Copilot CRM Mastermind 09/22/2024

Hello, Copilot family. Hope you're doing good. Welcome to another mastermind. Let's go ahead and jump in today. I posted this yesterday.

Posting your questions for the mastermind balloon. But I did put a PS and only about 10% of members of Copilot watch the live streams. After you post a question, post an idea of how we can improve that format. Reminder time schedule. So let's see what we got today. Whoa, we got a lot. Okay, we got 28 comments.

So let's get started. Caleb says, what are some killer one click estimates you've seen that work? The major part about one click estimates are making sure you're timing the correct offer with the correct service and the timing of the of the year. So giving the right offer based upon what the customer's actually needing. I've seen people literally send out mowing estimates, like trying to get one click estimates for mowing in the middle of fall cleanups. Like, look, the pain point is not mowing is cleanups. I've seen painting companies pitch do one click estimate emails inside Copilot in the middle of winter when like, if someone accepted the estimate, they would not be able to do the job because it's below freezing. So timing the offer with the seasonality of our service is important. William Kelly says, do you take creatine? Wow, four people respond to this. Let's go. Yeah, I do. I take creatine. I take a very small amount of it. And usually people that take creatine, they'll take like six tablets. I take two a day. And then I take aminos. I take a amino acids and then I. And those are both, both mostly for muscle soreness when I'm lifting. And then I also will take a multivitamin and. And then I will take a Omega 3, Omega 6, Omega 9 situation tablet as well. So that's kind of like my daily deal for years. Matt, I think a reminder would help, like the Mike Mint mastermind. Okay, good point. You guys are on the mic mins Mastermind. For anyone that doesn't know, that's for gustination. We do it every day and we get over 90% of owners to listen to it daily. So that's a good point. Okay, maybe.

Maybe like an email.

Because we use Copilot actually to send out messages to all the owners inside of Augusta each day. But I think an email would be good. Okay, all right, let me think about that. That was a good suggestion. Thank you very much. Ezra, how did you deal with team members that would like more pay, but the business hasn't developed roles they can move into yet. That's when it's just like giving proof that you're directionally correct. So you're, you're, you're interested in things like pay for performance, you're doing profit sharing, you're trying to add and assess the P and L but to be able to add more benefits and more pay for them. So like every year when I was still at my first location we would look at the P and L and like what can we afford? And so like sometimes it was only like we could only afford like a $80 per month gym reimbursement but like that was something and and we did that until we were able to afford healthcare insurance and then you can keep adding from there.

Currently rethinking my every door direct mail Strategy. We have 60,000 Christmas lights flyers here and ready to go. I use US USPS yesterday to find all routes with average household above 125,000.

There's roughly 20,000 homes in these routes across eight different zip codes.

Original plan was to send out four 8004 to 8000 per week for the next nine weeks. However not exact was not exactly sure how I would pick this area to target. Now I'm thinking about two rounds of 20,000 sent all homes two weeks apart. Yeah I would go that way because it's such a seasonal thing. Then my mid October I will see most where most of our qualified leads are coming in from and using the remaining 20,000 to hit those neighborhoods and additional three to to three times. This would be five touches on those homes we double down on. We also have 1000 bandit yard signs ordered that we will use to increase exposure in the areas leads coming from. Let's go. I believe in order to do lights big this first year until Halloween we have to have have to market hard to stir up work then Halloween to Thanksgiving. I hope a lot of leads will come in from referrals. One click on Facebook ads. So hopefully the second half of the season our CAC be begins to dramatically decrease and minimally advertise. Minimal advertising is needed. Overall goal is minimum 100 installs. Hopefully 150. I know we we need to pull demand forward because we do not do 150 installs in November alone. Thoughts on the marketing plan? What changes would you make trying to boil the pond and not the ocean? I know I said eight zip codes but really the whole area is three different four to five mile race areas. We would target great 10. So when I generally talk about more touches on this a Single property. Keep in mind these are for services that usually you can do for three to six months at least. With, with Christmas lights, you have a very, very acute pain of a customer in terms of timing. And there's no reason to market outside of that pain point unless you are literally doing it for branding. And so if I, if you were concerned with like doing branding in a large campaign like this, I would do more or less Facebook ads. I would target do a low budget per day and just get on people's radar right now because you're just not going to buy. And I genuinely believe that your customer acquisition cost for like two to three weeks will be 20 to 30% of what it will be if you marketed too early. Whereas with mowing, for example, you might have a, a small decrease throughout a six month period because you have spring rush kind of baked into that six month period. But it kind of like is, is you know, maybe 30, 40% less. I generally believe you're gonna get 70 to 80% less return on something like Christmas lights. Whereas they're very acute. Like everyone wants their lights hung up within a month, one month period. And so I think I would probably not spend something high, high cost, like every door, direct mail. I would probably do the Facebook ad strategy for branding. If you're thinking about trying to like get the word out, drive traffic to your website and you're willing to get like a low customer acquisition cost on some of the ads because not direct response marketing because not attacking their pain point when they have it. I would probably just go with Facebook ads. Cause I think you'd be more efficient, I think sending, you know, sending out thousands of every door direct mail. If you take that same money and put it on Facebook ads and then target like the very, very targeted to the certain homeowners, I think it probably do better in terms of just getting the word out prior to actually going for the kill, which is the sale during that pain point.

Pierce. Pierce. It's because we don't have time to have. No one watches them. It's a small, it's a group for small business owners. Most of us have kids, wives, customers and employees yelling us all day and night. Lol. Okay. All right. Valid, valid. Mike Owens. Is there a way to see total hours worked for an employee? I can add it up in the time tracking, but it's in hours and minutes. So it takes a long time. Is there a way to total total hours worked for an employee? That's a good question. I'm assuming you're just trying to convert minutes over into total hours. So I don't know of a way to do that. Mike, feel free to book a call with support though they can see if there's a way to be able to grab that from somewhere else other than time tracking. But they can definitely. They'll have a much better idea of that. Mike Owens is infinite scrolling on the roadmap for the customer and estimate pages. So I'm assuming you are talking about infinite scrolling kind of like we have for the dispatch board. I don't think that's on. It's not on the roadmap. It's rare that you're wanting to scroll and scroll and scroll on customers or estimate pages. And it also is a suck for data in terms of like it'll keep sucking data which can slow it down. So we have in the dispatch board because it's very common that you do want to scroll a long period of hundreds of jobs on a dispatch board. It's less rare that we see people actually even going to the second page on estimates and, and customers outside of the 30 or 100 that are at the top. And you can, you can change that number inside your settings of what you want to the default to be send an estimate with a link to the Mastermind video. I know I missed one because I didn't see the notes on Facebook. Roger that. Okay, I will. Yeah, send us a notification even when I go back here. Okay, great. Okay. Well, it sounds like we have a consensus somewhat. So what we're going to try this. This will probably happen later, a few days after I record this. But we will start making this where we will send an email out as from the recording. And then if you have a question, just know that I usually leave up the question post for at least 24 hours before I record. So usually Friday evening or Saturday morning I'll put up the post. Okay. If you have questions. So just know if you ever have a question go Saturday morning, I'll make this post for you to drop these into. Cool. Well head in that direction. If you post on Spotify, I would definitely be better about listening. Yeah. The only problem, if we post it then it becomes public and I really, I know where this Mastermind will eventually go. And that is like I want hardcore business community being built and people that have really good connections. We have some really cool ideas like being able to do meetups with people and members and stuff like that down the road. And that's where this community I want to go is like the business side. So if I Make it Spotify. It's public. It's harder for us to share. There's people in here that have their name, their, their business name. They share numbers. We don't want to make that public if possible. So I hope it makes sense. Stroll alongs. Would you recommend we look into every possible way to be more efficient to raise our hourly rate before raising our hourly prices?

This is simply two sides of the same coin. You have defense and offense to win a game. Defense is going to be cutting costs and being more efficient. Offense is going to be raising your prices, increasing revenue, increasing your gross margin, et cetera. So I would recommend don't wait for efficiencies to raise your prices. If the signals of price increase are being shown, which is you're hitting your capacity and you don't want to keep growing. I would raise my prices regardless of whether or not I'm efficient at all angles. Every business can become more efficient. There's never a time where it's going to become perfectly efficient. It's simply a matter of will that efficiency take 6 months to develop and improve versus one email and in 24 hours your prices can be increased. So I like the, the speed at which an hourly price increase makes a change.

Applies leverage in the business versus some people. Like, well, over the course of this year we're going to change this certain truck. Over the course of this certain year we're going to change this piece of equipment. Like look, I can change my prices today and immediately have an impact on the business that's huge, like double my profits. So I would say it's, you know, offense versus defense. There's neither of those things are bad for the business obviously. But I would say take the win. I think the conditions of price increases are you are at capacity and you do not want to keep growing in terms of employees and trucks. And then I would do that. Nathaniel says I would love to see a live every once every so often from you to change it up. Great point. Okay, so yeah, I did lives originally with the mastermind. The problem was I only get a few people to come online and so we've found much better engagement so far where you can post the questions you can. So I can take this feedback though maybe once in a while I will do a live. I think maybe I'll do one in November, one in December. So maybe like periodically I could do that. I can take that. It just we don't get as much participation. I can obviously see how many people watch and things. So I want to get as Many people in here as possible. We have thousands of door hangers left from spring. Instant quote, property cleanup, mowing and molten salt. So we utilize these during the fall. It's kind of looks like a door hanger, a fall door hanger. Since it's someone mowing a lawn with leaves in it. The door hanger design. Well, you do have the property cleanup. If assuming your lawns are actually growing right now, you could definitely use these. I would also say if you think there's a better performing piece of mail or a door hands going to work, we're talking about, you know, you have thousands of door hangers. You're talking a couple hundred bucks. So don't sacrifice, you know better. Way better. Return if you can. If you know that fall cleanup door hangers are going to work way better. Don't sacrifice that for a couple hundred bucks. It would be my recommendation that everything I went through all of them that was 28.

Why does it not seem like there's 28 here? Give me a second.

What in the world is going on? Okay, one second. I'm going to refresh this page.

Okay, I got all these done. Yep. Oh, here we go. Why these not show up? Okay, here we go. Is two 21 inch mowers in a ramp rack. Efficient crew, first two and crew. Your mower size is going to dictate be dictated by your property size. And your mower size is probably going to dictate whether or not a ramp rack is going to work well for you. And all of those things are going to take whether you have a two man crew. The there's more and more waste. If you have lot, there's more waste to a route when you have multiple people on the route as you add more stops to the route. So if you only have one or two stops because there's big projects, have three, four, five guys in a truck. Doesn't add a lot of waste. If you do that though, and you have 20 or 30 stops throughout the day, adds tons of waste. So do you meal prep or eat out every day? A little bit of both. I don't do a lot of meal prep. I have a subscription called just Meats. There's another one called Factor 7. I think it's called Factor 5. Factor Factor 7.

Is it Factor 5? I forget there's another one. But I really like eating meat. So I just do just meats. And it's very, very clean meat. And it's usually like a 10 to $15 per. 10 to $20 depending. If you get like the steak ones and then some of the nice ones, but that'll last me usually three to four meals. So I usually have lunch three to four times a week on one of their meals. And so on average I'm looking at like four to five dollars a meal. And it's really good, straight, clean meat. I really like it. So highly recommend. How do you communicate to your customers that the request changes feature of their estimate isn't for asking questions? I have a bunch of change requests that are random questions or can we get a reply to the change request button? I have a bunch of change requests that are random questions.

I'm interested to see what kind of questions those are because request changes because.

Yeah, it'd be interesting, Mike, to know what those questions are because I think most time, the only time you see the request changes button is from the estimate page. You would think and okay, I'm open to being wrong here, that those questions should be about the estimate. So I'm wondering what other random questions they're asking because usually it's around pricing. Usually it's around, hey, can we change the scope? Can we change, you know, what type of plant is that? What time or date are you going to come? Like, we've seen that mostly, but I'm open to. If you actually know what kind of questions you're getting there, let us know and we can start to track and see if this is actually a recurring issue. But usually we've seen it's like around the estimate because it's only visible from when they're seeing the estimate. So, Ezra, how do you deal with team members that would like more pay, but the business hasn't. Okay, we already did that one.

Reminders and consistent schedule with time. Then we could put on our calendar. Okay, yeah, so I always do it on the weekend, but okay, I think, I think the email part might be the good idea because that way if I record or something like that, like, because I travel a lot and I have a lot of meetings, having a consistent schedule on the weekend would be tough because that's usually my travel period. But I think I could set up more of a recurring schedule of letting everyone know, notifying everyone, so that. We'll try that. Okay. Adam in Copilot, when we have a card and file for a client, we auto charge it for their recurring service. That's cool. When the client has us to do a landscaping job, I need it to not charge their card right away or have some type of button to choose to charge care or wait until later. Let me make that happen, please. But when? One second. All right, when we have a card on file for a client, we auto charge it for their recurring service. Okay, that's cool. But when there's a client for us to do a landscaping job, I will need it to not charge their card right away or have some type of button to choose to choose to charge care or wait until later. Can we make it happen? Okay, so there used to be a button on the client portal and we're making a ton of really, really good improvements to UI of user interface of the client portal over the winter. However.

There used to be a button that people could toggle off whether or not they would allow you to auto charge.

Their card. We came up with the fact that like, it is very frustrating for allow customers to be able to toggle that on and off. So I think what you're asking is you want that basically same right, but only on the inside on the client portal. I think you can do that. Give me one second. Now I have to go into someone's account. All right.

I am relatively sure that you can set this for a specific customer, so feel free to talk to support. Adam. I think there's a way to do this and, and that is basically not do the auto charge for a customer, but we, we took off the ability for the customer to do it. It's very frustrating. When you require card on file, they get a card on file and when you go to charge them, they've toggled that off and you can't charge them. And so this could also probably be done via tags. So Adam, I, I'm. I think I might have just missed you up a little bit here. But choose to charge care. I'm mimic later. So I do believe you can do this in settings for individual clients. Adam. If not, tags would probably work, but yeah, reach out to support Tony. I've watched some, but some questions don't pertain to me or my business. I would prefer to be able to read questions and responses. Any way to get a transcript for each video going forward? That'd be tough.

Okay, noted. Noted. Right now this won't be a priority like making transcripts of every one of the masterminds. My goal is to make these as valuable as possible. I've done this before with Augusta. It takes a while to kind of like build the value to the point where everyone wants to listen to them and everyone wants to submit questions and then we start putting the community together and I, we have some ideas around this. So I'm going to Focus more on the value part. But Tony, this is noted for future. Caleb, what are some killer one. Okay, we've already done that one. I don't know why this got mixed up all of a sudden, all these comments. How do you choose what to focus on in working in your business as the owner for the videos? Okay, so there's a different question. Okay, so, Ben, how do you choose what to focus on when working on your business as the owner? So if you think about it like a manufacturing plant, there's a constraint in each step of the manufacturing process that determines the output. So if you're looking to try to improve the output of, say, a manufacturing line, like a chain is only as strong as weakest link. And in this case, multiple steps in a manufacturing line, the throughput is only equivalent to the constraint of whichever step has the lowest performance. And so when you look at the 4L framework, where you have leads, then you have labor, then you, sorry, you have lead, sorry, you have liquidity, then you have leads, then you have labor, then you have leadership, that process continually cycles through and you just want to look at which one of those four are the bottleneck and focus all your time attention on that. And so. And then cut everything else out is the hard part as you grow and scale, because there'll be urgent issues in all areas of the business, but it still doesn't mean that that's the constraint. And so it's very difficult sometimes when customers, employees, et cetera, are really, really agitated about something. And you as the owner know that you have to stay focused on this one other part of the business that is the actual constraint. And even though something else is urgent, so urgent and important, like delineating between that is very difficult. As you scale up for the videos, text reminders would be great. I can never figure out how to find them unless I see a Facebook post. I wish they came up in YouTube feed. I think it would be cool if you did a series where you audited someone's copilot settings and showed them how they could use it more efficiently or easily. Ooh, that's pretty cool. Okay, well, I know Parker watches this. The challenging part is again, we really try to protect everyone's information. And so this would require someone to want this to be public, which is not easy and understandably so to see how your accounts are set up and everything is, you know, you just don't know who's going to see it. So this is a good. This is a very cool idea though, and it could potentially be whitewashed a little bit. So Parker will see this and see if this is something that we could do. Pierce, Pierce. It's because we don't have time. Okay. We already watched this. Listen this one. Okay. Okay. I think Mike on Masterminds is all about consistently doing it well is from Nathaniel Perham. People take time to get involved. Some will take use this tool, some will. What I don't, what I do not like is taking away. The taking away of daily support with Parker is very bad. That's happened with very little notice. So there's a bunch of notice quite a bit beforehand. And the reason that you probably didn't hear that is because like we can see how many people watch the daily live streams and it's not very many. And so right now the reason we believe this has happened is because right now you can get a phone call or zoom call usually within 24 hours with a one on one support. And that's being utilized a lot more than it used to be. And so if it ever got to where that was a that channel of support was blocked. Like for example you couldn't get on a call with someone for like a week, then we would definitely bring back the live streams and that's what it used to be like. But as we've added more team members to support one on one less people show up to the mastermind. There's lots of days where no one shows up and so we've made that more weekly. And then if it ever happened where the. The one on one support ever got backlogged, we'd bring that back to make sure questions got answered immediately. Otherwise just a waste of like Parker's time and his preparation for that because like there's like half of them no one shows up to which is what we want to just make sure we balance out. Which again, if the one on one support and zoom and phone calls ever got booked out really far like they were last winter, then we would bring back the daily support live streams and they'd be more comprehensive with more people involved. Nathaniel, My co pilot is not working the best for me. There's a lot I can't use it for. Setting up for. Can't use for it is set up for a landscaping company. Well, this being more user friendly for companies that are not landscape companies is. It is hard to keep paying for a service I can't fully. Can't use fully. And I am sure you get what I am saying to stay because I believe in the product. I need some type of timeline that I can look forward to. If you guys just fix the work form so we could fix it how we need it to be, that would be great. It's like work forms are down the road.

This is on the roadmap. In terms of landscape companies.

There are lots of non landscape companies using Copilot. So if there are specific things like the work form, that's really good feedback. We can work with that and that will definitely. When that comes into play, we'll be taking a lot of feedback from users. Lawn care and landscaping versus not is irregardless, but there's a huge chunk of Copilot members that are not landscapers. How do you control costs from day to day standpoint? What is one of the hardest things you had to figure out as the owner? I have had a few, like, never hire family. It just never worked out. Also, never hire good friends because it ruins the fun times on the off times.

How do you control costs from a day to day standpoint? You're really like tracking the numbers. Understanding having a really good bookkeeper, having monthly and quarterly reports is super important. Definitely recommend, you know, balancing your books at least quarterly. That's going to be looking at your balance sheet, making sure everything in your P and L and your balance sheet is lined up. One of the hardest things to figure out as the owner is like, what is the current constraint in the business and what will I not be able to spend time and attention on because I'm focused on that thing? That's the hard part.

Send an email with a link to the Mastermind video. I know I missed one because. Okay, we already did that one. Did that one. I think we did these. How to make an interactive quiz on website. Ooh. This is actually a really good question. I don't know exactly why you're asking. Maybe for customers, they fill out a form and then it kind of like channels them in different directions. There's a couple sites we're looking at right now. I'm blanking on the names. Sorry.

When you'll see this eventually. So, like, we've made this in house before. Like we have one for Copilot, for example. It's like, is Copilot the right fit for you? You ask questions, but it's not super interactive. There's some cool tools and software that you can make these very interactive quizzes. I would say something like trying to do a quiz on your website. You could do like if you did a button and just link it over to something like mailchimp. Not mailchimp.

Survey monkey. That one's pretty good, very simple. But there's some other ones that we're looking into that are pretty cool that you could potentially use. I'm guessing you're using it for like, customers and kind of like channeling based upon what their responses are to what line of support or sales or something like that. Potentially. So yeah, we're working with a couple different options right now of stuff that we want to use. And so when, when we figure that out, I'll, I can let you know what tool we use. All right, everyone, have a fantastic rest of your weekend and we will see you next week on the Mastermind. I will take some of this advice and feedback about the posting and we'll try and see if that helps remind everyone about the recording. But just know if you want to submit a question, usually Friday evening or Saturday morning, I have that post up there and you can start putting them in there. So, you know, keep it on your, your phone or anything like that. I'm going to probably not do where everyone can just dump questions in because I've, I do that for Augusta, but it's a smaller group of people. If I did it for, you know, thousand business owners, we could literally have hundreds of questions and it would dilute the, the, the feedback I can give. And so I think the people that really want to submit a question will make sure they see that post. So if you go on Saturday, you almost always will see my post. I'll leave that there for 24 hours before I record and put your question in there. And some, someone like every time we do these, they're getting better, better questions. We can learn more from each other and that's really ultimately what we want to build here. So I appreciate you all have a fantastic week and we'll see you next weekend. Take care of.