Best CRMs for Your Home Service Business, Automations to Help You Take Your Hands Off

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. Today is all about CRMs. Which of the top five are best for your business? Yes, we are aware that Mike is the CEO of Copilot CRM, but in all fairness he doesn't recommend Copilot for everybody. Find out which one works best for you after that. Mike talks about some automations that you can implement to make sure everything in your business is running smoothly without manual intervention. You can find all this and more over at the Mike Andy's YouTube channel. Let's get right into it. Here's a comparison between the top five CRMs in the home service industry.

Today I'm going to be talking to you about the best CRM customer relationship management tool for your lawn care, landscaping and any home service based business. I'm going to go through the top five and explain the pros, the cons along and also to talk about how much you're going to be paying for it. Also looking at the payment processing because that's actually the hidden cost of most of these softwares, it's not the monthly fee and then what the ideal user use case for every one of these software is going to be. And if you, if you're starting out I am biased. I am 100% biased because I'm the co founder of Copilot. I'm the CEO. However, you might be shocked by the fact that I'm not going to recommend Copilot for everyone. I think that these other software systems have a user that is better fit for their needs compared to Copilot. I'm explaining which ones I think should and should not use Copilot and you should actually use these other softwares instead of Copilot which I am affiliated with. I'm going to be comparing all of these and in terms of prices and features and things like that, I'm going to be comparing the top tier of their features and their top tier of what options they have. The reason for that is because when you start to grow a business the the amount that you spend on CRM is so minuscule compared to what it can save you if it has the right feature set as the right user interface. It's incredible. If have a million dollar business you could easily save 50, 50,000 or $100,000 a year simply by having a couple good features. So having an extra 50 or $60 per month is not going to be a deciding factor, I am going to go over price. But just keep in mind I'm comparing the best features and the best tier you might say or package that these softwares offer. All right, I'm not going to compare every single tier because most of them have three to four different tiers. All right, I got some notes, I want to be prepared, make sure I got everything nailed down. Just keep in mind I have tried out dozens of software packages. These are the most popular ones. And down the road I'll be adding in more one off software system. There might be a little more niche, niche, niche to the industries and specific types of use cases. But I'll compare and contrast those and the pros and cons of each of those as well. But these are some of the most popular in the lawn care, landscaping and home service industries. So just remember these are my opinions. I am biased. You definitely want to do more research and talk to other users. In my opinion the best feedback is from other users of this software, not the companies themselves. So just remember I am biased and I do own a piece of Copilot as I go through all of this. But I have tried out dozens of software including all of these and I know exactly what is the good, the bad and the ugly. And the whole reason I had to start Copilot is because I do feel there was a need in the market that was not being filled by these other players. So let's go ahead and jump into it. What I'm going to do is you got the little button here, the little color circle. As I move through the different features of the specific software I will move this along until we finish over here where I am going to explain what user and what use case is best for this specific software. So let's start off with Jobber. All right, so some of the pros that I have with Java, some of the good things is very simple, great looking user interface or ui, very, very clean. It's easy to learn and adapt. So if you have using another software and you're migrating in a Jobber, very simple. The user interface is very, very easy. They've some really good new integrations and 15 to 20 different companies that they're working with right now, direct integrations and a Zapier integration. Zapier allows you to connect with like 4000 other apps using that, that specific Zapier integration. So that's fantastic. Very simple way of using SMS texting and I'm just really like the way that they do the text messaging to and from the customer very simple. I've seen other software systems that their SMS texting is extremely complicated, it's hard to track. Jobbers really nailed it and they have great chat support. When it comes to Jobber, their chat support like in the bottom right hand corner of the software, you can just like chat with someone. Very good live support. I also like their mobile app. It's very clean, very simple to use. And their client poor portal layout is just stellar. Honestly the way that they have invoicing and estimates for the client to see in the client portal, in my mind one of the most simple ones and the most user friendly ways of getting started when it comes to CRM is Jobber. All right, some of the cons is that they do lack some automation flexibility. When you start trying to create automations beyond just estimate follow up and invoice follow up, there's just not a lot of customization there. As well as their dispatch board is just not really built for large operations. So for example, my very first Augusta lawn care location, you know there needs to be an ability of 3, 4, 500 jobs on a dispatch board and you know, dozens of crews. And I feel like jobbers is not set up for that. Their dispatch board isn't really set up for that. Larger operations and some of their marketing functions are pretty limited unless you integrate also with mailchimp for email for example. And the problem with that is I want to have all of my marketing and my serum in one software package if possible instead of having to go get a mailchimp subscription which is going to cost you an additional $150 depending on what type of number of clients you have. But for my this I'd have to pay an additional on top of what I'm paying to Jobber for just mailchimp so I can do my email marketing. There's obviously a lot of benefit to having open source where you have a lot of integrations. But also I want one software do a lot of the heavy lifting for me and that includes my marketing and Jobber does not have that right now. Now when it comes to pricing at Jobber, we're looking at $349 per month. That includes 15 users. So very nice. If you have like 10 users it's an average like 35 bucks a user. Not bad. But in addition that $350 you're going to have to pay for upgrades such as company cam mailchimp and these integrations might cost 50, 100 plus dollars. So just keep in mind you're not Getting really all the features that you would in some of these other packages at the 349 price point because there's integrations that are also need to be tacked on if you want to use their full benefits and their full feature set. So company cam, great integration, Love it. The ability to take photos and videos and attach those to pieces of the estimate, etc. But that's a paid additional feature. You'll have to get a subscription with the other company. All right, payment processing 2.7 to 3.1% depending on what type of credit card and depending on what type of layer and tier you're in their of their customer base, you're going to get 1% a fee for ACH, right. So you got credit card processing and then you have ACH stands for automated Clearinghouse. It's for basically when you get the routing number and the bank number, bank account number from the customer lot. Cheaper, only 1% ACH. However, they don't allow for auto payments from what I've heard, because this is a recent thing, from what I've heard, they do not allow auto payments on ach. The reason companies do this is because they want you to use the credit card processing because they make more money. So I don't like the fact that they don't allow auto pay on ACH and they don't have a cap on that 1%. So if you have a $10,000 bill, you're going to pay 1% of that, which is $100. A lot of these other companies what comes to ACH, they have a cap on what ACH is per transaction. All right, ideal user in my opinion is anyone that is from $100,000 in annual revenue to $500,000 in annual revenue. So again, they don't really have the flexibility for those massive companies, but they are going to be a little bit have some good features in here in terms of users that are still small and above 100,000 revenue. All right, I wouldn't recommend a job or if you're doing under 100,000, you don't need it. But if I would recommend it for people that have most of their revenue, that 100,000 to 500,000 is coming from recurring jobs as well as projects that are under $10,000. They don't have the most robust project management tools. They're really built for smaller jobs and recurring jobs. And so if you're doing 50, 100, $200,000 landscape installs and ponds and pools, probably not the best solution for you in my opinion. All right, let's move on to Service Autopilot. Now I've used Service Autopilot the most out of all these software systems because we have built Augusta nation to over 100 locations mostly on service. Apple, we use some other other softwares as well but the vast majority of our locations in the past ran on Service Autopilot. So some of the pros number one very powerful enterprise level features for automations. Potentially some of their best work was done a few years ago when they instituted some very robust features around Automations. Great for the enterprise level larger companies doing 3, 4, 5, 10 million fantastic features for them. In addition to automations for those enterprise level users they also have job costing and great price matrixes. Again something that's not visible in something like Jobber, but it is great for that enterprise level user that is doing hundreds of estimates a day, thousands of recurring jobs a day. Their dispatch board is fantastic and in my mind one of the best dispatch boards out there for recurring work and for large volumes of recurring work. All right, so this is again enterprise level users is where the game is at for service all because their automations, their price matrixes and their job costing. All right, now let's talk about some of the cons. So cons for service all very long learning curve. We had to train our franchisees for months many times to get them up to speed and learning how service all can be used. It's very complicated to learn and it's very hard to implement. In fact a lot of times they upsell you into a setup. So the thing I don't mention a lot here is the fact that they're actually trying to sell you on a package just to get your software set up for you and then on a recurring basis try to sell you on a monthly 50 or $100 extra just to get your email account set, your email document set up and your estimate formatting and your invoice formatting. It's so complicated to implement. Honestly, it's the one of the worst things about it.

Really. Honestly, in my mind one of the cons of Service Autopilot is that they have a slowing innovation ever since their co founders were bought out and they've been part of a larger company that has venture capital behind them, innovation has slowed to a crawl. Also their client portal in my opinion, just very, very poor. Hopefully there's some updates down the road, but we've been hearing about those updates for four or five years now and haven't seen anything. They have very few integrations, they're much more of a closed system, kind of like Apple compared to something like Jabra has an open source and allows people to integrate and connect with Zapier and other apps. Last thing that the cons is really bad customer service. A lot of their users, that's their biggest complaint is bad phone support. And then the way they do their ticketing system that when you call in the person on the other line just picks a ticket for you and then says that they'll call you back. And sometimes you wait days waiting for them to call you back. So definitely a big con in terms of pricing. You look at $279 per month for their Pro plus account plus $19 per user. So keep that in mind. That's a big part of the cost is user pricing plus setup because they're going to charge you for setting it up. Plus you're going to pay for upgrades such as Maps Pro which allows you to do measuring of properties via satellite, etc. Plus you're going to have other upgrades for like client portal $50 a month if you want to do Quickbook sync, another $50 a month texting more like you're there's just a lot of Additional so the 279 per month is definitely just the tip of the iceberg. Similar to Jobber where there's other integration that you're going to need that are going to be on top of that monthly price. So it's a little bit dec, but 279 is the actual price plus $19 per user plus setup, plus all those other pieces of features that you're going to need most likely. All right. In terms of payment processing, this is definitely a downside and that is that you are locked into clearance. Clearance is the company that owns Service Autopilot. Above them it's Explore. Then you have clearance, then you have service off. They're a bit of a in a big conglomerate, a bit of a subsidiary of them and we'll talk more about that in a second. But honestly, being locked into one payment provider, not the best. And that's ultimately why so many of these payment processing companies buy out these CRMs is because there's so much money in the payment processing, not so much in actually the monthly fees. So that's something why I made this extra whole column here just for the payment processing. It's very important to know that because you're going to be paying typically 3 and a half to 4% depending on the size of your business on processing through clearance. And there's PCI compliance, and they're currently not. ACH is not available to the majority of users. I think they're beta testing it, but it's been like that for a year or two. It's just not widely used. It's not a great user experience. And they're avoiding ach, like most payment processors, because they make more money on credit card processing. All right, the ideal user, in my opinion, for service autopilot is going to be someone is doing 750,000 or 3/4 of a million dollars in revenue, and they're doing lawn care and mostly recurring work. All right? We're doing lawn care services and other recurring work. That's going to be your mojo. If you're doing above 300, above three quarters of a million in revenue, if you're doing under that, it's too much of a pain to get implemented, in my opinion. You don't need the price matrixes and the job costing and the really complex automation. You don't need that when you're doing 3, 4, 500,000 in revenue. All right? And if most of your products are under $50,000, then it'll also work well for you. All right? So I say that because if you're doing design build and you're doing $3 million revenue, but you're doing 250, $300,000 projects, it's not going to have the project management tools available that are substantial enough to handle those massive, massive projects. So again, above 3, 300, above 3/4 of a million in revenue, mostly lawn care and recurring work. And if most of your projects are under 50,000, Service Autopilot probably good option for you. All right, Yard book. All right, so the pros of this one is really simple because that's what the pros are. It's extremely simple to use. It's very intuitive to get started. You know, there's not a big learning curve. You literally can just open it up and if you know how to like navigate PowerPoint and Microsoft Word, you probably can figure this out without a whole lot of of pain. It's really built for mowing and simple recurring services only. If you're doing projects really of any sort of, it's not that great. But when it comes to, like the pros, if you're just doing mowing, some really basic property clamps and mulch installs, you're doing things on the side, getting started. This is a great, very simple, very intuitive to use. You literally can be up and running within a day and understand the majority of their features.

All right?

Let's talk about some of the cons lacks features to grow into a larger company such as automations, a dispatch board in depth reporting, automatically charging credit cards. These are things that are not there. Also just a lack of innovation and support, especially from a lot of the longtime users. They just feel like there's not a lot of new stuff happening. You can look at the design and the UI of the software and just realize it's probably caught back, you know, five, 10 years back similar to service Autopilot in terms of this, their ui. It just. There's not a lot of innovation happening. But they don't really need to get so simple. It's so basic. They're not focused on really what's coming. It's like this is a basic CRM for you to be able to use and get started with estimating, invoicing and doing some basic things like that for your job. Here's the beautiful thing about probably the best pro, honestly with Yard Book it's. There's a free version that you can literally get started without paying a single dollar. It's awesome. And you know you can pay $35 a month for the premium version. The free version is supported by ads. And also if you moving on to the payment processing side, if you have the premium version, the $35 per month you're able to get a little bit slight a better discount when it comes to the stripe fee that they are. You're getting char payment processing. So 2.9% plus a 1% fee. If you're not that premium $35 per month user then you get an extra tack on for the payment processing. But basically 2.9% from stripe is exactly what stripe is charging them. So pure as them, they're not making anything on the payment processing. They're really just charging you for that $35 per month. ACH Again, using bank transfers instead of credit card processing. Not available inside of Yard Book. Again, if you're watching this in six months or 12 months or even three months from now, some of these features could have changed things that can be added. But currently they do not have ACH available. All right. Ideal user in my opinion is from 0 to $100,000 in annual revenue for a company is doing lawn care and simple, simple services. No projects above 10,000.

Right?

It doesn't, it doesn't have enough capabilities to do any sort of project management at all. All right. It's great for new owners that are starting out or if you're doing this on the side kind of A side hustle weekend. You're doing this after work, you're getting started. This is probably the best software for you to use because you can focus on growing the business and sales and getting the work done. Instead of like how to set up automations and price matrixes and estimate email templates and all these other things, just focus on doing the work. That's what the majority of your time should be spent on if you're doing under $100,000 in annual revenue. But you just cannot beat the price point for the fact that if you're just getting started, this is the software you want to use. And that is Yardbook.

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All right, so now we're going to talk about LMN. All right, the pros. What's good about LMN? It's very good for training skilled laborers. They acquired Greenius, which is a software that trains people via video and online. And so really great integrations between Greenius, who they acquired and LMN to train your hardscapers, your landscapers, guys that need skill for building walls and doing large installations and patios and decks, pergolas, 3D designs. That's the type of user that's going to want lmn. Those are the pros. Great for those big projects. Design, build, project management. Fantastic tools. I also really think that their budgeting and job costing is the best for any software. And what's really cool is you can use for free. They're just their budgeting software. Now I personally think a lot of people using budgeting, they're, they're bringing the wrong inputs in and therefore the outputs that get on the other side are flawed. However, it's still a great software when it comes to budgeting and integrating that with the job costing of your projects. Very important for jobs that are hundreds of thousands of dollars of massive installations and, you know, three, four, five week projects that take a long time to get done and are Just like, you know, recurring mowing visits, LMN crushes it not so great. I've heard from the recurring side in terms of mowing and the dispatch board for recurring, but for projects absolutely nails it. I also really think there's great leadership. One of the few companies on this list, I think their leadership is fantastic. And Mark Bradley, the CEO, very involved in the industry, been in the industry for a long time. I really like the leadership over Element. All right, let's move on to some of the cons of Element. Most features based upon the majority of users I've talked to do not use the vast majority of the features. There's just too much going on. There's a lot of complexity and depth because they're really trying to focus on those massive contracts, those massive projects in terms of design build. And so a lot of the smaller operators just feel like they're overwhelmed with the depth and layers of complexity and super in depth features that 95% of people don't need or don't use. And so what that causes is confusion because you're looking at software where you're seeing so much many options and things that you could do and you're really using the tip of the iceberg, which nothing against the software, it's just a matter like there's very powerful features. But the fact is that a lot of smaller operators just feel completely lost and they're not using the features as much. It's expensive to get started. All right, very expensive to get started. Not only is it to the cost like we talked about, but also just the setup fees, very expensive to get set up. Another con is it's not really robust for, robust for recurring work and automations. And a lot of people again have been complaining about their support in terms of phone support and other forms of support from the users. I've heard from multiple users that even recently that's still the case. All right. In terms of price, the the most expensive one on this list just depends though. Service all could probably compete for that because of the amount of tag ons and you know, upsells they give you. You could probably put service, I'll put it right up in this category. But the monthly price is the Most for element. $394 per month plus $19 per month per user plus a $900 setup charge. Okay, so again it is substantially more than service all but, but service all part is going to have other tag on and upsell features that you really need. So they, you know, $400 a month, nothing no small, small amount of change there. In terms of payment processing, we got 2.95% for credit card processing. Ach, so they do accept bank, bank transfers at 1%. And what I really like is they have a cap at $10. So what that means if you have $100,000 project, you're only going to pay $10 for that ACH transfer. You're not paying the 1%. Really like that they did that. I think it's a fantastic move seeing that the majority of their users are those big design build contracts and big jobs. There's big volume in terms of dollar amounts. ACH does not work like credit card processing. You don't need to charge a percentage from the back end, which I am familiar with. You do not need to charge the 1% into perpetuity, having the cap of $10. Very nice of them to do that. They also have what's called LMN pay. And there's pros and cons. Again, like with clearance, with service off site, they lock you into clearance. Similarly with lmn, they lock you into to LMN pay that requires you to use that payment vehicle. That's where they're going to make their money. That's where they're going to get extra fees. And there's pros and cons that there's pros in that. You should have better integration with the CRM. I don't usually see great strides in innovation when it comes to having clearance or LMN pay, but there's definitely capability for that. The cons are that you have lack of competition. They can charge whatever they want. And honestly there's just. That's usually where they're making their money. That's just the truth of it. So they're less inclined to and think about the CRM as much as just optimizing for the profitability of the payment processing. All right. The ideal user in my mind for LMN is a company that's doing above three quarters of a million dollars, $750,000. If you're doing above that and you're really focused on design build, that's really what I would be focusing on is LMN. If you're doing projects that are above $100,000 per so 150, 200,000, $300,000 projects. LMN great option because there is a massive amount of project management that is required for those size of jobs and handling materials and job costings and having what's called a gaunt graph, which allows you to be able to track over the course of time what certain parts of the job are being done. All very useful when it comes to project management and necessary for above 750,000 in annual revenue. Focusing on design, build and we are projects are exceeding $100,000 in revenue per project. All right, so now let's go ahead and move down to copilot. This is the one that I am biased on. So this just. I'll be honest right up from the get, but I wanted to be open, transparent about why I think we need to start a CRM because of the hole that we've talked about in these other software systems. And I'm going to tell you, we're not for everyone. Let me explain. So first and foremost, let's go over the pros.

So pros analytics in the KPI cockpit. So analyzing all the key performance indicators in your business, from close ratio to time to close to just so many things about your service area and which customers you should increase prices on and which customers you should cut because they're too far away from your radius. These are the type of things that we really dig into. We use AI, artificial intelligence to figure out what customers you should be cutting, what services you should be cutting. There's so many different aspects of your business. How long it takes you to get the estimate done, how long it takes you to get the estimate sent to the customer. These are things we track, we analyze for you. And on our what we call a cockpit, the copilot we get, we have this cockpit where you can see this data over time. And then we give you and we analyze that data and then tell you what you should be doing in your business. That's what the AI really comes in. And that's going to be the driving force over the next couple of years. And we start to innovate is really leaning on AI more and more. We call 3D data driven decisions. And so a 3D notification will pop up and say based upon these three data points, we believe you're going to need to hire someone in six weeks Based upon these three data points. These are the, the individuals on your team, the employees that should be cut or they should be on a performance improvement plan because they're your lowest performers. All of that can be done using AI and it's going to be thing we're focusing on over the next year or two. But even as I speak, the KPI cockpit analyzing the data has already began. In my opinion, the leadership at copilot is something I can stand behind. Obviously that's me so I'm completely biased. But I do believe that my experience in the industry, having over 100 plus locations around North America, being very in tune with other landscaping professionals, home service industry experts, having a full pulse on we have home service web design, we have home service cpa. I know so many different elements of the business in the home service industry. I fundamentally understand what we as contractors need and I'll stand behind that every single day of the week. And I truly believe that the majority of other software companies are led by tech people instead of contractors that know what we need, what features we need and things that are actual pain points for us in our business. And so the leadership, myself, and then Patrick Cash is the CTO Chief Technical Officer here at Copilot. He also has been the landscaping industry for almost 14, 15 years and developed software inside of it for many, many years, that's a massive pro in my mind. We also have what we call office hours. So every two weeks you can literally talk to me on a zoom call with other users. It's only for users of Copilot and I don't see anyone else having that kind of access directly to the top at the CEO level. And our goal is to make this for the users. We get the best product for them and be very open and transparent about what features we're adding, what the roadmap is and how you can adjust your business to make sure it's optimized for the roadmap that is ahead. Most of these other companies that they're not doing that, it is features will pop up, things will disappear, things will change, things will have glitches and you don't know what's going on. The communication at Copilot is what we're trying to really improve on comparison to everybody else. We're not VC venture capital backed, we're not trying to go public, we're not trying to sharpen the pencil and cut support and optimize for profit. We are focused on building the best product. And I am in this for the long term, in the long haul as well as, as Patrick. And so we don't have ulterior motives, we don't have a board behind telling us what we can and cannot do. Our hands are not tied about what features we can add or how much we spend on research and development. We are 100% focused on the users. I cannot say that. But most any other software because they are venture capital back, which means there's investors behind them expecting a return on capital. There's someone wanting to exit the company and sell shares. There's a lot of things going on that have nothing to do with creating a better product for the users and that's what we're focused on. We're not part of any sort of conglomerate or anything like that. Our focus is really having a modern, simple UI that's easy to navigate and really over the next year really trying to develop a really top tier support system, both from the chats support, but also having where you can book a zoom call and actually interact with a support person via video and share your screen. Something we want to add as well. We're trying to be, like I said, very open about our roadmap and what we're trying to work on. In my opinion, what we're really trying to go for is taking the pros of Jobber, which is the clean, simple user interface and the design and the ease of being able to get up and running and then marrying that with some of the features of Element and service autopilot over the next 12 months to really allow for the enterprise level user, software user to really dig in to some of those more complicated features. Now let's talk about some of the cons, because there are cons with Copilot. Number one, currently does not have price matrixes or job costing. Those are coming in 2020, the end of 2023, those should be integrated. So if you're using very complicated job costing or matrixes for pricing, we currently do not have that. Our plan is to have that by the end of 2023. For those more enterprise level users as well as another massive con to Copilot is that we are brand new. We do not have a track record. Everything I'm telling you, if you're watching this in February of 2023 is completely hearsay based upon what I'm saying. You, you don't have a lot of users that can say, I've been there for five years, 10 years, definitely a con of Copilot. It is new. That being said, when we started last year with developing Copilot, we use the code base of lawnpro software.com, which was the old company that Patrick still owns to this day. And he makes that for people that are just getting started with Lawn. Kind of similar to Yard Book, but a little bit more premium above that. That's, that's no longer the. It's completely separate than Copilot, but he has 14 years of experience building that code base and that's what we use as a foundation to build on top of for Copilot and our goal is to build a more enterprise level user experience for larger companies on top of that code base as well as add AI driven analytics and decision making processes using CoPilot. So just keep in mind, although we are new and we don't have a lot of experience in terms of people being able to say yeah, I've been with them for five or ten years, we do. The code base has been around for 14 years, been being developed and we just try our absolute best. That's all I can promise. But there's absolutely a con and that is we do not have thousands of users that you can talk to and get feedback on what their experience has been over the past 5, 10, 15 years. All right, pricing we are at $249 per month and $15 per user. All right, so kind of in the middle, not as, as expensive as service all applied Element, but probably a little bit more than Jobber just depending on what features you add. We don't have any add ons though. Right. So even though that monthly amount might seem like a lot, the bottom line is we don't have like $50 additional if you do, you know, measuring properties from satellite and $50 more if you do text messaging. We don't do a bunch of add ons like that. There's no add ons for the client portal QuickBooks. There's not. At $249 per month, you're getting everything that Copilot has to offer. Okay. Bulk, emailing, SMS text, two way QuickBooks like I mentioned, client port, all that. There's not any extra add ons. All right, let's move on to payment processing. We also, similar to Jobber and I think Yardbook might actually use it as well, is we use Stripe. Stripe is one of the best payment processing companies that is available and we charge what they charge us, which is 2.9%. And then in terms of ACH, we charge 0.8%, the lowest in the market market 0.8% with a cap at not $10 but $5. So again, don't get too hung up on this dollar amount per month that you're looking at all these softwares. The payment processing is what adds up very quickly. And you're spending thousands of dollars and usually five, ten times more on your payment processing than you are on your monthly fees. So we literally charge exactly what we're getting charged from Stripe. We charge you as a customer because for now my goal is not to focus on the payment side down the road. We do want to Create our own bank. But that will only happen if we can make the user experience for both you and your customer somehow better than just using Stripe. But in terms of fees, we are not charging or tacking on any extra. We are focusing on the product and ensuring that that's where we are making our money. All right, ideal customer for Copilot. It's everybody. No, it's not. There's some people I don't think you should really focus. I really don't think you should use Copilot and I'm going to explain why. So ideal user is someone that is wanting to scale up to past half a million in revenue in the next two years. So if you're just getting started, you could join Copilot, but not if you're going to take 20 years to get to 200,000. All right, if you're going to get to 500,000 or more in revenue in the next 2 years, I would recommend using Copilot. If you're just getting started and you're growing quickly and your plan is okay, I'm going to 200,000 this year and $500,000 next year and 700,000 the year after that. That if that's your trajectory of growth and you're going to plan to do above 500,000 in the next couple years, I would join Copilot today. All right, now if you're doing under $2 million in revenue, also good time to join with Copilot.

All right.

I could potentially say even a million.

All right.

What I mean by that is because there's not job costing and because there's not price matrixes, if you're a larger company, you might be using those features and I just wait one more year in 2024 you can join at that point and you know, take consideration then. But if you're under a million, maybe 2 million, then we could potentially put you on board now. But if you're above 2 million in revenue, I just wait because we need to add those. Those cost, job costing as well as price matrixes. We do have really great automations, like 30 pre built ones that I would dare to say that it'd be tough to build one that's outside of those. However, we are going to probably integrate with something like an infusion software key. Keep that. You can do some very high level automations but for now we don't have those built into the software. In my opinion, servers all part the best automations for those very enterprise level users that are having 70, 80 automations that are Very detailed and very minute. If that's you and you love automations and you're so tagged into them and you have 50, 60, 70 of them doing very, very minuscule things inside the business. Just wait, we are not set up for that. Give us another year before we will do that. So. So again ideal user for Copilot is going to be someone who's planning to get above 500,000 in the next two years. So maybe you're doing 2 or 300,000. If you want to go above 500,000 go ahead and join. You do not need Copilot if you're only going to do 100,000 or $200,000 for the rest of your life. Okay. If your plan is to go bigger though and grow the company, I believe you can do that with Copilot. So right now I'd be looking to join if you are under 2 million. I probably more conservatively they'll say under a million because when I seen companies at 1.5, 1.6, 1.7 they start using some of those enterprise level features we just don't have yet. That's job costing, price matrixes and very intricate automations.

All right.

And if your project sizes are under 50,000 I would also join. We do not have some of the very high level job costing and project management tools that LMN has. We will be adding those in 2024. So give us a year and a half, maybe two years to where we have some of those more enterprise level features for 80100 $200,000 projects that I feel Element has crushed. So our goal is to some cherry pick some of the best features across the board of these other softwares and hopefully over the next 12 to 24 months from the time of recording this is February 2023. So by the end of 2024 my goal is to be the best in all these areas. Allow for the growth of a company to go well into 5, 10, $15 million annual revenue territory and not have any. We have to switch four times going through different softwares that they begin to grow and allow for that project management. Large projects manage to be done but also allow for the very in depth automations job costing the dispatch board. Allowing someone that has millions of revenue as a service autopilot user that could potentially switch over then as well all being tied back to a very simple interface that Jobber has which is easy to use, the mobile app, the customer's experience and and ultimately creating a world class support team over the next 12 to 24 months. So should you join Copilot that's hopefully can help you answer the question. I will say this. We are new, we are trying to figure things out. I will make mistakes. I'll try to be open and transparent what those mistakes are, what we're doing to fix them and have a clear line of communication directly with our users. And every single waking moment will be spent trying to make sure that the software is stable, that it's responsive, the user interface is good, and that we are developing a support team to help you fully utilize the software. Because I truly believe that in three, four, five years down the road when AI has become integrated so well with Copilot, it'll be leagues ahead of other of the competition. And so if you want to join us for that ride, I'd be very thankful for that. I appreciate you even considering it and thinking about joining Copilot. Just go to copilotcrm.com and you know check it out. There's a free version that you can get started with. Check it out for up to 50 customers completely free. And I just want to say thank you. I'm Mike Andes, Co Founder and CEO of Copilot and we'll see you in the cockpit.

We hope you're enjoying this content. If you're new to running a lawn care business or you're looking to revamp how you do your business, Mike created Lawn Care Business course specifically for you. This is Mike's personal lawn care oriented course directly from his experience growing Augusta into the successful business that is today. It's a step by step resource showing you how to grow your monthly revenue to over 100,000 in just three years including over 30 plus lectures and tons of bonuses to dive into. These lessons aren't the same one Mike puts up on YouTube. If you want a full picture on how to run a growing lawn care business, this is the perfect place to start. You can find out more@landscapebusinesscourse.com Next up, here are some automations that you can implement in your business to keep things hands off.

Today I'm going to share with you.

The seven top automations that I use in my service based business to make it more profitable and more efficient. You can use these too. So let's go ahead and check it out in Copilot CRM.

Com and I'm not going to show.

You the entire sequence today. I just want you the understanding and start thinking about how automations can massively improve your business, make it more efficient and reduce the amount of office staff and overhead you need to grow Your business. All right, let's jump in. Let's create this one which is going to be called SMS after meeting. Now what I want to do here is after the meeting with the customer is completed, in fact, 15 minutes after it's completed, I want to text the customer and I'm literally going to send them a text template that's going to say it was great to meet you. Keep an eye on your email because I'm going to be sending over that quote via email now. My next favorite automation is the ability to be able to remind someone on your team or your mechanic that you need the oil changed. So I'm going to go ahead and create a recurring to do on my visits. Now it's not going to be a single one, it's going to be recurring. I'm going to do it. Let's see, every single month on the first, let's do. On the first Monday of every one month, I want to make sure that they remind them to do the specific oil changes on the equipment. Now I'm going to go back into my automations and I'm going to go create an automation that is going to then remind them of the oil change right before that date. So the first Monday of every single month there's going to be a to do on someone's schedule. I want to make sure though that before, let's see here, before an equipment maintenance happens, before that happens, I want to run one day before the event and I'm going to do, let's do, let's assume that this is actually going to be an employee, right? You could go ahead and text an employee, you could text a customer and then make that customer into your mechanic. If you wanted to literally just say, hey, I'm gonna be bringing over the trucks for example, to do oil changes. But in this case, let's assume that we're gonna text one of the employees that we have designated these to do's for and where. Then we can literally choose exactly which employee, what the text templates gonna say and remind them the day before every single month that they're responsible for the oil changes.

All right.

My third automation I love is the ability to be able to text message your applicants before the interview. So you might look at their application, you might see that they're really great, give them a call. You set up the interview, but it might be three or four days from now. Maybe they got an application on Friday, you reviewed it, called the references and you set up a interview for next Tuesday. We need to make sure we stay in touch with them. Emails, phone calls are great, but let's go ahead and we can do text messages and emails automatically to make sure that they are reminded of their interview time. Because, because sometimes just getting them to the interview is half the battle. So let's go ahead and create my next favorite automation which is the SMS applicant before interview. Because we've seen that text messages really, really help with getting applicants to the interview process. So the trigger on this one's going to be before a meeting happens and I'm going to ensure that this happens two days before the event. And so that way when I schedule the meeting with this quote unquote customer, which is going to be, see here action, I'm going to go ahead and do text customer. But then what I'm going to do is I'm going to make sure that this customer is a potential employee because look at this, underneath my customer's profile I'm going to have this Joe employee and he's going to be a potential employee. What's really cool is I can determine exactly the customer type and I'm going to make him a potential employee so that leading up to the interview process I can actually remind him via text message and email of that interview and make sure that day one, day two, day three, the days prior leading up to the interview he's reminded of our time, what to bring and what he can expect during the interview process. Now the next one is the most simple and basic of the automations but probably is going to pay for your software in spades. And that is your estimate follow up, the ability that once an estimate has been sent that it actually follows up on the quote every day, two days, whatever you have, until the estimate is either marked one or lost. And that's extremely important. You don't want just estimates being sent out in the ether and you never get a response back. It's amazing to me how 30, 40% of people that you send an estimate to you never even hear back from. So you've got to follow up with them, send them text messages, send them emails, have a reminder sent to your office staff to give them a call. These are things that can be done inside the automation. So the next one's called my estimate follow up I'm gonna do the trigger is going to be when a estimate is sent and then I'm gonna run this, let's see, one day after the trigger and then what's really cool is after I do this, this one I'm gonna do, let's go Ahead and text the customer. Fantastic. I'd be able to select a text template and then I can write a sequence by doing a sub action and just running. So after day one I'm going to do day two, then day three, then day five, then day seven, then day ten. However many days you want to do a follow up process. And some of those could be text messaging the customer. Some of them come emailing the customer, some of them could be emailing your office staff so it reminds them to give the customer a call on the phone. These are all things that can be done via automation so you don't have to remember or do. What are they called? Notes. What they call sticky notes. Sticky notes all over your desk and pieces of paper scribbled here and there. Be professional and have it automated. Another important process you've got to automate and the fifth automation I love so much is your invoice and collections automations. Because once you send out your invoice if someone doesn't pay, like assuming that you're not having a credit card on file or bank card on file, which is the most ideal scenario. And absolutely I would love to be able to go into the customer profile just like this, go into their profile and have their credit card right on file. But for example, this customer does not have this on file. If I scroll down I can see here they haven't set up their client portal and they don't have an ACA or credit card. If they did, I'd see it right here. So because they don't have it already set up inside their client portal, I'm going to make sure I have automations to follow up with them so at least they, you know, look at the invoice and pay with it via credit card from the invoice or maybe send me a check if that's what you're doing. So let's go ahead and open up the automation. Let's go ahead and click new. I'm going to go ahead and call this one my invoice follow up and collections and this is going to be when the invoice becomes past due. Now the reason I'm going to do this is because some customers, I might have them become past due due upon receipt which is like the day after I send it to them. Other people I might have a net 10 or net 30 for property managers. They might require that you have give them 30 days to pay so that net 30 allows them 30 days before it goes past due. But as soon as this trigger becomes present, I'm going to be immediately emailing this customer and I'm going to say that's your email the customer boom. And I'm going to be telling them hey, you're overdue day, maybe seven days after this trigger, once I do another sub action of another automation being ran, I might wait another seven days and send them another one. Say hey look, within two weeks we're going to be stopping service and if they continue then they're going to be sent to collections. I'm going to have an automatic email coming back to my office with instructions on how to submit that to a collections agency to make sure we get our money, at least some of it back. If you have to go to collections it's not great because you usually got to give 30, 40% of your money to the collections agency, but it's better than getting nothing. But the goal is that there's a sequence of events that's emailing the customer and letting them put a credit card on file. We want to avoid sending you to collections, it's going to hurt your credit. I know all of this can be avoided by having a credit card on file or a bank ACH card on file. But if you're taking checks or you're allowing people to pay via just one off on their invoices via credit card, you're going to need to make sure you have an invoice follow up process and if at the worst comes the worst, send the collections. Now my sixth automation that I love so much is the ability to have a survey that if they have a good survey I give them ability to leave an online review. But if it's a bad survey I send them to a form that's in internal to just protect people from trying to air out dirty laundry before giving me the chance to go rectify and fix the problem. So how do we do that? Well, first and foremost from the client portal they're able to submit surveys. I'm going to send these out periodically via another automation to ask them how they were satisfied and if they were satisfied with their job. Now you can really easily create this login profile. They can click on the client login, they'd immediately be able to log into their, their client portal. From the client portal they can submit work requests, pay for invoices, they can see all their past billing, they can put their ACH and their credit card on file, they can do all sorts of cool stuff. But one of the other things they can do is leave a survey. Now if they leave a positive survey, I'm going to want to make sure they also post that online on like Google and Facebook and other review sites. So what I can do is go into my marketing, go into automations, create a new automation. I'm going to go ahead and call this one online review request. Now for the trigger. You'll see here if I scroll at the bottom here, there's a customer has left a review with a rating of to five stars. It's safe to say that they're happy and I want to get an online review from them. Now I'm going to create a different automation of the person that would leave a review on their client portal of 0 to 3.5 because that email automation is going to be like hey, submit this form so we can become better. Tell us exactly what we didn't do right? Please let us know so we can rectify the problem. I want that to come internally. It's probably like a Google form or any sort of form that's internal where whereas if I want to make them leave an online review that's positive on Google, Facebook, et cetera, I can have the trigger being if they leave a review on their client portal of four or five stars and then I'm going to immediately send them a text message and I'm going to literally text them, text message them a link to my Google, my Google page with a review link so they can click on it and immediately leave me a positive review. That's fantastic because they're probably on their desktop version or maybe they're mobile. Actually if they are on their client portal submitting this review, this survey and they only get the request for an online review that's public if it's four or five stars. If it's less than four stars, it's going to go directly to me internally as a form and I can deal with the problem before it becomes public and before dirty laundry is aired. Now the last automation I love so much is making sure that the credit card or ach the bank information that's on the client's profile is always updated. Because really cool about Copilot is the fact that I'm able to see see credit cards that are on file and ach bank cards that are on file and be able to charge them automatically and I can manage those credit cards and make sure they're up to date all the time. But I don't want to do that manually because I have 5, 6, 700 weekly mowing customers. I don't want to deal with that. So what do you do? You create an automation for everything in your business. You can save yourself hours just by creating really good automations. Let's go and create this new automation. It's going to be called Update credit card and what we're going to have the trigger as if we scroll down here, you can see here, if the customer removes the credit card, I don't want that. They might take the credit card off their profile and then the next time the invoice goes out, there's no longer a credit card on file. And I hate that. I hate when someone's able to take a credit card off file or take their bank statement off file. And now I can't charge them. And that was part of my agreement with them. And although they have to have certain consumer protections and consumer rights to withdraw payment information from being on file, I want to make sure that I really press them to get this card on file. I'm going to have them.

This is the trigger.

Customer removed the credit card file. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to email them immediately when they remove that credit card and ask them to put it back on file and why it's so important for us to have that credit card information on file.

What I'm also going to do is.

I'm going to set up a second automation that is going to email my office staff and they are going to check it the day after this trip trigger to ensure that a card was added. Because if they took their credit card off a file and I am requiring credit cards on file, I want to not only remind them, but the day after I'm going to have my office check and see manually, did they add a credit card on file? Because if they didn't, I'm probably giving them a call and I'm literally going to say you have to have a credit card file in order to proceed with service. These were just seven examples of an endless plethora of amount of automations that can make your business more profitable and more efficient. Efficient.

This has been the Mike Andes 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.

Sam.