Mike Minutes Mastermind 12/21/2022

Everyone, let's rock and roll. Let me just drop this in the comments.

Drop it on Facebook. There's quite a few questions that came in on the form, so let me jump into those.

Drop this here. Why does it work? Thank you. Okay, cool. All.

Right.

All right. Okay.

Let's go ahead and jump right into the questions. Present. Present.

Okay.

See here. Okay. Will you be using Angelus for leads on new locations? We'll definitely be spending money towards it as part of the our budget, especially over the next several months just to see how it does and just testing it because we have not used Angie for years. I don't know if I ever actually spent money against it. So we'll be testing it for sure. 100. I'll let you know how it goes. We'll be testing it at all my locations likely.

And so. Yeah.

Which I should make a note of. Taco but Taco check about.

Okay.

I wanted to revisit my question from yesterday about after hearing your response about the profit and cash in our account. We have about 55000 in the more bank account currently. We have been cash flow positive so far over the winter and I feel comfortable always have a minimum of 30k in our account. You had mentioned buying another truck before the end of the year to get the tax write off. Currently we only have one truck for the normal location, but we could use a second as I'm planning to grow it to cruise rather quickly. Just a few questions. How would I use the More locations profit to purchase a truck and reduce taxes or would I just have to pay myself a draw and put it in the Norman account then purchase the truck? So what you could do theoretically is you could buy it under the More account and then gift it over to the other, but you're still going to have a tax. That's still a tax event. So.

Like in the short term you could save yourself taxes by essentially having it be on the More locations. You could do that.

So.

How would purchasing a truck out of the More location account allow me to title the truck under Norman? You'd have to gift it. You have to gift it from one account to the other. I know in our state, for example, you can gift a vehicle twice and so they don't allow it to keep going and going and going. But when you're transferring just the the you say, hey, look, I own both these businesses. I just need to change the name on the title. You'd be good there.

Would that trigger a tax event?

Br Would that trigger a tax event? A gifting of a truck between your two entities. And what would the second entity have to claim? Just the ass on their balance sheet.

The basis wouldn't say the same, so it wouldn't trigger anything. Okay, you heard it here first first. You heard it here first. So yeah, that's what I would do. I would, I would buy underneath the normal location and gift it to the the normal location. And because your basis would be zero, you can't like depreciate it underneath the new account, Correct? Right. Yeah. You just take all the 1 section 179 underneath your more location number 3. I would most likely spend 9 to 10k max. I say this as I'm not as I don't necessarily want to give the money to the government just because I just don't know if it's too early to purchase another truck for a new location and what your guidance on what you do in this situation. Yeah, if you know you need two trucks, I would get one now. You know, I do believe that you know, over the next six months the longer you wait, the cheaper trucks are going to get. But again we're talking marginally. So.

If you bought it now, it's good move. And then by the time you paint it, decal it, insure it, you're looking at end of January anyways. So you're going to be using it with within probably four or five weeks of it being painted and decals. So I don't think it's a bad move. You're saving on 10 grand. You're probably saving $3,000 in taxes. So I definitely make sure you have a projected tax liability and estimated tax liability and then work off of that. Have you heard about new tax credit for keeping employees during the pandemic? Is that the same as the PPP? I guess it's supposed to be worth 26k in tax threats. Yes, I have. Give me one second here.

I'm going to put a link real quick in terms of who I would recommend using. Give me one second. So there's a gazillion. Everyone's been called a bazillion times about this. This is who I would recommend. They've been fantastic to work with. I don't get like a cut of this. I've been offered massive cuts from these guys. Not the, not this company specifically, but these companies that are doing the ERC stuff. I have been offered so much money to put them on my channel, it's not even funny because there's a lot of money in it. But here's the Deal. You can file this yourself, but if you mess up a form, this could take literal years to get your money. So these ERC companies are basically specializing in filling out the forms for you and then they're taking a cut off the top. So they're typically going to take 10% upfront or 15% once you get your check. So I'd recommend filling this out and then doing the 15% one. So that way you don't pay anything until you actually have money in your hand. So, yes, this is true, this is not fake. There is no cap in terms like this money is not going to run out. It is a credit against your payroll taxes that you spent in 2020, 2021. And yeah, basically, if you didn't lay people off and fire them and you, you have to be in business in 2019. The reason I haven't talked a ton about this is because most of our franchisees started in 2020 and beyond, so you can't claim anything. But if you had employees in 2019 and then you kept them throughout the pandemic.

This is a killer program. So I'll tell you all, like, I'm not talking about this publicly. We, we got $450,000 back from this because we didn't lay anyone off during COVID So, yeah, so that's who we use. ERC specialists. I'd recommend them highly. Kyle, we are at the point this year for winter services. There isn't much to do but maybe five minutes of work. Would you suggest to have us keep going even though there isn't anything to do or tell the customer? We will check back every so often. I don't like doing the customers 50 or 60 bucks for five minutes of work. So we cannot leave the customers properly after five minutes. We have to get creative, whether that be shaking out their rugs, checking their eaves for.

What's it called, cobwebs, Covering like little foam covers over their spigots if it's during the winter.

Shaking out their, their screens. Like, I'm literally talking about anything and everything we gotta get creative about. So raking up the mulch in their flower beds, edging the flower beds. There's a lot of things you can do if you get creative. Obviously, checking the downspouts, etc, you've probably already done that. You can clean the gutters, like literally get. Tell the guys, like, if it's not freezing cold, taking a.

Sponge and like, let's wipe down the gutters, right? And we're going to do this section by section throughout the next few weeks. You can absolutely do that.

Plano this question has been answered before. Should we put our home address or location visible on Google? A bit a little bit of context for why I asked this question again. We have been just recently signed up for Google Local Services and successfully past the requirements. So I've been looking at Google often and asked my wife Karen why our location does not show up. She said she spoke to a representative of Google suggested we not make that available our home address. Correct me if I'm wrong, I think you would advise otherwise. I don't have any idea why they would say that.

Because it has nothing to do with Google Local Services. This has to do with Google Maps and your Google listing. So I would highly recommend keeping an if your address is showing up on a map then you're good. Don't change anything if it's not showing up. Like when you go to your Google listing and you put in your Augusta lawn care Plano if it's showing just a service area there's a problem. But if it's showing your address I would leave it. You want to be on the map.

And that has nothing to do with Google Local Services. So I don't know why they're saying that that's not true. If you just recently got signed up for Google services, it sometimes does take a while to get on where you actually see the Google guarantee in their program and their system. So I'd give it a couple weeks.

And then two. Like in your market for example, there's probably a lot of people on Google Local services so it might be a while before you actually see yourself just because there's so many people on the program. Karen and I were talking about the conference and the fee and Karen made a comment about if the fee could be spread over 5 months, 12 months. It sounds like a wonderful idea. Thought I would share and see what you think. No, the the cost for the franchise or the conference fee. The 500 in January is going to be taken out on the January 5th with all the other fees. It's just a one time cost. All of our costs are during that time. So I paid $1200 for one ticket at anytime Fitness and they probably make money on it but we don't make it a single penny on 500 for two tickets and guarantee that. So we gotta charge it then just because all the food costs are then all of the, all the expenses for the hotel and everything we have to pay is during that time. Will we be updating our automation before spring example, sending estimate Follow up, et cetera. Will we be updating our automation before spring? There's nothing specifically we need to change the entire thing on at conference. We're going to be going over a little bit of stuff around one click estimate emails and automating that. Um, if there's specific things you want to change though you absolutely can just. I would recommend doing it with the coach so that makes sure you don't mess up or like send an infinite loop and then just making it very clear because what some people are doing, for example they're changing their follow up call from five days to the next day and that's fine and they're wanting command center do it. Just make sure the email that goes to command center is edited appropriately so that they know when they call in the customer that that was not five days ago because they're going to, they're going to infer that unless you tell them otherwise in the email because they're trained like hey it was five days ago we sent you a quote and they're following up. If you're going to move that to one day just make sure you know.

Make sure that they know on the email. So just do it with a coach. But you can absolutely move those things around. Change alter if needs be I would just stick to the main core of what's there. But if you want to change the dates, for example, I would personally recommend probably putting a day one extra call and have command centers do those. It cost you like a couple, couple dollars probably per estimate but you're getting someone to call next day if you're not doing that. Because I would recommend everyone be calling the next day. At the best you're the estimator doing it. But the very you know if you can't have no time I'd recommend then command center doing and what you could do is you could put the call there, have it going to you and then when you're getting too busy just switch it over to command center. You could do that again assuming that you're in growth model. Assuming that you have that all set up with them and they're doing those automations for you.

I'm thinking about incentives for a GM. I already have profit sharing at 10% as I will still be involved until all responsibilities are handed off. I have 3% year over year growth and two weeks paid time off. Do you think it would be worth giving a bonus of 200 to $500 a month? The GM hits the budget hours week goal defined at the beginning of the year. What Other incentives, share offer. Our market will have a GM for about 45k. I would not recommend doing this incentive based upon just a random budget hour goal.

I would really stick to the profit sharing. If you are in profit mode. If you're in growth mode, like starting brand new and you're really wanting to ramp up, that's the only time I would be trying to give them some sort of incentive around revenue, knowing that by doing that I'm shooting myself in the foot for profit. But that's the only time I would do that. When you start giving people incentive like this, like they can manipulate budget hours, they can manipulate these things pretty easily. So you're just giving perverse incentive and now you're giving $500 a month at $6,000 a year for something that is actually not good for the business. So I would highly recommend, I'd be moving this number the fastest. If you're actually trying to give them more money, if that's profit sharing or potentially their base pay, to make sure that they're around this. So for example, if your market in your. If Your market dictates 45k, maybe $20, 25 an hour for an hourly wage and then so you're competitive and then this is like, you know, gravy on top. So it just depends if you're in gross mode or profit mode. If you're in profit mode, I'd be sticking to profit sharing to the highest extent possible.

And if you're in growth mode, that's the only time you potentially give them some leeway in terms of revenue.

My accountant said a lot of people are getting audited for the employee retention credits if they are using third party people. They tried telling me I had 105k depending on a business that did 250k in revenue. Sounded fishy. Yeah, everyone's gonna. There's a bunch of fishy stuff around the employee retention credit stuff. A lot of really bad actors, tons of people calling and sharing numbers that are false. So the guys, these ones I would recommend and if you get audited like you're, you're going to get audited at some point, just do things right.

Audits don't scare me anymore because I know we're doing things right. So.

And if you are messing something up accidentally, they're usually pretty lenient because they can tell if you're trying to be evasive or not. So honestly, everyone freaks out at the IRS and audits like, look, just do everything by the book, be honest as you can and if you mess up and you accidentally make a mistake during an audit, they're going to give you a lot of leeway. And I know that for a fact. They, they waived all my penalties one time because, I mean, they could tell, like I was trying to do everything by the book and I just made a mistake. They waived massive amounts of penalties. So. But yeah, the ERC thing, you're probably, you guys, phones are probably blowing up, people saying they can give you money. You're probably getting emails all the time about it. There's a lot of bad actors and they're funneling the money to themselves and a whole bunch of other garbage. So there's, there's a lot of scams around it, as it was with the ppp, as it was with the eidl, as is with just every government program. There's going to be in this handouts of money involved, there's going to be scams around it. But I have actually seen my money, so this is a good one. In my opinion. The money comes directly to me instead of them. And if I get audited because of it, I'm fine with it because I have to spend $10,000 to get 400,000. I'll do that every day of the week. So. But yeah, I took the 15% option. If you use the ERC specialist, where I only have to pay the 15% once I get the money, I don't have to pay the 10% up front. So because I was very apprehensive about all these different scams and all the rest of it, and I vetted these guys like crazy before taking them, so I'd recommend them. They're pretty good. But again, you can only use it if you had employees before 2020. If you're in business and had employees in2019, highly recommended. It is not a program that will run out of money. It is an actual credit that was passed by legislation, so there is no limit to how much can go out. All right, hope you all have a fantastic rest of your day. Happy Wednesday and we'll see you tomorrow.