Mike Minutes Mastermind 12/14/2023

What's up everyone? I might not be able to finish all of the questions today about to pop onto a train, but before I do that, I want to go ahead and select Ann in quick announcement and that is that we are.

At clinch and we're starting to send out text messages and emails and we're going to send out an estimate so it'll go out via text and email.

So they've started making that part of the process as everyone's moving into copilot, it'll go on text and email when they send the customer an estimate and needs to be accepted.

All right, let me just drop this into Facebook real quick.

All right. It's not going to.

Question.

I quickly checked these and I think there's five right now. All right. Nick from the Peanut says circling back to force question a couple days ago. In regards to splitting responsibilities with a gm, there seems to be a fair amount of locations getting to a point where we aren't ready for a full GM to open our second location, but our main location is at the point of needing to separate sales and operations. Would it be possible to have a document made like the ones you have for GM and regional manager, but for an owner that needs to split operations and sales as well as the compensation you'd recommend for each role? Off the top of your head, do you know in general how this task would be split? In theory, the sales guy would be doing estimates and operation or doing anything else. But being that the owner would most likely take the sales role seems unreasonable to unload every thing other than the estimates of first. Yeah, like if you're going to be moving them out anyways to be a gm, they're you're going to need. They're going to need to know sales and operations. So you're probably going to be like, it's more going to be a matter of like, hey, can you fill in for me on a couple estimates? Maybe you give them, you know, projects that are small for operations. Like, hey, the guys go to them for certain things. It'd be almost impossible to make a document about this because it's so dependent on how soon are you going to move them in to be in gm? What's their role of the GM going to look like once they get to a different location and what their skill sets are? Are they more sales or operations oriented? It's likely going to be if you're just trying to prep them to the gm, you're going to. There is going to be some crossover between two people. Now if you're trying to grow one location and have two people, then you need delineation of roles. But if you're just trying to kind of like prep them for being a gm, they're going to need to know a little bit of sales and they're going to need know a little bit of operations. So you're probably going to have a hybrid kind of approach of like, hey, you're going to take this, I'm going to take that. The guys go to you guys this, they go to me for that. It's going to happen a little bit more like that. Whereas in the event of what we're talking about, course he's going a much, very large one location, you're going to need those delineations. But if you're trying to, if you're trying to prep someone to become a GM and they're kind of like you're not really ready for it yet, they're going to need to know multiple things. And so it would, I would take it more as like, hey, I'm going to pay a little bit higher on base pay because you're not going to be doing just mowing or just landscaping anymore. And I'm going to take you. And if you're willing to take that a bit of a pay cut in terms of not having as much P for P upside over the next year, I'll get you trained up to be able to do estimates, be able to hire and fire. I'll keep you with me a little bit more often. Maybe one day a week you'll be out doing other stuff and then that, that would be up to them. But I'd be careful about, you know, putting all the eggs in one basket of someone being with you for another year to come to become a dm. Make sure they're profitable, make sure they're efficient. If you need their role in the current location and you're not like training them for the next six to eight months, you're. The likelihood of them staying around and waiting home in the year is.

Not a good bet in my opinion. It's like get them trained up, do it to where they're still profitable for the business.

And have the defined roles in terms of like certain parts of the sales, certain parts of operations they take over.

I have created a beef. Mr. Anonymous strikes again. Have exact price door hangers proven to be productive enough. Enough. It should be a big priority when pushing for growth. Is it realistic to ask a GM over a smaller location to do door hangers at at least 10 hours per week during the busy season. Has anyone within Augusta try to hire a part time 20 hours a week or so? Exact price door hanger team member during spring rush. What are your thoughts on this? Yeah, we'll probably do that in my locations. The last part, hiring someone just for door hangers this coming spring I'm assuming and price not very much on marketing otherwise because we know it works well in that market. And in terms of the top part, the 10 hours per week during the business season comes down to what are you expecting to do otherwise? So I expect 30 budget hours worth of work to be done by working GM and then subtracts for every estimate in person that they do. And then it's like okay, well if they can do 20 in person estimates now, they've done 10 remaining budget hours. Okay, that could be the hours they spend doing door hangers for example. So.

Mr. Anonymous again, what man hour rate are you seeing as a sweet spot for cleanups? When pushing a lot of growth without leaving too much on the table mowing, is it 35 minimum too low for a weekly 1000 square foot lawn or even in growth mode should be close to $20. I have lots of lawns under 2,000 square feet in my area, so getting the minimum right is a pretty big deal. Yeah, like if you're under a thousand square feet, 35 is okay because you literally are going to take five minutes. I would not go much lower than 35 minimum. Again, you are assuming your growth load. Like I wouldn't go much lower than 35 a cut. Unless you are in massive growth mode, you're willing to lose a little bit of money and you know that then you know, maybe do 30 right. But like 35 in my opinion is kind of like the lowest you want to go to cover your overhead costs. But I have seen, I have approved people go to 30 per week and if you're a massive growth man, you just want to rack up a bunch of people, you know, eight by, you know, that's a thousand square feet. Like a thousand square feet takes a few minutes literally.

Next question from Tim. Would it be worth buying contact info of landowners on profly? I don't think so, honestly. I just don't see the benefit of getting a list of cold customers depending what the price is. Obviously there's a price for everything, but I don't think there's a huge I personally don't think there's a huge amount of value. I haven't seen these like perform over the top. So I think there's Just better uses of the money. And again, it depends on the amount of money you're spending on ProfWire. I haven't actually looked at what their cost and rates are. Like, if you're paying $10 for thousand customers, maybe it's worth it. But again, it's like, what are you gonna do with that information? Are you going to like, I don't know, do they give you their emails? You give them their phone number? It's like, well, I can get that from the white pages, their address, their phone number and their name. Right. So.

It just depends what information you're getting, what the price would be, I guess.

But typically I haven't seen those lists honestly convert very well. I've tested a bunch of them. I've tested them with like any list of phone numbers for texting. I've tested those. I've just never seen like, oh, it's so great for the cost of spending. Next question. Tim, what's your thoughts on monthly profit sharing from field worker employees? I'm okay with it. The problem that I find with it is one.

The number doesn't get very large. If you're doing 10% profit sharing, it doesn't get big enough per employee for it to be super significant where there's a lot of pain if they're late because it's like, well, it's 100 or 200amonth of profit sharing or 300, like they don't care as much. I do like the frequency of it being shorter because then people get incentivized faster. But I would probably wait for achievement awards and PPP and focusing on like perfect attendance on the monthly basis. And then the quarterly is profit sharing because there's going to be months where you lose money and then the next month you're crazy, crazy high. And that's because like, you like the first month of mowing, typically you don't make all your money as quickly. And so therefore the money comes in the second month of spring and so you lose money that first month. Well, is it their fault? No, not really. It's the matter of like collecting. When do you collect the money? So.

I typically see the number not being large enough compared to profit sharing monthly. And.

And it just isn't painful enough because the number isn't large enough for them to not delay, etc. I would rather tie in monthly incentives around like perfect attendance, for example, completely separate from profit sharing. I typically see network best because otherwise the undulations of up and down. Like last month, for example, the Bellingham Shop they had like.

$60,000 in profit, $68,000 in profit. But the month before we had like a loss I think of like, I forget what was it, three or thousand dollars and it was like nothing really changed other than we had a bunch of big checks come in like a week, the week, the first week of November. So was it like were they way worse in October? No, not really. Like it's the exact same team, no one really changed, nothing really changed and yet they had like, like 40 something percent profit in one month so.

Oh and it's Corey's birthday so that's probably why they made so much profit last month because Corey's birthday so of course they're gonna just crush it.

I think I heard it was 10 cents per contact. Yeah, if you're paying 10 cents per contact that's for a thousand people paying 100 bucks. I don't see the return on that personally because you're talking about cold leads right? You're talking about people like never heard of you. You're just like dming them out of the random. And I don't know if you're doing postcards, I don't know if you like what medium you're going to contact them with but one click estimates in COPA before email and texting. Now see there's no such thing as a one click estimate text. There's not the technology that allows us to track someone like that yet we are going to try to work on it right now we had someone go in and click a one quick action email today that really put us through a loop because it created a infinite loop in the automations. So we're patching that right now and so if some of the emails were delayed today that's why. But we patched making some upgrades to sequence automations and no links. But the problem is it created a loophole. Someone went in there and created an infinite loop that was like just around the system and email. So I figure just trying to patch these things and make sure it's usable but this is definitely on our radar and they're like how can we somehow make the technology for a one click text message to work like a one click estimate email. The other part of it is sending a text messages. Sending a text message is literally about.

200 times as expensive as sending an email in terms of like our costs from like Twilio. So when you send a 10,000, 10,000 text messages it costs us $100 like there's real cost involved, probably more than $100 actually it's a little over a penny per text. So we have to actually figure out how like throttle text messages because technically someone could go in there and like literally bankrupt us. And so we'll be working on that. But down the road we could have it where it's like, hey, look, if you want to send a one click estimate or one click text message out, you know, I think that one penny is, is better spent doing that than like 10 cents on a random call or a random like, you know, person like this, for example. But there is significant cost in texting. Like significant. We pay hundreds if not thousands of dollars now daily at Copilot for text messages. So we'll have to throttle text messages because they're just so expensive.

Anyways. A little behind the scenes there, but yeah, today was not a fun day. Someone got in and just made these infinite loops, slowed everything down. There's a couple locations specifically. Just check your email today. I just go through your estimates real quick. Just make sure they all went out. Some of them probably did not. And so that's partly why sending an email on text is helpful. But when someone bombards the system with an infinite loop, the email service is like, oh, there's a ton of spam and they'll start filtering us. And so. But if it wasn't sent out, it'll say deleted in your account. So I would just check that. So if you send a few estimates, just go through, make sure. The estimates went out today. But we were printing guarded over the next couple days to make sure someone can't do this again. I don't know who this is or what exactly, but we're figuring out make sure that we can't make infinite loops around these automation stuff and we'll fix it. So appreciate all of you. I'm hopping on this plane because now it is final boarding. All right, here we go. So you guys.