Mike Minutes Mastermind 12/11/2024

Hello, Augusta Nation. We're live. Happy Wednesday. Let's get this party on the road. I am now in a different spot in the office. Let's go.

A couple quick updates. Speaking of which, this is Liz. If you did not get the email yesterday from her, please check your inbox. Sometimes those mass emails can go to your, um. If you've unsubscribed, you might have. They might be going into your, your spam or like me, anything that says the word unsubscribe goes to my archive. So I always think I don't get the messages and then I'm like, oh, it's in the archive. So that came out from yesterday. Updates from Command center, one of which was the ADP preferred vendor from Command center and so highly Recommend them over QuickBooks in terms of cost as well as in terms of support. And so basically, if you're doing your payroll through Command center for $60 flat, you get all your payroll through them instead of having to in QuickBooks do $85 a month for the subscription, plus $9 per employee. If you have 10 employees, that's 150 bucks.

Or more, $170. So it's just a flat 60. So it's pretty cool. And Command center has their dedicated rep from ADP as well. There's also discount if you just. If you're running your own payroll, you can also contact the person that Liz gave the contact information for and they will give you some discounts as well. Basically it's just you don't get the all inclusive of all employees. So it's still a little bit of a discount. And I highly recommend the service, the customer support over QuickBooks. We just had a lot of issues with, with payroll stuff with QuickBooks and their support has been so difficult. We've been spending hours just trying to get a hold of people, etc. So you kind of get bopped around from person to person. You end up doing hold times and wait times for hours. And so to avoid that, we switched to ADP Net Command Center. If you want to use QuickBooks, they still offer that as well. For any reason you want to stick with QuickBooks, that's totally fine. But I think 33 of the locations that do payroll here at Command center have already switched over and have been doing that for the past few payrolls. I moved all my companies over as well. So I know Lee has another really great preferred vendor coming out as well with a really, really good discount which will affect a lot of people. Specifically down south where you have this specific manufacturer and so that'll be coming out hopefully end of this week, if not next week. So that'll be great edition as well.

All right, cool. Let's get this show on the road. Present Share screen.

All right, first question is from Thomas in Clinton. Any idea where the pixel Metapix I submitted is showing hits for the main augusta page and webagencyteam.com and not just for my locations page. Oh, I saw this the other day pick attached of events pixels making it seem like the pixels on multiple different sites. I think you were in touch with Tory. I saw him work on this yesterday Thomas and he and I discussed this. I'm getting a report on this later today as to why that was happening, but it seems like you guys are figuring it out or in the middle of that. So and are resolving why the pixel is picking up that so if you ever see Web Agency team by the way, just you guys information. We make several domains that are completely made up from web design. Whether, like whether it be longer design, home service, web design or all the stuff we do for Augusta. Because when we do tests, if we are sending out emails like if we do like a thousand emails to test something and they're all not opened because we're running a test, it can hurt the deliverability of the emails. So the reason the team does not use web @augusta longer services.com is if we're seeing a bazillion tests out and it'll impact the domain authority and the the deliverability of our entire domain. So that's why we make up random URLs sometimes. Metapixel also has an event tracking code now similar to Google. Took me a while to navigate, but when I emailed the web team they were super awesome about getting it added. It would be super awesome to get an updated done for you ads tutorial. Yep. So that is getting done here in December. Nick Reed will be putting that together.

And I know that they made some changes. A lot of times these platforms will make changes in October, November because they're gearing up for the holiday season. And so sure enough, Google and Facebook have made some changes in the past couple months and so Nick is going to be making a new done for you ads tutorial that you can follow through and it kind of just follow steps of setting up your Facebook ads, pixels et cetera. Mr. Anonymous, what does your typical day of eating look like when you've been on the Carnivore diet? Also, what supplements do you take and any other things you do or take for your health. Okay, so for supplements. Okay, let's talk about so typical day for eating.

While in the carnivore. You eat meat and then I am allowing myself to eat vegetables, mostly just leafy greens. I eat kale and spinach because I love my spinach omelette and I will not separate myself from it. And so cheese. And then the one thing that I have is kind of like borderline is, is I have raw milk in the evening with this carnivore protein powder. So it has, it is.

It is from beef something, what's it called? Beef broth. Like, so it's. I think it's really good. That's like my dessert. My dessert every evening currently as it stands is a protein drink. I actually feel really, really good. I've lost a few pounds of fat. I have not lost any weight though, because I've been lifting too. So I feel fantastic. So even if I wasn't losing weight, I feel really, really good. And the past few weeks I've been working a lot and not getting a lot of sleep, but I feel pretty good, honestly, like, all things considered. So in terms of supplements, I always take the same thing I have for years. It is one multivitamin, it is a creatine tablet, it is an amino acids tablet. And then I alternate between like three others and I'll just like take one and I'll just mix it up each day and it's like one is a, like a mineral, like biotin and some other stuff, things for just kind of like for skin health, nail health, hair health, et cetera. The other one is a omega 3, omega 6, omega 9 complex. And then the third one is a probiotic. So I like switch through those three alongside these other ones. So there's usually like five supplements a day essentially. That's what that is. Okay, one second. There we go. Any other things you do for your health? One thing that's been really helpful is a 10 minute sprint. So I usually do what's called a 24, 7 challenge. I made it up 20 minutes, 4 incline, 7 miles per hour on the treadmill. That's like a full workout if you need like a, just to, to power through something. However, what I've been doing is doing my regular 20 to 30 minute lift in the morning and then I will do a 10 minute, 10 minutes of the 4 incline and 7 miles per hour in the evening. And Ken gives me a second wind. So that's been super helpful.

I take a cold, so I shower like regular, but at the End of the shower. I always do a cold shower. I try to stand up as much as possible. So, like, that's why this is a standing desk.

So the transition from, like, going out of the field to being out of the. Going from in the field to be out of the field can be difficult. And a lot of people times people gain weight for a year or two, and then they kind of got to figure out, okay, I actually got to go to the gym, et cetera. It's like with the first few years of Augusta, I never went to the gym. I just did like body weight stuff at home for the sake of time. But also like, you have so much physical exercise out in the field. Whereas now, like, if I did not work out, if I did not make sure I like walked enough on the walking treadmill or standing, like, you would see it very quickly. I have bad genetics in that regards. So those are some of the things. Hopefully that's helpful.

Augusta LongCurve Lawrenceville as far as brand recognition goes with social media, we are using Facebook and Instagram. There's a competitor near me called Gwinnett Lawn Care. He makes short videos each week, sometimes informational, sometimes they're just him mowing some grass. His subscriber count is low. However, with him having a presence on YouTube, does this help his business? Do you think having a YouTube presence for our location would be worth this small time investment each week since we are already out mowing? So there's. I actually talked about this the other day on a podcast.

Basically, I think that there's. There's two big advantages of this. Number one, the advantage is you is it has nothing to do with your customers. It actually has to do with you and your messaging. By making content, it forces you to get good at your messaging. Who you are, what you do and who you serve, you get very good at like what that one sentence, two sentence pitch is, right? So for myself, for example, like, even doing like podcasts is a really good way for me to like practice. Like, Q and A is my way of practicing. Like someone trying to kind of do a got you on you. Like, it's just also like, how do I. How do I pitch Augusta? How do I pitch copilot in like one sentence? How do I bake those things in? So I think that if you're trying to create content in general, it helps with your skills of communication and that will then trickle over into the run. The way you run ads, the way you upsell customers, the way you do follow up calls, you'll Just be better at talking. If you've done content because it's so nerve wracking to get in front of a camera. When you start picking up a phone to do follow up calls, you'll just be better at it. When you get in front of a customer on a new estimate, like you'll just be better at it. So I think the first benefit I see of making content is really actually for yourself and your communication skills and your own self education. The second part, and this is the part where you want to be careful of if you're trying to grow your local business, creating content like you mowing grass, your tools, your trucks does nothing for you. Because let's just say you have a thousand views on a video or 2,000 views in a video, the likelihood of someone being in your local area is like 1 in 10,000 maybe, maybe like so getting actual new customers in your local market is going to be much better served. If you're on place like Instagram and Facebook, you could do on YouTube, you might as well. And you are making the video about like very, very localized. So for example, I would make a lawn care video about how to take care of your lawn in Whatcom county during the winter season. All right. I would do how the, how the fertilizer ban around Lake Whatcom affects your lawn. I would make everything contextual to my market. Things that are happening in the news, legislation that's happening around chemicals, around mowers, around electric mowers. I would make everything contextual to my local area because that's the only people that actually moves the needle for you. You getting a thousand subscribers that are outside of your territory does nothing for you. Zero notch nail. Not a. And so I would recommend doing it. I would say if you're going to try to drive more customers, make it very localized to your market. If you're trying to become an influencer or you're trying to just like share your information, what you're learning and you care about other people, then you make it more broad. Just knowing it's not going to actually impact your business, but it's definitely effective as long as you have a long term mindset. Either of those routes will work. Whether it be like, hey, I want to go more mainstream or I want to drive more revenue to my business, just your strategy needs to change. A lot of people are like, I'm doing social media to get more customers and then they're talking about like their mowers. Your customers don't care. They care about their lawn. They care about their landscaping. And then you want to slide yourself into contextual news articles or things that are happening in your local area and revolve it around lawn care and landscaping. And then you become like the local mayor or the person that kind of is the expert when it comes to lawn care, landscaping, home improvement, et cetera, even real estate stuff will do well, by the way.

And then even to like doing like if you're gonna do an article or a video, or if you're gonna do a video, for example, like top five places to go or top five places to see in your city name. So you could like, you might be in like two or three different cities. You top five things to do in Blaine, Washington Top five things to do in Bellingham, Washington. Things you didn't know about Bellingham, Washington. And you just, you could start making articles or videos about that and just drive so much awareness in your local area to your channel that simply curates all the local news. And then you become the kind of like go to for everything in your city. So if you're trying to compete with the entire, like all of YouTube, it's very difficult. If you're trying to compete in your side of your market with 50,000 people and maybe two or three people of those make content and they're probably not doing about landscaping and lawn care, you've probably got yourself a good niche that's actually going to drive real leads to your business.

Tim, would a hybrid model for email management be something to consider? My thoughts is that a manager could manage email if they are out a few days or get swamped in other tasks. They could request CC respondent emails for that time frame. It gets really, really messy if you do this because who's in the inbox, who's not, who's responding, who's not gets very, very messy. Or if there was an email, like a customer needed to help with the portal or payment, then CC is just notified through connecteam to handle that specific request. This would be considered connecting, like if you need someone to go ahead and help you with something. But whenever you have multiple parties inside of an inbox doing any sort of management, this will trip you up. I learned this pretty when I was setting up my personal assistant. It's like, if I get in that inbox, I'm going to mess it up anytime. And if they get in there at the wrong time, anytime you're switching back and forth, even if it's for a day, oh, I'm out of town, can you check my inbox? Great. But what about the reply to that happened from a week ago. Do I respond back to that? I have no context now so it can get messy if you're hopping in and out of services like that. Also, we only refresh services for command center once a week. Seems that this would be an efficient use of time and financial resources. CC wouldn't have to check in an account multiple times a day. Owner manager would be able to save on CC bill and SOFA supported if something came up they need help with or if they were overwhelmed. Yeah, so in this case this would be more of a project like if you got way behind on something or like hey I'm out for next month, I'm going to go into the email management department command center. That'd be fine. You could do it I guess by the week because every Tuesday they update those but I would not recommend doing it for like hey this day or this two days. First off you can't because it's a weekly thing but more importantly I've just never seen that work well when it comes to personal assistance. Anyone in my inbox whether it be remote or in person. Anyone in my inbox like it needs to be very clear guidelines of like who's in it or when are they doing when are they in it and what am I responsible for and anytime there's a swap I've seen there'd be stuff just not go well whether it be wrong responses or things just get missed.

Is using the link to estimate form on website going to try random emails when doing a mass email? I know there are issues with using the one click custom email when emailing mass in the past. Yes, it has nothing to do with the one click estimate email has everything with the email links Just having that link in general since there are these spam filters are clicking depends who you talk to. Some say one in a thousand, some will say one in a hundred. They're clicking through all the links and checking for spam.

And so is using the link to estimate form on website? No, it's not going to so I'm guessing okay, I see you're saying.

You'Re thinking about making a link that just simply Hyperlinks over to augustalongerservices.com territory estimate that will not even if this is the thing it will click on those but first off you're not going to set up an automation to track that and secondly even if it clicks on it it's not going to have any action taken place. So you can always just do a hyperlink like click here to get an estimate they click on it. It goes to augustlongerservices.com territory estimate and and once they're there then they fill out information. So that will never get like falsely triggered because there is no email link associated with it. It's just a hyperlink. The email link functionality of automations based upon them clicking on it is the part that's currently being affected. And you can still do it. I know a couple owners are still doing it. You just gotta watch when you get a one click back to you. You just gotta check and see like did they receive the estimate 10 minutes ago? If so you're probably good. If they received it a minute ago or 10 seconds ago and then you saw an email link it's likely that that was a spam filter just clicking on all the links and so there. You can definitely do this. Especially now because a thousand emails per hour go out from Copa or Sorry, a thousand? Yeah. Is it a thousand per hour? Yeah, a thousand per hour. Now go up from copilot. You can track this pretty easily but it's still a pain in the butt especially if you're doing like 15,000 like, like the Bellingham shop. It'd be a pain to have to go thousand by thousand by thousand. Ultimately if you still want to use one click smells or email links in general you can, you just need to check the email click time with the email send time. Those are right up against each other. You know it's a spam filter but again that stinks because you got to check each one manually. But if you love it you can still use it. We are looking at a way to be able to basically filter out those robot clicks because they are they, they come to us as clicks so it's very difficult to distinguish somewhat. But they are robots from the spam filter side of things. So we, we aren't going to scrap the feature, we aren't going to remove it from copilot. We are going to figure out hopefully how to distinguish between what is the robot click and what is a human click. Just going to take a little technical engineering side of things that we'll have to figure out. Matt from Salem. How do you control costs in your various businesses? There's some tool, a tool or frame or thinking decision making criteria that you use. I imagine it's different for each one. Any favorite John Taffers we should check out? I have not watched a lot of John Taffer recently. I've kind of been head down on my stuff but anything to do with his his rants are always pretty good. They'll kick you in the butt in terms of controlling costs. First off is, you know, at least quarterly, I'm going to audit, I'm just going to go through the P, like today, this thing. Every single quarter, I'm looking at the P and L or sorry, every single month, I look at the P and L, I get my bank statements reconciled every single month from command center for my locations, and then for all of the other businesses, I get everything reconciled. And so I can scan a P and L and pretty much know where all the costs should be. Now, could there potentially be a couple little subscriptions slide by my eyes? Yes. Is it usually annually? I will go into this massive audit of everything I usually do in February, honestly, because end of year is so crazy, the audit. But honestly, I catch most of it on the monthly stuff because I can look at a P and L and I know generally where we spend on every category. And if it's out of whack or out of order, I generally know what the profit margins are on all departments, etc. And so if anything's big, I will catch it. If anything is small, like little cuts, like, you know, a Zoom subscription, a DocuSign subscription, we didn't cancel, etc. Those all usually catch annually, and there's usually not a ton. So.

The biggest thing I would say is avoid trying to give.

Employees credit cards with just like, spend whatever you want. So we have credit cards for our crew on the field, but we know it's like, it should be like a few places like the hardware store, the gas station. It's pretty simple to track that when you start giving employees like a lot of credit cards and they can kind of spend it on whatever you want to be careful, you. I'd probably be auditing more like twice a year if I was doing that. So, Mr. Anonymous, if we hold team members accountable for showing up at start time, do general managers also need to be on start on time at start time?

Yeah. Like, I would recommend general managers be on time if they're not consistently. Like, I'm probably not gonna have them as my general manager. And so now, that being said, if someone is on salary and it's like, hey, part of the agreement is that on these couple days, they start an hour later, that's fine. Or maybe they have. They have obligations that prevent them from being there at say, 6:30. They have to be there at 6:45 in a couple days, as long as it's agreed upon.

Now, if they're intermittent and literally the crew is showing up before my general manager and they're showing up twiddling their thumbs and they can't get their day started because nothing's set up correctly in terms of like the route hasn't been dispatched or they have questions about their job and the GMs rolling in late. It's a really, really bad look. And so the thing is this, even if I did not let my GM go over this, eventually this will affect the culture to the point where the business will not do well. And so from a performance perspective of financially, the location will decay. And so they will like self clean themselves. They will get themselves fired from performance. If this is something that's happening, even if I didn't even see it, if a GM is showing up late consistently like once a week, they're just late and the crew is waiting on them like the performance of the location will deteriorate, people will leave and eventually I'll have to. I'll be letting the GM anyways even if I never knew they were late. But it is a huge red flag, especially at the beginning if a GM is consistently late. Huge red flag, like huge. The more prepared they are in the morning when the crew shows up allows the crew to make better. On P4P, things are more organized. There's way less happenings in terms of damage cases.

Forgotten equipment, broken equipment, and then vehicle accidents. Especially on vehicle accidents. I see this a lot when you go from owner to gm and that is just an overall lack of checking the trucks. Now if a location is beyond capacity and one manager is having to manage 15 or 20 people, I don't really blame them for not being able to see all of the trucks and do a walkthrough of them maybe two or three times a week, make sure everything's looking good, the tires are filled, there's nothing, lights that are broken, they're in working condition, etc. Tires are not flat. However, if that does not happen and the equipment is not at least walked through, occasionally you start to see it in damage cases, people start to forget stuff. Lights are broken, things are not checked in terms of brakes, stuff falls and it ends up in vehicle accidents. So many times I see the amount of accidents per location for a GM relocation is significantly more their first year compared to when the owner was there. It's very, very, very frequent that happens. And it's mostly due to the fact that the owner gets there in the morning, they walk through all the trucks, they're there 30 minutes before they know everyone's going before they even show up. Everything's dispatched the night before and it's, it is much better planning. So as a very, very broad brush, there's also general managers that do a phenomenal job of this As a general average, that's what I see. But if a general manager does the same thing, they will get the same results. This is not a function of position. This is a function of care for the team and care for the business guy from southwest Calgary. I'm doing some reading on.

How to communicate better elderly people and how is different from everyone else because of their lack of urgency in everything that comes with old age. What are the pains we are solving for them in your opinion? How can we frame it so we have a good close ratio with this demographic? So first off, I actually think that your sense of urgency as you grow older somewhat increases. Depends on what you're looking at. I guess in terms of their urgency, they're probably not going to be reactive. However, they also their urgency to solve for time is greater because they might only have five or 10 years left in life. Also, their lawn getting long and if they have bad health means the lawn will not get fixed with them. Like they cannot do it themselves. So when a customer has a pain and they can't solve it, you actually have a huge leg up on it in terms of negotiation because it's not like they can be like, that's too expensive. I'll do it myself. So.

From my perspective, you're actually selling is peace of mind, insurance status. You're selling a lot of other things instead of what we usually would say is time. Because time is what we all think of. Like we are giving time back to our customers. But think about the person that potentially doesn't have a lot to do. They're sitting at their home all day long, they're older, they have a lot of health complications, et cetera. They can't physically do the lawn. However, time is not actually potentially a huge issue for them. But what they are concerned about is the fact that their house is paid off. They have say a $1.5 million net worth and 750,000 or a million of it is wrapped up in their house. So now you're talking about asset protection insurance. So how I'm going to sell to them if I know they've been in a house for 15 years, I know they're not leaving because interest rates the way they are. They're also from a physical perspective, it'd be very challenging for them to move. And so I'm going to really lean into the fact that, like, hey, this winter service is going to prevent any sort of damage. That could be a $20,000 bill for the house. I'm going to really lean into the fact that they are, they are willing to pay an extra 100, $200 a month to make sure that nothing happens bad to their property. So I'm going to really lean into, like, getting the bushes off of their house to prevent algae. I'm going to really promote, like, hey, let's make sure the gutters are cleaned out to prevent any sort of pooling on the, on the roof, which could again lead to a leak. I'm going to be really looking at things like drainage because I know if there's water that gets underneath their house, that's a huge bill, I can prevent that for much cheaper and work on the prevention side of things. So many of them are very acutely aware of this because they are dealing with health issues that are very big when if they would have just had preventative health care years before, they would be fine. And so they're dealing with something like cancer or skin cancer, for example, or.

Like obesity or heart disease or liver disease because of things they did in their past. And so a lot of them are actually pretty acutely aware that if I take care of my property from a preventative perspective, it'll prevent these massive, very costly expenses down the road for me. So it's actually something somewhat baked into them. So pitching that and understanding that is different for all of us because we are much more sensitive to either money or time. We are less inclined to think about, okay, this is an asset for them. This is not a house. This is not an apartment. This is not a place to live. This is their asset. This is like their nest egg. They retire because of the equity in this house. Something to think about. Not obviously, not everyone, but like, as a broad stroke.

All right, this is coach Connor. I am going through outstanding and overdue accounts in Copilot and compare it to the previous years with SA collection reports. As I'm comparing them, I see we are creeping up to 3 and sometimes 4% undeceivable or past due in SA this year we are shy of 2% or 10k for the whole year. We have changed some billing practices, like billing for initial modes, same day or next day projects upon completion. And with my wife in the office, she stops services from running within one to two failed attempts. Where I believe command default is 30 days, which by the way, you can change that in the automations. It's how you set up the automations. You can set it however you want. So we have decided we definitely reduced the amount that we have not been able to collect. However, what can we do to reduce it further? Clearly all money needs to be collected. But what are some fair use practices to help get this reduced? As close as possible to zero. Our lien process must be submitted within 45 days. The last render to service but requires manual paperwork and having to go to the courthouse to file internally. I thought about going to the public sidewalk and holding a sign saying John Doe doesn't pay his bills lol. However, in reality we are planning to switch over to weekly or daily billing next year to reduce exposure for collections and catch the problem sooner. Any other tips? I think you're doing all the right things. It sounds like you're at 2% so about 10k for the year. That is quite a bit I would say. You know having like your deposit threshold lower is probably one thing. So any project. So let's assume that half of this is like one time projects and the other half is like recurring. I'd be looking at that distribution of the 10k. So this is like 6000 of it is from One Time Projects and 4000 for mowing customers. You're probably not going to see a lot of the mowing customers pay you. The reason for that is because they're small little invoices. It's just harder to honestly get the gumption yourself to go take action on it. If it's a $3,000 bill for a one time product, you're probably moving on it. You could almost eliminate most of the project work project overdues by just decreasing your threshold required for deposits and then increasing them a percentage that they are required to pay. This again will probably reduce your close ratio by like 1 or 2%. But if you're really trying to focus on collections, you can wipe out one time projects pretty easily. I've seen some people actually copilot to 100% deposit threshold and at $1 as their deposit threshold 100% is what you have to pay on a $1. Anything above a dollar. So you could do that basically anytime there's a non recurring services that are basically prepaying you could do that again. It's like will this impact your revenue by more than 2% if you do these sort of actions? So that's the thing to keep in mind. But you know moving it to daily and weekly will definitely help especially on the recurring side. I would say on the project side, I'd probably be thinking in terms of deposit thresholds requiring credit card on file for projects in addition to just mowing. Could also be another thing to think about if you haven't already, which I would imagine you probably do.

All right. Will the conference be live streamed for those who came in? Nope, it will not be live streamed in terms of Blue Collar Summit. We will record the Landscape Summit, which is the Thursday event for Augusta Lawn Care, and hopefully within a week or two after it'll be available to everyone inside of Augusta Nation. Keep in mind, if you're not coming, you're going to be in the dark for a few days because there's a lot that we're releasing and until you get that recording, it's going to seem very, very strange. So just, just know if you're not coming, give us like a week or two, then you'll get the recording and it'll become much more clear. But there'll be several things that are released and everyone will be talking about it and you will be in the dark, which we will try to get the recording up as soon as we possibly can. But yes, the recorded portion for Augusta Lawn Care will be recorded. The part for the, the Summit will not be recorded.

When is the next roundtable? So we always skip the one in January cuts conference. And so the next one, I guess technically would be end of Q1. So April.

Is everyone getting a jersey even if they can't make it to conference? Nope. It's people who show up to conference, they'll get the, the jerseys. Unless you ask someone. No, you wouldn't have one for you. Now you have to have registered for Summit. And then I guess if you couldn't make it for some reason, you could get someone to send it to you. But we're not gonna, we're not gonna like send one to everybody. Just a matter of if you're there, you'll get one. Thanks for your point of view. Okay, cool. All right, I think that's all we had for today again. Reminder, make sure you check your email. I just searched Command center. They sent a update from Command center yesterday and some good stuff in there. All right, everyone, have a fantastic rest of your day and we will see you tomorrow. Take care.