Copilot Mastermind 01/27/2025

Hello Copilot family. Hope you're having a fantastic day. I'm on a family vacation on a cruise, so the Internet is probably not great. But I didn't want to let another week go by without the mastermind because we have. We missed last week conference Blue Collar Summit and so I wanted to make sure I catch up on all of the questions. So we will leave that today. So pardon if it gets a little blurry or if the audio isn't great because I'm have to be in this area. But I didn't want to wait another week in case there were some questions that were potentially time sensitive for some owners. So let's go ahead and jump into it. First off though, thank you to everyone that did come out to Blue Collar Summit. It was a great event. Congratulations to Australia Lawns for winning the ten thousand dollar MVP award voted on by everyone that was at the conference. So looking forward to be able to see him and Marco and his family grow the business. Kind of a cool side note, he decided him and his family to join Augusta Lawn Care actually at conference. So they're now part of Augusta Nation. So that's gonna be really fun. But shout out to them for winning as well as just for their massive transformation over the past year. Once they joined Copilot, I think they were basically one truck solo running solo and in one year now four trucks and shooting for well over half a million dollars in annual revenue in this year. So congrats to Marco, his family, his father, just great group of people and obviously a huge contributor to the community and the type of people that we want to see win. And so congrats to him, Congrats to Australia Luns and thank you to everyone that submitted. There were 17 submissions for the MVP award and all of them will be invited out later this year for an in person one one day with myself and I'm putting some together some plans for that and it'll be more of a not one on one but it'll be basically one on one in front of that group of people. So if you did submit your application, expect an invite late spring, early summer and then it'll probably for like August, September. I'm thinking I'll have everyone out that way. It's past spring rush and it's not the busiest of season for most of us and it's kind of beyond that point, so stay tuned for that. But thank you to everyone that submitted. Everyone's video is on the website, so thank you. It definitely also helps Copilot. We put your stories on there and just highlight your your massive wins in 2024. So I really do appreciate taking the time to do that and I look forward to seeing you all in person. So let's go ahead and jump right into it. Got 15 questions submitted this week for the Mastermind and let's get started.

First one is from Adam Burkett from Pristine Green Lawn and Landscape. Where would you recommend for me to start when looking into doing instant mowing prices on our website with small, medium, large options. Is there a software form that works well for this usage? You set it up so that customers can automatically sign up and add their car information when checking out. Can we connect that to Copilot? So I would recommend Jotform or Paperform. Those both integrate with Zapier. So if you really want to, you can, you can make it where it comes in from your website goes directly into Copilot. I don't think that's a huge sticking point. Everyone gets really sticky like, oh, it's got to integrate. It'll take you like five seconds, okay, 30 seconds to copy and paste someone's information from a form in your email into Copilot. So I would not stress out about the zapier integration part specifically because a lot of times that will be the sticking point as to why people will not do the forms. It was like, well, it doesn't integrate. I can't figure out Zapier. Okay, don't worry about it. Just do the form, collect their information and like the bottom line is you want instead of a submit button, you want to basically be accept this estimate. And so in terms of getting their card information, that is going to be something that down the road we'll work on when we do custom forms inside of Copilot. And that's not going to be 2025, but likely in 2026 and beyond. We will be working on more custom forms where you'd be able to actually take the card information directly from that form and it's store in the back in the copilot. There's a lot of security stuff around that, so you can't just like throw that together. But what you can do is at least get the estimate to be accepted. So baseline case you've ranges when you're currently doing your form now just like small and parentheses, the price, medium the price, large the price. The step above that is the show the pictures so it's much more accurate and have it where they're accepting the price. And then you're basically saying, hey, we'll get back to you scheduling and then you're going to send them an email to get their card information on file. Then down the road we will make it public where inside of Copilot you'll be able to create forms and collect card information and it'll integrate directly into the back end. But there are a lot of stripe forms, even from places like Jotform and paper form that will allow you to collect the card information. But the ability to be able to connect it to Copilot's backend, where it's on file is the part that's missing. There's a lot of security stuff around that because we're collecting from a stripe cart, like getting the stripe. Getting their card information from a stripe form, not hard. It's keeping it on file in the back end that you're able and keep charging it down the road. That's the part that is not built out yet. But when we get to custom forms inside of Copilot, that would be the big reason we do that. Victor France from.

Electric Landscaping. Oh, okay. Got it. All right. I got a question about business partners and how to play to their strength. My dad and I are 50. 50 owns the business. I am in the full time. I am in the field full time and handle almost all of the administrative roles. He handles sales and most of the estimates. We have one full time employee. My dad is a bit more limited as he's getting older, but can still do the labor. Have you seen partnerships where one partner is totally out of the field and at what size, revenue, profit, number of crews? Do you see this happening? Yeah. So yeah, this won't work with one full time employee. So to be blunt, you don't have enough revenue coming in to have one person out of the, out of the field. I don't believe you have one person can have one person out of the field until you have above four employees, to be honest. At least, at least. Even my crews, even my most efficient locations that.

Are most profitable their, their gm if there's less than six people in the field, the, the general managers can be out in the field with that. So that's just, you know, Once you're above 500,000 in revenue, you can start thinking about spending some time working on the business. Until then you want to optimize to get as much time in the field as possible. Otherwise you're simply going to run out of money. But yeah, you don't have enough time right now to have a full time. Your dad working admin all the rest of it one employee and then you kind of out in the field. Like that's basically two people in the field. Assuming all you do is in the field and then one person fully working outside the business.

Creating revenue. And I don't think the business is big enough to be blunt. And so maybe if he was part time doing estimates doing the sales side, but you don't even have enough leads to warrant having a full time estimator. Like a full time estimator should be Getting at least 5 to 10 in person estimates a day and they should be getting a bunch more of drive by estimates. So usually between 10 and 20 estimates net per day between drive bys and in person estimates. If you're not getting that kind of lead flow you do not need a full time estimator. I'd be trying to automate as much of my sales as possible using instant pricing or over the phone estimates and pushing your sales function towards your admin so you can spend as much time as possible out in the field.

Jeff Brand from Blue Sky Property Services hey Mike, thanks for all you're doing. I run QuickBooks Desktop and was watching instructions on transferring income data without syncing. Can you go over that with some details please? Are you using a CSV file? Are you suggesting doing this every time a payment is received weekly monthly? Thank you for your help watching your instruction transferring in from data without sync in. Can you go over that in some detail please? Okay, I'm not familiar with that QuickBooks desktop to be honest with you, so I'm not 100% sure what you're meaning here. But what we do is we do all of my income I can see in copilot broken down by service etc. All of that revenue comes into through Stripe into QuickBooks and I just am calcarizing at service income and so the IRS does not care as long as it is categorized preferences type of income. But they don't care about whether it's reading services or bush trimming or mowing et cetera. And so.

That'S usually going to be information for me and I could just run that report inside of Copilot now in terms of if you want it broken down you could do a journal entry inside of QuickBooks and break apart one chunk of income coming in and breaking into different revenues revenue sources from sort of.

If you really want to, I don't see the need for that in the next week or two. I think there's already people doing it from new users and that is the QuickBooks one way sync much, much stronger than a two way sync. We've been testing it, we had beta test group and now we're rolling out to new members and so eventually the warning that you have about quickbook Sync will go away because we have much more confidence in the one way sync that QuickBooks provides compared to two async where there's just so much room for error. So I do believe that in a matter of a couple weeks once I once every all the tests are done because we're rolling it out slowly, I'll be able to confidently say hey, if you want to do a one way quickbook sync, go for it. It'll take all of that.

Data in terms of revenue per service inside of QuickBooks and move it over QuickBooks and be a one way sync. Two way garbage. I just don't don't see the need for it. I've talked to a lot of other founders that have done quickbook syncs and they just consistently say if the two weight sink everyone thinks about one way sync must be good, if two way must be better. Not so. There's just so much room for error in that sink and we've seen it consistently. That's why I have the warning right now around the two way sync. But once we switch the one way I'll be much more confident. We're just rolling it out slowly. We're getting feedback from members about how we can improve that and and I imagine the next week or two it'll be available for everyone. But all new members are going into the one way sink. So that's again, if you are wanting to sync up with QuickBooks I don't see a huge need for it to be honest. I really don't.

I find that people spend more time making sure their sinks are right and categorizing income than just simply at the end of the year running a report and being able to do a journal entry and splitting it up if they really needed to. Words of pressure Washington we'll be rolling out discount and promo codes this year. For example, winter 2025 for 20% off will be entered in when a client is paying an invoice. We don't have discount promo codes. The new version of estimates from the customer portal will be rolling out and there'll be some updates to that when it comes out. Feel free to give some feedback such as this. But invoices is not something that we are working on. It's mostly the estimate side because we want to get people in the door. That's our big focus like getting you new customers. There's a few initiatives in terms of the estimates inside the customer portal, the customer portal in general as well as the.

Mobile app refresh and redoing that with a offline mode. Those are really our big focuses. Before we get into spring rush here.

Will Kelly from Military Lawn Cuts for instant pricing on the website decapsules name, phone number and email before showing them instant price so you can market to them later down the road in case they leave your page or no, because you don't want to waste your time following with tire kickers. So this is a great point. There's a bit of a trade off here. And so we've been testing this both ways actually depending on the type of it's actually a technological not issue but limitation. So basically we have to choose between either a do we click someone's lead information, then they can go to a new page because you have to switch URLs to capture that information.

Most security it's actually incorrect to gather the information without them actually like submitting it and then going to a new page. So when they go to the new page there's drop off. And so we've been tracking this a lot. We're in the valley decision on this or we're testing this in terms of do I a want to send them to a new page, capture the information with a sold estimate and then upsell them which is what we currently do or don't want to give get capture their cart, capture their their contact information and then have them submit again for a accepted estimate. So basically you got two shots on goal and so it's either going to be.

Collect lead information and then collect form completion which would be completed estimate accepted or what we currently do which is get all their contact information and an acceptance and then upsell them. So we do the upsell right now we've seen more value in that so far but we are doing a bunch of testing around. Okay, we have two shots on goal for the current technology that we have and we are optimizing right now for like getting the upsell. And by doing that it means I can't collect the lead information up front. So we're split testing this a bunch though to test if that's actually the best way. And we have a couple ideas of how we could work the technology to to be able to collect the lead information without having to first give them a price. Because you're right as soon as basically you're gonna lose even the ability to get the lead information of anyone that doesn't accept the estimate in instant pricing goal. That being said, I value the upsell a lot. And so because I only have two shots on goal, we're using one of them for upsell, the first one being an accepted estimate. If you wanted to though, you could make it where they click submit to get there. Like get your instant pricing now and then it would show them the pricing and then they have to submit again. And at first, when you collect their card, collect their contact information. The challenging part with that is keep in mind around the compliance of collecting people's information and marketing to them around text messages and email. So most of the time people aren't super thrilled if you they submit their cart, submit their contact information and then you start marketing to them and they decline the estimate. Those are usually people who mark you as spam and etc. So we're trying to balance it out too because it'll also hurt your email reputation if you start doing that too much. So we're testing a bunch of stuff around this, but my general thesis is either A, you want the upsell or B, you want every single contact lead. Current technology, the limitations we're finding is we have two shots on goal and you kind of got to choose between the two. We've gone the route of upselling because there's hard like, let's say. So let's say, for example, I'm able to get an extra $500 from one out of two customers. Well, if I can take that 500 and I can use it to market, I'll get two 10, 15 leads. And then those would be qualified leads versus trying to collect the contact of every single person and half of which are declining my estimate or dropping off the page, therefore not as qualified. And then me marketing them down the road and they might be out of my service area, et cetera. So.

Yeah, there's no right or wrong on that one. We are testing this. We test this a lot because it's like, do we want to do upsell or do we want to collect every single lead, including the contact information people don't accept. That is a tried and true debate that we constantly have and are testing all the time. So there's some things around technology that we're working on that might be able to change that, but you're basically choosing between those two. Also, keep in mind, they're already. We're already doing this for a lot of members like Copilot. We are going to be moving everyone to their own account inside Twilio we're going to be helping with the migration process. So we've done this for quite a few accounts, including all of Augustus. It'll probably be at least 200 some odd accounts. But removing everyone with their own individual silio campaign, it's gonna be really, really good. Just ensure what happened last year never happens again. Where someone's gonna try to get in and just do a bunch of spam and then hurt us all. And so right now, or in the past I should say, a lot of us were on the same campaigns at Julio, which means if there was a spammer that got in and tried to mess us up, it would mess all of us. And that's what happened last year and all of our checks were going out late and cause it was throttling us. So we're basically safeguarding that. We've done it for a lot of accounts and we'll be moving everyone over to that. So you might get an email from support one day asking to fill out a form and then we'll be able to move you over. But just as a heads up on that over the next couple months. Adam Burkett from Pristine Green Lawn and Landscape.

There it is.

Hi Mike. Blue Collar Summit was amazing. I'm in Ohio and I'm having a tough time making sense of the way we offer winter services and snow removal. We've been completely covered with snow over the past few weeks and so there was no way to get out out on properties to do bi weekly winter services. Since snow is so inconsistent and you don't know how to admit and how many events you will get. I feel like including snow move into your bi weekly winter service visits and pulling them forward for snowfall over 2 inches like you talked about for only work if you get a little snow a little number of snow events each year which is constantly changing and impossible to predict because if we were to get a super snow winter you would eventually run out of winter services visits to cool up. I'm curious what suggestions you have to make this work or if someone is in a heavier snow market like ourselves, if it would just make sense to sell snow of a separate service and not offer winter services at all. Because we can, we can only complete winter services when the snow is melting. Thanks again for the awesome event. Yeah. So what you could do, you could offer snow separately. Okay. Here at winter services is it's going to cover most of your snow needs but if you ever get a ton of snow, you're probably going to want to have this option a la carte. Item that you tack on for additional snow, snow support. And so you could do this as an upsell.

To people in winter services, or you could just do it right from the get go. It's like, hey, here's the winter services prices, here's the snow prices and you make it more differentiated. So I've seen both work. I like the idea of having the recurring revenue. So what I would do is winter services. I'm gonna have that, that secure base of recurring revenue. And then I would just tell them like, look, if it snows X amount, then there'd be an additional charge or we'd do an additional visit. So you say it's bi weekly. Unless we're getting a bunch of snow, we come more often. For example, you could bake that into your bunch of services to where the frequency increases if there's a bunch of snow. So just as an option, you could do that if you were trying to really bake winter services in the snow or just have snow separated from winter services. But the idea of putting them together is that when it snows you do have something to do. You can at least shovel, you can at least do some ice and put down some salt, etc. Which is really helpful from a scheduling perspective.

Jeff Brand from Blue Sky Property Services. Hey Mike, awesome conference. My question is what things did you work on changing in thought process to move away from micromanaging to delegating. Thank you. I sent an email out this morning. Let me get the title of it for you. I thought it was actually pretty good. Give me one second. If you go into your email, type in get in the details. I sent it out this morning. It was on Monday morning. To everyone. I recommend watching that interview with Brian Chesky from Airbnb. I don't think, I think that a lot of times we think about micromanaging way too negatively when I think a lot of times that's required for us to actually know what's going on in the business. And instead of thinking about micromanaging, think of it as being involved until someone is trained up to be able to delegate. I think sometimes we think of micromanaging and delegation instead of being in the details, training someone and then giving them the skills and resources required so you can delegate to them and be successful. And so, you know, I like, objectively speaking, someone would probably say that I have been more micromanaging the past four months inside of my businesses, but the results speak for themselves. And it is not a matter of me micromanaging as much as getting back into the details and then giving the tools and skills and training required to the person I did delegate to, to make sure they can actually be successful, making sure they have.

They have the reps with me that I'm actually jumping in and trying to retrain them, if need be, on the things that are gonna make them successful. And so I think micromanaging is overused in the vast majority of us. I think actually.

Instead of thinking about like.

I can do it for you, I can train you on how to do it, or I can ask you to do it. And so everyone's like, I should just ask people to do. I just delegate. When in reality they can't even do that because you never trained them how to do it. They don't know what good looks like. And so there needs to be an arbiter of truth for every business, in my opinion, and that's going to be the founder. And if you're trying to delegate everything away, just realize you're delegating away the live stream of the company, whether it be sales, admin or operations. And so having a keen understanding of what that is and then training it like deeply with people before you ask them to do it themselves. And delegating, I think is important.

Sorry about the background noise. It just gets getting busier here. Anna Burkett. Pristine green lawn and landscape. We use P4P. What would be the best way of paying employees when they are doing snow work that is billed monthly at a flat rate? We get paid the same rate no matter how much it snows. I want to guarantee my employees income throughout these months, but also want to allow them to earn more dollars by being more efficient. And I want them make sure they get paid their fair share if they have to work a bunch of snow events for that month and get a direct pay report after each snow event. Yeah, so you can do this a few different ways to balance that. What you could do is like, hey, you get a guaranteed base pay and you're gonna do it as a, like, let's just call it 15% of the revenue you know is coming in guaranteed because you're getting the same amount no matter how much it snows. You get like 15, but then give an extra 5 to 10% that you know, you could flex into if the snow just dumped on you. Right. So for example, hey, everyone's guaranteed to have 600 a week, but if when snow comes, you're all going to get paid on P4P or a higher hourly rate and overtime, etc. And then you can make above that, that way they're guaranteed and you're giving away basically 15% of the snow revenue. But then you know that you're baking in like 20 or 25% based upon the months where the snow gets dumped on you. So it's just, it's just a function of you trying to get to balance this guarantee to employees. But then also when there's more snow you're able to afford, that's what you're really doing here. You're a cow can't afford a bunch of like a better payday when it dumps on snow. But then when there's not snow, I'm paying them some. So like.

Is why ultimately you could probably offer a 20 or 25% P2P on, on. On paper performance, a percentage of the revenue using snow. The problem is what happens if nothing like there's no snow event. Right. So I would still break this down by a budget hours. Because you're using P4P. I would look at what are the budget hours based upon like trigger trigger depth, for example, if you really want to use PVP when they're doing snow route. So it's like, okay, here's the dollar amount for the, the, the project. Here's the budget hours based upon 2 inches, 6 inches, 12 inches, whatever. And then they get paid based on that. That way as there's higher trigger amounts like 12 inches versus 2 inches, they get more project hours. Therefore they get paid more. If you're using P4P, that's probably what I would do. I'd keep it really simple though. Don't do like 20 triggers. I do like 2, 4, 6, 10, 12, something like that. Maybe five triggers, a different amount of budget hours. And that, that would then make it where you would lose out when there's tons of snow. But then when there is a little bit of snow, there'd be less budget hours and they could still make money. But I would, I would really be focused on like if there's not snow, having another service they can do. Right. So doing winter services, some other service they can do besides snow would be my objective. That so that way if it's not sailing, there's still money for them to be had and you're not just paying them a flat dollar amount to do nothing because that ultimately is what kills, kills you. Unproductive labor during the offseason just crush you.

Matt from the Lawn care monster, what is the best way to get HTB workers? You can go directly through the program. You can also get people that Basically sub it out. Essentially they do all the back end work and then they just give them to you. Usually if you're going to do that, you're gonna pay 28 to $30 an hour. If you get an intermediary, someone else to go do the legwork, bring them over here, take care of all the paperwork and just rent them out to you essentially. So really I've mostly seen this work well when you're getting a bunch of them because then it's worth you going directly to the program, etc. You also open yourself to the liability that all of a sudden that just spigot just gets turned off. I have a feeling it's gonna happen this spring rush again. I just don't see this being something that is gonna like be super reliable. And back in 2016 when the program originally like literally got shut off, like 80 of some big companies workforces didn't show up during the spring route and they were left basically had to sub everything out. That that's a really tough spot to be in. And personally I don't want the government to be a partner of mine. They're just too unreliable and inefficient. And so.

You know, the challenging part is if you try to sub it out in terms of going and getting HDB workers from a third party that kind of is the intermediary, you're also at their mercy too. And you're going to be charging, you're paying 20, 30 bucks an hour. You might as well find someone local for that amount basically. So there are a lot of good ones, there are a lot of bad ones in terms of intermediaries. But usually what I've seen with the desk is when you go directly to the program, but you're getting 10, 20 people and it makes it sense that literally have a full time H2B full time HR person as a managing the program, making sure everyone's in again, that costs money too. If you're going to pay that person 60, 70, 80 grand a year to manage that program. Now you got to bake that into their hourly rate. And if you got to house them and do other things like that, it starts to become prohibitive unless you have a good quantity of them. From what I have seen, I have never personally used the program to be full disclosure. Is it possible to get the rate matrix on the items and service, please?

I'm guessing you're kind of talking about like components. No, you're not. I'm not 100 sure talking about here, Matt. There is items and Services. There is a rate matrix. I don't know what you mean by getting them on it.

I'm guessing you mean more like pricing. That might be what you're talking about. So feel free to book a call with air traffic control 14 and see what we currently have. I'm guessing you're meaning like doing pricing based upon. For every item and service based upon a certain rate matrix. So that's not there yet.

But we. Yeah.

Connor Johnson from Wolf Window Cleaning. I just signed up for a coaching program that's a thousand dollars a month. It's with a window cleaner that lives about two hours away from me. It does 1.5 million. It does. It comes with a community chat and weekly calls with him. He seems like a smart guy. Build his businesses on service agreements, which I am trying to do. As someone just starting their second year and did 50,000 the first year. In your opinion, was this a smart choice? I didn't feel lost just wanting. I didn't feel lost just wanting some help to get where I wanted to go. Yeah, I think it's a good choice. You know, you're basically paying about 25% of revenue though right now to this. So unless you're going to grow, I don't think this is a great investment for people. Join Augusta. Look, if you just want to build 150, $200,000 annual revenue business, join Augusta. You don't need that. That's in the free content. Get in the community. You'll be fine.

The thousand dollars a month for a one weekly call is high or low, depending who you talk to. I have spent before more than 50 per minute to talk to people. And so is that high? Well, the value that I get from that is I can make a thousand dollars a minute. It's. It's proportional. Right. Also the quantity of the information you're getting. So if this was daily versus weekly, that'd be more valuable because you'd have a faster time from your question to getting an answer. So that's the type of thing I look for in a community. Also the community chat. Like are these people that are all around your size and above or are these all people that are just thinking about getting started? I like to be in groups where there is about 50% of people around what I'm doing and 50% of people above me because I can reach out to people that need help or people that I can help and I'd be part of the community. They can help me. They're going through the same thing. They feel the Same thing I'm feeling they're learning the same stuff I'm learning while at the same time reach up to people that are slightly ahead of me, just slightly, because they're way ahead of you. It's very, very difficult to actually take what they're talking about and meaningfully use it the same way that people will take like what I talk about with time chunking and what I do with my calendar. And like they think they should do it. And like, look, you should be in the field 10 hours a day. You should not be thinking about, make your, make your time and planning in that direction. So that's why I like having a little bit of feedback from someone like a few years ahead of me, but not 20 because the 20 person is going to say something that is actually probably the wrong thing for me to be doing. So in terms of $1,000 a month, you know, I don't think it's bad. I've paid $5,000 to be inside of groups per month. It was just a community group and one call a month and twice a month a year we meet up. So I think it's helpful you can, you can time hack yourself on this. Your question is, are you implementing, if you're going from $50,000 a month, $50,000 a year this year and you're gonna get 250 next year and 500 the next year because of this information. Good deal. $12,000 a year. Good deal.

Jeff Brand from Blue Sky Property Services. Thank you. Thanks for your time. Mike. When doing estimates for level billing contracts, do you use the features in copilot or attach a form with all the specifics and just input the items and services in the profile. So we just make sure. So I don't attach a form. So in the estimate we will do all the information in terms of the schedule. We'll do it all inside the estimate notes. And then once they accept, we're going to do a level billing agreement. We're going to do budget hours for every single service inside of that level billing contract. But we do just use the estimate notes and we just have a format you can copy and paste it in. So for example, your title could be like 12 month landscape agreement or 12 month property maintenance. And then just do like January we're going to use things or like you know, for each of your services, the frequency of each one, I'm going to put all in the estimate notes. So when they click accept they're accepting everything. And then once they accept that, then I will go and Create a level billing contract with each of the services. So the budget hours, the frequency, the timing is all appropriate because I want to make your budget hours accurate for every single visit, not for the overall contract. Jeremy from Klein Lawn Care and Snow Plowing.

Congratulations on the engagement. How did you land that sale? What are your biggest three challenges with Tree Collar Summit challenges? Blue collar Summit. All right, number one was depending on third party speakers. So I am much more inclined next year to use our community.

The people that were from the community last year and this year that spoke put a ton of time into their slides. And you can tell the presentation is dialed in. It's very, very in the weeds. It is exactly where audience is at. And so I want more of that. I've had professional speakers, I've paid people to be there. They do not put the amount of effort that my audience does. That's just the bottom line. And I think it was because you all know how much time I put into my slides. Like I put spent six months on that presentation, almost eight. And so when I see you all get up there and do the same thing, it's very, very motivating to me. And so I'm very inclined next year to not use the professional speakers and go much more the direction of our community members, but then do a Shark Tank style like, hey, present your thing to me. I will then take the videos and then we will choose the best speeches. That's what I'm inclined to do for next year. So I haven't formalized that fully. I think that's going to be the best route because I can list off people like military cuts, troop smelling yard dogs, these folk. I can tell they have practiced their speeches. They've gone many, many times. They're dialed in. They speak our language of pay for performance, the 4L framework. They understand this stuff. And I think that's very good for continuity of the content. And so it's not a bunch of disjointed things that people don't really know what we talk about. They don't know our verbiage, our vernacular, what we talk, what we believe in in the community. And so the number one challenge was getting the speakers to show up because they all have their own busy schedules. But it's in part because like they're not showing up already. If my community is already showing up, it means they care enough to be there already. And I really want to lean to that in the future. I just consistently see our best rated talks as the ones that, and even the feedback coming from all the people that are there. It's the people that are in the community. They understand my level of dedication and commitment to preparation, and they're willing to do the same thing. So that's like a big challenge. A big challenge financially is always a big, big. A big list. So, like, our budget this year was well over $400,000, and that doesn't include all the labor for the team. And there's like 25, 30 people for basically a week, you know, just setting up and preparing everything. So it's. It's expensive.

As well, over 400 grand. And we don't come close to that in ticket sales, so they're trying to make sense of that a little bit more. I don't want to raise the price too much, but it's just expensive once you get to a hotel. Like, just the AV, like, our initial bill was like, 100 grand, and we had to, like, we have to whittle it down, like, 50 grand. So just like, managing the cost. So we don't do. I don't want to inflate it towards two grand ticket. Like, I went to Jocko's event. It was three grand a ticket. So they can do a lot more with that. But I don't want to charge three grand. I want to be able to keep it affordable as possible.

But we do need to cover the cost, so we got to figure out a few things around that. Reed Brown from Outback Irrigation. Hey, Mike. Congrats on the engagement. My question, should we utilize online booking to help push people through the funnel and narrow down the steps to get people from contact to schedule? My issue with this is we have a split territory. We may not always be in that area at that time. We use online booking as a hook and just call the customer to reschedule if we need to.

I wouldn't try to do scheduling.

Yeah. I would focus more on the pricing. Right. Most customers don't care too much about scheduling. The reason I know this is because you'll see out here in a little bit, you're gonna be able to see the reasons people decline. It's mostly around price. It's less about scheduling. Even though we have the option there around scheduling, people rarely decline because, like, oh, you can't. You can't. You can't do me on Monday. I want to be on Tuesday. That rarely happens. It will happen occasionally, like, 5% of the time, but not. It's not like 30, 40%. So the reason I say that is because what I would focus on in your instant Pricing is get the job booked, like sold.

And what. You could also do it. Because if you're doing irrigation. Yeah, if you're doing irrigation, this might be more like you have to set up an appointment. So what you could do is you could just have two different bookings. One would be like Tuesday plus or negative a day. The other one we Thursday plus their negative day or just like morning and evening. They just select on the form and then you know, you can reach out to them and book based on your schedule. So what you're trying to do on these forms is less about scheduling a specific time and more about getting them to stop going and finding other bids. And so I would, I would be more inclined to give them a price, lock in that job and then say, hey, we will contact you for scheduling. Because what you don't want to do is have to. Because like, well, that's a whole nother step. You're doing it already. Because if they're scheduling right now, you're calling them anyways to reschedule. And that's not even a great customer experience. So I would really be focused on how I just get them to close the job, like accept the estimate and the pricing. Or if you're like, well, all I'm doing is trying to schedule an appointment. In that case.

I would probably do something rounded. It's okay, what works best better for you, like evenings, weekends, mornings, etc. And just get them to commit. But ideally, I'm getting a price. I'm getting something locked in around price. Because usually until someone's price is locked in, they'll keep looking for estimates. Even if they schedule a time with you, they will go schedule a time with someone else, they'll call someone else. And so I'm trying to usually lock in a price for something like irrigation. I understand, like, hey, I've got to do an inspection. Why not just sell the inspection? Hey, it's 49 or 99. You can schedule it. You can go and.

Check out, or you can at least accept 99. You can even do a strike product. They actually do check out and you collect $99 and you tell them it's going to go towards their cost of any repairs. For example, yes, you will have less leads come in, but your close ratio will be higher. Like way higher. And so just a function of like, which, what mode are you in? Onion growth modes. You probably wouldn't want to do that. You wouldn't actually have forced them to collect $99. But what you could do is you could just have the form where it's like, hey, it's going to be $99 and you know, we will reach out to a schedule and we will collect your card information at that time. That alone will weed out tire kickers. So there's levels of instant pricing. Like the goal and the objective is that they in, in the perfect world commit to a price. And even the best of worlds, they give you card information.

If you can't get the card information part, that's fine. Get them to accept a price because then they're anchored. If they just schedule an appointment with you, they actually haven't crossed the finish line.

Jeremy from Klein Lawn Care and Snowply. With lawn care, I know you can bill monthly to keep your cancellations of weekly services. With snow removal you could come once a month or you could come 10 plus times. Would you recommend billing snow removal monthly with customers? What about customers with limited budget? Budget limits, monthly billing or after each visit. So in general, I don't like if you're going to do weekly, especially for snow removal. Like I would charge like the same day. Any sort of ala carte service, I want to charge the same day. The only reason you charge monthly is.

There'S not a whole lot of reasons to charge monthly. Honestly, by when you increase your frequency of billing, you will Increase your churn 100% of the time because people will see it more in their credit card statements. Now if you're going to charge weekly or daily, do not send them an invoice via email through copilot every time. Just charge their card, just charge their bank account and then they can always go and check their client portal if they have questions about their billing statement. The reason I say this is because if you send out an email every time you charge a customer and you're sending four, five of those a month, first off, you're going to increase churn dramatics. Secondly, you're going to reduce the frequent, the likelihood of an opening and responding to an email or text message. That is a marketing message. And so personally, my locations, we do charge monthly. We always have. There's not cash constraints and cash flow issues like I've always just let it slide. But the main reason I do it is because I want one email a month going to them, maybe two. It's gonna be a text and an email and can be pitching a service. I want that email opened up, I want that text message responded to. And if I've been bombarding with a whole bunch of invoice receipts, it's not going to get opened up, it's not going to get responded to. And I can tell in the open rate and the response rate of emails when we have changes. And so I would rather have a 50% open rate and much more responses to that marketing message than sending a every single week invoice email. Basically remind them they're on service and charging their card every single week. So I would just say I like weekly, I like daily billing. Just do not send them an email with a paid invoice receipt. Tell them right up front, hey, if you want to see your invoices, if you want to see all of your charges, you can simply here's your client customer portal link and here's your login information. Very simple. So that would be my recommendation. All right, everyone, that is it for today. I wanted to make sure I got this in even though I'm out of town, just to make sure we didn't get too far behind. Again, I appreciate everyone that came to Blue Collar Summit. And again, as always, down below in the description, you can leave a question anytime. Just submit the form and I'll get to it next weekend. Take care, everyone.