Copilot Mastermind 03/13/2025

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another copilot Mastermind. Get the party on the road. Last week I was getting married and gotten a honeymoon so I apologize for a couple weeks of missed masterminds. We have a whole bunch of questions today, 18 of them. If you have a question, comment or in the description there is a link and you can click on that and submit a question any time of the week and I will be responding to that. Very shortly we will be having a product launch and our VP of Product Josh will be having a video walking you through it. The new modern estimates being released next week and so yeah looking forward to sharing with everyone. I'm going to have a public video end of next week so I guess be Friday the 21st. It'll kind of walk you through it and it'll be part of my public video I put on YouTube. But prior to that our VP of Product will make sure everyone is walked through that and you'll have a pop up on your screen that will notify you when your account it's been able been enabled. So thank you all of the beta test users and people have given feedback on it and there's still more in the works down the road for the customer portal, but the estimate portion is the thing we focused on first. I appreciate everyone's patience over the past few months as we have been really trying to go slow so that we can go fast in the future and just rebuilding so much of the code base so that in the future when we are making changes to the customer portal and other aspects of the code that we can move quickly. So looking forward to sharing with everyone. Let's go ahead and jump in today though to the mastermind. Got 18 questions so let's get started.

First one, it's coming from Blackbeard Lawn Care. I love the idea of putting prices on our website for mowing and plowing. The size ranges of lawns and driveways is huge. In my area, for instance, our smallest lawn is 2000 square feet. Our largest is 200,000. Driveways range from 42ft long to 1500ft long. We have a complicated formula for pricing snow plowing and we compare similar lawns to get the timing correct for mowing prices. Mowing pricing exasperated further by the terrain in our area, for example, 20,000 square feet from one customer takes 0.45 hours and another takes 0.97. So we could couldn't price by size accurately. Is there a solution I'm missing other than drive by estimates? We can do satellite most of the time as we know they vary very well, but it's not instant pricing like you are suggesting. Like, you know, I'm not saying that every single territory can do this. I do believe that what you could do is say okay, what are 80% of our customers looking like? So yes, there are the $2,000, 2,000 square foot lawns, there's a 200,000, but what are the 80%? I would venture to believe that 80% of your customers fall in between 5,000 and 40,000, maybe 50,000. And there's going to be all other ones that you're will think of like oh, I have 10 or 20, I have 30, but I believe that there's a big chunk of them that fall in the middle. And then what you can always do is have a picture of a lawn that is much larger. And when they click on that, it doesn't give them a price. It just goes through the regular estimate protocol and sets up a drive by estimate. So especially on the larger lawns, very big properties, we are still going to do a drive by estimate if it's over a certain size. So I would probably just have like a lawn that looks about 4 to 5,000 square foot as you're small. I would probably do one around like 15 or 20,000 square foot for your medium and maybe 40,000 foot for your large and then other and show a massive property. And then if they choose that one, it just set you up for a drive by.

Another one for black beard lawn care. We're looking to grow significant this year and have a pricing question during growth mode. Our estimate acceptance rate needs to stay high. You've mentioned 70%. We handle follow ups, have a great Website Ranked Number 1 Google Brand Our trucks and wear uniforms. So the only lever left is price.

Okay, there's other, there are other levers, but let's assume that this is true. How long can we go while still paying our team high enough to retain them and avoid losses? How do you handle PVP when your hourly rate is lower during growth mode? For example, if our Target hourly is $80 with base pay at 20 but we dropped to 65 for new work, the PPP would be negative. How do you structure pay in this situation? So if you're ever on, if you're using PVP and you have to reduce prices in order to grow quickly, you're going to have to have an understanding with your team that either a, for a period of time, P4P is going to be a little bit skinny and we will raise prices after three months. But we are doing this so we can increase the route density and in the long term, we all make more money. But trust me, we will track the numbers and we will raise prices on these customers in three months.

That's a B is. You could just give them a higher percentage. So, for example, if you're going to cut your prices down to get new customers and fill in, you know, route density and go into growth mode, you could increase your percentage on P4P from say 30 to 35%. So the crew doesn't take the hit, you take the hit. That's what I would do. I don't want my crew to be paying because I'm like, I'm going to go in the growth mode. Well, if you're going to do that, you're going to cut prices, which I don't think is actually the thing. I do think there's other ways to improve your. Your close ratio. I'd be looking at optimization of the website from a conversion perspective. I'd be looking like making sure your estimate request form is above the fold. It's on the homepage. It's not on a different tab. It's on a different page, not on a different page. I'd be looking at things like, can I do mass? Like, can I increase the number of leads and upsell my existing customers, increase the lifetime value of them. And instead of just going out and getting new leads, I actually just take my existing customers and upsell them more. So there's a lot of ways you can increase the size of the business without having to reduce prices. The speed at which you get pricing to the customer, for example, back to your instant pricing thing. These are things that can increase your close ratio also. So I would not say that your last lever remaining based on what you said so far is just price, but assuming it was. Assuming it was, then you can't adjust the percentage on P4P periodically. Just tell your team like, hey guys, we're going to go up for this period of time because we're doing this, we're not going to be making money as a company. But I don't want to make. I want to make sure you guys don't take the hit when we raise prices. We will bring the P4P back to what it's usually been at in terms of percentage. Michael Endicott M and N Landscaping when is payroll services going to be available in Copilot? We'll have to stop using QuickBooks for payroll. We will not tackle payroll for quite a long time. It's safe to say at least a few years. It is a much more complex problem that other softwares spend all of their time on. And so as we move forward, we will try to nail the features that we release and I think they'll be apparent next week when we look at the estimates. There's things that no one else is doing that is very unique, very good on mobile devices and we're just not going to be out Compete Gusto and QuickBooks on the way that they do payroll. Every state is so different. There's a lot of compliance issues and so we will likely not be tackling that in the foreseeable future. Payroll, actually running payroll, I should say. Ben, from All Ashore, what metrics or percentage are you looking at when you're buying accounts from other businesses? I have the opportunity to buy a couple hundred accounts and average the average $800 annually. One spring service and one fall service, dock and lift install removals. So what I'm going to be doing, I'm going to look at the annual value. I'll be looking at, you know, what percentage of them do I think I'm going to keep? Right. So let's say there's a couple hundred of them, like 200 and you're okay, well realistically, am I going to keep 150 of them? Okay, great. Or 150 of them I want to keep because their pricing is decent. Other ones I'm going to have to probably raise the price and I might lose them. So I'm going to look at that. I'm going to look at how much I'm making annually. I'm going to multiply, but I think I'm going to make in gross profit. So if 800 annually you're making 300 or 400 gross profit, okay, great. Maybe I'm willing to pay six months worth of gross profit. It just depends, like every single. Are you going to keep this customer for 10 years? Do you keep customers for 10 years? Do they only usually last one or two? Because they only last two years. Sixteen hundred dollars is your gross revenue. And if you're 50% gross profit, like that's 800. I don't want to be spending 5, 600 per customer. Most acquisitions I see where it starts to get really inflated. Anything above six months worth of customer value starts to become crazy because you're. There's so many assumptions baked into like actually them staying on, like retention of them getting to the acquisition, then retention over the six month period. And then at six months like they're just. I want to Be able to get that like recoup the cost of customer acquisition cost as much as possible, as fast as possible. So like if I can spend 150 for a customer on ads and I can recoup that within a month, awesome. I don't want to be spending six months out trying to because of an acquisition. And so I find most time people do acquisitions because they can't make sense of spending money on advertising. But if they just figure out advertising, they could double their budget on advertising and spend a third or a quarter per customer compared to going out and buying those customers from someone else. The reason the acquisitions are nice because you get the immediate injection like all those customers at once. There's a lot of problems that come with that in terms of dealing with customers expectations and then what they thought about the previous provider and the list goes on. So just be careful. Realize that, you know, if you're paying say $500 per customer for one of these, well now all of a sudden if a third of them leave, if another third of them leave over the next year, all of a sudden they give me a really, really tough spot. So personally I don't like to spend more than three months worth of customer value.

But it's so variant based on like the stickiness of the service you have. Can you upsell them in other things? Can you turn it from $800 per year into 2000 because you have other services you can cross sell them into? Now we start to make sense of it, right? So Samuel Roth from Rothco Lawn Care. We have a partnership business. We have a partnership business. How would you split the roles and utilize these two people in regards to sales operations and admin operations partner 1 sales and admin partner 2 filling their spare time in the field while the company grows. How would their day to day schedule look like? So as the business grows, there's going to be constraints and what's going to be difficult is both of you communicating as to who is the current constraint. Like during spring rush, sales and admin is going to be much, much more intense than the middle of summer or in the middle of winter. Whereas operations might be busier at other different times of the year.

You know, knowing your strengths is very important. So if one person is more operationally strong, or one person usually, I would say it's like whoever's the best at sales is probably going to be the sales and admin partner two here and then partner one. As long as they love being in the field, they love being with the crew, they love training that's when I would be looking at that.

And in terms of their day to day schedule, it's like literally just run every single thing you currently do through the prism of which of these three buckets does this fall into, does this fall into operations, sales or administrative? And then you're going to make a list for every single one. Like, okay, is it reasonable that I can complete all these tasks and work out in the field? Is it reasonable I can do all these tasks and work on the field? Like, and then as you grow, it's going to be like a varying degree because if you get much more employees, operations gets way more heavy. If you start scaling and running ads, admin gets goes way higher because you get more calls. And usually the first few visits are when all your customer service calls happen because customers have to get their card and file and they have a complaint the first visit and the crew forget something and they want to add something in their job notes. So there are a lot more admin when you're setting up. So that's why a lot of times when you're growing a business, the percentage of revenue you spend on admin actually correlates with your growth rate because it's especially in a recurring business model because.

There'S so much more customer service to onboard a customer compared to retaining a customer. Christopher from CJ Property Maintenance how do I know when I'm ready for an admin? Is it determined on the amount of infield employees I have or revenue? Should my admin be handling all inbound and outbound call selling? Yeah, like ideally you're just looking at this as the value ladder of your time. If your time is worth $80 out in the field, you know, as soon as you can get an admin to do a task, you can pay them 20 or $25 an hour. Probably a good idea to do it. The challenging part is what happens when you only have one call every two hours because it gets slow. And what are they doing in the meantime? If it's nothing, all of a sudden you're paying $50 for them to answer a two minute phone call because it's two hours of them sitting there twiddling their thumbs. So the real really it comes down to when can you get to where there's blocks of time that they actually stay busy doing the list of admin tasks that you need them to do. And that might be a part time position at the beginning for them to be able go through email, run payroll, run your pay for performance, you know, go through contact Forms, do instant pricing, answer the phone during those peak hours, for example. So I'd be very careful about hiring someone full time on a, on a kind of salary basis year round because they become overhead and they become a fixed expense throughout the off season. So I'd be very, very careful with that. That's when I really, really encourage people to be above 500,000 in revenue. Before you start taking that kind of overhead where you're paying someone five, six thousand dollars a month, do you have a shop space? You have Internet utilities? Like it can get very expensive and during the off season you start to get hurt.

Mike from Wolf Eyes Lawn Care. If you want to lower the amount of invoices sent to client emails. Should I be charging for the services in Advance? For example, $200 at the start of the month for four visits. Is this your payment method? So we do not do prepayment. I'm not against it. I'm not against it at all. This is going to be kind of depend on a few things. One, your market, if other people are doing it, you can get away with it a lot easier. But I would do this as a measure when you are in profit mode. So it's really good for cash flow but it's not great for sales. Because when someone wants to buy and the first thing I say is great, let's go ahead and get your next four visits paid. They're like wait a second, like I don't even know if I like you yet. So it's gonna add a little bit of friction at the beginning, which I don't mind as long as I'm at capacity. I have tons of customers and I don't really care if my close ratio is down a little bit. Like if my close ratio is 30 to 40% but I'm like right at capacity, I can't really take on a whole lot more customers. I don't care. I just want great cash flow. So I do something like a prepayment. It's like hey, you pay for the upcoming visits at the beginning of the month. Makes total sense.

Great for cash flow. But that is going to be somewhat prohibitive of growth because it's going to require you to collect money before you show up at their house and most people are gonna have a little bit of a problem with that. But again, if my close ratio goes from 50% to 40% but I'm able to do this, woohoo, let's go. I'll do it. It's really good for cash flow. There's no problem with pre with overdue invoices, you never have bad debt, so it's a good deal. But it just comes at the cost of growth.

As you become in profit mode and you're at capacity more and more you can raise prices, you can cut out service area, you can reduce service mix. You can add parameters like you must stay on weekly of service or you can't cancel service during the off season or you have to prepay. Like there's so many things you can do to filter out customers, but realize each of those are a filter that prevent new customers from coming on easily.

Sam Gustin from Troops Mowing we are getting great results already from our Instant Pricing form on our website. My question relates to the card on file process. Here's an overview of what we are doing Schedule accepted services Call to get the card on file. If no answer, add Instant Pricing accepted tag which automatically sends a text message that asks for a card on file. Once card on file is added and customer has Instant Pricing accepted tag, the customer is automatically sent a booking confirmation text. All this is great only if the customer instantly adds the card on file. However, what you'll do if the customer doesn't add the card on file and if and is not answering phone calls, do you still send a crew out to service their property? Do you want to schedule services until do you wait to schedule services until a card on file is added? If so, what does that workflow automation look like? Ensure you're not forgetting to schedule a customer after a card on file has been added. Furthermore, are there any questions related to this topic that I'm not asking you think would be helpful to answer? So it really comes down to if you're in gross mode or profit mode. If you're in growth mode, I would go ahead and take the risk that 1 out of 10 people are not going to get that card on file and you're going to have one service where you might have to lose the job. But again, if I'm trying to optimize for just getting people on the schedule and filling up as fast as possible, I'm okay with a little bit of waste. Like growth sucks cash, growth creates chaos. But if you're trying to optimize for growth, I'm okay with a little bit of waste. Okay, so if If I have 2% of my revenue that I I have to give up, but I'm able to increase my close ratio from 30% to 50%. That's a good trade off. If I'm if I'm targeting growth okay, so this is a matter of your priorities. Are you trying to get every single dollar and in profit mode or are you in growth mode? Because you're in growth mode, I want to reduce friction to the sale. And what I would also do by the way you could do Sam, is have it where your automation, your sequence automation around this tag, have it where it.

Also sends them a text one day, two days and three days beforehand leading up to their first visit. So you could, you could build this as a separate automation or the same one to okay, it triggers it off, it sends it to them but then leading up to their first visit it could send day one, day two, day three before if they don't have a card on file. So that can be a contingency or a parameter inside the sequence automation that if they have a card on file, don't send these. So you could do that as well. You could also make an automation that sends your office a reminder the day before the service is actually on the schedule to ensure that it's actually done. Like hey, check this person's card on file and call them again. You could do that. So you can just set up another automation to ensure the card is on file.

So down the road we definitely want to do custom form inside of co pilot to where you could collect hard information. There's a lot of PCI compliance around that so it's not currently being worked on. Andy from Kinklar Emerald Oasis hey, here a few questions I have as I am trying to work through finalizing routing and product purchases. First when scheduling a one off occurrence mulch or multi step program turf applications, what is the easiest way to view total square footage of the day of how much product is needed? Example have one have.

Have I think 15 I think example have 15 homes each require one yard of mulch and each and are each.

45 square feet in turf. Is there any way one the schedule.

One the schedule a crew can look at their notes and see I need 5 yards of molt for the day and I'm treating 22,000 square feet. Is there a way to view yearly square footage totals as well as for greater price break opportunities through vendors? Okay, great question. I don't do a ton of chemical applications to be perfectly honest with you at my location. So I don't use this part of the the feet of the app.

I think this would probably be done through custom fields and then I don't know if in the dispatch where you can show that as a column. So I don't know it's a perfect answer to this one. I would talk to atc. I'm sure they have seen this much more than I have. I just don't do chemical applications at my locations. But I think you could probably do a custom field and then put that on the dispatch board as a column potentially. But I don't know that for sure, so don't quote me on that part. Talk to atc potentially talk to other operators that are doing a lot of chemical applications around this. But I think this is going to be a custom field if I had to guess. Second, what is the best way to sort through estimates to assure no accepted estimates has slipped through the cracks between acceptance and scheduling? Is there a filter year to date accepted emails, estimates then drill down scheduled versus non scheduled. So currently there is not what we are going to do with the wait list in the summer is going to be fixing this problem and that is right at the top of the dispatch board. When a estimate is accepted it would sit there at the top on the wait list until it was scheduled. So you'd always know which estimate's been accepted but not scheduled and it'd be a lot simpler. So yeah, that's going to be the ultimate fix for this. There are ways to filter this down, but we want to make it super simple. It's like all estimates get accepted sit in the wait list until you put them on the schedule. So I've seen the mock ups of working on this and yeah, it's gonna be good. Third, when setting up a multi step program example for terp applications, will it be an update where the pricing and information from the accepted estimate is auto populated into multi step program from the create a visit page. Thanks so much Mike. And yeah, so this is going to be something actually in the wait list we're really thinking about chemical applications because that's a big reason why you have a wait list is for things like core aeration where you want to get them all grouped up and then dump them all on the schedule, or different treatments that match up, etc. So this is definitely down the road because we have a series of different customer discovery calls we've had with chemical applicators. Hey, what are the four or five things that we're missing that would be really, really nice especially the people have more than 500 chemical customers. This is all they do. And so those are going to be likely more like next spring when we start working on that on the roadmap. But for now the wait list is the thing that you'll be seeing It'll help somewhat with this but not exactly what you talk about there. From one button you can create a visit and it all pre populates that's going to be really around the programs and the packages that will be built out much more for chemical applications.

Andrew Mansfield from Liberty Lawn Maintenance Enterprise. Is there a resource for automations other than Copilot University? I'm having trouble building up the automations. Just a little confusing. Just looking for some more teaching on it it or some more walkthrough steps like automating Google review requests. So automating Google review requests. Oh yeah, that's an easy one. Yeah. So first off, feel free to set up a zoom call, air traffic control, atc. Second, there's a brand new Copilot University series now. So I don't know if you watched this in the past Andrew, but as of last week Parker went through the entire Copilot University and read it, the entire thing. So it's much more condensed, it's a lot more workflows. So I don't know if he has a specific one around reviews for sequence automation, you could request that. If you reach out to support you could request this. But he does have a lot of really good workflows in automations that might be helpful. So watch those and then definitely book a call and walk through. There's so many ways you can set up an automating Google review request. Like when a job is completed and then having like a gap in between. So you don't ask someone every single week but it's like every three months or every six months for example. You can absolutely have that. And then when they, you know, the best way I've seen is like really simply like. Did you enjoy your service? We like to give our crew a $50 bonus. If you know they did a great job and you mentioned them in the review, they get a bonus. And so was your service satisfactory? Have a picture that says yes and a picture that says no behind the no goes to a Google form. You get information from that negative response. Yes goes directly to your Google review spot where they can type in information. So that's my, my favorite. You can also text that out. You just can't use the pictures but you could text the same thing with a link to yes and no. But I like an email with the yes and no picture seems to work really well too. So I like, I like the emails being automated based upon just jobs getting completed and having gaps in between like like 90 or 120 days and then I like Text messages being more of a manual basis where it's like, okay, that customer was really happy. I'm going to send a message. And again, I would really hinge it on the. The crew getting a bonus if they leave a review. Because usually the customer builds a really good relationship with the crew and they want them to get a bonus. So build it around that. Build an incentive program for your team, and then you can use that to get more reviews from the. From the customer. Cody McLeod from Proscape Lawn Care and Landscaping. Can I use Copilot to track expenses? I know it's an option. Do you recommend it to get a P and L by entering all business receipts in once a week? How often do you look at your P and L? Weekly, monthly. And how would you enter in receipts? So I would not use it for tracking expenses unless you're very small. If you're under 100,000 in revenue, you don't. You have a few expenses a week. But otherwise I would use QuickBooks so that all of your transactions from your bank accounts, your credit cards, your loans, all are flowing in automatically. You don't miss anything. The, the. The manual tracking of expenses inside Copilot is meant for a very, very small operator. It is not meant for. If you have dozens of transactions a day, you're going to forget something, you're going to mess something up, you're not going to be able to get something to write. Would not recommend using it for a large scale. You need it to be automated. Where bank transactions, loans, everything's being reconciled in terms of actually creating a P and L. So in terms of when I look at my P, L's at least monthly, even the locations that I'm passive on or I don't, I don't go to for Augusta, I look at those once a month. I get a report from command center. It's a P and L and I just look at that again. A little more. Hands off on those.

Cody McLeod has another question. Has Copilot released a feature yet where the owner gets a notification if an employee writes a note on a customer or a reason for a skip? I ran into this a couple times last year where the employee would have to call me and let me know they wrote something about a client. The only way I could do it was review all the jobs each day or have them contact me. This is actually in the works. This is a bit part of the paper cuts initiative and basically adding a merge tag around dispatcher notes. So you would have to. At first there's kind of two phases to it. The first one is basically just using the merge tag of dispatcher notes. So if you wanted to, you could have it where it triggers over. The thing is down the road we need to make a trigger that if there is dispatcher notes then it would trigger the automation. So that part won't be done right away, but at least the very beginning. The merge tag for dispatcher notes, we are working on that. It's not ready. It's not going to be released next week with this release. But it is being worked on and then that could be like the first step and then down the road we would have to create a trigger for if there are dispatcher notes, then it triggers an automation. So. Yeah, good question.

Cody McLeod again. If I budget a job first thing in the morning, four budgeted hours, do you include prep and travel time in the four hours? If not, do you include this in lost time? If not, where's the labor? Lost time not being on site, made up. So budget hours is what you're going to use for the estimate. So if you have an $80 per hour man, you have four budget hours. I'm going to be charging 3200. Sorry. Three. Three, three. Wow. Mercy. Michael. $320 would be my labor revenue on that specific estimate. Now I'd also probably have materials, I'd be doing E fees, dump fees, et cetera, but the actual labor revenue would be $320. I do not include drive time in this. That's it's cost of doing business. You're gonna, it's gonna be part of like making sure you have good efficiency. Right. So if you have four budget hours, but it takes you eight hours to the job, that's four divided by eight. Or budget hours divided by clocked hours. 50% efficiency. Boo. 50%. Very, very bad. 70% decent. 90% efficiency. Very good. Almost every business I've seen has a 90 plus percent efficiency score. They're, they're making good profit. That means budget hours divided by clocked hours. That's what efficiency score is. So that's why it's always the goal is always cut down drive time, cut down all that wasted time because that's how you become more efficient. We're 14 from Cruz from Kapana Landscaping. Hey, Mike. To 2025. With my first full year, 12 months of business, I'm a little worried about taxes and not saving enough. I'm wondering if putting 30% on the side after every distribution is a safe bet. For example, every $1,000 distributions, owners withdrawal, put $300 on the side, total 1,300. And then keeping business expenses and personal separate, of course, if it helps, I also likely file my LLC as an S Corp next tax season. Yeah, so.

It looks like you're profitable. So first off, if you're growing really fast and you're not actually taking a lot of money out of the business, don't worry about taxes. You're not gonna have anything to tax. However, it's not a bad idea to take a percentage of whatever you take out of the business and put that aside for taxes. I would also say talk to your accountant because they should be giving you quarterly estimated payments. So this is not an annual thing. Again, talk to your accountant. They should be setting you up for this. I'm glad they're thinking about S Corp. Basically, if you're making more than $40,000 a year, typically it's a good idea to switch to an S Corp instead of an llc because you'll save more on payroll taxes compared to the extra cost of filing another return, which is what you have to do with an S Corp. Mr. Anonymous from Klein Lawn Care and snow plowing. What are the most important things a business who is new to Copilot Focus on learning in Copilot to utilize Copilot for the spring rush. Good question. I think there's two things I would focus on if I had to narrow it down. One is dispatching and the other is automations. There are so many little things that you can automate notifying your crew. Like you can remember. Like in automations you can use your employees, you can, you can text yourself, you can remind yourself of doing certain things. There's so much you can do with the notifications of customers, following up on estimates, following up on invoices, getting cards on file. There's a lot of this automation. Like for example, there's a lot of people right now in copa, I'm seeing more and more people doing this where they don't ever touch invoicing because you can set it to create, send and charge an invoice. And so you should never really have to touch touch invoicing if you set it up correctly. So I would be focusing on how do I automate as much as possible using automations, but also things like the automatic creation, sending and, and charging of invoices and then also dispatching. The reason dispatching is because if you do bad job dispatching, your crew's now driving around, there's lots of windshield time, lots of wasted time. And if they're not having a good efficiency score, your business won't make money. Ultimately all of us are selling time and if we cannot make that time efficient we will not have a profitable business. Will Kelly from Military Lawn Cuts Aside from Dan Ralph and Mike Cowan's coaching mastermind coaching program do you have any recommendation for a mastermind group or peer group primarily long service focus from 1 million to 10 million that you recommend joining? I need to get more around more individuals on the same journey. I don't and even yeah like I just don't.

So I, I played with these before I even joined a franchise and like it was just tough. I never found one that really fit for me.

And anyone any like you're looking for money the cost that you pay to be in these is not for you to get in it's for to keep people out. So like if it's less than a thousand dollars a month like you're probably opened up to like people that aren't serious and also people that are very very.

What'S it called they're thinking in terms of. They're thinking small and they're thinking in terms of conservation and protecting what they know instead of just a matter of abundance and giving things away. That's why like I way back did the franchise is because we're all in the same brand so like there is no like ah they're against me or like their competition like and it's just very difficult so I don't know of any other ones I know I know of other ones but I don't know any that I can recommend and even these I, I have not been in them enough to say yes I recommend them. So yeah I, it's just tough like I, I honestly think a lot of us would be best served have you because what you want to do is you want to take commonality so for example when you go into a mastermind you have a like minded people that pay to be in a room and then therefore you can have there's a level of trust. I would use the copilot members map. Go on there see the company name go look them up and see okay. Oh they're a bigger business. Okay. Am I will to travel 30 or 40 minutes or an hour and go visit them once a month and just share all I know and they share everything with me that probably your best bet because you have something in common and that is the system of, of the copilot community and the software. So that's why we have the map. I think it could literally replace a mastermind. And if you have three or four people, even if you're driving an hour or two or three hours away, most masterminds in person ones at least they meet up two or three times a year, maybe four. You're going to be traveling, you're getting on a plane, you're going to be doing a hotel. So like if you can travel an hour, two hours, get to a larger sized copil community member I highly recommend it. You guys speak the same language because you're using the same software and there's a level of trust inside the community that we try to foster and we'll continue to kind of push as we go forward. Another question from Will it pricing on the website. If a customer blatantly abuses the sizing of their lawn and puts small when clearly it's large, do you still schedule them and raise prices later? Or send them a text and email saying your property size was deemed larger than noted? And here's an updated quote. So the yeah, I would do this if you're also it sounds like you're double checking every single one, which is fine, but I also like the whole advantage of instant pricing is that you don't have to do this. So I'm much more a matter of like if I get their card on file and then they've agreed to the fact that on that first visit they're getting charged a minute per minute rate then I ding their card. So if they abuse the system, I ding their card and then at that minute rate and then I'm giving them updated price based on the actual square footage.

So if you're already checking every single one though.

Just to make sure, then yeah, I would probably reach out to them beforehand and just be like hey, based upon us looking at your property from satellite et cetera, you know, it looks like you should be falling more in the medium or the large size. You click small. Is there a reason why? Is there something we're not seeing? And you can even take a screenshot of your Google map or whatever and be like hey it looks like this is larger. Let us know if we're not seeing something. We don't want to assume, but maybe you took out some of the lawn or something like are you only wants to do the front yard or something like that. Just like give them the benefit of the doubt.

But we already did this. One last question. Jordan Trottier Sorry Kojo Property Services how do you charge for fertilization weed control? Right now I'm taking the cost of how much fertilizer is needed based on a square footage adding a 20 markup, then assuming one hour of labor, drive, setup, spread, etc. I find this works because I don't lose money on the job and keeps my pricing consistent and able to do over the phone. However, I find my competitors are able to charge much more. I'd hate to lose out on profits because I don't understand the game. Any advice is truly appreciated. Yeah, you're definitely like, this is a very cheap way to do it. Like for the customer. I think you definitely add a lot more than 20% markup and then an hour of labor because you know this would, this would work. This would be really good for small properties. But if you're doing larger properties, this could easily become, you know, half the cost of your competitors. So it really depends on the size of your property. But I would definitely try to do it based upon a square footage matrix. You could use this as a guide like, hey, this is what I know I need to make some money. But then like as these properties get larger, you're going to want to make a lot more than 20% markup in an hour of labor. Because if it should be a 400, $300, that's an acre of property. You don't want to be be, you know, charging one hour labor. So $80 for example, and 20% markup of materials because you might be literally 150 bucks. So yeah, I would, I would. First off, if you really don't know, ask three or four quotes from your local competitors on a, on a property, friends, for example. It's like how I started way back in the day when I was 11 years old. I had no idea. Just get a general ballpark and then, then use your benchmark here as an example. It's like, hey, this is what I know I need to make to, for me to make money. And. But then.

You want to price based upon value, not price based upon cost plus. Cost plus never makes money. You want to be able to say, hey, what's the value of the customer? When are they accepting the bid? When is the close ratio high enough? That's what I want to be basing my price on. That's value based pricing. Cost plus is here's my cost, I'll tack a little extra on. You're just never going to make a great margin business doing that. So definitely think about value. One way to kind of know what value is of the customer is see what other, other companies been around for 20 years are charging. As a general guesstimate of like what are the customers valuing? And those numbers you'll find also are going to be all over the place. So don't use like one of them. And like ah, that's the example. No, like you get several and then realize that like in between that you're going to find your happy medium. And if you're going to be more pro growth, then you're going to have a high close ratio, probably 70, 80, 90% but you're going to be on the lower end of the price. But if you're like, hey, I don't need a lot of customers, I, I'm happy where I'm at, I just want to make more profit, well then great, I'm going to go on the higher end of that range. I want my close ratio to be 25, 30, 35%. So your close ratio determines what you're if you're too high on price or too low on price, your close ratio determines that because your close ratio is associated with the value you're providing and if your value is not high enough, the customer will not accept. And so I look at close ratio much more determining factor of what are you too expensive, are you too cheap? And if you're over 70%, use it as meat on the bone to immediately raise price and immediately draw more bottom line profits. If you're over 70% close ratio. If you're under 30% close ratio, you gotta be careful because you don't want to be running ads because it can take sometimes too long to recoup the customer acquisition cost to running a 15 or 20% close ratio again, depending on the services. There are some services that are 50, $100,000 jobs and you have a lot of materials, et cetera, and you're okay with the 10, 15% close ratio and it's just part of the game. So as a rule of thumb when it comes to recurring services that's kind of like 70% up, I want to raise prices almost immediately. But if I'm around 70, 75%, I'm optimizing for growth. And if I'm around that 30 to 40% close ratio, I'm optimizing for profit, which means I'm usually on the higher end of profitability or of price. But I don't assume that right off the bat because you might have a bad close ratio because you stink at follow up because your estimates don't make sense because you took four weeks to get the estimate back to them. So don't assume right away it's price but assuming everything else is constant then I would use those kind of as rule of thumbs. All right everyone I think that is it for today. I hope you have a fantastic rest of your weekend. Boom. Look forward to sharing next week the estimates, the modern estimates when you log in and it is in your account you will see the pop up and that will also have a video from the team in terms of walking you through what that looks like for your customers. It looks really good on mobile. Really good on mobile. I'm very proud of the team on the design of the mobile version of accepting estimates from your customer's perspective and the way that it flows with the deposit thresholds, credit cards on file is just very seamless especially on mobile. We've really I'm very proud of it because so many of your estimates are being accepted on mobile devices so looking forward to sharing that with everyone. Hope you have a fantastic rest of your weekend. We'll talk soon. Take care.