Mike Minutes Mastermind 12/11/2023

Hello, Augusta Nation.

Hope you're doing good. Let's go and get started. We'll jump right into questions because it looks like we got.

Eight of them. Great, let's go. All right, copy this in here.

Let's drop this into Facebook.

All right, it's rock and roll.

All right, we are in business. There we go. All right, first one. Kyle Tarvin Moklhoma I can't remember if I asked this before or not, so posting it up here again. Does your holding company over your locations own all the vehicles or does each location's LLC own own that location as trucks? Most likely next year both of our locations be borrowing trucks back and forth. We do it underneath the LLC and those LLCs are underneath the S Corp at the top. I don't think that's necessarily the right thing to do. I would keep your LLC separate until you have a few and then throw it underneath an S Corp. Like if I had anything more than three locations, I'd probably consider having an S corp with LLCs underneath it. But it's really up to your individual state and your the professional opinion of your insurance broker as to whether you'd put it underneath the S Corp or you'd put it underneath the LLCs.

In terms of your insurance. Kyle Tarvin from Oklahoma as we get more multi unit operators, I think it'd be great to have some sort of regional manager training. Maybe not so much a dedicated two or three day in person training, but have a special video course checklist etc to train regional managers. It would also be good for owners like myself that are moving into an owner plus acting regional manager role. Just a thought. And we have a whole folder on the the.

Academy.

The regional document, regional managers documents, how to find general managers, the pacing at which you do meetings with your general managers, etc.

So it is in there.

Robert from Modesto, A couple questions with the employee profit sharing, I wanted to know how the 10% of profit sharing is split amongst the employees. Is it 10% divided by eligible employees or is it 10% divided by total employees? And the business keeps the ineligible employees portion the latter part. So you take the 10% and if people are ineligible it goes back to the business. The reason for that is because the cost of people being late and not showing up etc. 10 typically falls on the business to fill in the gap, people have to work overtime, etc. So there's been times where I actually don't end up giving a 10%. I'm giving like 5 or 6% away because people are not eligible. So it takes the number of people who have been there the whole month divided by that number. And then if people showed up, didn't show up, were late, etc. It just comes off of that number. And that way too. People are not.

Pitting it like against each other on the team, like trying to make people look bad or make them be late in order to try to get a piece of their profit sharing. Number two, we have a big problem with guys calling out the morning of and letting us know that they have appointments the day, that day, so they can only work half a day. What is your stance on correcting this? You got to use profit sharing. You could.

You know, it really comes down to profit sharing. Like you got to make it where it is painful to the extent of them losing 3 to $600 for that one instance. That starts to really speak to them. That problem is if someone's late twice in a quarter, all of a sudden now you have no leverage. So if someone's repeat offender, then you have to fire them. And then again you have, you, you don't have a standard until you fire over it, in my opinion. So you can make suggestions all you want, tell people not to do that, but until you fire someone over it, and I would do this during the slower season, then, then you set the standard.

Nick from Napine. Hey Mike, thanks for input Friday. Here's a couple follow ups. Number one, is there any scenario would you recommend hiring the promising new guy and letting go of Ryan? Assuming they both want management rules right away and I can only give one of them that role, I would not recommend that. Sounds like Brian's been with you for four years. Obviously I don't know him. But someone who's been with you for four years, in my opinion, you should show some.

Respect to that. That's just my opinion. Now obviously if someone new is coming in that you think they're so much better, you could have an individual talk with Ryan about like, hey, like this person coming in, they have all this experience, blah, blah, blah. Like I, I really, I really think that someone's movie for four years deserves a chance at the, at the role. Unless you think they're incapable of it, but it sounds like both of them are promising and et cetera. The thing is, Ryan's work worked with you for four years. This brand new person could fizzle out in six months. So.

I would not let Ryan go in the exchange for a new person I like. You have a good person on hand. Don't let that Go. Because like the thought of some other new shiny great team member coming along, I would not recommend that. Number two, assuming the new hire is as promising as. As he, as I say he is, would you ever overpay someone for their first year just to have them come on board? I know it's still in talks with his current employer, so it would most likely be a bidding war. Thanks. Here's the original question for your reference. Yeah, I remember.

Yeah, like if you're in a bidding war now, it's a matter of like, okay, you got one guy he's been with for four years. He doesn't sound like he's in a bidding war. If this other person's going to come in with a make a bidding war, it kind of speaks to what they're. Where they're coming from in terms of what they want from you. Um, I just like, hey, this is what we can offer and if you want to stay at their current position, fantastic. Like I want what's best for you, but this is what the company can afford. This is what we can offer and move forward. I'm not a big fan of bidding wars. I going to put my best offer forward and then if they're going to start pitting me against another employer, they can, they can go do that with someone else.

Robert from Modesto. How often do you guys have team meeting at the Valiant shop and what is the topics discussed? We have a Monday and Thursdays. I show up on the Thursdays one and I just do like the optional meeting beforehand and talk to the guys.

Meetings stuff, discusses safety. It's.

Moments of appreciation. It is reminders. It is, you know, what's the backlog of our work looking like? What's the rest of the week look like in terms of stuff, yellow slips, etc. This is anonymous. We have completely transitioned to coplat far snow removal customers. Almost not almost.

Almost not using service autopilot at all. However, my Copa onboarding call is not until the 23rd of this month. If I were to downgrade my service autopilot subscription before my payment gets taken out on the 15th, would command center still be able to access my account and do everything they might need to do like an estimate or access a customer's account? Yeah, as long as you downgrade to your the lowest account, we can still access your account from command center in service autopilot and to see like all your customers informations etc, we can do that. Absolutely.

So very brave of you to switch over to copilot before your onboarding call. I would not typically recommend that, but I also understand, like, everyone's kind of backlogged in terms of when we can get everyone in to copilot for the onboarding call, so. But yeah, I would, I would. I know. We can still access your account even if it's downgraded. That's fine. Modesto Force. Robert is our gm. These are the job dudes I have lined out for everyone for this upcoming year. Does this look accurate or do I need to revise the job duties list? Let's check it out.

Whoa.

Oh, man. I'm gonna be able to go up and down. Oh, I can. I have to use the keys. All right, come on. I can't see the top. Command center tasks. Robert's tasks, forest tasks.

This is good.

I'm just working over it.

I see a little bit of. Of cross.

Looks like you're doing okay. I got it. So he's doing follow up calls for, like, recurring meetings. You're doing follow up calls for projects. Projects categorization. I would. I really don't think QuickBooks categorization is the best use of your time as the owner.

In terms of just like highest value tasks.

Command center is doing your payroll, answering the phone, scheduling estimates, meaning calling calls. Yeah, this is fine. I think what I would recommend doing is try to chunk this a little bit more. These are great. This is good. This is good. And you will need to do this. But I try to chunk things down to make it simpler. For example, it's like, okay, we have sales, operations, and admin. If admin is mostly covered by command center, you have sales and you have operations. Then underneath sales and operations, it's like, what are we going to tackle together? Who's doing operational stuff? Who's doing sales stuff? I see a lot of crossover between both you and Robert in sales and operations, which is fine. But you'll have. This will be more important, the checklist. If you're doing that, and that's typically like. As long as you both know that, like, this is what usually causes a little bit of friction with owners and GMs is when you have crossover of roles. As long as you're both on the same page about that and you know it's going to happen and you know, okay, here's how, like the rules of engagement. When we start disagreeing on something, I'd be very clear about that because you are doing some sales, he's doing some sales, you're doing some operations. He's doing some operations. You're also doing some admin. So you're kind of doing all three, which is fine, but you just got to make sure you're very clearly defined so that when someone disagrees or like, hey, like you're stepping on my toes. Like how do we. What's the deal breaker? Like what's the. How do we break a tie is important because you have quite a bit of crossover with your general manager and typically I like to have everything on the general manager in terms of operations and then. Or sales or they take both. That's typically how I like to do it. So my general managers, they take all sales and operations and then command center takes admin and then you have a regional manager that will step in if they need help or like guidance on top. But it's very clear like you're responsible for all of these things and there's no crossover. It's not like, okay, well I'm going to do sales if it's projects, you're going to do sales if it's recurring, I'm going to do follow up calls. Like if it's this, like you just might have a little bit of crossover there that might cause a little friction which is again, okay, I'm not against it. Just you both need to be on good communication in terms of what happens if we disagree on something or stepping on each other's toes because it will happen when you're. You're doing that much crossover.

Connor from Evansville, do you think SA is throttling or making it harder for us to leave since we are a big chunk of their business and banning you from service edge, commenting about only allowing 250 characters within client notes, et cetera. I don't remember this being an issue before or if we are only running to now because of scale in which you're doing it. I don't know, I'm just not jumping to conclusions. Even the thing this morning, just not jumping conclusions. We just. The thing this morning, like we can become better to prevent someone coming in and trying to be malicious. This part I don't know. I think, I think that they might because we've had so many people downloading massive files, it might be putting stress on their servers. But like I don't think the 250 character limit is malicious. I do think that the throttling of them exporting is and I see why they would do that. They don't mass exodus and that's what was happening the last couple weeks. People have been trying to get an essay and they haven't been able to export a lot.

So it's kind of intermittent though. So I don't know that that would lead me to believe it's more of a server thing. So I'm not, I'm not really spending any time thinking about this, honestly.

Yeah, unfortunately the 250 character thing didn't used to be a thing. But I don't know how long ago we were able to do this and I don't have any evidence so.

All right, we got some other questions it looks like came in.

How do I eliminate the crossover with gm? What are you. Yeah, because duties of GM at BM and is there an estimated BM or is GM estimator? Yeah. So at Bellingham because they're going to be going to growth mode next year for the first time they are going to be getting a full time estimator and then they'll have Corey as the general manager. So in this case you have admin will be covered by command center. Operations will be covered by the general manager. Sales will be handled by the estimator. Right. So always just think of soa. Right. Sales, operations, admin. And if you can keep things distinguished by those three categories, very helpful. And I believe you can grow a business to past $2 million in this industry if you have those three roles covered. And so.

There it's not about crossover is going to happen with smaller locations. Like if you have smaller locations you're going to have some crossover because it's not a full time job to do sales, it's not a full time job to do operations, it's not a full time job to do admin. That's why like the use of command center is mostly helpful from zero to 800,000 or a million because after that you should probably go get a full time office person. The reason is because until that time you don't really need someone full time. Throughout the slope like for eight months out of the year you don't need someone full time. And so when it comes to operations and admin, sorry operations and sales the same thing is true. Like until you get to a certain size you don't need a full time estimator. It's very rare that you would need a full time ester until you're well past a million dollars. So that's what like I like, you know I don't really want my location to get above 800,000 because I want my one general manager to be able to handle sales and operations. And so if I was ever hitting up around 7,800,000, we probably just keep raising prices and some of my locations are already raising prices and they're more around that 5, 600,000 level or below even 450. So.

Yeah, it's not, it's not about eliminating it. I'm guessing this is forest. I would just be very clear right now. Like the clearer and more concise the roles and responsibilities are, the better. I really like sales, operations and admin because it gets very, very clear. It's like am I selling the product, am I delivering the product or am I doing all the back end stuff required for us to operate? That's really it. Right? So is it sales operations is like routing, scheduling the trucks going down, getting the crew start in the morning. Who does like you'll see me do this internal like okay, so if the, if the crew is call out for the day, who they contact, that's the operations person, whoever they contact in the morning to say I I gotta get off today or like I, I'm sick this morning. That's almost always the operations person. If that's fuzzy, it's like well it's kind of both of us. That's a really good tail tall sign that someone's crossing over between admin, sales and operations. And they don't. There's not clear roles in the business. So I just get really clear. Like your checklisting is good. It is clear. Like what are the specific functions? It's just that those, you want to chunk those as much as possible to keep it simple. Because if you have like a bunch of random tasks, great. You are not going to be looking at every few hours to determine whether or not you should or should do something in the business. If you can keep it to like am I selling, am I delivering the product operations or am I doing back end admin work? That's the, that, that's a really easy way to break it down. In my opinion. If you that structure will last about 2.5 million, start getting above that, you're going to need other stuff. You're going to need like an office admin. You're going to use a full time estimator underneath someone else doing like project versus recurring sales, et cetera. But well the past 2 million I've seen companies do very well with just those three, those three roles. And if a location was asking me and they were doing 5 million in revenue, I would have a different answer for them and that would be you need an estimated for projects, you need an estimated for recurring services so that they can chunk that down and have operations in terms of, you know, pre and post a job. So for example like scheduling and routing versus like the the crews on the job site like project management essentially. So that gets much larger company size though is if you wanted to keep everything on one house. That's what's nice about chunking down locations and that's why I'm a big fan of doing chunk down locations because I can keep one person doing sales and operations or even if you get to like 1, 2, 1.2, 1.5, you can get one person doing sales, one person doing operations and then have commands and do a back end admin and once you start getting past that 1.52 million now you're starting to need people underneath each of those SOA sales, operations, admin and that's when it starts. I see complexity start getting added to the business and a lot of times reliance on the owner being around and that's, that's the part where I like to chunk down the locations so. All right everyone, I hope you have a fantastic Monday and we'll see you guys tomorrow. Take care.