it should be more about training. It should not be about like giving her promising 10 hours a week. This one thing alone could take you from very high profit mode to very like not great. The swing of someone that produces say 120, $130,000 in revenue per year back to being an overhead position is, you know, and now they're going the opposite direction by 50, $60,000 can crush your profitability. Like absolutely demolish it. So just be careful with this. I know that the inclination you want to help people get to next stage of the career, but you could completely cannibalize your profitability goals here. So just be careful with that. But I'm not opposed to. Okay, if I can slowly train her maybe during the spring rush for three to five hours a week, she does some estimates or do some admin stuff. It's. But I would focus that as training. Don't think of this as a position and then just be like, hey, in 2026 or up at a little bit more 2027, we'll up it more, we'll try to get to full time, but we need to get to 1.5 million. And I would base the amount of hours that she's working on admin based upon the revenue. So it's like, hey, these are the benchmarks that are going to unlock the ability for you to work more in the office. So that when she is in the office, she's gunning for trying to get more jobs sold, upselling, collecting on revenue, etc. Because again, that 800,000 to $1.5 million mark I just see all the time is a very spot. Like it's crazy what happened when we took Bellingham out of this this past quarter has been nuts. Like their profitability is just like awesome. And it's, we cut back, we reduced the size of the crew, we reduced the size, the number of trucks. The general manager has more time like to not think about the business. Like there are so many positive indicators of getting below that $800,000 level. And for some reason last month, I don't know, I got a good report on it, I just saw the numbers. There's 110,000 revenue. So like.

Yeah, so I would just say.

Just be careful about getting above 800,000 and adding more admin people because you will not be in profit mode. So just be careful about that. My biggest apprehension, as you add more admin overhead type positions, you can very quickly go from 700,000 in annual revenue being very profitable to $950,000 in annual revenue and not making any profit. Like that happens all the time. So because you start adding admin staff. So I would be have a very clear path to go from 800,000 to 1.5. So take a year, be really just focused on the profit and then stack aside a hundred grand so you can at least like at least a hundred grand to be able to go from the 800,000 level to the 1.5 as quick as possible. You don't want to get caught in the middle. That's what I'm afraid of you do you do 900,000 next year because you have some office and admin support. Then you do 1.1. But now your cash strapped, she's like okay, I got to do kind of a year where I got to do, I got to do some more profit. But you have three admin people like three overhead positions like so it gets very expensive. Three admin roles. Let's consider you getting paid as an owner should an estimator or GI or manager and an admin person. You're looking at like 15 grand a month. Like minimum. If you taxes or benefits, your business starts to grow, you guys start add benefits like you're looking at 20 grand a month. Then you gotta get an office like so all of a sudden your overhead just for your admin in Your office is 25 grand a month. Like that becomes very, very difficult. So on, on a business that does 50,000 during the off season like you're, you're gonna be negative cash flow. So just that'd be my, my concern.

But you, you have the right ideology. Like what you're saying is correct. I'm just giving like a warning if you go a different direction. I'VE had a team member that has got us about 50 reviews on Google from his friends and family. I had to let him go a little over a month ago and based off the information I provided to our department of unemployment, they just this evening rejected him. His receiving unemployment. He just sent me a couple of nasty texts. I did not reply. In the last 50 minutes since he sent me those texts, three reviews from his friends and family have already turned to one star reviews. I don't want to assume but I could imagine he texted most of his friends that left us a five star review to change theirs. Anything that you could think of that I could do outside of just replying to these reviews are from a disgruntled previous team members. What I've look thought about so far call Google looking at third party companies that claim they take down reviews drown out with five star views. Worst case of 5051 stars by the end of the week I could shut down my business and open no, don't do this. This should probably not be ideal but I'm not sure I could get verified again. Yeah, don't worry about this. So respond back to the one star reviews. I'm assuming these are friends and family that have never done business with you. There is a template on the dashboard of how to respond to customers that are doing this. You've never done service for them. So we want a customer that is potentially going to read these one star reviews and the response is hey, it looks like in our side of our account we've never done service for your property or for your name. Please reach out to the office. We'd love to take care of this for you but you might, you might have been looking to put this on someone else's account. You've never done. They've never done service for you or you've never done service for them. So this is a pretty easy one to get around. I don't think this is a negative. Be very cordial because that's what a new customer is looking for. All things considered we should be okay. We're pretty much at capacity for snow and in profit mode. We aren't planning on growing next year so we have a good 12 months to really drown these out with five star views. If you, if it gets out of hand. Yeah, so get more 5 star reviews and for the ones that are 1 stars respond to them accordingly. Which is we've never done service for you and please reach out to us. We're always looking to improve but we don't have your name in our system at all.

And you could even be like, I've looked through every single account. We've never done service to you at your address or your name. Like you can people read that? I'm like, oh, someone's out to attack them. And like this is fraudulent. And best what all the other 1 star reviews on your account just became invalidated in the mind of the customer because they can see that people are trying to smear you.

Matt from Delta. Hey Mac. We're bringing some of our team to the conference, including a couple of future GMs hopefully and probably would they be welcome to join the Augusta Nation Only conference and topgolf. Really excited for the event. Can't wait. Yeah, if, if anyone, if anyone from Augusta Nation is there, whether it's your two tickets that are included or you buy more for people like your GMs or other spouses, et cetera, they're all welcome to come to any event. We just need them to fill out the form on the dashboard. So go to the dashboard, go to Dash, go to conference and fill out that form. We do need everyone. By the way, this is a side note. If you have not on the dashboard there is a conference tab. Go there. You need to fill out the form so we can make sure we get everything ready for topgolf for the the Thursday lunch and have enough EV of everything in terms of swag, et cetera for Augusta Nation. So thank you for the reminder. Last one, Johnny Denver from North Carolina. North Carolina. On our call with Nick this week, Thomas Enright said he was having some issues with the name change on Google. He said he'd done a DBA and I was planning on doing the same. But if it's going to change, make the change easier on Google, should I just start a new llc? I have no attachment to my name and have no problem starting a new llc.

Okay, so I don't have full context here. I'm assuming someone's trying to change a previous Google my business page to Augusta. So my assumption is here and they're having some problems doing that.

So I'm assuming they're asking for like verification. You're submitting your DBA and then someone's having a problem with this.

I don't, I don't think that should be a problem. I have no attachment to my name and have no problem starting new llc. I see. So they're probably gawking over the fact that like Billy Bob's Lawn Care is now Billy Bob's Lawn Care dba, Augusta Lawn Care and You're trying to change your Google address. Google my Google listing to Augusta Lawn Care. I can see where they might say that, especially because if your LLC from previous says your old name, I could. I can see that. This is why a lot of times holding companies are random names and their DBAs are the specific business names so that you can move business names and brands around without having to worry about changing the entity. So it might just be easiest to start a new clean LLC, especially given that January 1st is coming up and just kind of keep everything fresh and clean. It also kind of if you've done business in the past, what's kind of nice about changing entity is if there's any crazy customer from the past like who wants to sue you. There's a little bit of a barrier legally. When it's like, hey, the LLC is back there. Like we closed it. That LLC has been closed down. So I've seen it where like workers comp claims come randomly in or unemployment stuff, it's like, oh well, that LLC is closed. So you know, yes, they worked for that company and that company is now closed. So that can be helpful somewhat too. So if you're not opposed to getting ulc, I usually recommend it, honestly, for that perspective, as well as keeping things clean, whether it be for Google or for insurance, etc. So it doesn't get murky waters. I've seen that just be the easiest thing whenever I've done acquisitions. I always Recommend Starting new LLCs, new entities, new bank accounts, new insurance. Just keep things clean.

So. All right, everyone, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your Thursday. We will see you tomorrow. Take care.