Mike Minutes Mastermind 12/15/2022

Hey everyone. Hope you're doing super well again. It's a little bit later of a live show, but wanted to answer some of the questions that came in on the forms. Just drop this into Facebook real quick.

All right, let's do this.

Share. Day three of training went really good today. Day four, the final one is tomorrow.

Cool. All right, let's see here. Can you all see this? Very good.

Any update from vistaprint for no snow designs on Pro Shop? Oh man. I know they're not in there because I literally noticed this yesterday. Let me email the media team on here. No.

Designs. Need these. Follow up.

Test the print out. The disappearance.

Of the no snow designs.

Don't.

Show snow as a service.

As a service. Beautiful. All right, send some new team.

And I'll CC vistaprint.

Okay, media team, thank you. Yes. I don't know what's up. As soon as. When they did their update several months ago, it just took all the no snow designs off. I don't know why. And we asked him to come back. So we will follow up with them. Sorry about that. The saga continues. The shop space situation. I talked to a lawyer about the lease and had him review it to see if it's something I could use. It could use to break the lease. He said based on how the lease was written, there is nothing I can use against the landlord as everything was very fairly vague in the least and they weren't breaching the agreement. Having said that, I'm still weighing options on if I should just stay there and run multiple locations out of space or try and find someone else to take take over the lease. On one hand, I don't want to get stuck paying on a lease I'm no longer using and trying to find someone else to take it over. On the other hand, I think we should be able to put multiple locations in the shop space to make rent. Each location is paying. Make sense. I hear one of the tenants is moving out of the end of the month and not telling the landlord.

Okay, well, it just seems funny to me that these other tenants have moved out without any problem. Assuming that they're in leases as well. Maybe they're not in leases but. Or maybe their leases are ending. So that's a little bit suspect to me that that's somehow not an issue. But yeah, like you could definitely run multiple locations from. From that shop space assuming that it's within proximity to a secondary location. Like if it's kind of in the middle of two different territories, that could work. You definitely want to talk to Lee about that to see if you can actually plan around that in terms of if there's a territory that you can use.

The second thing I would say is like, even if that doesn't work out is keep using it while you are trying to find someone else to lease it out. Just the last thing I want you to do is go find another lease and then you're stuck paying this lease for four years because you can't find anyone else to do it. That's literally.

$30,000 a year that you'd be basically flushing on the toilet if you don't find someone that can lease that. And $30,000 a year out of your profits would put a big dent in terms of your second location and being able to afford that. So you don't want something like that to mess you up. Leases are, this just can be a beast. I had to pay.

Seventy, almost a hundred thousand dollars to get a lease several years back. So. And it was like either I paid for that or I paid for the next five years and would have paid out like250,000. So yeah, in the terms of recession and expenses, what are the thought are the things you would immediately cut out? What things would you keep? I would try to just be cutting out anything that isn't driving revenue the business. Again, we're assuming that you are in growth mode. You are.

Extremely hungry and you're willing to sacrifice a lot for the business. If you're, you know, if you're several years in, you know, you're like, hey, look, I'm not going to cut out, you know, date night. I'm not gonna cut out, you know, other niceties of life. And that's not a bad thing. There's no right or wrong. But if you're in that growth period of life and you and your family and you, your spouse have agreed that that's where you're at.

Then you would cut out the thing and just like downsizing everything. Like for example, maybe you do date night, but instead of going to a restaurant where you spend $120 and get wine and all the rest of it, maybe you just go out and get burgers and spend 40 bucks. Right? So there's a way to live life enjoyably without spending a lot of money and enjoying, you know, things that don't cost a lot. So it's just how you look at like my family when I was a kid, we never ate out and I, I really barely ate out until I was later in my teens. But like I remember we never ate Out. But it was normal. It was totally fine. Like we enjoyed it and like a big treat for us was to go get a Frosty at Wendy's. Like that was a big deal or a blizzard. Like that was. That was like what we live for. I remember still one time when my dad, he was. He was selling newspaper subscriptions door to door. He was doing ministry part time and then he was working at night in the grocery store. But then in the afternoon he would sell these newspaper subscriptions door to door. And basically if he sold two, I served on this one time. Like he said, if we, if I can sell two subscriptions a day, then we'll go out for blizzards. I still remember to this day. That day we lived up in Custer, which is like a couple miles from here in Blaine, and going to the Dairy Queen in Ferndale, which is like right across the highway from where we had conference last year. And like that was the life, man. So like, I think you can live on little and still be very, very happy. And, and, and contentment doesn't have anything to do with money. It doesn't. And in my opinion, contentment is success. So you know, when you see, you know, I went out to Africa and saw these orphans that like have. Have nothing and see their ability to be happy and content. Like, you know, it doesn't take a lot to be happy and content.

I would. You are. I would. You are using Relay bank for your checking. Who are you using for your credit cards? We aren't doing the credit cards. We're using the debit cards from Relay. So I'll show you more how we have set up. Have it all set up at conference.

Evan Zillow. I asked Lee this question. However, I know Christmas lights were quite the talk at first and after talking to Garrett about them, I thought I'd ask here for others for context. Context. We should hit the 500k mark next year if we are willing to stay at the working GM model. Is it worth adding another service like Christmas lights to add more growth or helping with the seasonality of our industry? Or that we're spending the 7.10k on marketing for fall cleanups and doubling down on our current services to copy and paste into other locations easier? Garrett and I were talking about talking and cleanups requiring less training. We already have the equipment and extra marketing to a service we already do is essentially plug and play. Garrett shared that sometimes it's hard to complete both Christmas lights and cleanups as it gets closer to Christmas overall. Just wondering if adding the Christmas the Lighting services counterintuitive to the norm of cutting out services in the working GM model and also and simplifying. Also was SA surprised how much do you know about their software? How proficient command center is on their software? Own software. Okay, so yeah this is a great point. I would, I personally wouldn't do Christmas lights unless you were slow in November and December. If you're crazy busy in November, December and like you can't stay up with the work, then it would be a good idea to not do Christmas lights. Like if you're doing like leaf cleanups and proper place based upon revenue of 90% of our locations, people go significantly lower November and December. And that's why Christmas lights are a great option. Especially if you're in a drier climate where you're not going to be fighting ice and snow on the roofs during November, December, I think it's a great thing. But the bottom line is if you can not have to add more services and you can fill that time with profitable work, I would do that. But if you can't, which the majority of our locations have a significant precipitous drop in revenue in December, it's a great service to offer and it's relatively simple. You get ladders. There's obviously some risk of being on top of roofs and things depending on your market in my opinion is the biggest thing. I don't want my guys going on the roof because the ice where we're at and the cold and being on ladders, I just don't want that liability and I don't want to have to add that as another service for my GMs to have to figure out. So I don't do them. But if you are just bone dry with work throughout December, talk to someone like Dylan from down in Louisiana. And yeah, he like 44000 in revenue. I think it's the best month ever in December or November. Sorry. And I bet he's probably better in December and it's all because of Christmas lights. So it's not to say it's bad service, but I would not do it unless you cannot fill the schedule in November and December. And if you can fill it with something that you already have the equipment and you know, it's easy, you know, relatively easy to train, I would focus on that instead of adding a new service. That would complicate things. There was other questions in here. Sorry.

Also with service, how much you know their software.

They follow everything I'm doing. So they, they knew, they know us quite pretty well. They Wanted me on their.

Advisory board thing and I declined and we'll talk about why at conference here in a couple weeks. But yeah, like we use their software more than anyone else does. They're building this new franchise tool for us. Really? And one other client that has 20 or 30 locations but they're going to charge an arm and a leg for something that's relatively useless in my opinion. And it's. They're still eight to nine months away from having it finished.

No comment.

How should we handle invoices that are not paid and were not submitted to collections?

Should I make an expense category in QuickBooks to account for the loss? Okay, so I'm assuming you did not send them to collections.

And they weren't paid. It's going to be considered bad debt. So you can put it in on your. You can just cancel the invoice if you wanted to inside the software. Just, you know, cancel the invoice. Market as bad debt. You can do it in QuickBooks as well.

It's not a loss. Right. So if you don't get paid, you just don't ever recognize the revenue. And so it'll never get into QuickBooks. It only gets into QuickBooks if it hits your bank account. So you wouldn't really have to do anything in terms of QuickBooks. Any steps to take with the invoice itself in CRM other than noting and letting it remain with the sent status? I have two small invoices from earlier this year that I didn't think think were worth putting into collections. Yeah.

Honestly you could just delete them or mark them as bad debt. I forget the exact statuses of invoices inside Zooper. But you can. Yeah, you can void them. So like void is the status name of service autopilot. Or you could just delete them out altogether. I would make sure you put notes in that customer's profile if you actually delete the invoice.

But that's what I would do. You don't need to do anything in QuickBooks because there's no loss. You just don't recognize the revenue. How do you coach or train a GM to keep sales up when you transition out of the location and they take over? We will hit around 650k this year and I want to make sure we can hit around that mark next year. The goal is to raise prices and make the more location super profitable.

Yeah. So how do you coach or train to keep up sales? Yeah, like they should be doing this already with you and really learning the ropes of in person. Sales. Keep in mind that the majority of your revenue should have should be coming from recurring revenue already. So like you should already have at 650, 350 or 400 that like is slam dunk because it's recurring revenue at least. And so keep in mind that any new recurring jobs are mostly being sold over the phone and like drive by estimates. So really it's only the in person side of things that you really need to sell to them. You're trained with them, right? Go with them, go in the car with them, do some training, let them watch you explain things like using icon, explain why it's important to give them give the customer something at the end of the talk, how to transition out to a getting away from the customer and shooting the.

Project management video.

Using, you know, building the job in the mind of the customer. Assuming the sale, these are things that you'll need to do in person with an estimator. But honestly a good estimator that has worked out with you in the field and already kind of knows the budget hours pretty accurately and kind of knows this formatting of the estimate. Comments should literally be able to pick up some of most of the sales skills in a few days if it takes them more than a few weeks to really nail some of like the in person stuff. That is pretty basic. A lot of it is assume the sale and use the verbiage of when we come to your property instead of if we come or if you accept. Like just assuming the sale alone and having good eye contact. Those two things is like will pave the way for an estimator honestly, because internally they just need to be accurate in budget hours. So it's just a little bit of a salesmanship and kind of that side of things that you'll have to teach them. All right, wonderful people. Hope you have a fantastic Friday tomorrow and a great weekend. I don't know if I'll have another mastermind tomorrow, but if not I'll catch up on Saturday.

But yeah, I didn't think there's a whole other announcements other than that. So hope you have a great evening and we'll see you this weekend sometime. Take care. Week day four of training tomorrow. It's great. Great group of people. It's gonna be.