my staff deserves an APOLOGY...

Finally, we wrapped up the deal tonight. It's been months.

I usually don't record much in the morning prior to going to the office, but massive amounts of jet lag. Went to bed at like 12:40, 12:45, woke up at 1:30. So I was wide awake. Coming back from Australia, obviously they're something like 16, 17 hours ahead, so I was wide awake. So I went and worked out, started working on my laptop and I'm going to head to the office. When I was in Australia, someone asked me a question and I thought I'd share it with all of you. Okay. I don't know if I've ever verbalized it, and that is they asked me what do I think leadership is. Now, obviously I am not the most adequate person, person or experienced person. He's talking about leadership. There are much better people. Patrick Lincione makes, has a whole bunch of really good books about leadership. You can look up his books on Amazon. But my response to them was this. I said, in my mind, the leader is the one that runs to battle. And I think if you look back, what it be, even when we would live in towns or villages, like the chief of the village, the chief of the tribe was the one typically that in the time of war was the one that would hop on top of the back of a horse and like run towards battle. And if you look at kings, like they would lead their army into battle. And I think the reason why we give leaders, whether it be CEOs or a chief of a tribe way back in the day, we give them respect, we give them loyalty, we give them, usually they have more money and CEOs make way more money. The reason that we do that, I truly believe it's almost like an instinctual thing to make sure the leader is taken care of. Even if you go back in the day, you know, the. The leader would wives and like palaces and mansions and like all this stuff, I think inherently it's like, look, we are going to do this with the unwritten contract that if there is war, if there's bad things that happen, that you as a leader run towards that chaos and take care of us and protect us. And so it's almost a form of protection and insurance that we look for tribes of people and then we find a leader to make sure that in times of battle there's someone to go to war. And I truly believe that's what a leader is. In business and a family, in a church, in any organization, the leader is the one that runs to battle. And I think that's when people get mad and people feel like there is corruption inside of an organization or a country or leadership is when things go bad. And all of a sudden the CEO is taking like a vacation, all of a sudden the president is like nowhere to be found. That's when people get really mad. And I think they have every license to do so. And so I would encourage you, if you are a leader, number one, make sure that you have your motives in because you better make sure that when the people you are leading are in trouble, when the organization is doing poorly, when chaos happens at the organization, you better be the one running towards it, you better be the one embracing it and figuring things out and making the hard decisions, having hard conversations. Because if you are not doing those things, you are not the leader. And if you're inside of an organization, an employee, and you want to find someone that you want to grow underneath, find someone that runs to battle, find someone that when everything just hits the fan and everything is going horrible, they suffer somehow. Figure out a way to have clarity of action and clarity of mind. That's a true leader in my mind.

Sunrise I'm working here. I am by no means the best at doing meetings. It's something I actually really enjoy though and something I'm still working on. So a couple things I'm trying to work on, improve at is number one, making sure everyone in the meeting, especially if there's less than 10 people, is engaged and actually contributing. So someone's quiet for a long period of time. It's like, hey, what's your perspective? And try to re engage them.

Could we say we're going to set up a drive by but if the franchisee feels that's too far away during a snow event and not close to their current route, then they will determine whether we can service you and then we will call you back.

I think whatever the service area is for a project based job, that's what the franchise needs to honor. We're gonna set up and if they don't, it's up to them and they're gonna disappoint their customer.

Because we just can't keep customizing service area for every single service you're gonna get. You're literally gonna get people eventually being like, oh, I'll do mulch even further out and I'm really good at mulch. We'll do leaf clamps. Like this is like what Sarah, Kevin. I'll do leaf further out because I have a snow, I have a leaf cleanup thing. I make a killing on it so I'll go further and you're going to get more and more and more. So I think it's like we do our job of like here's your service area. Anything inside we're going to set up. It's up to you now if you want to cancel that and have a bad customer experience that's on you.

They make the call back.

They would make the call back. Got it. Or do the email or whatever. I know that's not great for the customer but we can't keep adding more layers of complexity. I'm not saying okay.

And then we would just set everyone up in that service area and then would say it's up to the franchisee to call. Franchisee will call. If not in service area. That would be on their wiki.

Either way that she is mentioning is fine. And to go to Settings or just create a mock quote like you would do right now for an over the phone estimate to get the verbiage.

And then I copied and pasted it. We kept changing ours.

Yeah. What she's saying is you just make a mock quote. You create new estimate. You click on what your services and see what they got.

Yeah. That's what you want them to. And it would always be up to date.

Second thing is just like me shutting up and listening. I'm not very good at just listening and keeping my thoughts in my head. And I'm getting better. But the thing that I typically will do is also cut someone off because I have a thought. I need to shut up. Listen. Otherwise just rude and something I'm still trying to work on.

Very clear direction on the people that are already supporting for P4P and how to handle their P4P calculations during that time.

I think it's a one on one with tech team. That's okay.

I'm just saying they need to reach out to get.

I agree again on the P4P team and the three people that are going to be ready to run P4P and snow at the same time. Okay. It's not worth just trying to figure a whole system when we're talking about 3 to 5% of our whole system doing it. But is that even something that we need to know on the front lines? It's okay. Let me set you up. We're taking clients. Let's get back to you. And if. If they're so smashed they might never get back. That's just gonna happen. And I know it's frustrating for us because they're calling back what's the price? What's the price. If they're not getting back to them with the driveway, they're probably not paying for a couple days. So what if it was like accepting new clients, yes or no. And if during the event they're like, okay, I'm capped. Turn it to no. That way someone that's on the phone is like, hey, we are not accepting.

It is late August 31, couple hours toward till midnight. I had promised the franchisees that by the end of August we would have a health insurance carrier and preferred vendor for a destination. Finally we wrapped up the deal tonight. It's been months, so I'm actually pretty excited. It doesn't seem like anything's changed for probably most of them, but we've been working on this for like eight, nine months. So I'm super happy now. As long as we have three, three people including like if you have your wife and you and one employee you can become on the plan. So really awesome. And as we grow, we'll be able to get better and better benefits for free, like freebies that they throw in. So super excited about that. I might show a little bit.

Hi Augusta, my name is Ryan Hays. I'm the insurance broker for Augusta Lawn Care Corporation here in Washington State as well as for Augusta franchise. Over the past year I've been working on creating a partnership with a health insurance carrier to be able to offer employer sponsored group health plans to Augusta franchise. So because they are across the US we're able to offer plans in pretty much every state. We're really excited to be working with Augusta on this. I hope you're excited about it as well. Stay tuned for additional information. I appreciate you watching. We'll be in touch. Thank you Augusta.