Close More Jobs WITHOUT Lowering Prices

What would you have for suggestions of trying to set yourself apart besides pricing or just get into connection with, you know, the person that actually makes the decision rather than, you know, the, the property manager who usually just collects the bid.

Great question. So do the job of the property manager like the property. Think about like instead of thinking yourself as like the maintenance guy, think of yourself like do their job. Because property managers do want to do as little work as possible because they're going to cut a top line revenue of rents. And so if you can do site inspections for them, if you can do like say hey, we don't just come mow your grass, we're going to also take pictures of any damage. We're going to take pictures of the, of the, the, the garbage bins for example, we're going to take pictures of any broken glass. Like things like that separate you. Because usually they do site inspections and that's really the main cost of them. Once they get a tenant in. Once they get a tenant in, probably manager does not do very much, but what they're supposed to be doing is property inspections. So I've seen this work pretty good. And it's like you actually say, hey, we do free weekly property inspections for you and you can even do videos. But some people do this inside copilot too. They make a video, put in YouTube as an unlisted thing and then they put it in the client portal. You can do before and after pictures as well and it's helpful. So as a differentiator for some property managers, especially the ones that are managing 20, 30 properties, if you can do that for them, you're essentially doing their job. So I've seen that work. Sometimes it's sometimes difficult to sell the value of the upfront because you don't have any trust with them. But once you get your foot in the door like one property, if you just start doing that, they'll be like shocked. Like no one else is going to do that for them. It's more of a long term like build that rapport with them knowing like you're the only company that every week they get a video of the property with before and after pictures and they don't have to do their job. So I would look at that angle.

More like upfront value with a long term play.

Exactly. It always B2B is always A longer term game. Like you're gonna have to build that relationship. But, but once they have one property with you and they realize, oh, I go to that property half as much because the same way we Track efficiency. They're tracking how much time they spend these properties because they have thousands of properties. A property manager, depending on if it's residential, commercial, but like they have a lot of properties. And so they're saying, oh my word. Like this one, I'm spending half of the time. Oh, why? Because I just watch the video every week. And based upon that, I say if the trash guy needs to come more often. Based on that, I say whether or not the gutters need to be cleaned out. And by the way, when you're doing your, your inspection, you're also upselling them on all the improvements where the margin of the business is. And so. But when that property manager talks to other people because they all are very networked in property management and they say, hey, if you want someone that you going to be a little more expensive, but you're getting a site inspection every week and you're going to know everything that's wrong in the property, even if it's not to do with lawn care and landscaping. Like the trash overflowing, the waste bins are not. Don't have the bags in them. The public restroom was dirty. These are the type of things that literally you're there on the property anyways. You're walking, you're blowing these things off. Like, it doesn't take you much longer. It's like, how do I create a system around that? If you can do that, huge value to them. Okay, thank you.

Dan. Mute button, bottom left hand corner.

There it is. I found it.

Sorry about that. You're good.

So I had a question. Like I said before, I have a business partner. We're 5050 and we're looking to do like the aggressive Augusta growth model. Get to 500 profit, you know, 800 get a GM kind of deal is. Does that need to change with having a business partner, a 50 50, like the revenue or any of that.

Are either of you active in the business?

We are now.

Yeah.

We again, we plan on going to 5, getting the profitability, 8 and then getting a GM that kind of. And taking a step back and, and possibly then doing other locations and. And growing it a little more.

Yeah. So, you know, given the fact that you're both going to step out, I would say it's okay if you're both going to stay in the business at say 6, 7, 800,000 and take salaries and work on the business. Usually there's not enough profit for distributions. And so as long as you, hey, we're going to build this thing, we're going to be really, really profitable. We're going for a GM place. Then you just be like, what, do you split your distributions every month or quarter? How you're doing your distribution distributions. So if you're 50, 50, hey, any distribution in the month, our GM gets a chunk of it, then we split the rest of it. Totally fine. Obviously you're going to make less distributions, but also you're going to need less capital required to start a second location because you're going to split that capital expenditure. Right.

Okay, that makes sense.

So usually your. Your average returns. Return on invested capital will be the same, but you'll have less returns and less invested capital.

Gotcha.

Okay. Of the partner.

Perfect. Thank you.

You got it. Got a quiet punch today. I just got another call, and we, like, went for an hour and 40 minutes.

I'll ask another question. I just go for it. Bombarded one thing. One of the reasons why we made the switch to copilot is because the old CRM we were using didn't have a way to see the billable hours. So I'm starting to finally see the inconsistency of how I've been structuring my weeks, because it was all in my head, and my head's not going to get the math right.

And we were mostly efficient. But anyways, so one of the. One of the questions that's kind of come up now that I've seen this is when to hire. And I've heard you talk about this a lot, but it's more specifically to. To us. So we have. It's three of us working. I'm kind of limiting myself as to like, five billable hours a day, basically just because things on the back end otherwise will completely fall apart. So we're like. We're currently. We're booked out about three to four weeks, give or take, and that's with my guys at about seven to eight hours a day and me at five to six.

Got it. Okay. And so your question is, when do I figure out how to. Hi. When I need to hire.

Right. So. Because for me, like, the stuff on the back end is suffering, and I don't want to be working till midnight every single day trying to do everything to try to stay on track.

Yeah, totally. So I would be adjusting each of the users inside copilot what their capacity for budget hours is each week. Yours should be lower.

Right.

So you're just say 20. Theirs might be 35.

And then secondly is when it comes to your role, I would treat yourself kind of like a GM at your current Size. And what we do is we say, okay, here's the expectation of budget hours per week for a worker. Let's just say it's 35. What we then do for our general managers, hey, you get one hour off of that 35 budget hours for every in person estimate and another hour off for every in person training or interviews you with a team. And so then that way we can calculate whether or not a GM is efficient based on 35 budget hours, expected amount of work to be done minus an hour for every in person estimate, minus an hour. So for example, they have 10 in person estimates, they have five interviews. They should be still be completing in this case, 20 budget hours worth of work if I'm expecting 35 a week. All right, and so then what I. The challenging part with that, Justin, is you're going to have to modify your budget hour capacity based upon your influx of estimates, et cetera. When to hire someone comes down to your confidence level, the number of budget hours is going to stay at capacity and continue to go up. And so I think it's pretty safe to say you could get someone because you know immediately you could give them 15 or 20 of your hours. Yeah. And then the question is, could you get a little bit more? And do you have the, like, do you, if you already have the capacity for trucks and equipment to fill, get to buy that person or to hire them, it makes a lot of sense to hire them. Like, would you have to get another truck or equipment to get one more person right now or not?

Yeah, we have what we need.

Cool.

So that means your asset capacity is higher than your labor capacity.

Yeah.

So if you're trying to, you always want your capacities, your lowest capacity be increased. So right now I'd say like I'm gonna make numbers up. Let's say your, your, your personal capacity of what you think you could do is 100 grand a month. Your asset capacity is 80, 000 in terms of the trucks and equipment you have that could do that much revenue. And then you're making 60, 000amonth in revenue based upon your current group. Like we've got a hire to get to 80 because we already have the trucks, we are the equipment. You're already paying for it. There's no more additional fixed expenses. Insurance, rent, all that's already covered. And so getting to that, that asset capacity would be my main focus.

Gotcha. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah.

Spend more money on ads or something like, because the margin is so much greater. Because now the really, your, your Your net profit almost equals your gross profit because you already have covered all the fixed expenses.

Yeah, yeah. And, and we like, we have our, like we're not doing any hard selling in any way, shape or form. Like everything's coming to us. And so it's like there's this whole like world of sales that we haven't pursued. Like you and I did a call one time and you made a recommendation and I've sort of been able to do it, but I haven't had the time to do it since then. But we've, we've definitely grown. We're at, we're at our capacity as far as what we can do hour wise. So like I want to be able to spend the time selling because I definitely can fill hours if I'm selling versus out in the field.

Yeah, I would be out 100 hire and I would just know like if you have several hundred contacts, you send an email and a text message through copilot to all of them, you're immediately going to fill a schedule. So if you have, if you don't, if you lack the confidence that you can't fill someone's schedule, this is what I would do as an email and text message to all my customers. With a seasonal service that you know, you can sell very easily. It's like a one time job or even if it was recurring something, I would then book all those jobs starting three weeks from today. I would then have one week of interviews knowing that if I hire someone within the next week, they give it two weeks notice and they join. I then already have the work as if I have the budget hour capacity for another employee.

Love it.

And congrats because I remember when we talked it was very difficult to scale your service because the fountains are very specialized. So good job, man.

Yeah, we've, we've done a lot of work on systemizing it and we've, we're on the right track.

You're the man. Proud of you. Anyone else? Feel free.

I'm just curious. So with bigger job, I like your idea of don't act like you're a big guy when you're first starting off. And I'm a newer business so you know, going door to door, I'm not trying to act like I've got 10 trucks behind me.

Right.

But with that I've been able to land some bigger commercial jobs that I can get by doing by myself that you know are like a 20 home like COA or HOA. Right. But you know, making a call once in a while like I called a school to do a cleanup, just wanted to offer them a cleanup service. And then I get transferred three times and I end up talking to the director of whatever for schools. And he's like, oh Yeah, I run 10 of the schools in Pierce County. I, I'm looking for a landscaper. So what do you do? Like, I'm not ready to do that. I can't do that. Do I step back and ghost him? Do I? You know what I mean? I can't. I don't want to put my name out there and then just leave him alone and not talk to him. So what, what's your opinion on that?

Yeah, like, I think first off, I think if you talk to him, he would, he would do enough due diligence. Probably know you aren't ready for the contract yet. Usually those side of the contract, they're going to figure this out. That being said, you could also fake this, go get the contract, go sub it out and make a margin on this. And so it depends on how aggressive you want to get. You could, I could, I would say to most people, they probably shouldn't go after this contract. And even if you want it, you don't have the manpower, the, the experience or the equipment to actually do this profitably. And so I would probably definitely be saying, unless you have tons of capital to scale this, I probably not going to go do the service itself. But you might be a decent 15% margin on this and just be the middleman and you go sub it out. And then you're like doing site inspections, which might be then the thing the revenue used to go get the trucks and equipment and scale a bigger business. But it's never bad to talk to someone. I would just be open up front, like, hey, I'm the middleman. Here's the value I bring and I find the best contractor. I use site inspections. I report directly. That way you only have one person to ever talk to. You have to deal with different crew manager. Site managers, if they go with a big company, will cycle through almost every year a different site manager or account manager. And so the value of the subcontractor in this case is like you're getting a small local guy to be the in between, between the you and this massive company that's going to cycle through account managers. And here's a number to them. Whereas I'm going to like do this in site inspections, et cetera. I'm going to hear you out. You have my personal sell whatever. So you could probably sell that value proposition. I Don't recommend trying to scale up a business to a 3,4 million dollars contract over the next few weeks at your size. I don't recommend that because usually you lose your shirt on it.

Yeah, okay, thanks.

Got it.

So I, I've got a question about like your take on debt versus cash. So with us doing like retail centers for snow, you know, it requires us to buy loaders, skid steers, all that, you know, and then having them sit over the winter with the, you know, utilization of them. Just want be wondering like what you think the best way of when to finance or lease and then when to pay cash and at what points to do what.

And yeah, they're very individualized because it's not so much a matter of how you're using the equipment because they're going to sit there regardless if you lease them or you buy them. You're not going to use them any differently. And so it really comes down to a matter of your tolerance or risk because you will be able to scale this business much faster if you don't do it with cash. And so the question, because what's the current constraint in the business? Do you, if you just need more equipment and, and liquidity is the problem, the question is, okay, let's assume we have all the equipment in the world, can you get enough leads? Like will the leads be able to come in? So I would do, if I was you, Jordan, get so many leads that you know, regardless of whether or not you get the trucks with or the equipment with cash or debt, it makes sense because what I see most people do is they go buy the trucks and equipment or they go get the lease and, and then they go find the leads. So if you get the leads and you have the work ready to go, you can always merge into this to a subcontracting. So especially with snow, you're like, hey, I got a massive commercial contract, part of it. Snow, you're going to come do the snow. I'm a subpart, stuff it out. Then once I have enough contracts to know that I can then go lease a piece of equipment and make sense of it, then I go make the big purchase. Yeah.

Is there like a percentage that you look at to stay under when it comes to say debt payments versus like monthly revenue?

Personally, I don't, I'm pretty risk averse when it comes to debt. I know most people right now, they're more risk tolerant. If it's under 10% interest, they're kind of, they're okay with it. You know, typically A more risky approach is you add 5% on top of the 10 year treasury. So the 10 year treasury now is like 4%. For example, 4 and a half percent interest rate. If you had 5% on, that's 9, 9 and a half percent. A lot of people are more risk averse. Like if it's under that, I'm just gonna get it. I'm not that way. I like to have my like equipment you can usually get for say 3 or 4 or 5%. And now you're, they're going to bake that into the term loan or the term, you know, of the agreement. You're going to pay more usually. But it really comes down to my opinion when it comes to snow, for example, a $60,000 piece of equipment can make you $600,000. Like there's what I see so many people do though, the asset utilization is so poor they do not have the leads to warrant getting that kind of equipment. The equipment sit there not only during the winter, it sits there during the spring, doesn't do anything and they end up having these payments that do nothing for them. So if I was you, I'm okay with like literally leasing, I'm okay with getting a loan on it. But if you go get five, 10 contracts and you then you have super amount of confidence that I can go, it's completely covered and I'm 12 month, I have 12 month payments on these 12 month contracts. Therefore the 12 month payments on this piece of equipment doesn't kill me because I see a lot of people do is they go from residential or like per cut or per mow or per push pricing and then they switch over to 12 month contracts and immediately they go buy equipment. And in reality they do not need the equipment yet and it does not make any financial sense. So if you have the le, just get the work and you have enough contracts to make sense of it. When it comes to snow, you usually have a decent enough margin to like make sense of it. And it just comes down to your risk tolerance really in terms of whether you go debt or you go cash and how fast you want to grow. Okay. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. Anyone else have any questions? We'll wrap up here in 10 minutes.

I've got a question.

So last year we grew a lot. I bought some equipment and we got slow during the winter.

Downsized a little bit because we just, we went from like five people to 11 in like three months. Bought trucks, whatever work stopped and had to downsize. And now we're back to five. But my assets are now still suited for 11. So I'm trying to build back up as you're saying with the, the, the leads, you know, that's what you, that's what you're really needing on. But like I did the balance sheet and basically our, our nut for the month is like 15 grand. But we do probably 80 to $120,000 a month in sales. I'm just seeing if, if is it worth liquidating some of this equipment? Well, it's really just two trucks that are just stagnant. I'm not in underbelly on them or anything so I could get rid of them.

What's your thought on that? Is it worth it to keep those sitting around? I guess.

Do you anticipate on growing the business to where you would need them in the future, like in the next six to 12 months or not really?

I would hope so.

Yeah. I would hope so. Did you lose a big contract or something?

No, it's just I'm project based only so I don't do any maintenance stuff. So that's why the it just cut off. I have a couple pool contractors that we work with and they got slow and that's like half of our business is all post pool work. So they got slow, they stopped selling and then we got slow. And just marketing was not enough to you know, maintain all the guys in the labor and keep everyone happy and busy.

Right. This is a leads problem I don't think is a capacity problem.

Because if you have the desire to grow back to that size, I think we can do it if we just fix the leads constraint. It's not like you're dying for cash. If you were like hey, I have no money, then we go sell those two pieces of equipment, we liquid it and get some feet, get our feet underneath us. But I would be trying to solve two things. One, we have a leads problem because you don't control lead flow. And secondly, I'd be trying to figure out some sort of recurring revenue model. And so even if you don't do mowing for it, I'm assuming here you landscaping right now.

Yeah.

I don't think you need to do mowing to do. To do recurring. I don't know. Have you. You probably haven't had a chance. But like I recommend going mikeanny.comworkshop it goes through five different ways to go to your off season. Now it's going to talk about your off season and generate random new year at time. But the part I want you to see is tier 4 which is the recurring revenue part and I talk about how you don't need to do mowing. What you can do though is like when you do a project warranty things based upon a recurring subscription, warranty things based on recurring maintenance, that would be a slow build. So you could technically use those two trucks and just build that over the course of time. For example warranty plants or all the installation that you do. As long as you come every single month and you're doing a maintenance visit and that's going to cost them 199A lifetime warranty on everything we just did every year we're going to come reseal the pavers, we're going to resend them, whatever, whatever. You're going to check the drainage on the walls like build that value in to get the recurring maintenance side that will make you less susceptible to the lead flow that's currently upstream of you, which is from these pool contractors. Second thing is I want to control the lead flow which is like I want leads coming from your website, like I want leads coming from your marketing, your brand, not from someone else. Because I don't know what they're going to do. The economy could be great and they decide to leave town and all of a sudden you're actually going to be hurting.

Yeah.

And so I would be like really looking. Okay, is your website ranking well on Google? Do you have Google reviews? Like dialing your advertising? Like that's. I would be focusing on that and I think if you do that you'll probably fill the two trucks back up.

I like it. Yeah.

Right now, like right now of, of of you, the work that comes in like what percentage of it from the full like other contractors versus your own worth. 50. 50?

Yeah, I'd say it's, it's closer to 50. 50.

Yeah, yeah. And so like even the past, I would say 70, 30 now they, they declined a bit. Ideally we're doing like 80% our own stuff because you could control that like the lead flow of someone else. Like who knows, they might just decide they want to scale back and all of a sudden that's going to hit you. Yeah.

10 point.

So before you spend any money in marketing though, definitely look at your website first because that's going to be the best return on any dollar spent is like the site showing your pictures, your video, your crew, your trucks, having it well like designed and stuff like that. And even if you're building your own, just go on like long care web design and just like look at some of the sites on there for like Inspiration to how to design it.

Thank you, man. I appreciate it.

You got it.

If I can ask a follow up on what you just said about the, like, the warranty and stuff like that for like, recurring something I've been trying to process for, because we do maintenance plans, but we have. It's about half the people, you know, they don't find us for maintenance. They find us for repair, and then we sell them.

Curious on, like, what. What do you think would be a way to provide more value on the warranty? Obviously, you can warranty whatever was repaired, but how do you. How do you sell that? How do you word that to a customer? That it makes sense.

Yeah. So if they're coming to you and they've had a fountain, it's likely they've had another fountain repair guy or they've tried to have their landscaper fix it or they've tried to doctor it up. Right. So this is what I would recommend. Same thing, like irrigation stuff is. I would. Hey, Mr. Jones, it's $800 to fix this bad boy. Stinks, right? Yeah, I. I know that. Last week you tried to fix it, and two months ago your landscaper, Billy Bob, tried to fix it. I'm here. I'm going to do it. Right. It's 800. Now, here's what we can do. Give me $800. Today, I'm going to fix it. It's going to be $1,200. And I'm going to do an inspection of the entire. Of the entire system, not just the one part that I know needs repaired. I'm going to inspect the entire system. And then once that's done, I would then give you all the list of other things I think need to be repaired. And I will warranty this piece, this fountain forever as long as I come every month on this service schedule. And so what I'm then trying to do is just. I'm trying to annualize, like insurance, right. They know the percentage of houses they're going to burn down, that are going to flood, etc. And they just come up with an annualized premium to their insurance plan. And so you're selling insurance now for. For fountains, and then you are just going to be the service provider when it breaks. So I would like. I really believe this model works, especially when people get annoyed around fountains not working, irrigation breaking, flooding happening, et cetera. And they've tried to doctor themselves or someone else has say, here's what it cost to fix. I would probably potentially even Justin, I would waive the. Any Additional of the inspection, I would say, hey, here's what it costs to fix. Here's the other thing that kind of think might need fixed. Here's a dollar, another dollar amount. So there's your upsell. You're going to go from an $800 fix to a 1500 dollar fix. If you get this one, you are now eligible for our package and you name it something cool and it's a $199 per month or whatever you know that premium needs to be. And it warranties everything inside this pool. So now you've doubled the ticket and you've upsold them into recurring. So I would probably eat the cost of the inspection to be able to get the upsell and then trying to get them into recurring. Love it. Yeah everyone. This thing's recurring maintenance means they're paying me for coming to service. It's not. Think of it as insurance and peace of mind like you will never think about the scan. If it ever fixes within 24 hours, I will be here. If I'm not, you get that month refunded to you. So you just build into an insurance, make it like an insurance plan.

Oh. Anyone else want one last question?

Hey Mike, I got a question. Maybe simple. I know we always talked about like the budgeting hours for just one crew member. What I've don't really understand how y' all come up with budget hours. Like are you including the time drive from one place to another? Because of my location, my Mondays and Tuesdays and Wednesday routes are kind of. They're kind of good. They're grouped together pretty decent. My Thursday routes, I may have the same or maybe even less yards, but they're so far apart that it takes from like 7:30 in the morning to like almost 8:00 clock at night to do my Thursday routes. And I just don't know. Like how do you budget.

How do you do budget hours on routes like that with crew members and that's with two of us. That's with me and another guy running that route together. And so it makes it kind of hard. Almost like.

They'Re kind of too space apart and that I'm not making enough money and maybe I need to get rid of some yards. But it's just kind of, that's kind of like it. That's just what it is around here, you know. It's not a lot of. There's not a lot of ways that you can group yards. So it's kind of. You just kind of have to deal with it, I guess. But.

So I was just wondering, maybe raising prices and getting rid of those also is my other question. Maybe get raising my prices another 10% even on all my yards. Maybe I can kind of condense that down a little bit. But my biggest thing is budgeting hour. How can I get that dialed in a lot better? Because I really don't have a budgeted hours.

I know what it kind of takes on a yard, but it seems like it takes a lot longer than what I have. So I think on copilot, I think at the top, it tells you how many hours you're going to spend on mowing these yards all day long. So. But a lot of times it goes over that because the time of driving from one place to the next. So if you can kind of just kind of help me out with the budgeting hours on that and dial that in a little bit, that'd be great.

Yeah. So the budget hours on a job are only inclusive of what we are spending time on the job site. It does not include drive time. The reason is, is because I want to know an accurate efficiency score is. And when you have a lot of drive time, it's going to reduce your efficiency score. Now, your efficiency score is budget hours divided by clocked hours. So what's happening is your Monday and Tuesday, you're completing a lot of budget hours and not a lot of drive time. Therefore, your clocked hours are lower. What's happening when you expand your service area now you're driving all over the place is you're getting less budgeted hours done, and. And you're having more clocked hours to get the work done, I. E. Your efficiency score is going down. And so budget hours are only on the job site to come up with that number. The only thing we need to do, we don't actually need to have, quote, accurate budget hours. What we need to do is, like, what is our target hourly rate? Let's just call it $100 an hour. Okay, we have a $50 lawn. That means that there should be 0.5 budget hours. Okay. You're like, well, that's impossible. And like all these properties, well, then it probably means your rate's actually like 60 or 70 or 80. But figuring out approximately what that is all I care about. So that way, when I go to the job site, based upon $80 per hour, this should be a.5 budget hour job, or 0.65 budget hour job, or whatever the number is. And then I'm able to accurately distinguish as to whether or not someone's Price is high or low because how long the job takes, not whether or not it's too far of a drive time. Now, that being said, what I would then do once you did this and that is like, look at every single job, say, okay, here's how much it costs. I'm gonna divide it by my target hourly rate. Do you already know what that is, Matthew? Like, kind of generally approximately what your hourly rate target is.

So I try to do. I went with like, on landscaping, it's kind of different. Like, I try to get a hundred dollars an hour per man hour. And then on mowing, it's. It's fluctuates. So sometimes, like on commercial jobs, it's sometimes it's 50. On residential, sometimes it's 75. Now what I have found out is that it's kind of all over the place. You can get that with some places or some people on 75 an hour, and then some are like around 50 an hour. You know, they, you know, you can kind of get that. But how.

How do you.

I forget the formula when you got two men working on a yard. I forget that formula. I always forget it of how to figure out how much to charge If I'm doing 75 an hour.

With two people on there. And it takes me 45 minutes to do that. I forget that formula to figure out how many. How much money I need to charge on that one yard. Because I'm trying to do that right now before the season starts to see where I'm high at and see where I'm low at on which yards.

Yeah. So you're always determining budget hours based on one person being there. And so if there's two people, it's simply going to cut the budget hours in half. And so you can actually use the budget hour calculator inside of copilot over on the calculator section to determine this.

But do you never budget for two people at all?

No, because when we look at budget hours, always assuming one person. And so if there's. When I put budget hours, it's not a matter of, oh, there'll be three people, because what if tomorrow there's two? What if the next day is four? I'm always taking the number of budget hours for one person to do the job. Now, if there are two people, then it'll be half, and if there's three people, it will be a third. And the system, the software knows. And if you use P4P, it knows, okay, there's three people assigned. I'm cutting the amount of Budget hours by a third.

Okay. Okay. I guess that's where I was kind of conflicted, I guess on the formulas. If it's two people, then I was kind of having to figure it out. But if you got one. So you always just figure it with one person and that helps determine everything a lot. Okay, I got you. That makes sense. Then that should be a little bit easier to go back with all the yards and kind of figure it out.

Yeah, 100%.

75 an hour it'd be. And it takes me an hour to do 1 yard is 75. No matter if you got two people on there, because obviously it's going to be a little bit less with two people.

Exactly. It would take 30 minutes. It should take 30 minutes, hypothetically.

Right.

And so, yeah, you could immediately go through all of your, your, your lawns. Inside of co found. Okay, I'm going to do 75 an hour for all residential. I'm going to do 15 hour for all commercial. And you can lose look at your prices that you currently are charging them and determine budget hours and just do that. And then three months from now, go back and look. Okay, budget hours versus actual hours. Are we actually hitting these numbers now? What's going to happen? Let's assume we just nail this. Like almost all of them are right around budget hours. Let's assume that now you're still going to make less money on Thursday and Friday because the route is so dispersed. And your efficiency score will be less because you get less budget hours done in the same, say eight or ten hour day. And so then what you might do is you might raise the prices on your Thursday and Friday lawns. Now when you raise prices, guess what happens? Your budget hours go up. And if you increase budget hours, your efficiency goes up. Because a budget hour divided by clock hours, I increase the numerator. The budget hours. You'll actually quote, unquote, be more efficient on that route even though you have more drive time. And so your, your first order of operations, the term budget hours on every job, determine that by based upon an hourly rate for residential and commercial. Second thing is determine your efficiency score for every single day. And that's going to be your. How many budget hours are you complete divided by my clock hours every single day doesn't matter if the two or three or four people are one person. How many budget hours are completed divided by how many clock hours for the crew. Then you're going to see very quickly that your Thursday and Friday routes are very inefficient, even though you're hitting budget hours in individual jobs. And then what you can do is raise prices and give yourself more budget hours, which means you will beat budget hours consistently on Thursday and Friday. But your drive time makes up for it. But now your efficiency will look much more even throughout the week. Does that make sense?

It does. And yeah, I appreciate that a bunch. It helps out. Is there a way to.

Do a.

Mass.

Like a 10 increase on everybody on copilot, or do you have to go in individually to each one and do that?

You can do a bulk price increase inside copilot. I'm still a fan. It's such a high leverage thing inside the business to do it one by one. Let's say you have 100 customers. If you're raising them all by 10 bucks a visit, that's a thousand dollars a bit. That's like three, four, five grand a month. It's worth you spending half a day. And do it one at a time just to make sure everything's dialed in. You've looked at all the customers. You're not going to any surprises. You accidentally click, you know, 100% instead of 10%. You can do it with bulk. I still do it with one, to be perfectly honest. I want individualized emails and text messages if I'm doing that to the customer. And I wanted all the pricing done right on a recurring job.

All right, I appreciate it, man, so much. Yeah, it looks like I got some work to do. Would you recommend doing that right now or wait till April?

Are you. Can you take any more jobs on without raising prices or can you take any. Any more customers without. Right now without hiring or getting more trucks?

So I'm in kind of like an. I need to expand or either get rid of some customers because last year, liked it killed me and another guy, and I lost some customers because I wasn't able to get back to them. Because what I did do is a subscription based on four of them. And I lost two of those because I wasn't able to fulfill my duty as doing their landscaping and as well, mowing. They love the mowing part. They said, you know, it's perfect on the mowing part, but the landscaping just kind of was neglected a little bit because I wasn't able to meet the standards. So.

Right.

So you're over capacity. That means you're over capacity for two people. You have too many jobs. So you need to raise prices so you lose some customers. And, you know, God forbid you make more money, but you need to lose some customers to be able to get back under capacity because over capacity you will make more money in the short term. But eventually you lose customers, eventually you ruin your reputation, eventually you get bad reviews and eventually you burn out. So like let's not do that. Let's raise prices across the board by a minimum of 15% minimum. Don't raise your prices for 4% dumb 15% minimum. You're gonna raise your prices. We hope and pray that we lose 10 to 15% of customers so that way you can make way for new customers and or at least under capacity so you can serve the current customers better.

Okay, no thoughts about doing an extra truck with two other guys?

Well, this is comes down to are you in growth mode or in profit mode? If you have plenty of money in the bank and you want to grow, go get in that truck, expand capacity and now you only need to a price increase. You'll go get advertising at more customers. But if you're in profit mode, like if you're strapped on cash, then you can't get another truck. You know, the thought of hiring more people is overwhelming to you. Then we need to just focus on our current customer base and raising prices and being in profit mode.

My biggest, what my plan is, is I want to get somebody else driving my truck and another guy in there and they're running the lawn care, the lawn and mowing and all that good stuff. I want to start doing more on the we control fertilizer side. So maybe doing the 15% increase and then if I get somebody to do my truck and then me going and doing the weed control and fertilizing. What do you think about that?

Yeah, it's the more conservative route, which is you basically going to go into profit mode in the short term, which is raise prices, probably lose some customers, but then you're going to use that cash flow to then fund the extra truck required to be able back into growth mode. So you're going short term, profit mode, long term, you still know you know the truck and continue to expand. Not a bad strategy. It's less risky than right now. Just be like, hey, I'm not going to raise prices. I'm going to immediately jump to the new truck. It's just which one do you want more growing fast, which is go get the truck now or B, take it a little bit slower, you raise your prices and you get the other truck using the cash flow from the price increase.

What I really want to do is just the we control fertilizer and having another guy run my truck, that's, that's what I really want to do because the profit is so much higher in the we control and fertilizing. And so I kind of like to get. I got about 25 customers right now that I'm doing is and along with the mowing and some landscaping, it's just a lot. And so I'm just either I need to do something, either get rid of some yards or try to hire at least two other guys one for the truck. But my main thing is I want to get somebody driving my truck so I can focus on doing the weed control and fertilizing as going forward a little bit more.

Yeah. Like the good thing is you are at the the decision point of do you enter profit mode, raise prices, don't buy another truck or are you in growth mode, which is immediately get that truck immediately put them them in that truck by hiring another person. And you go into chemical applications. It's the perfect place to be. This is like thing and just a matter of which way do you go simply comes down to how much cash you have on hand and how fast you want to grow. So you know, it's really a good place to be is where everyone wants to be at and has the ability to raise prices if you want to, but also the ability to go get in the truck and expand a few. Like you have to make that determination yourself in terms of like which one of those is most important, you know. So awesome. I appreciate everyone being here on this wonderful goal session this wonderful Friday. I hope you have a fantastic rest of your weekend. Take care, guys. See ya.