Mike Minutes Mastermind 12/21/2023

All right, let's get this party started.

Just drop this into Facebook real quick.

I'm going to do the Mike minutes.

Masterminds on Thursday mornings at my house.

Because I go to the Bellingham shop Thursday mornings.

That's why I'm here.

Just put this into the playlist.

Drop this into the Facebook group.

Okay, let's get started with a couple.

Announcements, or at least one I think I know I have.

Sweet.

All right, we are live. Okay.

Announcements.

Let's see here. 3M list.

Okay, first thing yesterday you might have saw in the.

Second half of the Mastermind, we kind of workshopped a little bit of an idea for.

When pausing a service of recurring visit. So we worked on that the rest of the day or yesterday I should say. And so what we're going to do is build a feature in Copilot that when Command center or yourself, when you are pausing a recurring service, it'll just ask you do you want to restart start this service at a specific date. So that way when you if someone pauses their mowing service, say October 15th and you're planning to mow all the way through the end of October, when you pause it, you can just literally put it to restart January 1st and it will still take the off season and just go to whenever your off season ends. So I think we could do that without confusing Command center because my concern was that Command center would need to know everyone's mowing seasons, which is impossible. And you'll know exactly when you're starting and you'll do that accurately. We would not be able to do that accurately at 99%. So what we could do though is have it where when and when pausing a recurring service, it simply asks would you like to restart this service or resume this service at another time? And you would say yes and you would select the calendar date and then the off season would still be in effect. So I think that would be would do well and we will be working on that. Not like tomorrow because right now actually everyone is pausing, has their mowing service basically paused. So it's not going to really help us right now. So we will definitely get that done though and we put it in the backlog for us to work on.

The other thing is, I know I've mentioned it kind of hinted at a couple times. It's we are working on probably have some more announcement in the next few weeks here about it, but I am building a software tool for getting Google reviews and having automations via text and email, et cetera all through like one app it's gonna be really, really cool. And so basically why I'm doing it is because with Lawn Care web design and home service web design, we have people pay 499amonth for their website. However, a lot of people, we actually don't think they should get a website because they're too small. And because of our model at lawn care web design and home service web design with no contract, if someone cancels within their first year and a half, like, we can't make any money. So what happens, these small little operators get really gung ho about starting and.

They, you know, we're very supportive of them. We're like, let's go. We build them this massive website, takes a couple months and then in six months they're out of business. So instead of doing that, what we're going to do is say, hey, look, if you're just getting started out or you don't have a lot of money, like go use this other option and build up your Google my business page and like get a bunch of reviews and like these text automations to get a lot of reviews from clients, etc. And then you can compile all of them in one spot, like from Facebook and all over the Internet for your reviews and have them showcased really nicely. So that's what we've been working on and it is totally separate team from copilot. My goal is just to make enough money to have one developer. Basically all of Augusta will have it for free. It costs 100 bucks to the public. And.

The goal is that I don't think it'll be like a big hit or anything. It'd just be a matter of fact, if I can get it to like 10, $15,000 a month in revenue, that will cover the cost of a developer, which you basically need a developer to kind of maintain a software like that. So that's kind of the goal. And as long as I can get a couple hundred people out in the public to buy it, that'll pay for it and then we will all get it for free. So that is coming in the works. I'm hoping. Next few weeks we're just tying up a few more automation stuff with texting and connecting Yelp, which I'm not a huge fan of connecting Yelp in general, but we're gonna do it. And yeah, so looking forward to be able to share that with everyone as well.

Let's hop back into the.

Here.

See we got some questions today.

We got two questions.

Kyle Tarvin.

Boom, boom, here we go. Let me zoom In a bit.

Actually, you know what, let me pull this over here.

There we go.

All right.

First question is coming from Kyle Tarvin. Question is this may be a super ignorant and naive question, but here we go. Okay. How does a business acquire loans out of being a personal loan in your personal name? I get a lot of times business loans require personal guarantee. But don't, don't you want to separate business loans from the owner personally taking on a loan for the business? Example, I purchased a truck, my personal name but use it for business use or the business purchase the vehicle and the business name solely for business use without the owner's name on the title. I guess I'm just confused on how the paperwork works as every time I've got a loan for a vehicle they tell me it has to be my personal name.

Yeah.

So until you get a certain size of business, you will typically have to have a personal guarantee on any loan. Even if you're it's in the business's name, they'll still want a personal guarantee. And this is very, very, very common. Again, this is why, you know, when you listen to people on social media, people talking about buying everything in their trusts without any personal guarantees and owns owned by the business and all this other stuff, a lot of times they're big businesses, they have a lot of businesses, they have a lot of revenues and they have built up a massive amount of credibility with their banks. So this will come in time. But you're not going to get this if you're scraping by the small business owner in your first few years, if you don't have very, very solid tax returns and if you haven't built a relationship up with your bank. This is why I'm a big believer in getting a local credit union and building up relationships with the bank because this sort of thing does can happen as time goes on. But you're not going to get it when you're first getting started the bank. If they, and if they did, they would charge an exorbitant amount of interest due to the fact that it is much higher.

Risk for them. And the reason it's higher risk is because they know that you're like, why? Like the whole notion that you are using of like I want it in a different bank, a different entity. So that way if it goes belly up, it doesn't affect me personally. They are not stupid. They know what's going on. So your interest rates to typically and your terms will be much, much more stringent even when you are kind of past the threshold and they, like, allow you to do this still. A lot of times I will put personal guarantee on stuff because I want better terms. And like, I'm not going to let the business go bankrupt. So, like, I would, I'm happy to sign the personal guarantee in order to get like, way better terms. If it's going to save me thousands of dollars a month on financing, I will do it. And I understand, like, you know, you don't want to. Here's the corporate veil. And I know that people are like, well, you know what? If one's business fails, I don't want them to come take my personal home. I get it. But if the business fails, I've probably exhausted my personal home and done everything else I can to save it before it goes down. So I'm usually like, hey, look, I just want better terms. I'll sign a personal guarantee, whatever.

Papa Pain has another question.

Oh, man. What is the ethical line between competition and manipulation? And how can businesses engage in a healthy competition without resorting to harmful tactics?

Let me think about this for a second.

What is the ethical line between competition and manipulation? How can businesses engage in healthy competition without resorting to harmful tactics?

Okay, I'm sure there's a story behind this, so I'm lacking that information. But based on. Let me just try to answer the question just with what I have. Typically, an open market will prevent this from happening because you will not have a monopoly. And so this is why the government steps in when there are acquisitions happening between companies, especially large companies, because what they're trying to do is prevent market manipulation. They're trying to prevent.

Any sort of something getting in the way of the open market. Because if the open market actually exists, which in a lot of cases it doesn't, unfortunately, due to regulation, but if it actually exists, it is best for the consumer. And so when. So, for example, like the cost of housing in a lot of places like Los Angeles, California, et cetera, goes way up. Not because of.

People don't want to build houses, but because the people that want to build houses, it takes so long and so costly. And so it's a pain to get, get permits that no one wants to build. So what happens is supply of housing goes down. Well, when supply goes down, assuming that demand doesn't go down, the cost is going to go up. And so that's why you look at a lot of states that have a lot of building requirements and codes, and it's like, like Washington State, I'm in four years trying to get this, this building project Done. It looks like we're going to have a building permit by March 15 and a site plan by June. That's what they've said, kind of like without saying it to me. I was at a meeting the other day for it. But you look at states like mine, that's why our cost of living, especially around housing is so expensive, is because they make it so difficult to build. And so whenever you have a, whenever you interfere with an open market, that's when competition is hindered and manipulation increases. Now, in a microcosm like your local market, you can have.

A kind of a monopoly with a company that's actually not that big. Like for example, when it comes to lawn care landscaping, I have seen it that small cities that have like 5,6000 people has a 2 million, 3 million company inside of it for long care landscaping and literally does own 60 to 70% of the market. I've never seen more than 60 to 70% of the market. That's why I always kind of chuckle when people are like, there's it's not big enough. It's like I have never ever seen that. And when, when I say 67, it seems like you have a hundred percent because it is that powerful in those small markets. Blaine Washington, when we started Augusta has like six or seven thousand people. And we built it just, just over a million dollars. Before moving to Bellingham.

I would say there we only had like 30%, 40% of the market. So we could have kept growing. But in terms of the ethical line.

Assuming that you believe in free market capitalism, I don't think that this is actually something that to be concerned about. Typically assuming again that you don't have regulation that is creating market manipulation by having monopolies. So that's the problem with having. The reason the government gets in the way of these big mergers and acquisitions is to say, hey, look. And the reason they would say, hey, we're doing this in order to prevent market manipulation and to spur competition. Like we need competition in order to drive prices down. That's what they say.

And I think in a lot of regards, it is usually actually good to block out like oligopolies from merging. So an oligopoly is a monopoly. But ollie means like various. So usually three or four big market players. So for example, you have like T Mobile, Verizon AT&T. And then like a coup other big players if they ever try to merge, typically the SEC gets into involved and says like, no, that can't happen. And that is because it's an oligopoly which means there's just a few core players controlling the entire market and if anyone combines forces, it essentially makes it too powerful of an alliance and it could lead to market manipulation. I would need more context here to answer like a more. Oh no story behind my question. Just wanted to give you something open ended here, your hot take. Yeah, so I'm a big believer in, in open market which is allow the market to do its thing because this is, this is the deal. If you have an oligopoly even and you allow them to merge and they begin to get such great high profit margins, guess what that does? That increases the incentive for someone new to enter the market. And so this is what in, in an open market site society, like this is why I believe that government should get out of all business basically is because if, if someone's going to like do something bad and manipulate the market and like prevent competition and get such high profit margins in an open market, what should happen is new entrants should want to join the market. So if I own 70% of a lawn care industry in a small market for example, I should be making so much money because I have a monopoly that other people want to enter the market. And by them entering the market, what do they do? They offer lower prices. And because they offer lower prices it then forces me to either lose market share or I am going to have to reduce my profit margins and lower my prices. This is why a free market will balance itself out. And that's why in my opinion, anytime the government steps in and creates regulation, it almost always messes stuff up. Like we're seeing in a lot of these states where there's all this homeless going on and housing is through the roof. It's because they step in like, oh, we're going to like do good for this area. But like preventing building sounds great in theory. It's going to be good for the environment. No, we're going to have like a well structured code or whatever. No, if it's going to take millions of dollars and years to build housing, guess what's going to happen? Not enough housing supply is going to go down of housing and the demand, if it continues to stay the same or go up, is going to create a massive shortage and therefore a shortage means price gouging. So it, whenever, whenever there is, in my opinion market manipulation is far worse from when, from when regulation gets involved than it is just letting the market do its thing. Because like in a, in a free market economy all this stuff gets balanced out because of Supply and demand. And so if you're like, well, we're gonna, like, create this really, like, we're gonna make all this profit. As soon as you make a high enough profit, guess what happens? People enter the market. And so you see, like, for example, Lee and I were talking the other day about.

Like, the cookie craze with like, crumble cookie and insomnia cookie blowing up. And then like, what happened with yoga studios and. And spin cycle studios and all that sort of thing. So when one of them got. Got really popular, guess what happens? You get five competition come in, dilute it, and then all of a sudden, there's not enough of a market there. And so that's what. That's what a free market does. That's. It's good for the economy, it's good for the. The consumer. And that's why, like, I'm very, very against government getting involved with any sort of regulation. This is. Dustin. I'm going to start pulling a salary out of Bloomington. Can I put. Can I have CC put me on payroll? So it's automatic or should I just do an owner's draw? Bloomington is an llc. This is when you want to talk to your cpa. If it's an llc, I would assume you needed to make it like doing 1120s and make it sure it's getting taxed like an S corp, in which case you would need to be taking a salary. And I would make the salary, you know, small. Uh, but yes, I would run it through and you can throw it through, you know, have commands and run it through cookbooks and just do like an automated kind of salary every. And it's like super easy. They don't have to do very much. They just process it for you one time, and it's automatic. So that's what I do for all my business. Like every single one of our businesses. Make sure that's accurate. Every single one. Besides Copilot, I have a salary of some sort coming out mostly just to make sure, like when the IRS goes through, I can check all these boxes. And so it's small, but I need to have that in order to be able to, like, get through an audit easier. One of the biggest red flags they look for is a owner, like, no owner salary. On a. On a S Corp or an llc, it's mean taxes and S Corp. I don't want to go through audits. They just hurt my head. All right, everyone, I hope you have a fantastic day. Happy Thursday. One more day after today and.

That'S all I got. Take care and have a fantastic day.