A Virtual Office Staff Will Save Your Business THOUSANDS $$ Every Month!

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes. And today I'm going to be talking about why hiring an answering service for your lawn care or landscaping business is really the best thing you could do. And before we get started, I want to say a big thank you for watching these type of videos. Don't get a lot of views, but I'm really passionate about it. Some people have been saying, why don't you do more mow out in the field? I just don't have the time anymore. I can make these videos in about 15 to 20 minutes versus spending a whole day recording out in the field. So do those out in the field on a mower get a lot more views? Yes, but these is really what I care about because it's gonna help you actually grow your business, not just entertain you. So I know me behind an extra whiteboard. Extremely entertaining, but probably not as much as mowing a lawn. But it doesn't get as many views. So if you appreciate this content, I'd appreciate a like. And even if you're part of a Facebook group and you could share a video like this when it is impact for you, I'd really appreciate that too. But let's jump into it because I think I have a bit of a unique perspective due to the fact that I use answering services. And I also have built an answering service for the franchisees at Augusta Lawn Care. So if you don't know who I am, I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn care. We have 50 plus locations and we answer phones for all of them as well as do a whole bunch of other office admin work from our what we call Command center, which is like an answering service for our franchisees. And before someone comments asking if we can do theirs and open it, other people outside the franchisees, no. And everyone's like, well, you can make more money, you can just charge people more. No. The whole reason Command center works and we can charge 30 to 40% less than anyone else when it comes to backend answering services is because we all use the same model. We're all using the same software, the same systems, allowing us to have much more cognitive scale and efficiencies at Command Center. So just to answer everyone's questions, we can't do your phone calls. We cannot will not ever open up Command center to anyone outside the franchise simply because we would then have to charge $1.50, $2aminute, which is what the average is. So like, we then lose our differentiation factor and we just become another service. But I'll give you A couple others right off the top, Call boss, pink callers as well as Jill's receptionist. Those are all a few that you can use. And Jill's receptionist is going to work really well with jobber, Pink caller is going to work great with service Autopilot. And then call boss is a little bit more flexible and they all have different price points. But typically you're going to be paying some in the neighborhood of $1.50 to $2 per minute that they're on the phone. And if you hire someone to do other tasks outside of calling, then they might be a slightly discount, more like A$10 cents to $1.40 when they're actually doing the task. I'm not a huge fan of when a calling service asks for a big chunk for a whole week for one person because the whole benefit of having an answering service is the fact that you get charged by the minute they're actually doing work. So I'm gonna explain today why it comes down to the fact that for an office person most of the time they're actually not doing work. They are going to the bathroom, getting coffee, talking, getting clarification, doing a follow up email, they're doing other random tasks, getting the printer set up, getting the Internet set up. Oh, the Internet crashed. There's so many things that go on in an office to where most of their time is not actually doing the work. So you only wanna be paying when they're actually doing the work. And I'd much rather be charged two or three times as much when they're actually doing the work on a minute by minute, second by second basis. So couple things I want you to keep mind and first and foremost let's address the fact. Should I have an answering service? Are you a small lawn care business? Are you a small landscape business? Let's assume that you are small and you get a few calls a day. But let's assume that first of all we're getting charged $1.50 per minute on the phone. So when the customer's on the phone with the our calling service, we're going to charge $1.50 per minute down to the second. Okay, so we're only getting charged when they're on the phone, we're not getting charged when they are leaving us a note of what happened, et cetera. Let's assume that the average call is three minutes. And I know this from a fact. Basically the average phone call in this industry is about three minutes because sometimes you get 45 second calls. If someone is wanting to Quickly ask a question. Then you get six or seven minute phone calls. When someone's trying to ask clarification on an estimate or an invoice, they have questions about they've got to change their billing information, whatever it might be. Average is three minutes per phone call. Okay? We have $1.50 per minute. So that's going to equal $4.50 average per call. So per call. And we're going to assume that we do four calls per day, okay? So if we do the math on that $4 and a half dollars times four calls per day, that's going to mean that we are going to have $16.

That we are going to pay this answering service. So if we have 20 days in a month that we do work, so five days a week, four weeks in a month, that is going to be 20 days per month. That is actually, we're using this answering service that's going to mean that we pay $320 per month to this answering service to get our phones answered on the first or second ring and have someone actually live in person answering the phone. This prevents you from having to be on the mower. Be like, yeah, Mr. Jones. Yeah, one second, I can't hear you very good. What was that? You want what? What? Okay, I'll be over there tomorrow. You can avoid all of that by having an answering service that can pick up your phone. Be professional. Immediately pull up someone's account in front of them on their computer instead of getting back to them the next day or calling them. Like I said, in the background there's a mower. That just doesn't make you seem as professional. And in my opinion, you could simply raise your prices by $5 per hour just to accommodate this extra price. If you're a solo operator, maybe have one employee just getting started. I still think this is an amazing opportunity. If it was double this, if it was $3aminute and I had to pay $600, I still think this is a great deal. Even if you're a solo operator and you're only getting a couple calls a day. Cause if you're a solo operator, you're not getting like hundreds of calls. You're literally getting four or five a day. And I know this from doing. We have lots of franchisees and when they're just starting out, they're only getting like 4, 5, 6 calls a day max. And if they're growing fast there, obviously you're advertising. But if you're small and you're not trying to grow really quickly, you're Only gonna get several calls a day. People gotta change their account information or ask for an extra estimate, or maybe someone sees their truck and calls. But those four or five phone calls, if you can close one extra person because you're not blaring over the sound of a mower in the background, you're going to get more jobs. As well as the fact that now you're answering it live. Or your answering services, instead of getting back to that evening because they left a voicemail at the end of the day. In this industry, I've said it before, most of the time, the job is gonna go to the person who answers the phone first, and then whoever gets the estimate to the person first, they're gonna be the person, the company that wins the job. So if I can simply avoid them having to leave a voice message, yes, a voice message is fine. You get back to them a little bit later or after the job that you're currently at, you get back in the truck. But it's not easy to switch from office person in your little laptop in your truck or on a phone. And then being like, okay, now I'm gonna go out and work. It's a tough transition back. It's distracting to you. It makes you very reactive. And I'd much rather have someone professional doing it and getting even. If I had to pay twice as much of this as a solo operator, I would be happy. All right, now you're asking, well, what if you're a big business? Okay, because the question that makes a lot of sense if I can only pay 5, 600 bucks a month for someone to answer my phone throughout the week if I'm a solo operator. But what if I'm a big company? What If I'm doing 100,000amonth, $200,000 a month in revenue? What about then? I want you to think about this, and that is the cost of having an actual office person. Because now if you've grown to 100,000, 200,000 per month in revenue, you need an office. You need an office person full time. You might even need two if you're growing to that size. Let's assume you just need one office person. Let's assume you're maybe doing like 100,000 in monthly revenue on average. So this is gonna be for a big business. Do I still need a calling service when I am now? Let's assume I have 500 customers, and the typical attrition rate or amount of customers that you lose every year is around 20%. So literally, I'm gonna lose 100 customers because of bad customer service. I mess stuff up, they move, they sell their house, whatever. I truly believe I can reduce that attrition rate down to 10% simply by having someone in the office all the time, whether it be an answering service or an actual person in the office taking phone calls and being alert to the customer's needs when they need it. So right away, I literally can't have a plus 50 or a net 50 increase on customers simply because I have better customer service, better answering time, better communication, and yet keep more customers. So there's +50 right there. Now, let's assume that I do 500 estimates every single year and 100,000 in revenue. You're gonna do it probably on 500 estimates a year. If I could increase my close ratio from 40% to 50%. So I'm literally just going up 10% in my close ratio because I have an answering service. I have either an answering service or someone in the office. Cause remember, at Big, I might actually have an office staff and an actual office building. Okay. If I can do that, that's gonna lead to an extra and again, a +50 customers simply because I have an office staff I want. My closing ratio went from 40%, so 40% of the estimates I gave were accepted. Now it went all the way to 50%, 10% more simply because I have someone that's answering the phones immediately. I'm able to get the estimate back to the client as fast as possible right after I'm done putting together the numbers. And so I literally lead to a positive net 100 customers simply by having an office. This is why when you get bigger, you need to have an office, whether it be an answering service or an actual office building. Now, I'm gonna try to convince you or give you the math of why even when you're large, having an answ.

The best option. Most of the time, when people say, well, I need an office person full time, they don't take into consideration all the different factors and costs that come with that office person. So let's go through the math. Okay, let's assume. Actually, I don't have it written down. So let's just do it on the fly. Let's do an office staff person. And for a good office staff that is by themselves working all day long, they're very much keenly aware of your emails, your billing, your invoicing, everything that they're doing. You're probably gonna pay at least $25 per hour. This is gonna be your solo person. They know everything about the business. They do all the scheduling, they do all the payroll. They do everything. And again, I'm assuming this includes payroll taxes, so you're probably only actually giving them $20 an hour. But with taxes and all the rest of it, you're looking at $25 per hour without any paid time off, benefits, paid leave, all this other stuff. So you know what? In all reality, just to be actually much more accurate, you really need to put the cost of all that's gonna be $30 an hour, okay? Because just paid time off, we give two weeks paid time off. If you have medical benefits, payroll taxes, labor and industry, like L and I and workers comp. And all the rest of it, you're looking at 30 bucks an hour cost to have an office person. But what people don't usually realize, because what they'll do is like, okay, well, if I can $30 an hour, and I do 40 hours a week, and I can multiply that four times a week, four weeks in a month, that's basically, let's see, 120, that's gonna be like $4,800. So, you know what? If I've grown my business and I have a big office or a big customer base and maybe 50, 60, 70, $100,000 in monthly revenue, I can afford $5,000 a month in payroll. And you're right, you can, and you should. You should. $5,000 would be a great trade off on a $100,000 business to keep all the books clean, answer the phones when you need it, et cetera. However, this is where I have the problem. This is why I still think you should have a virtual staff for your office, even when you're big. First thing is the big bad turnover. The problem is this office person is extremely valuable because they have all the information in your business in their head. What happens when they get injured or they have a child and they need to leave, or they get sick for two weeks, and now all of that burden falls on you and they. When you got to go hire somebody else, you got to find them and train them for three or four months, literally just to get them up to speed where this office person was. Then that person leaves after a few more months. And if you have any turnover in your office, it's going to be extremely bad. This is why a lot of times people use their spouse or their relatives because they're literally afraid that their office person would leave. And if they did, it would be very, very bad. It would take the owner training the office person a few Months to get them up to speed on billing, invoicing, scheduling, payroll, all the different aspects of running an office. So turnover is a huge problem, because I'm not even baking that into this price. And that is your time training that office Persona. How to answer the phone, how to input a customer, how to take a contact form, how to answer an email, all the tiny little details of running an office. It's gonna cost way more for you to train them. Cause now your time is most valuable, is now spent literally just training somebody who might leave in three, six, eight months. And now you're doing that all the time. So turnover's killer. And this is something we're not even taking into account when we look at this number. Another reason why I'd still say at this size of business, you should have a virtual office staff is because of the winter months or down months, whether it be winter, summer, et cetera. And that is, guess what? If you're in the winter months and you have a really good office person, you might only go. You might go from 100,000amonth in revenue down to, say, 30 or 40,000amonth in revenue. But guess what? You're still gonna pay this 4800 because you want to keep that person on staff. If they're really good, if they're really bad, they're not really worth 4800. If they're really good, it is worth it. But you do it throughout the whole winter months when you're only doing 30, 40,000 in revenue and literally 10, 15% of your revenue is going out the door just to pay this person. Because this is considered literally a fixed cost. Because you're not going to let them go for three months. They're not going to want to stay. If they're good, they're not going to stay for three months. They're not going to want to leave for three months. They're going to stay and you're going to pay them, even though you can't really afford it and the business isn't making as much money. And that's really a fixed cost now. So during the winter months, even when you slow down, you have to keep paying them. For a virtual office, if you're paying by the minute, you get to basically have a variable cost of this number here. Because as you slow down and there's less calls and less call volume and less customers and less jobs and less estimates, you pay less. So now with a virtual staff, this expense of an office becomes a variable cost based upon how much revenue and how much jobs you're doing versus being a fixed cost, that regardless of how much work you have, you still have to pay this because you don't want to lose them when your business slows down. The third reason, the biggest reason why I still think if you have a big company, you should be using a virtual office is because of overhead. Because what people don't take into account is all the other costs associated with having an office staff. Because guess what? This office person isn't going to want to work out of their vehicle. They're going to want an office. So these are the hidden costs of having this office person. It's not just the 4800, it's a lot more. Because these are the things that are not being taken into account. Rent. Okay, if I do not have an actual office building and I'm having virtual staff answer my calls, do my emails, etc. The rent for my property can literally be a gravel parking lot with some storage on it. I do not need an office building with a permit to have occupancy and lights and toilets and water and all the other utilities and Internet. I only Internet at my office anymore. So literally my rent, just my rent alone would go from let's say $800 a month for like a pad of gravel and a storage container. No building structure whatsoever. I can get this on like my own land. I don't need commercial land, et cetera. Now that's gonna literally become like $3,000 a month if you're running a pretty big business. Because on this one I can literally just park my trucks, put a storage container on this one. I need an actual office building. I've got to have it where it's commercially rated and zoned and I got to have it all wired and it's big structure and indoors and all the rest of it, alright? So I'm going to be paying a lot more per month. So this difference Here is what, 2,200? Let's just call it two grand extra. So a difference of two grand per month is going to be the cost of having the extra building of for rent. Plus I've got to have utilities, alright, so that's gonna be water, sewer, garbage, Internet connection. We pay almost $500 per month in the Internet we got at our other shop. Before of course, we had our virtual staff, which now we will not need that. But before we had command center, we had to get Internet installed. Guess what? It cost US$500 a month because we had to run a line for like 500 yards. Dig through a channel, whatever, give us fiber optic utilities is literally for us almost $1,000 per month. By the time we have water, sewer, garbage, Internet access, we have solar. But if you don't have solar and you gotta do lights, it's gonna be even more. So literally $1,000 extra more in utilities. Now you're gonna still have to have garbage and things, even at the smaller rent size. But the actual utilities of electricity, the, the water for the toilet and all the plumbing and all the rest of it, that's going to be a lot more if you have this large building. So therefore, let's maybe say this is plus 500. All right? So it's a difference per month of $500 in order to have the larger structure and have the office building. The other thing you ought to take into account is miscellaneous, and that is the fact that with an office comes like computers and phones and, and tables and chairs. And now you need a break room. Now you need a coffee maker. Now you need an espresso maker. Now you need toilet paper. Now you need to have all these other random stuff in the office that's gonna cost you way, way more. And so just a computer might cost you $1,000, $2,000. The table $100, $200. A chair, $100. It just keeps adding up. So if we look over the course of a year, you will easily spend $1,000 per month in just office amenities. The random stuff like a refrigerator, oh, now I need a microwave. Now I need coffee cups. Now I need this. All the randomness that you're spending every month because now you have a building, let alone the insurance, let's just throw that into here too. The extra insurance of insuring the building and all your stuff that's now in it. So when we really look at it, the cost of having an actual office, one office person working all day long is going to be that 4800. Now we're at 5800 plus, plus 2000 at 7800 plus. This over here, we're looking at $8300 per month to have one office person working full time. So even in a big business, I believe it's still better to have an answering service. Now, the last thing I wanted to share is if you're looking for an answering service, what are the three things that you want to ask them or know about? Number one, you want to make sure that they integrate with your CRM, your customer relationship management. So whether you're using Java or service autopilot or Lawn Pro or Yardbook or whatever software you're using, make sure that it integrates with your software, because you don't want them just taking notes for you. You don't want them just to be a fancy answering service. You want to be where they can actually get into your software, schedule appointments for you, they can set up estimates for you, they can do your invoicing, take payment over the phone. You want them to actually be in your software, not literally just be answering the phone call, making notes on a piece of paper and sending you a picture. They're just a fancy answering service, a fancy answering machine at the end of the day. Number two is you want to make sure that they can do more than just answering the phone and taking a message like, okay, all right, great. Okay, bye. You don't just want that. You want them to actually go in and change things in your software, and you want them to go in and be able to do things like email. You got to open up your email to them. You got to billing, invoicing, payroll. If you can get to where they can do onboarding so that when you hire someone, you're not having to send them forms and ask them to sign this paper. Can you send your bank information and, oh, can you get that tax, you know, W4 over to me? And I gotta fill that out. Let the office person do that. Let the virtual staff send that information, ideally through, like, DocuSign. It can be virtually done. This is how we do at Command Center. The franchisees fill out one form when they hire somebody. Takes them like two minutes. And then. And then Command center goes and creates all the documents and sends that via DocuSign. And on the DocuSign asks for a voided check from the employee so we can do payroll. It's all really systematized. It takes us maybe 10 or 15 minutes to onboard someone instead of the owner taking an hour out of their evening when they're working on a document, they're in bed with their spouse or they're working on their laptop. That's what you don't want. And so number three is there will be minor mistakes. The third thing you gotta keep in mind when you're hiring an office staff that's virtual is you're gonna have minor mistakes, because, again, we're trying to get around this whole turnover issue, which means you're gonna have multiple people handling your account. If you're doing a virtual office staff, and you want that, by the way, if someone's like, oh, no, I'm gonna have a Dedicated person, that's again, bad. What happens if they leave? What if they're unhappy with that call services as an employer and they leave, or they get a kid or they move to the other side of the country or whatever, you're gonna have that same turnover. You're gonna always have new people that you have to keep training them up on how you do things. You want a system that you buy into that's a virt that can answer your calls and all the rest of it, regardless of who answers the phone, they know how to do it. Now when you do that and you have that many people touching your account and you have people that are not physically with you answering calls, making customer service judgment, when you have that, you're gonna have mistakes. And so, like I've said before, if someone can do 90% efficiency compared to me, I wanna delegate it if I'm trying to grow my business. And so you've gotta really, there's gonna be minor mistakes. Things like wrong phone numbers entered in as they're typing and they knock, a wrong key, the wrong email address. The address is like 5, 5, 6, 5. And instead they do 5, 5, 5, 6. It's gonna happen. It's gonna happen a lot. And it's because they're virtual and they don't know your area. They don't know specifically that on the left side of George street is a good neighborhood, on the right side is a bad neighborhood. They don't know all those little intricate details. And so you've got to realize there's going to be some mistakes. But it is a massive, massive win to reduce all of these issues by having virtual staff in comparison to your own office building structure as the business grows. And if you're small, it's a whole lot better than answering the phone with a mower in the background or jumping back on a truck and being reactive every time a phone call, like, oh, the buzz in my pocket. I remember this buzz in your pocket. While you're mowing up, stop the mower, turn it off. Okay, boom, Grab it. Walking to the truck, grabbing out your laptop, trying to answer back. That's no good way to run a business. Take those things off your plate, that admin work, that more reactive type work, and focus on selling jobs, hiring more people, and building your business. This is my opinion. I think everyone should be focused on hiring a virtual staff that doesn't require a big office and buying more land and hiring people ever so often and putting all the cards, all your eggs in one basket of one person's. Mind and hoping they don't leave. I'm Mike Andes. Let's getbusinesscourse.com check it out and make sure you click the like button.