Mike Minutes Mastermind 12/18/2024

Hello ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the mic minutes. Mastermind back in the office. Let's get things kicked off. I just sent a message out. We only had one question submitted. Looks like another one just came in. So we got two. So if you have a question in the description there is a link. Fill out the form. If you've never submitted one before, this is a good time.

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Present. Ah, wrong one.

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Boom. We'll jump right in. First question.

Let'S see Here is from Mr. Anonymous. Let's say I have an idea for app or website that would provide a service to communities. What would be the first few steps to figure out if this is a viable thing to put more thought and energy into? I have the idea and a start to the design aspect.

How would it work and feel from a customer standpoint? No clue on the actual work to get it done, financial commitment, time, et cetera. So it feels impossible because I won't know where to begin. How could I start to research this to understand what it would take if something actually wanted to commit to right now?

If you're trying to kind of build a MVP or minimum viable product for some sort of technical thing, as long as it's like a web app, you can use something like Bubble. It's a no code builder. So expect results of a no code builder. So kind of like you know, yes, you can build a decent looking website on something like Weebly or Squarespace. You can usually tell if it's not custom. So as long as you're not trying to build like a, a massive like a consumer facing product that's going to be used by a bunch of people. It's more like a organizational tool. It sounds like this is some something to do with.

Community. Like sound like you're trying to get something on the community to put together. So like it probably doesn't have to be like super sophisticated. And if that's the case, like Bubble would be a good, you know, Bubble IO replit is another. It's a little bit more complicated but still another option for like no code web apps to like mock things up. If you're just trying, if you actually like, oh I want to like take this to market and I want a developer to do it, you know, then you're going to be putting significant amount of money of cost into it. In fact, well even Bubble is too complicated for me. You could get someone like an upwork to throw it together for you for usually a couple thousand dollars to put together like a basic web app. On something like Bubble or Replit deployment and Replit is a little bit different.

How would I start to research to understand why I take in some of the action. Want to commit to right now? Yeah, that's where I would start now. If you're having a backend database and a lot of.

Other things that you need done in terms of payments, payments even aren't that bad. Repl and Bubble have integrations. But if you're going to get complicated, you need a developer. And then if you're going to start getting people inside the app. Oh, it was here, it was me. Definitely customer facing product would need to process payments. Even Replit just added in a pretty cool thing with Stripe to be able to do stuff. But if you want to like go hardcore, I would probably start with those. And then like if you wanted to go more hardcore, then you're gonna invest, you know, tens of thousands of dollars to maybe get a developer involved for a little bit. And then it's a matter of like if you have people in the system, it's gonna constantly be breaking different demands on the servers and the databases, especially if that's scaling up. So if you have like one day where there's a thousand people that touch your site, another day where there's two people that touch your site and then is it like, does it need to be done differently on mobile versus web? So it gets very complicated if you want to. It just depends on what you're trying to build. Like if you're trying to build an app for a website or provide a service to communities, don't know what exactly that means. I don't know if that's a service like a business or if that means a service like some sort of organizational community board. Like community board would work great for like a very low code, no code type situation. But I would, you know, for every person that goes online. So they made a million dollar business off of like a no code software SaaS product. There is a thousand other people have tried to do that and they just don't go anywhere. If you're building those platforms, it is the equivalent of trying to build inside Weebly or Squarespace. You can build a decent website but everyone can tell and there's limitations. So usually you need engineers to start jumping in, in my opinion. So Nick Hudsonville. Nick from Hudsonville. Here we go. Hi Mike. I hope you're doing well. I've been reflecting a lot on goal setting and achievement recently, both in business and personally and I wanted to ask for your perspective. If you're comfortable sharing of course, Part one Over the years, what large milestones and personal goals have you set for yourself? I'm especially interested in hearing about your business goals, but personal milestones are just as fascinating. I'd love for you to be as specific as you feel comfortable. Examples, timelines, or even some of the processes you use to set these goals would be really insightful. So everyone has access to the Copilot goal session. I know some people inside of Augusta have joined the goal sessions inside Copilot. Those are helpful for sure.

And they're nothing new to Augusta, but I walk everyone through them so feel free to hop on those.

The the link to that you can get from support at Copilot. You can also get it just in the chat like ask for your goal session call but do either honestly the the most probably one on one is going to be your coaches. You know, do it in your December your January coaching call.

Going over more of a budget style thing. But what I'm usually going to do is just simply look at, you know, quarterly what am I going to do each quarter. So usually that's three things max. So that's 12 for the next year, things that need to get done and then I'll max it out at 12 now. So.

Like what are the most important key initiatives for the year broken down by quarter and then are those going to have in terms of demands for inputs, so marketing inputs, hiring inputs and capital expenditure inputs. So if I have three, three objectives for the quarter, okay, do I need to hire anyone for these things? Do I need to do something different on the marketing side to be able to make these initiatives cross the line? And then do I need to buy any capital expenditures? Do I need to invest in computers, software? Do I need buy out trucks? Do I need to buy equipment? Do I need a shop space to make this happen? So these are all really, it's like we work backwards. Like these are the goals for the quarter and then backwards to the inputs that I need in order for that outcome to happen.

In terms of like large milestones. Personal I've never been like super driven by like goals. Like I just know I'm going to like I know the long, long term vision one and I know directionally I'm going that direction and then I'm just more focused on usually just incremental progress because it's so easy when people start talking about goals and milestones, they basically create different businesses inside their business. So they start adding services, they start hiring people they shouldn't. They start adding Marketing channels that are not proven, they start to jump to conclusions that are not correct in the business. And so I like to think of it as like, my goal actually doesn't change very much. This is just for me, like, this is not like what's right for anyone, like, what is the ultimate North Star? And then I just look at the next year. So if you're doing goal plan in here, I'm like, hey, this is the North Star. Like, I know we're going to take the company public, I know that we want to change the level of professionalism in the landscape industry. And here's how we're going to do it. There's the vision, and then what am I going in the next 12 months that will get me towards that? And I believe if you do that for 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 years, all of a sudden you wake up and you're really close to your goal. As the saying goes, like, we overestimate what we can do in a year and underestimate what we can do in 10 years. And so most of the time that's just simply due to the fact that incremental progress is boring.

But if you stacked up five years of incremental progress with every quarter you did three new things, that'd be 60 new things that you changed in the business.

And initiatives that you were accomplishing. And if you did that, you would radically improve your company, your business, your personal life, same thing as personal life. So let's say one out of. If I was doing it like this way, I'd probably do like one personal goal, health, wellness, spiritual, whatever, and then two others that were commercially and use business goals for every quarter. And then if you did that, you would basically wake up in five years you would have completed 20 personal goals and you would have completed initiatives and then you would have completed 40 initiatives that were the business related. So there you go. So that would probably be the way I do it and I'd just be like, hey, what are the next year's quarterly goals? Max of three. And I'll be working back to the inputs that are required to hit those, which is hiring, marketing and capital expenditures. Part two of those milestone goals, which one have you achieved on time and which were delayed or missed. If you don't mind sharing, I'm curious what you think contributed the differences between the two. Whether it was circumstances, strategy or anything else.

Honestly, nothing goes fast, fast enough in the short term. So like.

2024 is difficult because like, basically I lost an entire year in terms of development at Copilot. So that was difficult. So yeah, like all the milestones and goals that you had, it's like, oh, like that literally just got pushed pause for exactly 12 to 13 months. So that stinks. Which were delayed and missed. So usually I find if I miss a goal it is a matter of I did not quantify or qualify the inputs correctly. So who I should hire.

The hiring inputs, the marketing inputs or the capital expenditure inputs. And so for example, like let's just take the most recent failure of what happened the past year copay having to delay that goal in the roadmap. I would say that I did not quantify how much I would have to spend in terms of capital expenditures to actually do what we were talking, saying that we would do. And then I did not adequately quantify the level of skill that I would, that would be required to do what was on the roadmap. And so it took a year to basically it's going to take a year, which is another six weeks, six to eight weeks to actually be like, oh okay. Like it took us all of that time just to catch up to the, to be able to get the inputs correctly. Like you can have all the goals set up for next year, but if you do not have the inputs correct, like you will never hit the goal. And so generally speaking, any goal I've ever put forward and then don't hit or it's delayed. It is a matter of I did not adequately budget for the inputs. And that could be budgeting from a hiring perspective and skills perspective. That could be, and that could be my own deficits. So like you don't adequately budget or plan for like what skills are required, hiring, marketing side of things, like underestimating the amount that you'll have to actually spend, the level of data that you will be required to be able to actually break into a market. And then the capital expenditures, like how much will you have to spend? I want to double the business. Great. You're gonna need four more trucks, you're gonna need three more employees and you're gonna have to buy $80,000 worth of equipment so they're all fully.

Equipped out and they can actually scale the business and a $20,000 marketing budget. So if you don't have, if you haven't quantified the inputs correctly, then usually you'll fall short of your goals. And so I typically do fall short of my goals, Honestly, I usually fall short of them in the one years, almost every single one. And then I usually hit my five year goals. So it's weird. I don't know. It's just a matter of like using my five year goals. Probably my brain is like, oh, if we doubled cool or if we tripled, well then, then I'm like almost thinking the same thing in a year. So it's weird, like just psychology. Like technically I just need 20% of my 5 year goal done this year and I will get to the five year goal, but. But then somehow my one year goal is like half of what so yeah, just weird human psychology, I guess. We got no more questions. Let's see here. I know there's a bit personally what you're comfortable with. Yeah, that was cool. Let's go.

Yeah. So it's simply like when you think about a system, it is putting together a series of inputs to get an outcome that is predictable. Right. So if I have a system in a lab experiment, if I have a system in a business is I have certain inputs that I want to be able to have a predictable outcome. And so if I want to have a predictable outcome of hitting my goals, I need to have specific inputs, which is okay. I need to hire the right people. I have the skills that could be potentially yourself your own skills, especially if you're smaller. I need to make sure I get customers and I bring attention to my services and products marketing and I need to make sure that I have capital required to be able to fund this growth. Assuming you're trying to grow.

And so typically the inputs are the thing that lacks in when there's system failure. And so yeah. Next question from Johnny from Denver. I hear on multiple podcasts that you want to sell the results versus the process. With plant health, it can take entire season, see results from aeration and seeding, fertilizer, weed control and proper pruning of plants. I find myself selling the process to manage expectations, but I feel like I should sell the results of a season having us take care of the property instead. What's your thoughts?

I think it is important to set out expectations, but to your point, like selling the. The vacation and not the. Selling the destination and not the actual travel part is important. Alex always talks about like you sell the warm sandy beaches and how they're going to feel when they're on their holiday and not the fact that they're going to have to take off their clothes for tsa. They're going to get padded down, they have to get cramped in this tiny little tube and go flying for six hours. So like, you know, it's very easy to start talking about the details of the travel because you are selling that service. We are selling the transport, we are selling the, in your case, fertilizing, et cetera for plant health, seeding, weed control. You are selling the, the equivalent of the airline and the parking that is required to be able to have the vacation. So what you want to focus on is the destination and then set the expectation once they have bought into the vacation of like hey you, hey, I'm going to sell you the sandy beach but you will need to get on this plane.

And so it's really a matter of we can get so much in the weeds of like these are the nine steps we're going to do. We're going to show up every six weeks and we're going to be doing fertilizer on the plants, going to be doing all these things for 12 months and just remember they want their plant healthy. So I would really focus on that and just say in order to do that we're going to do whatever it takes over the next 12 months to make that happen. It's going to take 12 months. However, this is the result and just keep talking about the result specifically like the plants are dying or if they're extremely high value. This is something I'd be leaning into is like if the destination is plant health and you are selling if essentially the transportation from where you're at today to that end goal, we want to talk as much as possible about the end result and then the goal would be to set the expectation that this is going to take out a year. We're going to whatever it takes. And if you really want to see the fine details of everything we're going to do, that's fine. I can walk over that, what we're going to do with you. But in 12 months this is going to be the end result and you're not going to have to worry about anymore. It's going to be irrigated automatically. You're going to be able to step outside here in the shade of the trees, whatever it might be. So I would really, you know, I agree with that premise, you know, focusing on the destination instead of the travel side of things. Mr. Anonymous, curious to know your thoughts on strategy. We have asset capacity for two trucks currently doing about $20,000 a month in revenue with a part time helper that we will be losing soon. Just hired a full time person. We have about 60k in personal finance. 60k in the business, no debt. We would like to double next year revenue. We will finish just over 200k this year. Yeah, so like my strategy in this case, you have plenty of capital, you have no debt, so no fixed expenses. Assuming you're trying to double the business to 400,000, that's going to require essentially getting to capacity. I actually think you can do this very profitably because at 200,000, just over 200,000, I'm going to assume you actually did pretty decent on profit. You had one helper, so probably like a part time helper, like you probably paid them 30, 40 grand. You probably took a very good paycheck like amount of profit on the books home. Obviously there's probably startup capital, et cetera to get the business off the ground. But I would, I'd be inclined to think you'd pretty good. You're at that first stage of profitable growth. You could stay here for a year. But given the amount of cash you have, I would recommend if your goal is to double next year, just fill to capacity. I would be spending most of my time intention on marketing because that's going to be the thing that gets you from 200,000 to 400,000. I'd be doing as much as instant quotes as possible to keep you in the field while you're growing. And I'd be putting significant amounts of time and attention on the marketing side. So whether that be door hangers, Facebook ads, Google Ads, et cetera, I'd be testing all of those heavily for like three to four weeks at the beginning of spring rush and then I would be investing in that. If you have to spend $10,000 in marketing and the business amount in the business goes from 60,000 to 50,000. I happen to be if you spend that $10,000 correctly, you can double the business. I would just focus on don't fall into the trap of just like I'm going to add more services or go big projects, I'd be really pushing it instant quotes, I'd be really trying to push it there so that way you can stay in the field and stay profitable. The difference between going from 200,000 to 500,000 dol, losing your shirt and staying in the wilderness versus being able to do it at least at a decent like your profit margin or your profit dollar amount doesn't go down a whole lot. The way to do that is to stay in the field as long as possible.

And so that that 200,000 to 500,000 gap because you start getting out of the field to do estimates. Typically if you can reduce that and eliminate that, you can actually get through the wilderness without too much pain. Your profit dollar amount won't go down. It will go down though if you jump out of the field and start doing a whole bunch of estimates. So I'd be really, really pushing. I'd be okay with a higher customer ac for the services that require you to not be out doing in person estimates. That would be my strategy and I'd be pushing that instant form. I'd be. All my ads would be governed around that. I'd be doing instant quote. If I was doing door hangers, I might even during my four week period when I know mowing is the height, I would probably hire someone full time to just do door hangers because I'm going to probably pay them. If they do full time door hangers for one month, I'm probably going to pay them max five grand with commissions and like a base pay. Um, and that's probably going to double your business just in and of yourself. So if you do $5,000 there, $1,000 in printing, six or $7,000 spent on door hangers would probably lead to a doubling of the business. Again I would just push on instant quotes on door hangers and instant quotes online. That would be like my big, big push.

Next question from Jameson from Ohio. Do you still mainly use the remark. Do you still mainly use the remarkable? Would you recommend it to someone or recommend something different? Is it a good size or would you go larger or smaller? I would honestly probably if I redid it again get um, for the sake of like the cost is. Is the remarkable significantly more unless you go iPad pro. Um, it just that they're remarkable. When I got it a few years ago, uh, it does last for like weeks and then secondly it feels like paper. So if those things are meaningful to you, get the remarkable. Honestly though, an iPad can just do like a hundred thousand times more different things and is more useful for other things. However, if you really like writing on paper I would definitely move to remarkable. I have like all my notes like hundreds and hundreds of pages of notes and you can just go back and you can search and et cetera. So it's kind of cool. But I would generally say the iPad would be my go to. There's so much more you can do with it. All right everyone, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your Wednesday. We will see you tomorrow and have a great Wednesday. Take care.

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