Copilot CRM Mastermind 11/09/2024

Hey everyone. Hope you are doing fantastic on this weekend. Today we are going to be doing another Copilot Mastermind. Looks like there's just a couple questions that came in today, but we do have somewhat of an exciting announcement and that is November 23rd. That's two weeks from today. I'm recording this on November 9th. Two weeks from today will be the first time we announce the new big launch at Copilot. So I know it's been a long 2024 in terms of coming out of Bughell, rebuilding infrastructure in the back end of the system, and we've been doing little improvements and enhancements along the way, but we have a pretty clear roadmap that'll be coming together and we're making some announcements in two weeks and you'll be seeing the fruits of that next month, but we will be announcing exactly what that is and showing the prototypes of that in the end, I guess in two weeks. So November 23rd. So really looking forward to sharing that with everybody. But today let's go ahead and jump into the Mastermind and start with we just got two questions today. So again, if you have a question down in the link below this video, in the description of the YouTube video, I actually have added the link. So if you're watching this down below in the description it says submit questions here and there's a link to a Google form. Also, anytime you're thinking about submitting a question to, just go to the Facebook group, go at the very top in the featured posts. And there is a the link is there as well. So anytime you think about a question, just post it there and I'm happy to help. Whether it be looking over your profit and loss statement, looking over your marketing plan, looking over your budget and your projections. Anything I can do to help with your business, feel free to post it there anytime. And again, that link is in the description of this video as well to make that a little more accessible. All right, let's jump in. First question is coming from Kevin Ginty from Wink Exteriors. Number one, any recommendations on putting door hangers in neighborhoods with no soliciting signs? So look at your local regulations. Things like door hangers, for example, in some areas are looked at as canvassing, not as soliciting. Usually soliciting is actually knocking on their door and talking to them. But again, I would just look at your regulations. It's also like, how fine of a line do you want to walk here in terms of it being in the gray area? And are you okay with someone calling you and Saying, you know, threatening you or saying that you're going against the law or the police potentially calling you because someone reported to you. So, you know, I would really default to potentially just putting the yard signs outside of someone's neighborhood. So along, like more public roads and not private residential areas. That's probably what I would default to. Where you're like, I gotta get inside. I would do a couple things. Number one, I try to get customers in that area and then ask for, put the sign on their yard. In their yard. Because what you want to be careful of in a lot of HOAs is the homeowner will actually own all the way to the road, including the patch of grass or lawn or flower bed between the sidewalk and the road. And so if you put a yard sign in that area, technically you are trespassing and you're putting like your junk on someone's property. So that's when it can kind of get a little more hairy. And in most areas that are HOAs, you own to the road. Again, every state's a little different on this. But like my area, the HOA homeowner owns all the way to the road versus a more public road where they just own to the sidewalk. And then the city kind of governs the common areas in between. So just, just a thought. Also you could focus on if there is medians putting the yard signs along there, they're usually less likely to get pulled because they're not in someone's residential property. It's on like what is usually seen as more common areas for an HOA or neighborhood or park, public property completely. So that'd be some of my recommendations. Number two, is it stupid to put door hangers in gated communities we are working in? Like if they have no soliciting signs? Typically I just avoid the, the specific houses. But if I'm, if I'm working inside their neighborhood and they don't have a no soliciting sign, I'm going to put a door hanger on. You know, do a five around or a nine around to the houses that are around my existing customers. Also remember, if you paint your truck, you have decals. You wrap your truck. That is a form of essentially a massive sign showing up in their, in their neighborhood every single time you show up, whether it be on a weekly or bi weekly basis or quarterly if you're doing other types of services.

So I would really lean into that aspect because you're not going to get in trouble for it. Number three, do you have certain rights related to canvassing that are different from us listening. We should know about. Yeah, just look it up in your local city. So what I would recommend is doing something along the lines of like canvassing your city name if you really want to know the detail on this. Now, sometimes it's just better to ask for forgiveness instead of permission. Because if you ask for permission, it opens up a whole can of worms of people that just want to put their fingerprints over every little thing inside the town. Especially if you live in a smaller area. Like something like this becomes a big deal. They want a permit and they want to see everything and gets approved and go through a committee. I'm sorry, I'm just going to go do what I need to do and I'm going to ask for forgiveness if it's against the law. So just, just find that balance and really what you're comfortable with. Some people would do like, would literally shrill up and die if the cops called them and said, hey, we got a couple reports, please don't put your signs out. And then other people would be like, okay, cool, awesome. I was able to put 300 out and I pulled three or four, three or four or five of them because people complained. So it's really up to you.

Will Kelly has a question. Two questions. Number one, should I have one general liability insurance policy covering both of our locations or individualize each of these and have separate policies? You know, talk to an insurance agent, a broker, ideally about this. You are opening up yourself to somewhat of a liability if you start grouping everything together. However, you're getting better rates, so there's kind of a balance there. But talk to your individual broker because I've seen some states where you can just insure the holding company have a whole bunch of LLCs underneath and the corporate veil stays intact for every single llc, regardless of insurance. But please talk to your insurance agent. Talk to your insurance broker. Someone has been in insurance for at least 10 years and does just commercial lines. Don't talk to someone who does like life insurance and home insurance and auto. Talk to someone who does commercial lines only. That's done it for at least 10 years. And I think that'd probably be who I would lean on in terms of advice there. Number two, should I have one worker's compensation insurance policy covering both of our locations or individualize each one and have separate worker compensation accounts and policies? Again, these, I think, I think will, you probably want to talk to an attorney about what you're trying to do here, right. So I can give my, you know, my what I've done in the past. But like you gotta talk to an attorney. Like I can't answer this question. For you to be the most.

You know, individualized to you, you need to have an attorney look over what you're doing and ask, okay, is it worth the downside risk of having some sort of, of lawsuit that crosses over into LLCs? And then ask yourself like, okay, if someone really sued me, what for one of the LLCs, is that going to bring the whole like everything down anyways? Or is there really a point in having this corporate veil between every all, you know, every single llc? Is it worth the extra cost of doing all the different bank accounts and having the different insurance and not having them all in one insurance policy? So as you do multiple locations, there's upsides of having different accounts for everything because you do reinforce the corporate veil and you reduce the liability between locations. So if something happens, someone gets an accident, there is a workers comp claim, someone falls off a ladder. Also if you get hurt in someone's property, also if you get into an auto accident, like if you have the policy across the whole company, yeah, it's going to affect everything, but you're going to have massive amounts of, of cost reductions because the economies of scale. So historically I have done my auto, auto insurance and general liability of the holding company and then all my LLCs underneath, all with different bank accounts, all with different. Everything else was, was the same. Each one had their own stuff. Mostly because I wanted my general managers to have different PNLs and really feel like they had full ownership of the business and not be just doing journal entries between different accounts in QuickBooks, etc. So that's what I did. And there is, you know, talk to an attorney. There's ways to prevent this issue of someone being sue one LLC into another. For example, you could always change LLCs down the road if it became a huge issue with auto insurance. Again, if you get into a big auto accident every time you apply for insurance, you've got to declare that. And if they, if you don't, they'll pull it up in your DMV reports, they'll pull the ein number, et cetera. And so then the question is, well, I can change my ein number, I can change my entity structure, I can change my business name and just like do that every few years and I'll never have a problem. Yeah, like you could probably get away with that once or twice and eventually you'll get caught and eventually this will really come back on you. So I just recommend Talk to an attorney when you're starting to multiple locations and ask, hey, I'm going to do different bank accounts, I'm going to have different softwares, I'm going to have different credit cards. Everything's separate. I have a different ein numbers and they're all going to pay payroll from. However, should I have an insurance policy that covers the entire thing or should I be having an insurance policy for each and every one of the locations? And they may just say, well, it comes down to cost, in which case you're probably going to do the more of an umbrella type policy. Or they might say, look, if you do any general liability insurance plan for the entire holding company, you've now pierced the corporate veil. And if someone sues one of these LLCs, they can dip in the other assets. Now keep in mind, like basically any lawsuit with enough firepower in terms of someone willing to come after you, they can, like a good attorney can get through all sorts of stuff. They will go through one or two transactions that you, you know, did something between the two companies or you took, you did a car wash in a different vehicle that wasn't on that general liability policy. Like if they are really crazy, they can go after you. So I would focus mo like 99.99% of your time on offense. And I was like, how do I grow the businesses? How do I get great general managers? How do I have a great marketing strategy and then focus like grow so big that the defense actually makes sense. That would be my recommendation. Don't overthink like at your side and you're in two, three locations. Flip a coin, it doesn't matter. You're running very, very lean. You don't have a lot of cash on hand. Like, focus all of your time and attention on growth and focus on being offensive. And when I say offensive, I mean find general managers, find new customers, grow the business. Don't worry at all about the corporate veil between my two LLCs. When you start getting three, four, five, six locations, you're doing three, five, six, $10 million in annual revenue. That's when you start playing a little bit of defense, starts to pay the bills. It actually starts to make sense. I think far many too many small business owners try to act like business owner, big business owners because you, you're hearing podcasts and videos from people that are doing 10, 20, 50, $100 million. And they're talking about having a CTO. They're talking, sorry, a CFO. They're talking about having projections and budget programs and committees Et cetera. And you're like, oh, I've got to do that and I've got to set up all these LLCs and these trusts and I got to have this, you know, coming over, revocable trust to my family and all this, like, look, build a great business to the point where doing that actually makes a lot of sense. Until that point, stay on the offensive, stay on growing the business. And that would be my, my biggest recommendation. One thing today is kind of cool. I just want to give a shout out to the tech team. There's a whole bunch of engineers that have come on the past few months and I know that some of them watch this. I just want to say thank you to them. There's just been so many things in the back end that we don't get to talk about because it's just a bunch of techno jargon to everyone that has been happening in the back end. There's a couple more big ones landing over the next few months. We call them hardening programs. So like email hardening, payments hardening, communication like email and text hardening. One of the things I recently noticed is like text messages going out immediately when they're one on ones. The mass ones obviously are throttled at 20 per minute, but the ones immediate are going out immediately. There's no delay. I just want to shout out to them. There's a lot of infrastructure changes that have happened over this year to make sure that's happening. And they're big, big shout out to them. We got a couple big infrastructure back and stuff landing throughout November and December. But like I said, in two weeks we will be announcing the first big update to Copilot since the beginning of 2024. Really? That will be. We'll be announcing in two weeks and then releasing it in December. It'll be really, really good. I'm really looking forward to sharing with everyone. It'll definitely be our most well thought out, well planned, well designed, well tested release we've ever done. And it will affect every one of us because it's affecting our customers and I gen the way we are building this feature. When we consistently ask ourselves how does this make the business owner more money? And we build everything around the design of that to meet that goal. I think it's going to have a huge impact on all of us. So I really appreciate each and every one of you. Look forward to sharing that in a couple weeks and we will see you on the next week of the masterminds down below. Again, the link. If you have a question about business anytime. Bookmark that link, put it in your phone and put that question in there from the mastermind. Love you all, and we'll see you next week.