Mike Minutes Mastermind 12/08/2023

Destination.

Let's go ahead and get started.

Sure, that's good.

All right.

Why is YouTube taking so long to load?

All right, Happy Friday.

Let's go ahead and get things kicked off as I put this into the Facebook group and I put it into the playlist and I copy this.

Facebook group.

Boom. And why is it not showing up in Facebook group?

There it is.

All right. And we're live.

Foreign.

I hope everyone had a chance to watch the turnaround show on the main channel yesterday. I think it was a good one. We didn't have any good gear, but we did have a good story. I think all of us should watch, so please listen to that one. I think it's just a kind of textbook case of someone that is trying to do too many things instead of focusing on one in their business. And the downside.

Downstream effects of what that causes is pretty.

Evident.

So let's go ahead and get this party started.

Should be able to move this up here.

All right, we're in business. Why is there zero people watching? Did I do something wrong?

Please don't.

Okay, well, maybe no one's up on a Friday morning. All right, let's get started.

First question comes from Pascal from sw. I can't say this word. South City, Iowa. Number one, who should we contact to set up an account with stripe or should we just go to their website? You have to set up an account with stripe yourself and you use your company, email, etc, and then you can just. You're gonna need the code, the key to be able to put that into copilot so you can get money. There is a video on that on copilot university and shows you how to do that. But it literally takes like 5 to 10 minutes to set up your stripe account and then you should be good to go. Okay, I still not understanding why there's zero people watching. What am I doing wrong?

This is live.

So weird.

All right, well, let's keep going. Number two, how can I cancel my service autopie account and clearance? Do you have an email specifically for Augusta? Thanks, Mike. If you contact their support, they'll get you rolling. You do need to con. You do need to contact clearance and service autopilot. I've been told it seems like last week they're exporting. Thing was acting weird. Supposedly some information wasn't being exported correctly. Like.

Office notes. We're only having like 50 characters exported and not like all of the office notes, so I don't know what that is about. Sometimes the exports were taking like a few days to get Rolling like and actually finish too. So I don't know if it's throttling or if it's just. I don't know, I don't know. But a lot of people are having problem with exporting out of service all part right now. So. But in terms of canceling, I would, I would downgrade to the lowest subscription level at least for a couple months. And then in terms of clearance, cancel that out.

And you likely will need to contact both of them.

Next one Nick from Marysville for us in Augusta. Should we have the work request form through Copilot turned on, which would bypass the one on our website or is the one currently on website linked or will it be linked to Copilot? Great question. Yeah. So the work request form, you're not going to put that on your main website right now? Right now it's totally separated down the road. We will connect it but. But I'm going to wait until Max can talk to Copilot and we're, we're a little ways away from that. So that way like literally any incoming lead will go into Copilot, whether it be from your website, from the phone call, all of that will be connected. So I just leave that for now. The work request feature inside of the portal, should you have that? Feel free to turn the work request feature on. Basically that means if someone's inside of the client portal, they can click the work request and fill out the form and it. And basically they're submitting an estimate request form from there. So that's totally fine. If you do they do that, it's going to send you a notification and you would have to handle it because it's coming straight to your Copilot account. It's not coming to Command Center. Oh yeah, that's, that's what your question is like literally right here. Yeah. So if you're going to turn the work request form form on right now, unless Command center, if they're managing your email, you could just have it send an email to your inbox and then they would obviously take care of it. But if you are not sending that work request to Command center, they're not going to know about it. So you will need to handle those. Unless they are manage your inbox, just send it to your email and then you'll be good to go. But you'll want to set up an automation to make sure you get that. And you'll also get a little alert in the top right hand corner when that's happening. Also, should we add the client login button to our website so clients can access the portal easier. I'm not a huge fan of this. We've played with this and tested it and very few people actually use this because especially when you make it easy to log into their accounts because from any estimate and any invoice they can click with one button and be inside. And so it also reduces the amount of people calling and asking about usernames and passwords to command center because you don't get your phone calls. You don't know how many people this happens to. It happens all the time. And so with service off because they had like the complex way of signing up and all like the security questions, the amount of people that call in to like change their password or like they can't figure out and log in is ginormous. And so I'm not a huge fan of having client logins. I'd rather one click they get access inside. There's nothing that is like super revealing inside someone's client portal. The very worst thing is someone could submit a work request form on behalf of someone else. That's like the worst case scenario because they can't see their credit card information.

And so it's not like they can steal anything from them. Let me just make sure.

Okay, cool.

All right. I'm trying to limit my COPA questions here to those irrelevant mainly to guys. That's totally fine. Totally fine. Feel free.

This is from Anonymous.

I need a GM to run one of my locations that will do around 650k next year. I don't have any current employees I feel have the skills that will take. What are some ways to determine in interviews who would be good with operations? I can run this location if needed by preferring to hand it off to a GM. I also need a GM to run another location. I'll do around 350k next year. I don't have any current employees to promote to this position either. What are some ways to determine in interviews who will be a good sales type for this individual for this position? So what's interesting here is both of these sizes of businesses could be made profitable with more of a working gm. Your second proposition, you're finding someone with sales is going to be a harder find.

And so.

I would just. I'm only saying that because you might get into interviews and realize it's easier to find the operator type. This is why we've made a specific starter role for my. For my locations where someone that loves sales goes from one to the other and they like they get a piece of all the profits as they build locations. And honestly like if someone actually did that for like five to 10 years, all of a sudden they, they would literally be making like the equivalent of all the profits from multiple locations if they just kept starting locations a couple times a year.

And it that they wouldn't be, you know, have to do anything. The reason for that is because a salesperson doesn't like to stay in one spot for more than two or three years. And they are uniquely capable in starting locations and they don't like operations. And what's unique about that is some people like oh that's dumb because they never make the locations profitable. It's likely the salesperson doesn't because they get, by the time it gets profitable, they get bored, they want to move on. So what you will want to do is typically that person becomes more of a starter person. And once they want to grow it from like 0 to 500,000 and then they want to like they're kind of bored. They do not like operations. And typically that person does is actually not a very good operator in terms of making it profitable because they just get itchy feet. And that's very normal sales oriented people. So I would just say keep in mind you might at the 350 just find someone who can work in the field and manage the crew. And even though you maybe only have three guys with that person working, you could make that 350k location profitable. I just, I'm just saying that as a way to. It's a harder find to get someone who's good at sales. Beyond that then what I'd be doing is offering a salaried position along with.

Profit sharing. Because both of these locations, because they can be profitable, you can give good profit sharing away. This is why as a location grows, I give less profit sharing to the gm. Because when they start, when they, sorry, when they start, if the location's already established and growing, they get less profit sharing. Because once the location like they inertia from going 0 to 300,000 or 0 to 500,000 is where all the costs are. And then it becomes profitable. And so that's why like someone who's starting brand new from a GM perspective for me gets 35% of profits because the first year and a half they probably aren't going to see any profit sharing. And so both of these locations, if you turn them into profit mode could almost immediately be getting a pretty good profit sharing check to a GM and you could, because you have P Ls in hand. You could literally show them, hey, this is what the profit was or this is what at least the revenue was. We grew a bunch. We're going to change that to a more profit mode. We expect the profits from this revenue to be X next year and you're going to get this percentage of that. So if you give 15, 20, 25, whatever it is, this is what you're going to get. The 650 location, you might only be giving maybe 10% of the profits away, but again that would just be a matter like what's your salary versus what your, your profit sharing going to be. And what you're targeting is really the project managers and mid level managers of other landscaping companies that have plateaued and they have nowhere to go. So that's what you'd be targeting like your ad copy for that position is like.

Are you plateaued? Have you worked in the same spot for five or 10 years and looking for that person that has capped out at 25 bucks an hour, Whatever it is they're working out kind of a field crew manager, crew leader maybe they've done some estimates at another company that has 10, 15, 20 employees and now it's like, hey, let's go start. You can basically work underneath me and start your own thing now and like run the show and like looking for someone who wants more autonomy. That's what you'd be looking for, but not the financial risk of starting their own. Just from Nick and naping couple follow ups. My question from yesterday, how would you vary the GM compensation structure? If I was to make Ryan essentially GM the location without sales, I'd be doing the selling and hiring for him. He would still have to clock 30 budget hours per week, but would also be in charge of scheduling, equipment, maintenance, etc especially everything other than selling and hiring.

It's just challenging because when you're involved in the daily operations and calling the shots, they really don't have a lot of sway in the decision making. That's why like profit sharing in my opinion becomes more relevant when you're not there. Because if you're there like they're just kind of going along with the show like they're, their decisions aren't going to have a huge impact on profits. Like them working hard well but doesn't make the decision making is what you're trying to reward with profit sharing. Their ability to like train people and like all that sort of thing. Like because if you're doing everything in terms of selling and hiring like you are governing the ship and so giving them a Piece of profits is pretty tough.

Number two, I have the opportunity to hire someone who is a manager at one of my our competitors. I've been talking to him for a couple years and he's an absolute a player. I always told myself I would jump on the opportunity to hire him. He's working with us this winter, the snow shoveler and so far he's amazing. He's looking for a new job opportunity because he doesn't feel appreciated. His current job, he makes about $30 an hour. His current job with way more respons response than what our guys making close to $30 an hour have. Dilemma I'm having is twofold. In order to convince him to come work for us, I didn't need to give him my responsibilities. He is more than willing to work in the field. But as a guy that wants more responsibility and a clear growth trajectory. Number two, I really want to hire this guy. But as a guy that wants more response and a clear growth trajectory. Oh, sorry, sorry. I really want to hire this guy. I think he is exactly the type of hire I need to get to the next level. If it really came down to it, I would take him over Ryan. However, Ryan has been with me for almost four years. While great guy, cares about the customers, crushes, fever feet, wants to grow within the company but doesn't seem to have his extra have this extra gear that I've seen this potential new hire, there's a significant chance Ryan would would leave if I hire this guy and promote him first. As you mentioned yesterday, things are always getting a little management heavy. So I don't think it's feasible for both of them to have management responsibilities. How would you go about the situation? The only way I think this works. I got to jump in on our call. Sorry for rushing this. I will leave this question Nick for tomorrow and address it a little further. Is.

The only way to actually accommodate everybody in this situation is literally to grow the company by at least double. And so.

If he's not, if he's willing to work out in the field a little bit, you need to get all three of these people in a room and be like hey guys, in order for this to work the way I want it to and give you guys all the opportunities we need to get 2 million and I think we can do it with the four of us, three of them and you. But like the infrastructure of the company does not sustain this number management until we are at that level. And so let's create a strategy for that. Here's what I'M willing to do in terms of capital. Here's what roles and responsibilities we all need to take to get there. And we're all going to have to kind of chip in, in the field over the next six to eight months while we're not at the size required to get there. That's like the massive growth mindset, Nick. So, Nick, if you're trying to, like, if you want to grow and you want to, that's the mindset you take. It's like, we need to get to 2 million. Here's what we need to do in order for that to happen. And then in terms of growth trajectory, you maybe tell someone, say, hey, like after next year, we're going to have another. We're going to start a second location and I'm going to make someone a gm. You could do something like that to give them that growth trajectory. But I'd be very careful about doing that number of cooks in the kitchen when you are at under a million. So I do have to bounce on another call. That was a fantastic question, Nick, based on what I said there. Feel free to respond again and I'll, I'll dig deeper into it on Monday. But great question there, and that's a tough situation, but I think growth mindset is get them all in a room and you shoot for the stars, give them the boundaries of what that needs to be to make financial sense, and then you go from there.