A.I. & Home Service Businesses, Unreasonable Expectations, CRM Secrets

Welcome back to the Mike Andes Podcast where we discuss the ins and outs of owning a small business. If you're new here, the Mike Andes podcast is all about taking your business to the next level. What do we have for you today? Mike is going to do some work with ChatGPT, an AI that can generate human like writing that will completely change the home service industry in the next couple of years. Next we have a clip from Mike's live call in show about how to set reasonable expectations for the growth of your business. Finally, Mike breaks down exactly how CRMs make their money and some things they don't want you to know about how their business works. You can find all this and more at the Mike Andis YouTube channel. But let's get right to it. Here's Mike with a new AI takeover.

The first thing that AI is going to completely revolutionize inside of service based businesses is going to be their marketing. Let's jump into ChatGPT and I'll show.

You what I mean.

Let's go ahead and ask ChatGPT to.

Write me a Facebook ad selling lawn care services. So let's go ahead and click enter.

Looking for a lush green lawn that will make neighbors envious? Look no further than our professional lawn care services. Our team of experienced experts know exactly what it takes to keep your lawn looking. It's best all season long. From mowing and edging to fertilization, we control. We've got you covered. We only use the highest quality equipment and materials to ensure your lawn receives the nutrients it needs to thrive. Plus, our flexible scheduling means we can work around your busy schedule to provide the most convenient service possible. Don't settle for a lackluster lawn. Let us help you achieve the beautiful, healthy lawn you always wanted. Contact us today to schedule your first appointment.

That's phenomenal. All right, now that's a little bit long and you might be like, well, I want a little bit shorter.

Okay, well, let's say make it shorter.

All right, let's see what comes up with. Now it's going to take that exact same ad that I asked for a Facebook ad and make into get the.

Lush green lawn you've always wanted with.

Our professional lawn care services. From mowing to fertilization, we've got you covered.

Contact us today to schedule your first appointment.

Great.

This is, this is great.

I want to say, you know what, Add in the fact that that we.

Also do spring cleanups. Okay, let's see here.

It's gonna redo it again. Get the lush green lawn. You've always wanted with our lawn care professional lawn care services. We do it all from mowing and fertilization to spring cleanups. Our team of experienced experts who make sure your lawn looks its best all season long.

Contact us today to schedule your first appointment.

So marketing copy and the text needed for your advertising gonna completely change.

Whether this is on your flyers, whether.

It'S on your Facebook ads or Google Ads, AI can absolutely do a very good job. It's not gon to be like the best of the best, but I promise you it's going to a 90% of a job compared to going hiring someone for hundreds of dollars to simply write.

The copy in your ads.

The second thing that AI is going.

To completely revolutionize in the home service.

Industries is going to be customer communication. Not only communication with customers, but also.

Communication with your employees.

Let's jump into ChatGPT.

Write an email telling customers or why.

We need to raise prices on our mowing services this coming year. All right, let's see here.

Subject Important Notice Price Increase for Mowing Services your value Customers I hope this email finds you well. As the upcoming mowing season approaches, I wanted to take a moment to inform you about an important change in our pricing for mowing services. Effective from the beginning of the upcoming season, we'll be raising our prices for mowing services. While we understand that any price increase can be an inconvenience, we want to ensure that this decision was not made lightly. After careful consideration, we've determined that a price increase is necessary. Going too fast here is necessary in order to continue providing the high quality services that you have come to expect from us. There are a number of factors that have contributed to our decision to raise prices. First and foremost, the cost of labor and materials has increased significantly over the past year. In addition, we have invested in new equipment and technology that will enable us to provide even better service in the coming year. These investments, while essential to our long term success, come with a higher cost. Please rest assured that we will continue to provide the same level of care and attention to your lawn as we always have. Our team of experienced and dedicated professionals remain committed to providing top notch service and support. We appreciate your continued business and hope that you understand the need for this price increase. If you have any questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to reach out to us. Looking forward to serving in the upcoming mowing season.

Sincerely, this is phenomenal. This is crazy awesome. I guarantee you if I asked anyone to just out of the blue write an email that would do price increases 90% of us would not write an email that was this grammatically correct, politically correct. Hit all angles of everything you need to tell a customer when you're doing a price increase. Now let's go ahead and look at.

Though, what about employee communication?

Let's go ahead and assume that we need to fire an employee, has been working with us for a while, and.

They haven't responded to us in, like, three days.

Been texting them, calling them, leaving them voice messages. We.

We need to now let them go. We need to fire them.

Let's go ahead and ask ChatGPT to give us the communication for that. Because I don't want to get in legal trouble. I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. And ChatGPT has a great way of being legal and super politically correct.

So let's go ahead and ask what.

To say because I'm emotionally charged as the owner. I'm. I wanted to say they're fired. Get out of my face. Maybe they did something really bad. Maybe that's what you feel in your emotions. Let's go ahead and ask ChatGPT and AI to write an email that might be better. So write an email to fire an employee for not showing up to work.

For an entire week. All right.

So this is literally subject to the.

Email termination of employment, employee's name.

This is incredible.

I'm writing to inform you, unfortunately, I made a difficult decision to terminate your employee with company name effective immediately. As you are aware, you're not shown up to work for an entire week without any prior notice or explanation. This has had a significant impact on the operations of our business, and we cannot allow this to continue. We have tried to contact you several times through various means, but we have not received any response from you. We take attendance and punctuality very seriously at this company. It is essential that all employees show up to work on time and are dependable. Your absence has caused disruption to our team's workflow, and your lack of communication has made it impossible for us to manage the situation effectively. And we would have appreciated a prompt notification if this were the case. However, since we have not received any communication from you, we are left with no option but to terminate your employment. We wish you the best in your future endeavors and hope that you can learn from this experience. If you have any questions regarding your final paycheck or any other outstanding members, please do not hesitate to contact us.

This is awesome. Because we as owners get wrapped up in the emotion of firing and hiring and the drama when, like this is what needs to be said to prevent yourself from getting into legal trouble as well as doing it in a very diplomatic, politically correct way.

That's not going to hurt anyone's feelings.

Now let's say, well, you know what.

This is too long.

I want to write that in a.

SMS text format that is shorter.

All right, let's see what happens.

Now.

It's going to literally take that same.

Exact thing and put it in the text format.

Hi employee. Unfortunately we have to determinate your employment.

Effective immediately due to your absence for a week without prior notice. We have tried to contact you several times but haven't received any response. We take attendance very seriously and can't.

Allow this to continue. Please contact us if you have any.

Questions regarding your final paycheck or any other outstanding matters.

This is phenomenal. The communication both to the customer and.

Your employees is going to be dramatically improved using AI.

The third way that AI is going to change service based businesses is through management. Now you can already see this@p4psoftware.com where now it's going to start analyzing which of your employees are the highest performers and which ones are the lowest performers, that is which one should be paid more, given bonuses, given more responsibility, and which of those employees potentially might need a performance improvement plan, more training, or potentially even being let go. AI, in my opinion, is also going to be the liaison between management and frontline team members to be able to give data to the managers like we've already mentioned. But also the feedback that would typically come from the manager is now gonna be coming from AI to the employee about their performance, about how fast they're working, where they're ranking out on the team. Also looking at, okay, over the past four weeks you've improved dramatically in efficiency or your quality has gone down and you've had multiple yellow slips and callbacks and you've created a lot of damage cases. These are things that AI can do in a much more politically correct, unemotional way and simply give the data and the facts and to the employee and to the manager. Management is going to be completely changed. The fourth thing that we're working on@copilotcrm.com for 2024 is automated scheduling and using AI to make sure that things are the most efficiently scheduled. Now, before we jump into number four, because I'm extremely excited about it, there is the gentleman's agreement. And the gentleman's agreement is that I put together all these videos simply with the expectation that you're going to click the subscribe button. Now, the fact of the matter is that 60% of the people watching these videos have never subscribed. It's like, Michael, you always have this gentleman's agreement for every video. You're right, because 60% of people aren't abiding by the rules of the channel and the rules of the channel. The terms of service for this channel is that I make videos for free. And the only thing I expect in return is a subscribe. And so until you do that, you're gonna keep hearing these. And even if you hear these while you're taking this, time should be spent like sharing the video or liking the video or comment while I'm making the gentleman's agreement. That's it. If you've already subscribed, comment below. Which of these five is affecting your business already? Now, number five for scheduling. I truly believe that whether it be scheduling estimates, so meeting customers, whether it be scheduling recurring services like mowing or maintenance, when you're going back to the property multiple times, like every single week, or actual projects that are big projects that might be six or eight weeks down the road on the schedule, or all of this can be automated. Now, there's a lot of variables that go into scheduling, and this is why it's in the past been so hard to tackle. Because if it's raining, well, guess what? My capacity for all my employees just shrunk massively. And so AI is going to be able to look at the weather pattern and say, okay, based upon the fact that there's 3 inches of precipitation expected next week, we expect that your budget hours next week capacity is going to shrink by 25%. Therefore, we need that. We need to be able to reschedule some projects or you're gonna need your employees to work more hours in the first three days of the week. This is absolutely possible through AI, as well as being able to optimize your estimator schedule to ensure that they're only driving four or five or six minutes between estimates instead of from this side of town to the other side of town, or doing one estimate in the morning and then one estimate in the evening when they're literally right next to each other in terms of geography. So this is all can be done by AI. We already have the infrastructure and the systems in place@copilotcrm.com and we're rolling out automated scheduling using AI in 2024. This also includes doing a route. So there's no reason for you, when a customer accepts a proposal, to have to send them an email telling them the first date of service when they're going to be on the schedule that can all be automated based upon the GPS coordinates that they're positioned in the longitude and latitude. Simply based on that you can tell, okay, they're all this certain part of the is always gonna be on Mondays. This side of the city is gonna always on Tuesdays, this side of the city is gonna be on Wednesdays. And then the computer AI knows exactly where they're at and can tell them and email them back exactly what day of service they're gonna be on. So looking forward to that in 2024. Number five is the price optimization. Because you are wrapped up with the emotion of raising prices. How much should I raise prices? And you're kind of playing this game of looking at your close ratio, how many of your jobs are accepted and kind of determining based upon that if you're too high priced. But AI doesn't care about emotions, it's simply gonna look at what is the result of me raising prices by X amount of dollars and it's gonna track this over time and it'll tell you exactly what you should be pricing your jobs at to optimize for profitability. Cause if you raise your prices too much, you'll start to lose customers. But if you don't raise it enough, you're basically leaving money on the table when you could have otherwise charged a more premium price and optimize your profitability. So down the road your prices are gonna be optimized perfectly. And this is why in my opinion, AI is gonna put everyone back towards a more of a generalized pricing method. The reason that is so difficult when it comes to services is cause it's such a different estimate process and premium branding and all the rest of it that goes into these different companies. It's hard to compare a dozen of eggs here and a dozen of eggs here, or a lawn mowing here and a lawn mowing here. AI in the future will speak to itself and customers will have a much more educated decision making process of what pricing should be. And that's why the most efficient companies are gonna be the ones that are able to maximize profits. Cause when everyone's pricing starts to become very, very transparent and AI begins to optimize that, it's gonna simply be who has the most operational excellence and efficiencies baked into their labor, into how they train their employees and be able to retain and have a great culture of their team. These are the type of things that in my opinion are actually going to lead to real profits for businesses. Because AI is going to optimize what the prices should actually be. Now, AI really got popular with ChatGPT, but literally a year ago I made a video right here about where the future of the lawn care industry is going to be. Because it's not robots. I don't believe robots are going to be around for another 15 or 20 years. It seems like AI and software are going to take over over and this goes into more depth about that. Check it out here.

The smartest business decisions aren't always the most obvious ones. You can go out there and learn entrepreneurship by trial and error if you want to, or you could learn it from Mike. Whether it's starting, growing or saving your business, the MBA for Entrepreneurs teaches the principles of small business ownership at every experience level. With over 350 plus in depth lessons and new monthly lectures, you'll have access from anywhere through the teachable app. Do the right thing for your business and sign up for the MBA for entrepreneurs by heading to mbathenumber4entrepreneurs.com Next up. This kid wants to grow from 200k to 2 million in just one year. Mike talks to him and is clipped from his live call in show.

Next caller is coming from.

Two two nine. Welcome show. Thanks for coming on.

Hey Mike, how are you? So my question for you is we changed up our billing and basically our entire recurring system for our mowing route. So what we had before was a bill per service. But the issue with that was say we're charging for a weekly service and the customer may put it off for a month during the winter, but in our market we still have leaves falling and things like that. So it almost takes, it takes the exact same amount of time during the winter in order to be able to do that service. So what we have changed is we changed over to a subscription based mowing and so we only take weekly. We only have card on balance that kind of allowed us to do all of those things that we were wanting to do separately all in that one package. So everyone is subscription based. It may be 100, 200, $300 a month per person. And then we charge however much their monthly rate is. We bill that monthly, we charge that monthly rate to get started. So we have a $25 customer acquisition cost and then if we acquire them for $25, say we have a minimum of $100 monthly cost that we recoup. So basically every customer that signs up, we get four times the return without doing anything just for signing them up. But my question for you is, should we cut out projects if we haven't found a way to make those profitable yet. And should we sub those out? Should we recommend other companies? Should we continue doing those and just figure out a way to make those profitable and hire more teams or open and like, separate the two divisions? I don't know.

What was your total annual revenue last year?

250.

Okay. And why do you want to add projects?

So we're currently doing projects, so we're looking to possibly cut projects. And so what we have right now is two to three days of recurring mowing, and then we have maybe three days of project for our team. But what we're looking to do is possibly cut those projects, dump the money into marketing, and then we can recoup that amount quickly and hire more team and purchase more trucks and things to account for that, because we're trying to grow to 2 million this year.

So you're trying to go to 2 million this year?

I don't know what.

Yes, sir, I would not recommend that.

Why.

Why are you going from 200,000 to 2 million?

We're trying to grow to 10 million by the time I turn 20. So currently I'm 16. We're aiming for 2 million. And so I wanted to try to grow this location.

To the point where it's large enough and we can just swap into profitability mode this year. And then after this year, we can begin opening up other locations and we can kind of learn the systems on this one to know what works and just kind of plug and play.

So you're saying we. Is it just you as the owner right now?

Uh, we have two. Two people right now that are full time.

Okay. And I mean, like, in terms of ownership, are you at the top and like, there's no other owners or is someone else involved?

Yes, sir, it's just me.

So let me. Look, I do not want to be negative, and I appreciate the hustle, but this is. My problem is going from 200,000 to a $2 million business is probably going to require at least 2 to $300,000 worth of acquisition of just your trucks and equipment. Like, do you have that kind of capital?

We don't.

Right. So the reason I'm saying this is because I. What I don't want you to do is set yourself up for. I'm going to make $2 million this year, and then it comes out to 400,000. You feel like a failure because that's like a hundred percent growth and very admirable and incredibly amazing at your age. So I don't want to. I Don't want you to set up these goals too much for your, for what is going to become a failure in your mind. But it's going to be a phenomenal success if it's actually stepped back and look at from a much more objective standpoint. And so there's just no way without the capital that is going to be or massive amounts of debt that you're going to go from 200,000 last year to 2 million this coming, this in 2023. I appreciate the massive aspiration, but I don't want you to quit because in August you realize you're going to make 500,000 and you like, oh man, I'm way shorter my goal. Right. So I would take a step back. I would do, I would do a projection for this year every single month of what you're going to do in revenue. And then ask yourself, in order to hit these revenue targets, what am I going to have to buy in terms of trucks, equipment? How many people am I going to have to hire? You're going to upgrade your shop massively even if you double in size in revenue this year, let alone 10 exit. Right. So I would be much more objective about the size that you're going to grow this year. And whether or not you do projects or mowing is inconsequential. Right now I'm trying to prevent you from doing is setting a goal so high that you do an amazing job as a teenager this year and yet you see your, yourself as a failure because you fall short of your $2 million goal. And so I don't, I'm not saying you're not, not capable of that. I'm just making sure that you set realistic expectations of amount of capital that's going to be required and experience that is required to build a $2 million organization is, is, is pretty intense. Does that make sense?

Yeah, no, I completely get it. I'm, I, I like shooting for big goals and so sometimes I hate them, sometimes I don't. And so honestly, if I don't hit it, it won't kill me. But it's also something where I don't want to get halfway through the year and say I am for 500,000. I don't want to get halfway through the year, hit 500,000, then kind of sit back. So I try to aim for whatever's unreachable. So last year we were at 10,000 at starting of last year, and we wanted to hit a hundred thousand by the end of last year and we hit 250. And so we grew by, I don't know, what would that be? 2,500% or 2500%? Something like that. And so that's just kind of the number that we set to aim for this year. When I say we, that's just all of us, workers included.

Okay, cool. So your. Your question is, is should you split the divisions? Is that kind of what your question is for projects versus mowing?

Yes. And so, like, if, if basically, if we have a profitable mowing system and we can do shrub trimming, things like that, should we cut out? Because we're currently. We don't have the equipment, we rent the equipment for projects just because the maintenance on the equipment doesn't make sense to purchase it at this point. And so before we grow that massively, would it be a lot better just to focus down on mowing and get that so perfected that with all of our advertising and everything, we can hire someone? Because right now we have a week or two turnaround time before someone's profitable. And so just to keep that system and just grow mowing and not even offer anything past something that we can do with hedge trimmers and like, obviously spreading, straw edging, bed weeding, stuff like that we can offer. But should we cut out all of these retaining walls and sod jobs? And like, for instance, this weekend we had a $3,000 sod job and I was out laying sod till 2 in the morning because it's raining and we just don't have enough time to do it all.

Yep. Yeah. So my recommendation would be, like, just step back and realize your age. And I'm not into age. Like, like, obviously I started when I was really young too, but realize that the number one thing you don right now is experience. And so what you should be focused on is getting experience, because that's your lack. And so in my opinion, building the organization in size. Because if you have aspirations to grow a $10 million business, what you need is management experience. You need to learn how to grow with other people, and that's going to be much done, much easier by growing a land, a mowing and simple service business where you have a bunch of employees, you got to train them versus trying to also then stack. On top of that, the fact that you lack experience of excavation and grading and a lot of this equipment, you don't have the equipment, you're trying to rent it. So that's going to be a whole different ball game, a whole different business, in my opinion, compared to like, what the skills you're going to be required to have to just manage the team, manage the people, do the marketing. So in my personal opinion, I would focus on what was work is working well with your subscription model for mowing and simple services. And that means you can do push trimming, you can do pulling weeds, you might even do some fertilization or mulch installs, but you're not going to do these paver patios and stuff that you got to rent massive equipment for. And then focus on getting the skills required for marketing, hiring, building a team, managing them. That's what's going to be useful down the road when maybe you add projects to go from a $2 million business to a $10 million business down the road. But I would focus on those skills that are going to be much more.

Transferable as you begin to grow the company.

So with that, with those leads that are still coming in for projects, should we just tell them that we don't offer that or should we refer someone else? Or what would you rec like, what would be the most professional way to handle someone that we've marketed to, marketed sod laying to for the last year? And when they call for sod laying, what's the best way to kind of tell them that we don't offer that anymore?

Yeah, it's rare that someone saw an ad eight months ago for sod Lane is giving you a call because of that, because they didn't have the need back then. It literally was white space in their brain. So as long as your current marketing cuts that out as well as your website doesn't offer that as a service anymore, and you're very clear what services you do and do not offer, then you just weed out whatever gets through on the ads and on the office side, like the phone call side or even lead intake from your lead estimate request form. So just weed them out. Realize that that's going to be more at the beginning because people have seen you working out, doing these type of projects, but literally within six months, you will get way less of those type of leads coming in because you wouldn't have been doing the work, you wouldn't have been posting about them on social media. And so that those type of services will just diminish in the amount that you're getting in terms of leads.

Should we find a company in town to sell those leads to?

Or like I would find a project.

I would find them to or just tell them that we don't do it.

I would find a hardscaping company that you can refer them to and then just tell that hardscaping company like, hey, here's the agreement. I will give you all my hardscaping jobs if you can just give me all of your mowing customers. Because they're getting the same thing on there, which is they're getting all these mowing customers and people asking about their service. Just, hey, you guys, just hand those all over to me. I'll hand you all my leads. That's going to be the cleanest way to do it. Don't try to do subbing and get five or ten points on something. You're going to have all the headache and all the liability. And again, your focus is going to be scaling up your organization on the. On the lawn care side.

Okay? All right.

All right, brother. Best of luck to you. Take care.

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I'm going to share with you five things that your CRM software company does not want you to know. Where they're making their money and why they do things the way they do. And I know this because I've recently started copilotcrm.com so I know what it's like on the other side of the curtain. And I'm going to tell you all the dirty secrets they don't want you to know. The first is that most of these CRM software systems are simply running financial arbitrage. They're running numbers so they can sell their business later on in the year a few years down the road. And this is mostly due to the fact that they've taken on investors, venture capital or angel investors that are requiring some sort of exit within three to five years. And that means that exit means to optimize for profit, you cut support and you just make sure you hold on to people. Because guess what? With CRMs, no one wants to leave. You don't ever want to leave your CRM software. It's a pain in the neck, and people don't want to do it. So what they know is if we spend a bunch of money on marketing and we grow very quickly, we can then cut support, we can cut a lot of research and development while still keeping a very good user base simply due to the fact that people do not want to leave their CRM. It's very painful to move all of your contacts, learn a new software system. And so they know if they can grow massively, they can then they have a couple years where they can just really turn on the profit knob by cutting R and D, cutting support, and then all optimize for an exit. And that's what most of them are doing. They do not care about the businesses that they are using their software. They mostly care about the financial arbitrage. Because these SaaS products, software as a service are very sticky. No one can leave them. It's very difficult to leave. And so the multiples on the evaluations are extraordinary. They're literally 5, 6, 7, 10 times as much in terms of valuation then compared to a regular business. It's because they're subscription based and they're extremely hard to leave. They're called sticky in the industry. Number two is ach. They don't want you to know what ACH is all about because they want to sell you on credit card processing. I'm going to talk about credit card processing later, but ACH stands for Automated Clearinghouse. And a lot of them don't want you to use ach. So what they'll do is they'll have certain caps or restrictions on how much you can use ach, or they'll sell this as an additional feature because they don't make as much money on ach. But here's how ACH actually works. Think of ACH as just a technology to electronically move funds between bank accounts. Now, there's some problems with ach and here's what they are. Number one is latency. When you make a credit card transaction at say a gas station, you swipe your card and then you pump the gas and then whatever you pump then charges your credit card. That's because with credit cards there is low latency and, and there's authorization. Whereas ach, that doesn't exist. It could take hours or even days to actually authorize a transaction. So what that means is you potentially might have an ACH payment from a customer and it looks like it's paid and two or three days later it comes back as insufficient funds. Whereas with a credit card it's very quick, it's instantaneous, and there's very Low latency. Now, the best thing about ach, though, is the costs are dramatically lower. In fact, it's almost free to run an ACH transaction. So the reason that these CRMs want you use credit cards instead of ACH is because it doesn't cost a lot to do ACH and they can't charge you as much. And so they'd rather charge you 3 or 4% on a credit card compared to literally what it costs them is like 1% max in terms of ACH. And here's the thing. If they're charging you like even 1% on ACH payment, it's a set a dollar amount per transaction when it comes to the automated clearinghouse. And so if they're charging you 1% and you have $100,000 transaction, that means you're paying $1,000 in ACH fees. That is not required. And that's why at Copilot CRM, we have a $5 cap, because after that we do not need any more money. It's covered the cost. But if the CRM is taking that 1% in perpetuity without a cap, I guarantee you they're making a killing, because ACH doesn't cost very much to run when it comes to transactions. All right, number three is referral fees. This is what most companies don't want you to know is that when they have influencers and talking about their program, they're talking about their CRM software. What they're not telling you is that they are paying these influencers thousand plus dollars per user that signs up. So when an influencer says, oh, this is the best software out there. This is the best company. I've used this CRM for a long time. Keep in mind, there's two things going on. One, they're getting referral fees, and they're also probably getting paid to be an ambassador for that CRM to just say that they use the software. I've been offered tens of thousands of dollars to say I simply use a certain software. And this typically aligns mostly with the companies that are getting a lot of capital injection from investors, capital infusions from venture capital and stock market. And so they're just like, grow at all costs. So they'll spend gobs of money because they know if they can get people in, it's very hard to leave a CRM. It's like golden handcuffs. It's like, hey, once you got them, you got them for a long time. Because as they grow inside your system, they don't want to leave. Now, before we Go to number four, which is the dirtiest secret of them all, credit card processing. We have to address the gentleman's agreement. The gentleman's agreement on this channel is that you simply subscribe. The transaction here is that I put all this work and effort and I have now five full time people just working on these videos and creating content for everyone for free. The latency needs to be very quick here. Go right to the subscribe button, click it and it authorize the transaction so you can continue on to number four. I can't verify this. I just trust that you're going to subscribe to the channel. That's the gentleman's agreement. I do this for free with the expectation that you do that in return. Now number four is credit card processing. This is why so many CRM companies are being bought out by credit card processing companies. Because it's such a sticky product that if they can come in and require credit card processing of all the users that are potentially transacting billions of dollars over the course of thousands of businesses, the transaction volume is so large, if they can just get a couple percentage points off the top, they're going to make a lot more money doing that than just the actual fee for using their software. Their Software might cost $300 a month, $400 a month, and people are like, oh, it's so expensive. But the credit card processing for a company that's doing $100,000 a month can easily reach 3,000 or $4,000 per month in just credit card processing. And so you've got to be very careful that the credit card processing rates that you're getting charged by these CRMs is competitive because that's the bigger chunk of where the cost is going to be for using their software. As you begin to grow the business. If you're running a small company with five, $10,000 a month, you know, a couple percentage points doesn't move the needle very much. But again, if you're running multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars, you're going to pay probably 10 to 15 times more and processing fees for credit cards than you are the actual software subscription. Very important to keep an eye on what exactly those credit card processing fees are. Now at the end of this video, I'm going to link to another video ranking and comparing all the different software systems and what their credit card processing rates are. The money is not being made in the subscription, the money is not being made on the software. It's being made in the fact that they can lock down the software and then require you to use just one payment processor and monopolize that transaction, they can guarantee themselves a lot of money in perpetuity. And that's why they come and buy these companies out. Like, okay, if there's a billion dollars worth of transactions, and we can take 2% off that off the top, and right now they're having five payment processors, but we come and say, okay, you have to use ours, and we can take 1%, 2% off the top. That's where they're making their money. And so although I am a big believer in putting credit cards on file, it helps your cash flow. If CRMs were really trying to help their users, they would allow them to use ACH much more often because it's much cheaper. Yes, it might take a day or two days to clear, like we talked about. However, it's much cheaper, and the CRM just doesn't make as much money. That's why so many of them push you towards using credit cards instead of using ach. Now, a lot of them are gonna say, oh, no, like ACH is bad because of security purposes. And yes, that's true. It's gonna take a day or two for you to authorize the transaction. However, ach, unlike wire transfers, still can be retracted. And there's still fraud protection. When it comes to ACH, there's definitely great fraud protection with like, Visa and MasterCard. Immediately you can get things fixed. But ACH, honestly, for the fact that it costs 20 or 30% of what credit cards do, will typically do the trick. And again, when you're talking about large volumes of money being transacted, the amount of savings on ACH is tremendous. And that's why at coppa, we allow people to put ACH their bank information on file and charge it on a recurring basis. A lot of other software systems, they'll allow the customer to check out using ach, but they won't allow them to put an ACH on file because they want a credit card on file, because the credit card processing fees is where all the money is being made. So be very wary of that. And again, I'm not bashing these. I'm just telling you, you this is where the money is really at when it comes to your CRM. Now, the fifth thing is something that's really happened the past couple years, ever since COVID and that is support has gone remote. When Covid happened, everyone had to get out of the office and go remote. And all of these companies, almost every single one, put their support on remote. I personally feel like this put the industry back a few years in terms of just supporting their product and supporting their users. I feel like it's partly why over the past couple years a lot of these software systems have not innovated because there's just no cohesion or culture. And you got people running Zoom and you call into support and there's people crying, little kids crying in the background, and there's no cohesion of the culture between the development team and the support team. And so that's a big reason why we are making sure we have a support team that's in house that I can walk over to and like, oh, no, that's so old school. You're so like behind the times. It's now remote. It's all about remote.

Trust me.

We've developed systems for in house versus virtual. And the people that are in house, we can pay them more, they stay longer, and the quality of their work is much higher. And so what's happening in a lot of these companies is they're having a lot of their frontline staff being remote, being out there and taking the inputting calls. And all they're doing is literally making a ticket for another division. And it's this hierarchy that begins to be created because you have to, because you can't train or maintain a level of quality that is required to have a high level of support for a CRM. So these are the five things that your CRM is not telling you. If you want a full comparison of 5 of the most popular CRMs available, check this video out here. I think it'll be really eye opening. And I talk about Copilot in there and it's not for everyone. So check this video out here.

This has been the Mike Candies podcast. Now you have some ideas on how to take your business to the next level. And if you liked what you heard, we have tons of lectures, interviews and more over at the Mike Andes YouTube channel. That'll be right up your alley. That's all we have for you today. We'll see you next time.

Sa.