Mike Minutes Mastermind 12/22/23

Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Happy Friday. Welcome to another Mike minutes Mastermind. Let's go ahead and get started. Oh, wow. I have a ton of Facebook messages. What in the world? Okay, I'll get to this later. Let's see here. I need to put this link.

Sure this is the correct date? 22nd get. All right, let's go and get started. We have eight questions today. Very good. All right, let's see, we got. Let's pull this out here.

And let's zoom in.

Cool. Present.

Share screen. Boom.

Okie dokie. See if we can't get a little closer for you. There we go.

All right, Adjusted. Okay, first question is for Mr. Anonymous. Will you explain how you pay yourself from your profitable locations? My CPA has me take a fair salary of $40,000. Then I have significant amount of distributions on top of that. How are you distributing that money instead of just taking it from the business when you want it for personal use? I feel like there should be a set process, but historically I've not done a good job at this. Yeah, so you got to pay yourself the W2. If you are, you know, an S corp, you need taxes. An S corp, you typically be a pretty high amount of taxes. And so the alternative is you take the rest in distributions, which you're still going to be taxed on federally. The federal tax, but it's all the other little tax stuff you're not going to have to pay on. So.

In terms of how I do it, I just set myself up on as a salaried employee from every single one of the QuickBooks accounts, to be honest. And I don't usually do 40,000 because I don't spend enough time with them. So I can I do that as low as I possibly can and just make sure like my hourly rate would make sense if I got audited, but I just set myself up as a salary to employee in each of them. Mr. Anonymous, I was invited to join a networking group of local business owners of different industries. The membership is a thousand dollars per year. I feel my ROI if invested in marketing employees would be higher than join this type of group. Thoughts? Also, Merry Christmas, Mike. Thank you very much.

Every. Every one of these networking groups is so different. It's hard to judge. I'd be going based upon the members and their referrals. Like if you know people that are in the group and they're like, hey, this is very valuable. I've got a lot of leads in this. Maybe it's worth it.

I have personally never seen those be super amazing where it's not so much the thousand dollars, it's your time. You have to go to all those events. If it's not super high ROI in your time.

The thousand dollars is inconsequential. Kyle Tarvin from Moore, Oklahoma, the other day you mentioned you're updating your coverage for insurance for your locations. Can you discuss primarily what you are changing your policies in regards to coverage numbers, types of insurance, etc. Not so much of my locations as much as just like umbrella policies for me in general, especially with the franchise, I get thrown on all sorts of lawsuits because as the franchisor, but because they know I'm behind it, they'll throw me personally on them. So there was a franchisee that had a undocumented worker drive a vehicle, crashed into someone and hurt them, crashed into another vehicle and hurt the individual. And so I got thrown onto that and took a long time to fight it and get me off of the lawsuits. But it's still a matter of like making sure I'm protective of that sort of thing. And it like just that one thing more than doubled, almost tripled our insurance premiums for the franchise. So I just trying to beef it up most it's mostly protecting myself though. I'm not like my individual locations. I don't have like anything super specific things like cyber security is a big deal for me now because we have all the different softwares and command center, etc. It's like you know, lots of cyber security stuff now. Modesto, inco. But there needs.

This is not a very good way to get things done in life. All right. In copilot there needs to be. I don't even know what's about to say, but this would be my recommendation. If you want things done in life, don't use this term. There needs to be. In copilot, does there need to be. Oh, you're asking a question. Okay, all right. In copley, does there need to be an items or service added in? Okay, I apologize. Take back what I just said. I thought you were about to tell me something that you wanted. So okay. In coflight, does there need to be any a items or service added in for yellow slips? Like it is service aut or would we just use the to dos as a yellow slip? That's a good question. I, to be perfectly honest, do not know what command center is currently doing. Liz Lee Chuck Anyone that knows can comment below. That's already in copilot and already knows how this is working.

I'm going to go off on a limb and I'm going to guess they make a to do but I could be wrong. Tim from Mount Vernon Question on Copilot Is it possible like service all PI to have jobs on employee list disappear as they complete the jobs. This way they don't have to scroll as they do a long list of jobs and continue to see jobs complete at top of list. Thank you. Yeah, this is possible.

See here.

I put it on my list to talk and things like that. For example you could put as a feature request. You'll take the same path but.

Yeah, we can do that. Mr. Anonymous, do you still have the website that people post their lawn care companies for sale? If so, what's the website? No, we removed it because people started to sue me for the fact that they bought a bad company that was.

Had false information on their posting on the website. And so somehow I was responsible for that. So there are certain, there's certain laws that protect me from actually being involved like getting like being liable for that. However, it was not worth like I was making no money so it was not worth the headache of taking my time away from Augusta and co pilot to be fighting stupid lawsuits from people that were.

Not being honest. Russell from Canton, Georgia all my test emails out of Copilot for the Copilot transfer email are going straight to spam folder. I fear most people don't check their spam folder often enough to get everyone transitioned over in a timely manner. I thought about sending an email out through Service Autopilot to remind them to check their spam folder. Just wanted to get your thoughts on this. You know everyone else has done it. My onboarding call is today and I just, I can't wait to get started. Thanks Mike. Two things. Number one, it is a new email that you are sending your emails from, right? So your email in general is new. So almost every single CRM related email filter is going to capture your email and put in spam. We are working a couple things right now to try to help with this, but literally your Augusta email is new. So that's your first strike in terms of.

The way the email. So one of the people work at Copilot used to work at ActiveCampaign. It's like we know email very very well and we have a certain several things we're trying to do over the next few months to improve all of this. However, because your email is new, that's your first strike against you. Your second strike against you is that to this customer. The email is also brand new. So it's Also going to affect that. Whereas like the service autopilot they've opened up a bunch of emails like it no longer is going to go to the spam folder. It might put that little warning at the top which says like we think this might be spam.

Et cetera. Also having unsubscribe link is going to help which we are adding hopefully next week to all emails that are bulk going out of copilot. So those are the kind of things that are kind of against you in terms of what I would do about it is you could. This is what my recommendation is send the text message along with your emails. And this is why command center is doing this specifically right now is because it's if only 60 or 70% of your first round of estimates are getting through because your email's new, it's a new account. Like these email filters now share information and so Yahoo, Google et cetera. And so.

If you can get through eventually you'll this will reduce and decrease. And they're having some more policies coming out in February as well around bulk emails that we are trying to make sure we are ready for. Um, all of that to say.

Sending a text message out would be super helpful. Be like hey check your inbox might be in your spam folder. That would be my recommendation for now. Doing that will then get them in their spam, they'll mark it as inbox and then basically from then on the emails will go through. So that would be my recommendation and especially it's going to be specifically more for you because you, your your email address is literally brand new. Two time franchisee of the year. Okay, now you're gloating. I just want to say thank you or sorry. I want to say Merry Christmas to all of my gustination family. I love you all to the moon and back. Let's go. Thank you. Kevin. Yes. Happy. I almost said happy birthday. Mercy goodness. Merry Christmas to everybody. I hope you have a fantastic weekend. And Monday is Christmas day. Command center will be closed for Christmas. They'll also be closed before the new year. New Year's day. What else do we got? Do we have any other questions? I think that's what we got. I hope you'll have a fantastic weekend. A very merry Christmas. Will I do a mastermind on Christmas day? Probably.

I just don't know what time because I think in the morning I have to be in my family's and so we will see. Maybe we'll give all presents on a Christmas day. That'd be fun. Okay, maybe we'll do that. We will stay in touch. Oh, cool. Couple things. Australia, first location, Box Hill. Let's go. Also, congrats to dan Portello, new 3F program owner. First one outside of Bellingham shop, which is very good. Okay. I don't know. This must be Lee. I can't see who it is, but it must be Lee.

And So, yeah, first 3F program outside of Bellingham shop. Obviously someone has to work at a location for two years in order to be eligible. So we're now getting into our four year marker here. So I'm getting people going through. Let's go. Very, very exciting. Shout out to Iota. Also, who's the owner that that 3F member came up underneath? It's also something to be said about the level of leadership required to create a leader underneath you. So fantastic. It is Lee. Let's go. Merry Christmas. Ho ho ho from Lee. All right, everyone, have a fantastic weekend. Merry Christmas, and we'll see you next week.