Mike Minutes Mastermind 12/19/2022

Hello, everyone.

Happy Monday. Hope you're doing great. Let's go and get started. Let me put this in here and then hop over into Facebook.

Several questions that came in on the weekend, so we'll jump into those real quick. Let me just drop this into Facebook. If I can find it.

I should do this.

So, yeah. Last week was franchisee training. It's good.

We learned something new every single time. This was the first time we had to do training with the CRMs for autopilot and Zooper, which is not easy. So that's the area of improvement this year that we got to work on.

So gonna refine that a little bit, but we will do so for the February training and tighten it up a little bit more.

Okay, let's jump in present.

There it is. Cool. All right. Chad, would you suggest or is a good practice to open several business bank accounts for budgeting? For example, main accounts for deposits, tax saving accounts, payroll, winter savings account, marketing, etc. This is the, basically the profit first methodology, which is you have multiple bank accounts. Every dollar that comes in gets split between the different bank accounts. I think it's a great thing if someone has. Has a hard time spending money when they see it. So if you see money in your bank account, like, oh, I should spend that, and you're not accounting for the fact that you're gonna need to have taxes or need to buy equipment the year, and that's a problem. I personally have never really liked budgeting, but I've also never really had a problem with spending money because it's in the bank account. So I do think this is a good idea. If you have a problem, you see money, you're like, oh, I should go buy a mower. I should go do this, I should go do that. Like, then, yeah, it'd be a good disciplinary action to essentially.

You know, make a different bank account. And then every thousand dollars you put in there, you're putting 200 into taxes, you're putting 100 of into a winter savings account, et cetera. Right. So what's nice now is over the course of switching to winter services, I stopped having to lose money during the winter. We lose like a little tiny bit, but not like I used to. I used to literally say, have to save up at least 100k that we would lose every single winter at the Bellingham shop, just that one location. So it just took a while to build up the winter services to large enough. And it's the same thing goes for like, even command center, the franchise or any seasonal business is like it takes a few years to figure out what that demand curve looks like during your off season and then trying to match up what your variable costs are with it. So it takes a little bit of time.

So if you, if you struggle though with seeing money, your bank accounting to spend it definitely for the winter savings account would not be a bad idea. And even if you wanted to make it this more simple, being like, hey, I'm having one more separate account which is for taxes and winter savings, that wouldn't be a bad idea. But again, their goal should be build up your recurring revenue to the point where.

You can at least break even on winter services. And that is definitely possible. Like that's what saved us when we started.

For tithing the church. I've always just given 10% of my take home wages from the business. Curious on your thoughts of where the profits at the end of the year fall into either personal income or business income and should they be treated differently or give 10% of profits? This is a good question. So yeah, if you do tithing, how I personally do is I just pay my tithes based upon my, my salary and the end of the year. I look at all the distributions and I pay on that. So I usually pay a big lump sum at the end of the year just because it's easier for me. That's how I do it. If you're keeping the money in the business, like this is why I'm a big believer of having the money keep. Do not commingle your personal funds with your business funds. Because if you're going to keep the money in the business for next year's investments and it's going to stay in the business, then technically you didn't take that money as personal income. So that's personally just what I do. Obviously this is more of your personal beliefs and things like that, so it comes down to what you want. But that's what I do is just based upon my salary, which is relatively small throughout the year I'll pay on that and then at the end of the year I just take, I actually look, okay, what are the distributions and what are they looking like? And honestly sometimes I don't know that number until I run my taxes. Exactly what that is because now it's just getting confusing with all the different stuff that's going on. So that'd just be my recommendation. But if you're keeping the money in the business and you need the money to grow, like you're not taking it out, then I personally don't pay money on that.

But yeah, that really comes down to your own personal beliefs and things. Kyle, let's say that you set up five to eight locations and put a regional manager in place to handle the daily ops. What should you as the owner be doing to continue growth? Personally, I would want to look for other opportunities where we can grow or expand, possibly out of state. How would you go about this? Yeah, so I can only speak up to eight locations because that's where at now in terms of beyond that, you know, if you want it, then it just becomes like you're now in the seventh stage of growth, right? Like do you want to invest inside of Augusta or do you invest outside of it? Right, because at this point, like you know, getting the difference between eight locations and your joy and satisfaction and you know, Even livelihood at 8 at 20 is not going to change a huge amount. So it's like, okay, well do you want to scale this massively and do you Want to have 100 locations? If you do, then it's a matter of you need to create a program for your regional managers. You need to now focus on how do I give my regional managers? Because If I want 10 of them and I have 100 locations, that's that your role looks very different. You're now managing executives basically that are managing all of these locations. And you need to have, you're probably doing like off site retreats with all of them. And if you're doing it out of state, definitely you're probably going to have like some sort of gathering spot once a month or quarterly with all of them. So just looks a completely different company because now you are CEO and your main role is supporting the execs, right? So because at 100 locations you're literally going to be looking at doing 50 to 80 million in revenue once those locations are all at.

Kind of firing all cylinders and in profit mode. So it just looks very different. And that's what your role is going to be, is finding probably real estate. So for example, you'd probably start saying, okay, instead of investing into duplexes and triplexes, I'm going to find land for my, my locations to really grow out of. And that's how I'm going to like invest my capital in a more tax efficient way. So you'd probably end up becoming kind of like McDonald's model, which is you'd actually grow your wealth by buying the real estate. So you grow your wealth tax efficiently and then rent out to your locations. Right. So for example, like command the headquarters and everything that we're doing. I am buying that using all the proceeds from selling my real estate and I'm going to rent it out to the media team, to command center, to the franchise, to everything else that I'm doing. And there's going to be leases in place that pay me back. So it's just tax efficient. You can play with the numbers a lot so that's probably what you would end up doing. Or you'd say, okay, I have eight locations. I have one regional manager. I'm going to go do something completely different in a different industry because I just enjoy that. That's fine too. Like you're in stage seven of growth at that stage, stage seven of wealth at that point. So you have a lot of options.

Oh, this is the long one. Connor, text me like there's a long question I have for you today. Okay, here it is.

We've talked about this before. However can I have when I have conversations with customers I do try to do everything via email because it is written down and command can see what I said or what I am doing.

For context. I had a proposal accepted for snow removal today sent October 31st and it's three weeks past expiration date. But we have an upcoming ice storm coming so I'm assuming they're trying to cover their bust. They said no one would even call them back but we were the only ones who responded back to October. But we were so expensive they couldn't make it fit for their annual budget. I see this is going I updated my 2 to 3 my wiki 323 weeks ago saying that we were full on commercial accounts and can't handle any more at this time. However, I have no issues making it work because winter money is a great thing to have as long as they can wait until the very end of our list. I talked to Jarrett Command. She said, she said it was fine. It won't.

To document the conversation I have with this company. So if they need to be more aggressive they can be. I thought about having this conversation over the phone but because snow and ice play a lot into liability I really feel like I need to have it written down. So what's, what's the limbo in between emailing them and calling them? When do I need to have it in writing? Also I would I would have to buy more ice melt in this for this place because it's so large because I'm full do I make them prepaid the extra material that I may not have on hand and have to purchase last minute. So nice thing is in this situation you have all the leverage it sounds like, because they can't get anyone else to come do the work and you don't need the work. So you don't need the work and they can't find anyone else. It sounds like you have all the leverage. So if you wanted to do some sort of a pre made prepayment thing, you'd probably be able to. But it sounds like they can't get anyone else. Update to your question now. They want multiple properties done. Yeah. So I think you have all the leverage. There's two questions here. Number one, the last part is like should you have them prepay, etc. I think you have all the leverage here and it sounds like you don't really need them. They're at capacity already. So yeah, like throw whatever requirements you want at them. And secondly, do you need it in writing is you can always do a phone call with somebody and then say hey, after this phone call, want to hang up? I'm going to send an email just kind of breaking down what we talked about. And so we have it in writing and that's enough usually for them to at least acknowledge. And in your email you would say.

We discussed on the phone, here are the things we talked about and you agreed to and we will continue at your property, whatever. Like you can do that and if you wanted to, you could send an estimate with that verbiage in there that they have to click accept on if you really wanted to.

So it sounds like you have all the leverage though. And especially if you can get prepayment of some sort, it definitely would help because you don't like whenever you come from the place of your schedule is filled, you don't need to work and they can't get anyone else to come. You have all the leverage, like make up whatever requirements you want to give yourself a little more peace of mind because they can't go anywhere else and if they walked you wouldn't care because you're at capacity. Right. So that's why at capacity, being at capacity when you're growing gives you all the leverage from a pricing perspective because you don't want or need to grow. So.

Are we still going to get the new training videos next week? Yep. Hopefully by the end of this week we should have all the training videos up from last week broken down. We record the whole thing with an actual lapel mic, two cameras. Me and team helped out a lot. So we will have that up by the end of this week. Hopefully on the academy I'll let You know, when it is, it'll be broken down based upon topic throughout the entire week. And I'll put a screenshot or a picture probably of the schedule so you can actually look through each day what topics were covered, and then watch specific segments. So I think it'll be really helpful. The only part that we're just. We're still just not great at is the CRM part. It's always been our hardest part because it's just a dry topic and most people don't have a lot of context. Now we have two of them we have to teach, which is stinks. So we try to do like a kind of a jumping back and forth. As we went through the customer life cycle, anything went well. So we have some ideas. We're gonna make it better. We're gonna have a training program that people have to watch Based upon the CRM, both CRMs prior to training, that when they come, there's a little bit more. It's a little more continuous, and we go through each one all together instead of trying to do both at the same time. So all of that say it's still a better training than we've ever done. Every time we get a little bit better. But yeah, the CRM part was the wild card for this training period. That was a little bit jolting, we felt like. And so we'll improve, and we will get better. All right, everyone, hope you have a great week until Christmas coming up this weekend. And I think it's all for the questions. Yes. Cool. All right, take care, everyone. We'll see you tomorrow.