figured it out with a little help. if anyone else is running into the same problem the answer can be found here:
https://github.com/Bee-Mar/mmpm/issues/41

Working on my first magic mirror installation. I did a clean install of raspberry pi os and then installed magic mirror and successfully was able to start up. I now moved on to install MMPM and I’m receiving the following error when I execute pip3 install --upgrade --no-cache-dir mmpm:

Command “/usr/bin/python3 -m pip install --ignore-installed --no-user --prefix /tmp/pip-build-env-e41bnr3i --no-warn-script-location --no-binary :none: --only-binary :none: -i https://pypi.org/simple --extra-index-url https://www.piwheels.org/simple – setuptools>=40.8.0 wheel “cffi>=1.1; python_implementation != ‘PyPy’”” failed with error code 1 in None

Complete newbie here so any help is greatly appreciated. I assume I’m doing something wrong but thought I would ask for guidance rather than banging my head on the wall!