Copilot Mastermind 04/18/2025

Hello everyone. Welcome to another copilot mastermind. Looking forward to being able to go over these questions here today. If you ever have a question and you would like them answered, down in the description of the video is a link to a Google form and submit that any time of the week. Also at the very top of the Facebook page there's a featured post with that form link also. So you can submit a question any time of the week. And let's go ahead and jump right in. First question is from Adam Burkett from Pristine Green Lawn and Landscape. Can you take a look at my instant pricing for mowing and get and make suggestions? Okay, all right, we can do that, we can do that. Let's jump in here.

Okay, so first off, from a website perspective, this green on white is gonna be a little bit hard to read for some people. I would just consider maybe making that this white black. I like the fact that you show your truck here. It's a little bit dark all around here. I would consider taking this truck, making it clear without this black overlay, making the truck off to the side but clear so we can really see what it says, see the truck, etc. And then moving this text off to the right hand side potentially. It's also a little hard to read this white text with a white truck behind it. So it gets a little bit busy there. I'm just talking from a design perspective, from an instant pricing perspective. Just kind of scrolling through here.

So couple things like this SMS text is a lot of information. You can usually you may receive 10 messages per month. Like a lot of this you don't need for SMS consent. You really just need to say like, hey, you're required to, you know, by checking this box, you're text messages. As long as you have this privacy policy down here, you should be good. So you should be fine there.

Really good though. Like, honestly, I think this is really good. I think I like the orange, I like the green, it's good. The overall design, I would just say that this is a really long form. I would try to consolidate this form if at all possible. Even just like email being up here, this SMS thing being shorter, is it really important that you get how you hear about us? I don't know.

I want to reduce as many things as possible. If I'm trying to maximize for the number of leads that I want. If you're in profit mode and you're like, I only want to if there's a certain service, if it's coming from a certain lead source, then yeah, I would put stuff like this in here.

But there's a lot of text, a lot of forms.

Even this is a lot of zip codes for people have to choose from. Most you guys can't see it, but there's like 10 or 12. So like I would just try my best to consolidate this as much as possible, make it smaller, simpler and less like this is like 1, 2. It gets a lot. Even if you had to. Even if you had to make like a jot form where you just showed like the first part and they click next and it went forward.

This is just a lot of information, a lot of text. It's pretty text heavy. I would try to make it more graphic heavy if you can. That'd be my $0.02 on that one. But hey, I'm happy with instant pricing anytime I see it. But I do think it's pretty text heavy and just from a design perspective, hard to kind of follow with my eyes as a customer. So just cleaning that up a little bit and you'd probably be in a good a better spot from conversion perspective. Cody McClure from Proscape Lawn Care and Landscaping at what efficiency score should we set our budget hours off of starting out if we do not know our efficiency score? For example, if we want. If I'm wanting my guys to work 40 hours in the field, how many hours should I schedule out? I know this will vary with travel times and breaks. Great question. We typically use 30 budget hours as the capacity inside of the user account. So again, inside each user you're going to set the budget hours that their capacity is on a weekly basis and we do 30. If they're working 40 hours, I would assume a 75% efficiency score. Now if they're more efficient than that, like 90% are 95% efficient. Which again, efficiency score is budget hours divided by clocked hours. So If I have six budget hours divided by eight clocked hours, that's 75% efficiency. If they're completing seven and a half budget hours in an eight hour day, they're like 95% efficient. They're going to get more budget hours done in a week of 40 hours worked. So we traditionally though schedule 30 budget hours for every 40 clocked hours. So if someone's like working part time, for example, you can just go inside their user account inside of copilot and just change their capacity, say 15 or 20 budget hours per week. That way on your budget hour capacity chart and on your calendar, you can see the accurate number of budget hours that's assigned to the crew and making sure you're not above capacity. John Wiggins from Pro Safe Power Washing we are pressure washing company out in South Georgia. My question is in regards to service area. Our end goal is to have many different locations in the area. We are trying to grow really quickly this year. The question I have is how far is too far to travel and should I be turning away some leads? Most of our jobs come from two cities that are both half an hour from our location. Is traveling 45 minutes to an hour too far. Should I just not bother getting an estimate for those farther cities? We are a pressure washing company so as much higher ticket than lawn care. We shoot for about 175 an hour and we are doing P4P. So the only reason to extend outside your tighter service area is because you have a constraint of getting leads in the current service area. And so I would personally if you had plenty of excess capacity in terms of labor like you have tons of time, you're twiddling your thumbs. I would probably serve at a larger service area however especially for one time jobs like Pressure Washington. However, my goal is to market and boil the puddle of the area that I want to serve that might be a 15 or 20 minute mile driving time radius around my shop space. I'm going to boil that puddle with marketing and really focus on getting new customers there. I'm not going to spend money on marketing 45 minutes an hour away. So again if you have excess capacity that is you are twiddling your thumbs. I would take the jobs further away but then take that money that you make from those jobs and put it in marketing in the area that you actually want the customers to be in that more localized area. Wonder from Vantage Landscaping Hey Mike, thanks for the mastermind. So we charge cards after the job is complete for projects and on the 1st for mowing the jobs I do on Monday and Tuesday is what I used to pay my employees that coming Friday. What I get on the first is used for personal expenses, payroll, etc. And it gone in what like feels like three days. Is there a better way to structure managing the how or when we manage the schedule or charging cc's? Thanks. Okay, one thing.

I'm not sure what your question is because really a matter of like is this a matter like if it seems like that first part you're charging the first basically your recurring revenue is not making a large enough chunk to cover your personal expenses, payroll, et cetera. That's what the equation is here. If you had more recurring revenue and More of your, you know, billing was happening on the first, you'd be able to cover these expenses. So I would say this is more a matter of just like a balancing out of recurring versus one time jobs. If you're trying to make this equation work where the recurring revenue covers your personal expenses and payroll. So you probably would really want to focus on getting more recurring work if that's the equation you're solving for. I think the other thing I would think about is do you from a cash flow perspective just want to have your cards get charged every single week? I think a lot of us could absolutely. If you go to weekly or daily billing, not send anything to the customer, just have it where once the invoice is created, have that be the trigger for charging the the customer's card. And do not send the paid invoice receipt to the customer. And then if they ever ask about like payments or what's up, you can always have their. You can have your customer portal login from your website. You can also have just send them a link, hey, no worries. Click here and you can log into your account. They go in there and they can see all their payments, upcoming jobs, et cetera. So I think if I was charging weekly or daily, that's what I would be doing. And I would certainly not be sending paid invoice receipts every time. I would set it to where the invoice gets charged automatically as soon as it is created. That's what I would personally be doing. And whether it be daily or at the end of the week, that would probably be the cash flow fix you're actually looking for. Wonder, because to me what sounds like to you it's actually a cash flow problem. So instead of waiting for the end of the month, I would just do a more recurring, a more frequent billing because there's a cash flow problem. So that that should help. Next question is also from Wonder Wonder Round 2. Is there a way to have my taxes, federal and state set aside in COPPA or outside of it? If not, how would you recommend on going about it or knowing how to put how much to put aside, even though it's been very hard to put anything aside. Thanks. So what you're looking for is probably something very similar to Profit first where revenue comes in and it splits across different accounts. So that way at the end of the month you have money set aside. I would recommend Relay Financial, it's an online bank, but they really do incorporate.

Profit first technology pretty easily. And that and realistically any bank will do this. I have no affiliation whatsoever with Relay. But what they do make it easy to do is split money between accounts when money comes in. And again, most of you, if you just go to your bank and you have a turn, just say hey, I want money coming in X amount going over here every month or a percentage. Some of them will allow a percentage of revenue of money coming in to go off into a different account. And then you just set up that account inside of QuickBooks so that you now see two bank accounts, for example. So you have taxes and operating expenditures, etc. So technical setup, probably listening to something like profit first is what you'd be thinking about. Then if you're going to do that using a bank like Relay, that will allow you when money comes in, it splits into different accounts. That would be what I'd be shooting for.

Nathan Hart from Hart and Sons Landscapes. For marketing, we've tried your method of making the BI weekly mowing 150 more expensive than the weekly mowing to encourage more weekly customers. However, in our service here, the vast majority of customers don't want weekly mowing. They don't have irrigation and they want bi weekly. I'm worried that we are causing customers to get scared off by the higher bi weekly mowing price. I'm curious what your experience has been with this since we have someone in the same area, North Seattle, similar, similar climate. Should I be targeting new housing developments or maybe just focus on growing bi weekly customers and trying to sell them on switching to bi weekly or switching to weekly? Yeah, like you're framing this as I am charging more for bi weekly. Why not think of it as hey, the vast majority of people want bi weekly. You get a discount of 33% if you choose to go weekly. The bulk discount. So I think reframing this, if everyone's choosing biweekly, great. Like just use that as your actual pricing mechanism. And if they want to go to weekly, you give them a volume discount. I would also, I would also say like test this. I would probably do like 30 estimates with the increase and then 30 estimates I give you like. So for example, I have seen this where people will do, they will show only the bi weekly price and they'll test that 30 estimates going out. Then they'll take the same exact week. They'll send another 30 estimates out that have weekly and bi weekly. And I've consistently seen that they can charge a higher price just having the two numbers. The reason for that is because you can really sell the job so easily. When you say hey, what? Okay, you're really, really cost conscious around the cost per month. Great, let's go bi weekly. It's a little higher per cost per cut. However we can fit within your budget. Someone else be like man, the cost per cut is really important to me. I was paying $50. Now you want me to be charged 60. Great, well let's go down to 45 and we'll get you on weekly service so you can kind of use it to your advantage to sell the job. However, we also have I've seen owners do where they just do weekly and bi weekly price the same price. So then it's just a function of like it doesn't matter either one. And some people like that because like ah, my current guy up charges me for if I don't go go weekly. So it's how you want to sell it. I do think if you just gave the bi weekly, you can also sometimes offer customers like in the middle of spring rush. Hey, if you want to switch to weekly you get a discount. So think of it as like a discount. So it's, it's how you package this problem. I do think this is a feature of our industry does not have bug and I think we can treat this as if everyone wants bi weekly. Fantastic. I'm going to try to upsell them into weekly and give them a discount as part of that offer. And so you could potentially just give bi weekly mowing prices and then offer people to go into weekly at a discount instead of pitching as like, oh, it's a, it's more expensive to go bi weekly.

Jeff from Grass Gator Lawn Care Services. In my market, bagging clipping is pretty much standard. Welcome to the club. Same here. Would you recommend a trailerless setup and if so, what's the best way to manage that? Yes, the only way you can really get away with it is if you have smaller lawn sizes. So if you're in a lawn an area where you have to bag clippings, but the average lot size is 20,000 square feet or turf, square footage of your properties is 30, 20,000 square feet. You're gonna have a really hard time be on the bag clippings with a trailer setup. So like in my market we usually have a couple weeks of the year where we start to really pile up the back of the trucks because we bag clippings. But most of our lawns are under 5,6000 square feet of turf. Now if that was 10,000, 15,000, we, we could fill up the entire back of a truck with one or two lawns. So that's when you have a problem. But we don't have any problems with my locations. And for the smaller areas, it's a smaller areas with smaller property sizes. Not usually a big issue because you can do 10, 15 lawns. Each one has like one bag of clippings. You can fit it no problem. It's usually during the spring rush when the grass is just growing like crazy. In my market, it's rain and it's sunny. Grass is going like crazy. And we require weekly service to actually mitigate this one issue. So we require weekly service throughout the spring rush in our market because if we don't, the amount of clippings that we pick up is so much, we have to come back to the shop, dump clippings, and then keep going the rest of the day, and it messes up schedule. So we just require by weekly service through the spring rush, and most of them will just carry over into the rest of the year as well. All right, everyone, that is it for today. I hope you all have a fantastic weekend, and we'll see you next weekend. Take care.