Mike Minutes Mastermind 12/29/2023

Friday, get this party started.

Drop this in the Facebook group real quick.

All right.

Oh, look at that. Liz just made a post. Sorry.

Fantastic like.

Okay, let's rock and roll. Let's see what we got here.

There it is. Okay, let's start some questions. First question comes from.

Bretton cedar City in St. George. Oh well, look at this. We have our first. Our first question from Brent. Coming in for training in a couple weeks. I am in the desert with lots of decorative rock and desert landscaping. For years we have had a licensed technician doing bi weekly weed sprays and monthly weed sprays which is our Most profitable service. 1500 dollars to 1800 dollars per day. To simplify and help scale. What are your thoughts on switching to weeding on smaller properties for a similar price and anyone can do it and increasing the budgeted hours since spraying is a way higher hourly rate. I am also considering going with organic weed tiller to avoid the need for licensing at my smaller location mixed with pulling larger weeds. So anyone can do it. I would be careful with that one part. Just check your state regulations. A lot of times you still might need an applicator's license just depending on your state. So just, just triple check that. As we split one location into two this year and add more over the years, I can see it being a pain finding people with the right licensing and I really want to simplify. I'm also considering keeping things how they are at our larger Cedar City location which I will be more hands on with. And as we grow the smaller one run by a manager 50 miles away, we can stick to more weeding and organic sprays. We have around 200 clients. We do not we do these recurring spray services for they represent 19% of our total revenue and closer to 30% of our total profit. So any changes are a pretty big deal. What do you, what do you do for weeding and spraying? Thanks for your thoughts on my situation. Yeah, so we kind of go. We tend to go in the direction that you point out and it's like pull the big weeds spray the little stuff with organic.

Torched is the product we use for that. I would say this before to, to alleviate some of the stress around this just do you need to do some time motion studies. So you need, you need to literally choose several properties and if right now they're not growing weeds either a wait a while or B you can kind of guess. So if you go you know what kind of you're going to see when you come to we we at a property. The reason I Say this is. Yes, it's going to take probably like two to three times longer. The question is, what's your hourly rate for your crew versus paying a licensed applicator? And so if you can make sense of charging $80 an hour and taking an hour to weed instead of 30 minutes, but you're charging $160 an hour, it kind of evens out. And so really all you'd be doing is doing this for the sake of simplicity and scale. I would also say keep in mind that especially with everything that's going on in the world today, a lot of people, they might actually be willing to pay more for in a organic weeding treatment. Organic is going to be using this organic weed killer and pulling weeds. So I would also note that if your time motion studies check out and you're like, man, I actually could make more doing this. I actually think most people, if given the opportunity to say, we will still solve your problem just without harmful chemicals, they're going to be like sweet. So I would, I would keep that in mind. I actually do think I see plenty of people selling organic, quote unquote lawn care. And really it's a matter of like, okay, you are doing core aeration, dethatching, overseeding, top dressing. You're just not putting chemicals on the lawn. And so you can still do a lot of lawn care that is quote unquote organic and just not use the chemicals. Right. So I do think the same thing for weeding. I think most people, if given the choice, they would choose the non chemical option if the it still solves their problem. So now it's up to you to figure out how much longer does it actually take to pull the weeds compared to just spraying them all the time. And if it's double. Okay, well is our hourly rate double and our cost double on the chemical sprays? Right. So I would definitely do some time motion studies on this. This is literally a matter of like follow the crew for a day and say, hey, this, these ones we're going to pull the weeds and spray and we're not even going to tell the customers because you know the end result is the same. There's gonna be like, why are they here? A little bit longer than usual probably, but you literally need to track this. And if you don't have that information now and it's that big a portion of your revenue, I would probably wait to be able to do some time motion studies. Otherwise you could guess like you could go to a property. Okay, if I was at this property, I know it takes 12 minutes to spray. Now let's pretend like there's a bunch of weeds. How long would that take? You could do that too. Just know that's not going to be as accurate. Dustin from champagne. Now today is the multi unit operators time to answer questions. Here we go. Dustin. Morning. Each year it seems like the main avenue of marketing changes 2022 GLS, Google Ads, Facebook, then Print, 2023, door hangers, GLS and then everything else. Do you think that, that because we skipped the customer needing to reach out for an estimate because we already gave them a price for mowing cleanup, this was the best form. Do you think that based on skipping a couple steps in the sales process that this will again be the best Marketing Avenue for 2024? I know that this hyp, this is hypothetical and we will likely test all avenues in the spring rush. Again, just looking for your thoughts and opinions. Yeah. So in terms of why it changes, because platforms change. Like prior to 2020, Facebook crushed. But with iOS 14 like it literally tripled most cost per clicks and the effectiveness of the click was so much lower cause the targeting was messed up. So it always changes. Google Local services has been my favorite for five years but it continually is getting more expensive every year and harder to get more leads as more people enter into the program. So like that will become more and more, sorry I should say less and less effective. And the reason I put door hangers in 2023 above Google Local services is because it's something that I can actually dictate and like throttle up and down versus Google Local services. I can't, I can't increase my budget necessarily and get more leads. You can't. I can't be like I'm going to grow this month, I'm going to spend $2,000 and go do door hangers. I can do that. I can't do that with Google Local Services. And again every single market is so different. I do believe that by cutting out.

Steps of the sales process that we will be able to make much better sense of online advertising again because so much of this has got so expensive online as like people, they make these platforms so easy to run ads now it just gets crowded and that that's what typically happens with online marketing. Yeah.

And so.

I believe the main thing that in the past we've always tried to look at is conversion ratio of like number of people that click onto your website, how many of them are asking for an estimate. I think that's going to dramatically go up when we give instant Prices.

And so once that is done, then yes, I will collect data this entire year to see like what that looks like. But I believe it is going to allow us to compete much better effectively on things like Facebook. That has been so expensive the past few years because now when people get to your site they actually have a price form. And you can ask like Jake and Cody at Evergrow for example, they expect a 10% close ratio on leads coming from Facebook ads because they're so low quality. So I'd rather do instead of doing lead forms where I'm chasing my tail for nine out of 10 people and giving them estimates and they don't even know like that exist, I'd rather them being driven to my website and filling an estimate request form, getting a price and clicking Accept or at least reject and then so I can measure their property. And so that along with the upsells that we are starting to test that should be coming out in February for everyone I do believe will dramatically help us with our customer acquisition cost online mediums. I also think the same token though that what we're working on, the QR code thing for the print marketing, Sorry guys, I had breakfast earlier or later than usual. Sorry.

The.

Say yeah with the print, with the print marketing. I also believe that we're gonna have better.

Lead efficiency when it comes to having QR codes because instead of someone have to write something out, they have to go find a pen, they have to go find a marker, then they have to write things down versus scan this QR code. We can already use our instant price form that you have on your website to pre populate the pricing already pre populated as accepted. They just have to fill out their name, address, phone number, etc. So I think at every single like when we look at marketing and advertising, I'm looking at there's multiple sales processes. I broke down one at.

Landscape Summit, the one we showed on the board and talked about lead efficiency. But there's multiple, there's ones for print marketing because in print marketing you don't call in if you have like an instant price form, for example, like instant quote, instant price, instant quote on a door hanger. Cut out the need to call the cut, call the, the office, get a quote, all the rest of it. The next part we can cut out there though is the need to send that, to.

Send that in via email and write everything out like that's another part and friction of the process. So whether it be max on AI, whether it be the instant quotes online, whether it be the QR form stuff we're working on there. Like every single one of those initiatives literally is just like I have a line directly to like what point of the sales process are we removing or eliminating friction? And so I do believe that down the road it'll be a matter of two Having instant pricing will be important for the sake of AI. When when someone goes into chat GPT and says can you please set up mowing service for my property? And it says yes, Augusta Lawn Care has these prices, do you accept? Yes, I believe that's the future of the industry quite a ways down the road.

By the time it's mass accepted. But when you have your pricing like that, you can immediately start to tap into that sort of thing.

So anyways, make sure that's all the questions. That was all the questions submitted on the form.

Hopefully they answered that. Dustin.

Let's see here. Steve Milby is watching. Thank you Steve. You must have some sort of like automated thing. Cool. All right guys, have a fantastic Friday. A very happy new year again. If you would like tomorrow I am doing a planning for 2024. It's very basic, it's nothing complicated. But if you like to do goals for 2024 from a business perspective, feel free to hop on.

And talk a little bit about strategy stuff. Just mikeandys.com2024.

So yeah, that'll be good. Another thing we did add in Copilot this morning was when you're setting up a property inside of Copilot now you're going to get a verified map on the right hand side with a pin on it to ensure that it is valid with Google. Also you won't see the map unless there's a corresponding address in Google. So if you copy and paste something into the address, it's not going to show a map. You have to use the drop down in Google. I think it's going to dramatically impact and improve the routing situation so that those are accurate because Google just uses longitude and latitude. So if it has an address that it's not 100 sure on, it's just going to give a longitude latitude. If that longitude and latitude is wrong, it's the routing will immediately get skewed the entire thing. So I'm hoping that will really help down the road. We want to do it to when you import customers and you import properties that can flow throw a flag somehow that hey, this property doesn't line up with an address and that's just really difficult because Google's API uses longitude and latitude. So there's not any right or wrong. It doesn't know like that you're trying to hit addresses. It just uses longitude and latitude, so.

I think that'll help a little bit. Monday we have a whole bunch of sequence automation updates coming, as well as some really cool updates to the dispatch board. I'm really excited about it. It's like stage two. There's one more stage we're going to do for dispatch board, but it's going to make it where the colors of your employees, those colors on the bottom, like the list. So you'd see them in blocks. So like in service, for example, it'd be like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and be like 1, 2, 3rd, 4, 5, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. And you'd see like, those would be the blocks. We're gonna do like a faded color behind employees based upon their route. So it'll be really, hopefully much easier to distinguish different crews when you have already optimized that route. So.

Excuse me. All right, guys, I hope you have a fantastic Friday. We'll see you on Monday. Happy New Year and have a great weekend. Take care.