Copilot Mastermind 09/15/2024

Hello copilot family. I hope you're doing good. Let's go and get this thing kicked off. Another mastermind. I wanted to start off with some of the updates that we are currently working our way through. We're about halfway through the migration to Aurora. I know I'd mentioned this beforehand and a lot of the updates recently have been all back end things and it's a little bit like hey, we don't see anything. I understand but in order for us to move fast we need to have all this backend stuff done correctly in a way that will not prevent, will prevent breaking. Like it's happened in early 2024. And so in 2023 I was looking at the other day, we released over 12 very core parts of the software. Everything from price matrices to job costing to sequence automations. Like we released tons of stuff. The problem was we didn't have the backend infrastructure for scaling and we didn't have the backend infrastructure to allow lots of people to join and that's what's caused all the problems in 2024. Over the past seven months we've been revamping and rebuilding the entire code base from the back end and from the ground up. One of the things that we've done recently is switch over to ECS Elastic Container Storage. Another thing is Aurora is what we're switching all our databases over to. And you can look at this, Amazon owns the this and we're on AWS so we can tap into these sort of services which we did at the end of 2024 last year. But most of the downtime that we've experienced since starting Copilot a year and a half ago has been when there's been peak spikes of users. That's usually in the morning, usually right around 4 to 6am Pacific Standard Time. So about 5, 6, 7 o' clock Eastern Standard Time is when the peak of our users are at. So last night, ins of maintenance window last night, Saturday evening we went down and purposely had scheduled maintenance to start moving everything over to Aurora. We did two out of our three databases and we'll be doing the other one within the next week or so. Having everything into Aurora will allow for. I didn't really show you much but just so you can. It's basically allowing for the scalability of this, the database to go up very easily so that we don't just all of a sudden the system gets bogged down. It doesn't get really slow just because of the peak of users or even if something goes crazy with the code, it would just scale up automatically to prevent any sort of slowdown for users. And I've been a part of lots of different software. This is not like a fix all problem. But one of the biggest issues we have had is during peak seasons of Monday mornings and anytime in the morning, especially after new deployments, when those might have larger draws on the database, a new feature gets released, for example, and it's all good. And then we hit Monday morning and everything melts. This will prevent this. And so that's the big change that we're making right now. Again, I know it's backend, I know it doesn't affect anyone, but I genuinely believe that this year 2024 of anchoring the code, rebuilding the interface in the back end, and switching away from PHP over to Node JS and React coding languages is going to allow for 2025 for us to move very quickly and do so in a way that isn't alarming to everyone like it was in 2023 when all of a sudden everything broke. And that won't happen again. So that's why we're doing what we're doing. I understand it's not the results of our work is not being seen as evidently as it would appear, but when all of our resources can be spent on on front end changes like it has been the back end changes over the past six months, that's when everyone will be like, oh my word, everything's turning, changing so quickly and looking so good. And all this, it's because of the changes we're making now. And so it'll be first off this backend infrastructure, then we will turn more resources towards fixing the bugs. And then we will be fixing and changing and making changes on the front end that people will actually see. And so I understand that there's a slower process that I or anyone else would would prefer, but it is necessary so that when we start to create new features and we start to build the things that everyone is asking for, that the system continues to work and is stable. Let's go and jump into questions.

Asked yesterday for questions on the Facebook group. So let's roll.

All right, first one's from Adam in P4P. Can we get your. Here, one second. Let me move this over here.

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All right. Boom. Okay, here we go. Thank you.

And this spacing. All right, there you go. Okay, now we can Switch back.

All right, let's get this kicked off. Boom, Boom.

Okay, first question is from Adam. In P4P, can we get your videos that help employees understand it to be available in the employee app? Um, yeah, we need to do that. We recently though added a new tab called Yellow Slips. So we were kind of waiting for that to be done because a completely new tab inside the mobile app for P4P. So. Yeah, but these are going to be coming later this year in terms of new videos for the mobile app since there's been a lot of updates there. Adam says when you are selling your winter services and pricing at the same as a mo, are you're pricing it. Are you pricing it like one month of mo's? So technically, one winter service would equal two mows of winter service was completed biweekly or are you pricing it? One winter service equals one mo. Yeah, that's the way we're doing it. One winter service equals one mo. Going to be trying it this season. If it works, I'll dissolve what we've been doing in the past. Yeah. So what you're going to want to do is you're going to sell it to all of your existing mowing customers, use the email links feature inside of Copilot and basically make an opt out. You will double your conversion into winter services if you make this an opt out versus an opt in. If you make everyone opt in, you will be lucky to get 10 to 20% of customers to opt in. You make this an opt out, we've seen as high as 60%. The average is more around 40% of people will convert into winter services. If you make an opt out, just use the email links feature.

Armando says I like the idea of a business with simple services and I'm currently doing that. However, I'm getting the opportunity to begin offering masonry work. I have a family member working with me and teaching me the work. I'm wondering if it makes sense to separate the service in a different business or keeping them together. Thanks for your input, Mike. I think keeping it together is smart. At Blue Collar Summit we're going to be talking about a bunch a bunch about this in the workshop.

But I'd probably just keep it together for the sake of saving on a separate tax return, more legal stuff, different insurance. You could wrap this together in the same business pretty easily. Assuming your branding can accommodate. Like if you are Bob's Cuts, it's going to be a harder swing to get masonry work included inside that brand. You'd probably have to change to something Like Bob's Lawn and Landscape or something along those lines. So if you're assuming your branding can encompass that other service, I'd stick with trying to keep the same business as long as possible. And if eventually down the road it grows substantially, you break it off if needs be and make it like a sister company, like a sister brand.

But I like having them the same too because then you can even out the demand curve throughout the year with projects in your otherwise would be simple services.

Dimitri, door hangers seem to not work for carpet cleaning services. What are similar options? The biggest problem I see with door hangers is your offer. And I'm not speaking to you, Dimitri, specifically, just in general when people say it's not working for them, like if it's just a door hanger, just as talking about your services not going to work well, it's going to be equivalent like, like maybe a little bit better than every door direct mail, you'll be lucky to get half a percent response. And so like very lucky. And so I would be pushing number one, your offer and two, do you give pricing? So I've seen every door direct mail and door hangers work most when you have a killer offer. Like again back to Alex Hormozi talks about like making them an offer so good they basically feel stupid saying no to it. You want to make that on the door hanger or every door direct mail piece. And then secondly is I recommend giving them pricing, otherwise they are simply contacting you for a price. And so then in between that once they contact you, you have close ratio. You have the fact that most times people need to see you six, seven, eight times before they're actually going to call you and ask for a quote. Whereas you can jump over all those extra steps by just giving them pricing on the, on the piece of paper. So the thing about every door direct mail, the thing about door hangers is you can be very, very targeted in terms of which neighborhood you're hitting. And so you already kind of generally know the general square footage of the houses, the square footage of the lots. And so I would just round the pricing on them, whether it be for mowing, whether it be for cleaning houses inside, you can generalize the price enough to be able to give the prices and the increase in response rate is worth the lack of the less accuracy. I highly, I highly recommend it. Hey, I've been having a heck of time getting my trucks painted. Lowest quotes I can get are $6,000, maybe 3 to 4,000 if I drive really far and wait months what's your trick for getting trucks painted? Yeah, it's nuts. The range is absolutely insane. We've. We have locations that can get paint trucks painted yellow at Augusta for 500 bucks, the entire thing. Other areas of country, four or five thousand dollars, it's insane. I've never seen six. That's pretty insane. But four or five grand is still a lot. And so a lot of times in those markets, wrapping is the same price, if not cheaper. So give it a shot. It is pretty amazing how with decals, like vinyl decals, as well as paint, the. The pricing change is incredible from state to state and obviously we've done it all over and so it's just incredible. The range of pricing is insane. I would definitely be looking around quite a bit. And if you're willing to drive two to four hours to save a thousand bucks, it might be worth it. What was a realization or inflection point that unlocked your personal and business potential? Like definitely getting stuck underneath the dump truck in the PTO and kind of having the realization that my business was not built on systems was a huge turning point for me. And then also Africa. Going there and just kind of baselining what, you know, makes someone happy and in satisfaction and seeing kids over there at the orphanage and stuff like that. Those are probably two big ones for me. Pierce asks another question. Do you get complaints on P4P about the crew being too fast? This week I had a customer complain the crew was too fast and refused to pay full price and threatened me with a better view if I didn't take this offer. Take his offer? Yes. After he had already accepted the quote. He blamed his wife, of course, and then made his own invoice since he apparently knows how to run a landscape company and told me that's why he's paying what he's paying. Typical boomers. It's my first time dealing with that. Do you or franchise deal with that often? When I used to do everything hourly a few years ago, customers would complain that we were too slow. Now they complain we're too fast. For some context, I priced it out at about twelve hundred dollars for labor, not as a separate line item. And two man crew finish in less than two hours. Usually that job would take six to eight budget hours since the. Hence the price and they just crushed it. Yeah. So look, the question is, customers are either gonna complain about you taking too fast or taking too slow. I would rather have a business where my customers complain about me going too fast and my crew just crushing it. And they're always Moving and they just got the job done so quickly. I would rather have that. You're going to have one out of maybe 100, one out of 200 customers complain about this. The other 198 you're going to make more money on. And because the guys move quickly, they're on paper performance, they're not on an hourly wage. So I would probably just tell the customer, look, if you don't pay this and you don't, you know, we're not going to be able to do business with you. In the past, like you, we contracted based upon this is the outline of the services right requested and we performed those to your satisfaction and we did a walkthrough and here's you signed off on and you should be paying us. And if you don't want to pay us, that's fine, but we're not going to be doing work for you anymore. Depending on the amount, it looks like it's 1200 bucks. Like, I probably wouldn't do a lean or anything crazy on this, but I just, you know, realize that, yeah, one customer out of a hundred is going to complain about you being too slow or, sorry, too fast. Probably if you do hourly, if you charge, have customers where they make you pay, you pay, you charge them by the hour. And I would say 5 out of 10 or sorry, 5 out of 100 or 10 out of 100 are going to say you're going too slow. So just bottom line, I just probably take this as like, okay, one out of 100 people are going to be a little weird like this and move forward. Nathaniel, what do you recommend for bringing more clients? What online lead companies work for you? I know door hangers work. Have to have the right look and a great call to action to work.

In terms of lead companies like genuinely a great website with online ads in the form of Facebook and Google that you're tracking the cost per lead using your Google tracking code and your Facebook pixel that is by far and away the best. But driving it to a great website. The lead companies like Angie's List, HomeAdvisor, etc. Thumbtack, they all prey on the fact that we don't have great websites. And so they drive to a website that looks good on mobile, it loads fast, it ranks well on Google. Just go build that. And yes, you won't get leads tomorrow from thumbtack or you, you won't get leads tomorrow from your website like you would with Thumbtack, but if you build the site that loads fast. Looks great, looks good. On mobile etc. And then you drive traffic to it. It'll convert much, much better. So highly recommend if you didn't catch it. I'm way behind on this. So it's gonna be I'm a few weeks behind on this. But like if you go to mikeandys.com website, I'm doing assessments of everyone's websites. I am like at least three to four weeks behind. Hundreds behind, but. And so we've taken it down for the public. But if you're watching this, I will do it. Just realize it's gonna take me in October to get yours done. I'm way behind. Um, but I will look at your website and kind of tell you what you should do. Alternatively I just sign up for long care web design or home service web design. If you're not in the green industry, I just genuinely believe that money will be far better spent than paying someone like Thumbtack or Angie's List. And you can beat them at their own game and cut them out by simply having a great website. Like the reason people have to pay those online companies is cause they don't have a good enough website. That's why. So.

What would P4P do to help my type of company? I'm trying to see if this is a good fit and if it makes sense. I love your work, Mike. You're a great help. Yeah. So go to mikeannies.comp4p. There's free training on this and it'll walk you through if you're just getting started. I actually don't recommend P4P right off the get. But what I do recommend is build your business model in a way that P4P would work. It's using budget hours, it's pricing jobs with an hourly rate using the 25% rule where 25 where no more than 25% of what you're charging the customer per hour is in what your base pay is. So watch the videos, watch the training. Even if you only have one employee, even if you know employees, watch it now so you know how to build the business so that when you have 10 employees you don't have to pull the band aid off. It's the business is already built in a way where P4P will work.

Justin, how do we perform at our best when even our sales tax on copilot is inaccurately calculating? In turn, this reflects not only our accounting but also our budgeted hours.

Book a call with the support team, Dustin. They can look through your settings, see exactly what you're. What's going on your account and if there's an issue, they can definitely resolve this. We know like sales tax is important and you know, we would definitely, if there's a problem here, we can definitely fix it. So please book a call, make a zoom call, ideally so they can actually see what you're looking at and then they can walk you through your settings. There's multiple ways to set up different taxes in terms of different tax rates, whether it be by zip code, by service, et cetera. So please, they can walk you through that and if there's a problem, they'll definitely jump on it. Nathaniel, one thing that is frustrating on lead companies is you never get a great return on the investment. I would love to hear what you have tried and maybe some of that just don't work. You always seem to have great advice on this stuff. Yeah, like I just generally believe these lead companies are only will only. Like if everybody home service business had a great website and knew how to put tracking codes on their ads, there would be no reason whatsoever for these, these lead companies, they are simply middlemen and they're blood sucking companies that are basically taking a middleman approach to home service businesses. And it's basically taking all the profits from our industry. That's, that's essentially what it is. And so if I could convince every single home service business owner to just have a great website and then track their leads from Facebook and Google, you would not need those services, guaranteed. And so I just highly recommend get off the drug of them giving you leads. It's costing you a lot. You're completely out of control. You don't own anything and the moment you stop paying them, you don't get any leads. Zero. None. And you have no brand equity whatsoever with your customers because they are a customer of that service, not you. Because they can be marketed to anytime by that third party lead company.

All right everyone, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your week and look forward to next Mastermind next Saturday. Take care. Have a good one.