Mike Minutes Mastermind 12/17/2024

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to their Mike minutes Mastermind. Sorry for the crazy harsh light. I do apologize.

We're out on a turnaround, just wrapping up. I'll be headed back and I will be in the office tomorrow for the next Mike minutes Mastermind. A quick announcement if you have not seen it already. Lee posted it last week and that is a preferred vendor with Ferris. And what's cool is they actually give us their pricing list right on the dashboard so it's 25 off across the board. You don't have to have a fleet right off the rip. You get 25 off their suggested retail price. So again that pricing sheet you can actually see on the dashboard. So it's very cool. Check it out. Did I post this correctly?

Yes. Okay, good. All right, let's go ahead and jump in, see if there's any questions.

Give me one second. This thing is not showing. Okay, there you go. Cool. All right. Share, present.

See what we got today.

Got two questions it looks like. Let's zoom in.

First question is from Max from Burnaby Mike. I've been learning about sweeping businesses and they seem pretty interesting. This is a software called Sweeping Go which offers a client onboarding form that allows clients have instant price and add their car to file. If a company is using Sweep and Go they can add their form to their website and make modifications on it through the CRM including custom pricing for different sizes of jobs. If you want to see an example, check out the Poops Swoop Scoop website. Yeah, I've seen this one. They are based in Seattle that uses the software and intake form on the websites from Sweep and Go. Are we able to copy this form for our guest locations? From what I can gather, clients enter their information into a box that directly link with Stripe one of the processors for the need for overall web security is lessened because the Sweep and Go form is piggybacking off stripe security. In other words, the form is secure but not necessarily the entire website which allows so you can go to deploy the form on several websites instead of different companies. Thoughts on implementing something like this? Yeah, so yeah, I've seen their website. I really like their software. Actually the challenging part is that the the there it's like a hundred dollars 99 per user. But most, most people in scoop companies are like one, two, three employees. The vast, vast, vast majority. Anyways, all of us say yeah they're cool and we have looked, I've looked at this. The challenging part with Stripe, if you use that form is it really limits your user interface of the website of what the form can look like. And so at conference you guys see something for Augusta only. And then I think way down the road when we do custom forms for copilot, then we would have like the stripe part integrated but like their, their only way in their thing is like service area size, things like that. It's a little more difficult when it comes to mowing simply due to the fact that usually the price variance of our.

Of our pricing is dependent on size of property and not number of dogs. That's the variable. I've seen instant pricing on most of their forms. And if you have a static form, you can use a stripe form pretty easily. But it's when you start having the size of a property being variable because and even just like let's say for example everyone knew the lot square footage of their property, then you could also do, we could use that in that case of all kinds of static numbers. But.

Given the fact that the biggest pain point of instant pricing is accuracy, the number of dogs someone has very accurate 1, 2, 3, etc. The size of someone's property is a little more nebulous as well as.

One lot. A lot can be, you know, fifty dollar cut. It can also be 150 cut depending on so many variables versus like one dog versus two dogs versus three dogs. It's very linear. And so that's always been the problem with why most instant pricing forms haven't taken off on mowing as much as janitorial. It's. It's more common. A poop and scoop, it's more common. There's a few others like window cleaning, etc. Where it's like, it's more, you can count things out and people. It's easier for people to count windows than square footage of their lawn or square footage of their lot size, for example. And so as long as you're okay with extreme levels of inaccuracy, you can actually do this already using a stripe form. What you can't do in the part that we're going to talk about at conference for Augusta is how do we actually design this to use pictures to improve the accuracy as well as the confidence of the customer that the quote is actually correct. Because most people like I don't know the square footage of any of my properties, my lots, I know like how long it would take to mow them. But I'm a landscaper. And so that's always been the challenge with lawn care in general. Is your property dimensions, size, obstacles, etc. Play such a large factor in the pricing, it can double or triple versus if it's a simple stripe form. It's like choose your zip code. Okay, great. You're in our service here. All right, how many dogs you have? Two. Okay, great. Here's your price. Whenever you have linear pricing, it's dialed in. Instant pricing is so much more standard in a lot of those industries. But that's why mowing you don't see instant pricing forms. And so the stripe forms are great for forms. Where it falls apart is when you start designing it. So the pictures of the small, medium and large being able to integrate the back end of like weekly and bi weekly into the back end of that. But more importantly the up the aerial picture and the front picture, the accuracy dramatically increases versus us just saying, you know, are you a quarter size lot or are you a quarter acre, half acre, full acre, etc. It starts to fall apart there in terms of accuracy. And given that it's the biggest drawback. The reason people usually stop using instant price forms is because of accuracy. And so that's what we've always tended towards and which I lawn care hasn't accepted it yet. But again, we will address this problem within a month. This is a problem that for Augusta Nation won't necessarily exist. And so what is that? Oh, so yeah, just stay tuned for conference and we'll be talking about this. Hutch has a question. Have you ever considered highlighting some of the top Augusta locations on your YouTube done turnarounds inside of Augusta, but I'm curious if they're ever showing the top 50 percentile hurts the Augusta image. The public is often has only only seen Augusta when it's hurting your location in Washington or the series you had in North Carolina. Similar to how Alex talks about the success of portfolio companies and what they do inside the businesses that make them successful. If YouTube is the lead mate for new franchisees, wouldn't you want to share the biggest winners for social proof? Yeah, this is, this is something that we'll probably be doing in 2025. We're going to be doing on the turnarounds, meeting up with owners a lot more and just making sure like okay, if someone's like 30, 40 minutes away, we'll try to go visit them. So something that's definitely on the horizon, one that we're very careful of. People are coming to YouTube to either learn or be.

Entertained. So education or education or entertainment. Having a, a friend of mine like how, how, how someone outside of Augusta looks at this is like I have A friend who's doing really good and I pump air in their tires. That's how people look at it. I also don't like the impression that.

Some people have and I know it's like a minority, but I don't like the perception that the owner is only successful because like they're part of my brand. And so even when we talked about yesterday like the Augusta lawn care, the systems of it work with or without Mike Andy's. And so obviously the promotion of it is more secondhand and indirect with like me wearing this. Occasionally we'll mention like, hey, if you want to join a destination. No, here it is. And so showing the videos, the challenging part is it bombs in terms of view count and so it hurts the rest of the channel. And so when it comes to promotion, the challenging part is how do we create a story that people want to follow. And the problem is as soon as they see a guest, they think it's a sales pitch or they think I'm patting my friend on the back. That's what they think. It's like my business partner. It's like, you're so great and they're so awesome. And so like that's how they perceive it. And so what we have seen to work better is creating educational and entertaining content. And we're going to like heavy into this in 2025 a lot more. And then what they see is, they see, you know, this is the, sorry, I don't know why I have dirt all over.

There is a done for you model. It's like, look, you can build your website, you can do that yourself, you can raptor trucks, you can figure out, you know, instant pricing, you can figure out your automations, you can figure out your marketing, you can figure out a lot of these things or you can just do it with us. And so I don't like the direct approach of selling unless they are an in person captive audience. So.

It'S Rare that on YouTube it'll work as a broad net. And so for example, for example, like Alex, you brought up Alex. Alex doesn't actually show winners of school on his channel.

What he will do though, he will run ads against his, his audience off of his videos because if he did the former, the video would bomb, it would reach less people and then you actually hurt yourself. And so it's a thing you gotta be kind of careful of. And what we've kind of opted toward just to make sure we can pay the bills is the 1/3 at the bottom. And so instead of interrupting the message With a ad slot. It's like, you know, we're going to produce this, it's not going to be promotional at all. But then when there's a pertinent product that I do sell, I'm going to put it at the bottom as a lower one third. So you're not annoyed because we can't like if you, you don't want to sell the goose that is the videos for the egg. Like, like, like oh, I gotta, you know, kill, kill the goose now. It's like, no, let the videos keep pumping out content and getting more views. By doing that you. Yes, I'm not gonna direct pitch. Yes, I'm going to probably not promote directly inside of the company, but people that are hungry will find it. It's also a matter of like I just was just looking at this. Yeah. 1179. So what is it? Only 14 or 15% not even of people that apply and want to get into Augusta and like fill out the form and take a bunch of calls with Lee actually get in. And so it's actually our biggest thing in the past has always been like the biggest challenge is heat people out. And one of the best ways we found unfortunately is to increase the amount of money they need to get inside. Because we've always been very, okay, they're, they're hustler, they're younger, like they're new, but like they're hungry and they're a great cultural fit.

More, not more. I shouldn't say more. But almost 50% of the solo operators that joined four years ago haven't made it. Now that is in line with like general starting a business. However, if someone has the capital to get past 20, 30,000amonth in revenue and scale, those are the locations that stay. And so we also realize that the amount of effort we pour into those people that are struggling with such little capital is tremendously more than the people that if we could just spend time on like the higher level systems creating like the seven figure, the seven figure club and other stuff I'm doing with like multi unit operators is like that is going to be serving the best instead of just always spending like all of our attention on the person that is has $2,000 in the bank barely paid their franchise fee to come. And so we. One thing about the videos and promotion of Augusta is like as soon as I promote we are going to get 90% of people coming that are not qualified to buy and we have to find that out. Like we don't want to discriminate in terms of like, oh, we just didn't like them. Like, we want to actually dig in, make sure they actually, we want to give people a chance if they have the opportunity, if they're a good fit, if they have the capital, etc. And so it's a lot of tasks of just going through applications when we, when I do promote heavily and I'll say, yeah, look at this guy. Within three years he built his business. It's now doing 700,000amonth or 700,000 in revenue, has a general manager and there are people inside of Augusta Nation like that. I could list them off, but when I do that, it becomes the expectation of people that are watching YouTube not as sophisticated as everyone inside of August Nation. And that becomes a huge, just like weeding out process which we are going to refine in 2025 to make sure we can do that. So it's why we will be doing more in 25:25. But you see much more indirect, whether it be Alex or myself. We do not promote people inside of our community. On our, on our top of the funnel stuff. We talk about it, we mention it, but we're not going to spend a huge amount of time on it because it will bomb the channel. So, like if I post a video and it gets say 8,000 views in six months versus a video that does 100,000 views and trickles up from 10, 20, 30 and keeps going, the first 20,000, 30,000 views are people who watch every single video. Everything else is a new audience. So the question is going after the audience that already knows Augusta Lawn Care and they the ones who watch the video, or do I go after the 80,000 other people that have never heard of me and try to get them into the sphere and in six months they keep watching videos and then they buy. So it's a great point. There's a yin and yang here. There's a balance. And in 2025 we will be pivoting this a little bit more. Mostly because we have spent most of our time the past five years figuring out how do we keep people out and keep the right people in the funnel. Whereas now, like, we have executive model people wanting to join, and that is people that have hundreds of thousands of dollars at one join, they already have plenty of capital. And it's not a matter of like, oh, can I afford the franchise fee? It's like, okay, I have, you know, seven, $800,000. I want to start six to eight of them right away.

How do I get my general managers trained up? So these are Things that we're going to be addressing at conference. A lot of this stuff that I'm, I'm trying not to be like secretive. It's just a matter of like I like to share some of the announcement stuff at conference.

And so all of that to say you are 100% right, this will be happening. But as to why I haven't in the past, that is why is if you, if you bomb a YouTube video, the next two or three, you can see a direct impact because YouTube will not promote it on the done for you page or suggested for you as much. And so because of that, if I go for the kill, I'm paying for it for usually a month. And so you'll see the ebbs and flows of the channel many times correlate with how much I am pushing a product.

So most time we tend to like this is give everything away, be as educational or entertaining as possible. And then the brands will get fed by the most valued prospects because they go out and find like if they see Augusta I mentioned in the videos indirectly and they once in a while just say if you're interested, join Augusta or does a lower third, that person that's sophisticated will find it. What we, what we have in the past is try to avoid 400 calls being booked onto Lee's.

Calendar and 90% of them don't have $10,000. Just the broad audience of YouTube in general is just so different than what we want inside of Augusta. So hope that makes sense.

I'm not seeing these stripe forms, but how is that form different from our current small, medium, large? As far as inaccuracy. Yeah, because they don't have the pictures and their user interface like the design of it is not as customizable as we would want it. So I've played with this and split test the filling out of the form like the completion rate of them for lawn care and the completion rate for poop scoop and janitorial. Those are two. I split test is significantly higher because there's a linear pricing method versus most people don't know what we need to get their quote. Most people know the number of dogs they have. They know the number of rooms they have. They know the number of windows they have. They do not know the square footage of their grass. They do not know the lot square. Their lot square footage. They do not know if they have a 36 inch gate. They do not know like a lot of aspects that go into what is much easier displayed in a picture. And so that's why we've always in the small medium and large pictures and you'll be seeing this stuff you know at conference like just yeah at conference A lot of this this stuff is going to be answered for Augusta in terms of Copilot they will have to likely wait on this stripe being inside of Copilot when we do custom forms but it is from a UI perspective that the interface of these forms that even stripe has now is very HTML looking It's like choose your service areas and like your zip codes and there's a bunch of zip codes and it's like how many dogs do you have or how many bedrooms do you have? It's the UI is not set up to be well integrated into a mobile device on a website and ambifast to load pictures and so that's the part that we're just going to build it in house essentially.

All right everyone, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your Tuesday I'll be back in the office tomorrow and we'll see you then. Take care.

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