Copilot Mastermind 09/28/2024

Hey copilot family, I hope you're doing amazing. Happy Saturday. Today I'm in a coffee shop. I'm not in studio. So today is the first mastermind that is going to be where we have the form, the Google form that people can fill out prior to the mastermind. So it's not just from Facebook. So that's been super beneficial it seems. Looks like we got several questions that came in. So if you did not see that there is a form on the Facebook group, it's pinned at the top and the featured pinned part and you can put a question anytime you have one. So that way you don't have to wait until or catch the Saturday post asking for questions. You can just post that the questions in that form anytime. So we'll go through this today. A couple quick updates from co pilot. We have another big announcement coming next week in terms of a hire at the executive level, head of the design. We're looking forward to that. We're also entering a new stage. As everyone knows, since January we've been in a lot of defensive measures in the back end at Commands and Copilot in terms of backing infrastructure, moving just so many different elements, moving over to Aurora, ECS Elastic Container Storage, just really making sure that the infrastructure of Copilot is built to be able to scale and not break like it did last winter when we took the amount of users inside the program and so lots of security measures, lots of efforts being made in the back end, but it really hasn't been seen a lot by.

Members in 2024. In 2023 we had over 14 very large feature additions, including upsells, including sequence automations. Just so many things were added in 2023 and so that rate of innovation is what we want to get back to. But in order to do that sustainably without losing the stability of the program like we did in 2024, we have, we have to really take a step back and rebuild much of the code base. We switched from PHP or moving over to Node JS as well as React. That will allow us to do a lot of things in the future including creating our own native mobile app that works offline. And so there's a lot of coming down the pipe. A lot of things are already in progress. I am going to be under promising. So it's something that I fell into the end of last year after seeing our progress in 20 promising a lot of things in Q1 and Q2 of 2024 that we could not deliver on. And so to make that right I just want to under promise and then I expect I know that the team that we have now on board and are currently joining the team will over deliver on the things that have been set out and we'll go back on the train of being able to create products and features that you actually see on the front end a lot more. So really looking forward to it. Next week, like I said, we'll have that big hire, but there's multiple team members have been joining over the past few months.

Over the next few months we'll have some announcements in terms of when you can expect feature releases and doing it every six to eight weeks is when tranches and new features will be released. July and UX changes will be made and some big announcements so we're back on the train. And then if you're like hey, well there are still bugs, I agree with you. Some of the changes that we are making will actually fix a lot of the systematic bugs in certain areas. So for example changing UI UX of say automations and some of you have already seen some of the surveys and the beta test kind of side of things of what that would look like. We'll fix tranches of 15, 20 bugs at a time. And so we have some very significant efforts in terms of dividing engineering and product teams across three different areas and segments of the system to ensure that we are not only creating new things, but we are really creating much more stability and reducing bug count dramatically. And so we have some pretty ambitious targets even in terms of to the end of the year to dramatically reduce bug count. And a lot of that will actually come kind of synchronously as we are making systematic changes in certain features, whether it be the client, portal, automation, etc. And so I'm really looking forward to it. And it was a rough time and I really appreciate everyone the past really eight, nine months sticking with us.

It's been a battle, especially going from the high speed and velocity that we were operating at 2023 to now 2024, having to slow down what is visible to everyone in terms of progress and really restructuring and rebuilding a 5 million line code base from scratch. And so I appreciate the team dramatically. They are the unsung heroes in all of this. And so yeah, it's been quite, quite a fun endeavor. We are, we still have some few months to go as some of these improvements come out. They will fix big parts of the code base that created user frustration and.

Bad stuff. So I appreciate tremendously everyone supported us over the past eight, nine months, many times when I would not blame anyone for leaving. And so I try to document this whole process us. I'll be sharing a lot of it at Blue Collar Summit in terms of what all happened, things that were behind the scenes, what was going on. And I'm just very thankful for everyone for supporting us. And a couple of you have asked, okay, where's the company financially? We are not upright season like we were back in January. We are burning money, but it's for the the good of what we're trying to accomplish here and investing heavily. We do not have any outside investors. I am 100% in control of the company and I think that was needed this year to be able to make the massive changes and investments, to be able to turn this thing around and get back on track. And so as I stated earlier in the year when we were kind of in the thick of it and lots of instability.

There, there was no level of effort or investment that was going to be unturned to make sure it was resolved. And so that was done. And so I appreciate the support though we could not have done this even financially without the support of all of you and I really, really do appreciate it. So over the next few months, you're going to see some crazy cool stuff and then really at summit, Blue Collar Summit really actually start to see a roadmap of what we're doing. And it will be a roadmap that I'm very confident because we have built you back into be able to scale 10x of what we currently have without having these problems. And the level of talent and team that's in place is exceptional. This is not their first rodeo. They have done this before at a much larger scale. And so I appreciate them tremendously taking the risk on me, taking the risk on the company and visioning what we're trying to do here. I really do appreciate that. All right, let's jump in.

We've got nine sponsors. Okay. So just as a framework, again, this is the mastermind for Copilot. We are relatively new to creating the Copilot Mastermind. I have done this for a few years of Augusta already and over time we've made it better and better there. And so there'll be some feedback I might give to make sure that the mastermind is just the most valuable for all members. And so as part of kind of in the form I put here like some of the requirements for questions softly because I'm trying to be short or not answer specific questions etc, it is because.

This is what has worked across the board. When I have done masterminds in the past and masterminds I've been a part of and paid a lot of money to be in, these are the type of guidelines they put out. So.

All right, let's jump in the first question ever submitted from Kevin G. From Wink Exteriors, Indo Cleaning only now based in Alfredo Alfredo, Alpharetta, Georgia. Let's go. Question. Hey Mike, thanks in advance for my kind of longer question. Oh yes, breaking the rules. We're supposed to be succinct first. All right, we'll let it pass. It's the first one ever. My My window cleaning company has been operating for three months. This month I'm going to do about four to five thousand dollars in revenue which is four to six jobs with no paid marketing, just word of mouth and organic Google search. I work a full time job Monday through Friday, so I run my company on some weekends. In context about my company and I I had a pressure washing business in high school for about $10,000 each summer averaging about 110 budget hours. Work at service autopilot. Watched most of your videos to help me understand the industry. So thank you for that and talking with other people in the home services industry realize the amount of opportunity in this space decided to open my company. Wow, you worked at Service Auto. Very cool. I know a lot of people that used to work there and really good people used to work there. So couple questions because I am new to all this. I have about $5,000 cash in the bank for the business. I use profit sharing through Z Financial which is just an online bank for anyone that doesn't know.

To transfer based on the percentages and just wanted to make sure my percentages look right or if you could change anything or if you would change anything. I'm in growth mode and want to grow this as big as I can get with a several crews over the next 10 plus years. I don't really have a need for money made from the company since I have a good bit of my personal side to support me. So don't know with that context if you would take less owner's comp and put more into other categories. This is like a general rule of thumb if you're trying to grow the more money you put back in the business. Assuming you have a good customer acquisition to LTV like life and value, then the more you put into the business the faster you will grow. Like this is an input output equation. Like if you have good output, more input equals more output. So it's not really a Matter of like, should you invest more in the business? Like, if you want to go faster and you have a good cap to LTV ratio, you should invest in the business as much as possible. So looks like you're doing profit, profit first. So you have all this percentage breakdown. And if you guys are watching, you can look at this breakdown, make sure you can see it. Very Good. Okay, so 7% emergency fund, 15% taxes, 23 opex. Okay. Owners comp. Okay, so one thing I would say right off the rip is 23% opex is going to be pretty low unless until you have employees. Once you have employees, you're probably going to have less spent on new equipment.

But your OPEX will probably go up usually around for window cleaning. I see that being more around 30%.

Okay, all right. I think you'll eventually have less new equipment. They say on a $500,000 business, you typically don't need to spend $50,000 a year on new equipment.

Owner's comp. Oh, and employee payroll. Oh, oh, oh, I see. Okay, got it. You put owner's comp and employee payroll plus the 23 OpEx. Got it. Okay, so that's 48 total, like OpEx plus owner's comp. That makes sense. Okay, we're on the same page. All right, so of that 10 profit that goes to an account dedicated to doing good in the community in some way. Okay, cool. Second question. So what's this question?

Okay, so what's this question? Okay, so I think you're asking like, how do I grow as fast as possible? Where it really comes down to you probably put the 10 back into customer acquisition. Like if you just look at these numbers. If you took put your 10 profit and you can hold your breath while you're still having your current job. If you put this money 10 profit back into the 7% customer acquisition cost, you would more than double the business in the next year. And the next year you would double it again, which means you basically more than triple it in the next two years. So. So.

The more you can transfer from this profit into customer acquisition cost, assuming you have a good cap to LTV ratio, customer acquisition cost to lifetime value ratio, then you should keep pumping that lever. Second question. Most of my clients are on an annual semi annual plan and average ticket price for exterior windows is $315 to $500 two to four budget hours. And for exterior and window interior windows is $799 to $1400. 711 budget hours. My variable costs are basically only filters squeegee rubber, gas to drive to the job and soap which comes to less than $15 per job instead of a pure water system. Well that's cool.

But my indirect monthly costs are they list off Copilot, general liability, car insurance, Zapier, QuickBooks website, Slack, JotForm, health site reviews and banners and 100% buffer for anything else. Okay, cool. Plans to go to 4 to $5,000 monthly recurring revenue, quit my job, go full time growing to 4, $200,250,000 then hiring one or two crew members and me focusing on sales and admin. Other services I will eventually add once a new equipment category lines up are gutter cleaning, sky jack system and Christmas lights. I want to keep it pretty simple. Do you see any red flags, anything that I'm missing or a clicker route to be able to get to quit and go full time into this? I definitely went more systems heavy at the start because I have a technical background and wanted to have everything run through Slack so the admin wouldn't take away from my full time job. And when I quit my 9 to 5 it would be easier transition. But my systems are all set up now. So now my focus is on growing the company. Thanks again for answering the long question, Mike. Okay, all right, so first off, to everyone else listening to this, I can't do this for everyone. This is Kevin though and Kevin is the first question ever submitted on a Mastermind. So we're going to give him a pass but try to condense these in the future because otherwise we're not going to be able to get very far. Okay, so I would say a couple things, Kevin. I would challenge the assumption that you need to add these, these other services in like gutter cleaning with a skyvac system and Christmas lights at only your current size and even at 200,000 like I genuinely believe, like I know that they're in your market. There are companies that do over a million dollars and just do cleaning windows. So like just focus on that one thing. It's, it's also a service that can be done since inside of the house it can be done year round. So it's less.

Seasonal than something like Christmas lights. So I, I don't want to add seasonality if I have like I only want to add a season, another service to combat a current seasonality issue in the business. And I don't think that you need to have that right now. You can add that down the road and I would do that once you have a huge database of customers from window cleaning that you know, immediately you can upsell. I'm sorry, it's just a cross sell into the sky, back into the Christmas lights. But I would keep it simple. I would try to grow past $500,000 just using the lights right now. I think that's very doable.

The second thing I would say is, in terms of this part right here, this is mostly. I don't mean this in derogatory, Kevin.

This is mostly in your head. The difference between $4,000 and let's just call it $8,000, okay, your plan is going to four to five. So right now you're probably at two or three. If your goal is to get to 5,000 monthly recurring revenue, let's just call it six or seven. The difference between where you're at now and six and $7,000 a month in revenue is literally pounding the pavement. This is literally you being like talking to your spouse like, hey, for the next three weeks, every evening I gotta go sell. Like, you can do this in three weeks? 100%. Like, if I was you and you're like, I really want to do this. And like, this is where I'm going, I would give my two week notice. I would. Every single evening, two to three hours a week, I would be doing door hangers. I'd be posting on Facebook telling all your friends and family you're going full time and you're booking out on a schedule. I genuinely believe you don't need to have more money to do this. Going from say $20,000 a month in revenue to 60 or 70. You're gonna have to be advertising. You're gonna have much more systems in place. You're gonna probably have to invest in another truck, equipment, et cetera. That's a very capital intensive. To go from 2 to 3,000amonth in revenue, which it sounds like you're at now, to 6, 7, 8,000amonth revenue. It literally is a matter of dedication and investing time. And I believe that can be done two weeks or two years, depending on your level of commitment. And so the delineation, a difference between someone who takes two weeks doing what I just mentioned versus two years is simply like, how aggressive and how do you get with it? All right, two out of nine. Next question. Some bends. Enter all ashore. Where did you get your custom hockey jerseys made? To be perfectly honest, I don't know because Marcus.

One of our owners, is at Augusta and used to be my general manager. He bought it for me. And so shout out to Marcus. Marcus, he listens to this. He can comment, maybe on the Facebook group where he got the hockey jersey. But they are fire. He got one for the leadership team.

Last year.

For each of us. Jarrett, I can't mention can't pronounce your nice name. Sorry. I'm gonna say it's cool. And you have a silent S at the end of your name. That's what we're gonna go with. So we're gonna call you Jared from Diamond Lawn Care and Snow Service Ltd. How do I implement one click estimates as a non Augusta business? I see there's a path in the marketplace but require the download code. Yeah. So you don't need Augusta to do the one clip estimates. There is inside of Copilot University a video on email links and then I made a business use case for how to do one click estimates. So it shows you how to do it in the email links video and then right below it I talk about like when to send it, how to send it, how to create the emails. We are seeing a lot, a lot in the past three months, ever since February, there's a lot of changes around emails, AI time, topics. Like so many services. There is a ton of services that are now offering like spam detection, clicking on links prior to getting your inbox. It's. It's becoming less accurate, the email links thing. So I've been talking to a lot of people seeing how we can try to fix that. But like I just generally believe we're up against the biggest firms that are figuring out things like spam and privacy and they don't want track link, link tracking, et cetera. So be careful of that. I would just test it out in your market, make sure it's accurate enough. I realize that you're probably going to have sometimes where it says that someone clicked on a link and they didn't and they will say like I didn't click on it and they didn't because they have some sort of service, email service that is clicking on links prior to opening up their inbox as a spam detection virus kind of prevention system. So keep that in mind. But join the Cobalt University. There is the email links training and then there's a secondary video in there where I talk about the actual business case and how to set those up. So the marketplace has those for Augusta because we share that with our owners and they can just download the templates. But I walk you through exactly how to do it Inside of Copilot University, Sarah Williams from my Michigan Landscaper. How do you create an estimate for a level billing service agreement with budgeted hours. Also, is there a way to create estimate templates for different services? Example snow plowing, landscape installation, lawn maintenance, had a culprit and wasn't able to receive any gas. Okay, so your estimate templates, I'm going to guess you're talking about format because that you can't change much of. But what you can do is change the items and services with pictures, links, videos, whatever you want to bake into the description. You can do that. So I would probably push you in that direction, is like go make really, really good descriptions with like links or videos or pictures or however you want to do inside of each item and service. And then when you create the estimate, you just do this in the drop down and use it that way.

In terms of a level building service agreement with budgeted hours.

I don't think you'd ever want to do that.

Yeah, because usually a level building service basically is like this. To give it like a container. It's like, hey, look inside of the cup. The level building service agreement, I put water and the water includes, you know, all these other services. So you do landscaping. So it could include mowing, bush trimming, weeding, mulch installs. But it's all inside of this cup, which is the level building agreement. Now the water, the stuff inside has budget hours for every single visit. But the, the level billing agreement is just a shell that contains all the jobs. So the level billing service agreement, the reason we don't put budget hours to it is because it doesn't have budget hours. It is a container that holds jobs and the jobs have budget hours. So I hope that makes sense. That's probably why if you're talking to support, they might have been a little confused because usually level billing doesn't have budget hours. But I definitely know that the jobs inside have budget hours because when the crew shows up to the job, they're not servicing a level billing agreement. They're servicing the jobs that are contained inside of the cup inside of the level building agreement. So think of the level building agreement is just like a financial machine. A financial tool required to contain all the jobs. And each job has budgeted hours. Because when I show up to the job as the crew member, I need to know the budget hours for just the lawn mowing, just the weeding, for just the mulch. I don't need to know the budget hours for the whole level building agreement.

Especially when you're doing paid for performance, it's really important that each job has budgeted hours, not for the entire estimate. Oh, Sarah has A double question. Oh no. Next question number five. Kayla Bartlett, Spruce Lawn Care. Would something like an answering service payment go under cogs since it's a variable?

What all is supposed to go under cogs, by the way? Okay, so cogs are cost of goods sold. And just because something is a variable cost does not mean it is a cog. Cost of goods sold are going to include your materials, your direct labor, which is your guys out in the field actually doing the work, your subcontractors. For the vast majority of us, that's really all you got to think about.

So your answering service is overhead. It has nothing to do with actually performing the work. How do I know this? This is a good way to kind of summarize answer this question is if your answering service went down, the jobs that are currently on the schedule would still get done. So like the, the, the answering service is required to get jobs, but is not required to do the jobs. Like what is required to do the job is materials, labor and any subcontractors you might use. So that's that Think about like raw ingredients. So for example, if we're making this airpod case, the cost of goods for this airpod case are the plastic required to this. The plastic, the metal, the nylon, etc. That goes into making this. The cost of this is probably like three bucks. The cost of the materials, then the labor, probably 10 or $15. Right. So then you'd add that to it. And then they probably have some subcontractors that do certain elements of the molding or the lighting or the electrical components. So all of that together would be the cost of goods sold. And then.

If these are being sold for 150 bucks, they're probably like an 80% gross profit margin, which is revenue minus COGS is your gross profit. Then you have underneath that you have all of your overhead expenses and that's going to be things like your answering service, your office, your rent, your insurance, etc.

All right, six out of nine. Adam Burkett, pristine green lawn and landscape.

What do you do in the first 24 to 48 hours as well as the first couple of weeks? First month of a new customer signing up for Mellon, do you do any sort of follow up, check ins or touch points with them? Do you think having a great experience in the beginning stages of them signing up with you will have a higher retention rate? This is a great question. I'm going to prescribe a YouTube video to you. Give me one second, I will pull it up. It is under the.

Phone service Millionaire Mike Andy's channel. Let me pull it up. Let me pull it up. I would highly recommend watching this based upon this question. Share this tab let's see it is this.

It wasn't very much watched but it's probably one of my best videos.

This graph Triple My Business.

Yeah, look at that. The low view count video is always close. I think it's this one.

It is called this graph Triple My Business. Yeah, I'll never lose a customer. It's going to talk about the onboarding process for a customer. Did I share that one second. I'm sure I'm actually sharing the right thing. Yes. Very good, Very good.

Highly recommend that an automation sequence automation every single time a customer gets a their job, first job on the schedule, for example. Like that'd be a touch point when they get their first job completed and that could be another touch point asking for surveys, etc.

So we have a lot on the roadmap about this that I'm not going to talk about, but certainly parties down the road. Blake Moore, Moore's Mowing. You've recently run into trouble with bad candidates and high employee turnover. Any tips for more optimal screening or ways to find the best employees? Additionally, at what rev handing mark and number of field crew members, have you found it necessary or optimal for an owner still wearing all hats? GM sales operations plus many hours in the field to transition partially or largely out of the field in order to handle the growing sales and operational roles better? Okay, so you have typically from 0 to 200,000. We're going to be focusing on being a labor. Right? You're going to be mostly doing the workout field and then you're going to go from 200,000 to usually around 800,000. You're going to be a very good GM, I. E. Manager. Like that's your role as a manager. Manager. I'm going to guess, I'm going to guess that you're probably in that 500 to 800,000 range, which is tough because you're kind of stranded between that position where you really do just to manage your crew and train them and hire and like. But you also are starting to get close to the architect stage, which is 800,000 plus. That's now the role. 800,000 plus. You're the architect. You're going to have someone doing. You're going to have someone else doing the office and you're really focused on more strategic things, acquisitions, train your general manager, train your sales team, etc. And so you're probably in that 500, 800,000 range, if I had to guess. It's usually when this happens, when you start feeling this way. And in terms of bad kids and high employee turnover, I would really first be looking at their compensation model and then I'd be really, really zeroing on your onboarding sequence for your team members. Like, do you have a two week training program? Do you incentivize the trainer if the trainee stays on for the two weeks? Do you incentivize the trainer on the first paycheck when the employee that they're training goes solo and they get a bonus if they do above base? Like, I would really, really look deeply at paper performance. But then incentivize the onboarding process with your current team that they get trained really well.

All right, we got two more, folks. Connor Hutchinson from Augusta. One, two, question one. Would copilot ever have the ability to track sales for different people with level billing? I'd like to pay estimators an additional commission over the first six to 12 months of a client services with us. This will incentivize selling realistically, not just to close the sale, but to keep expectations realistic.

Okay, so the first part's easy, the level billing part. That part we. That can be a little more difficult. Let me think about for five seconds. Give me a second. This would require like compensation models, essentially a percentage commission, essentially, that then would have to track against like the course of time. Like if someone turns. Essentially. Here's what I would do, Connor, to make this work. Now give me a second.

So give me one second and get something, see if there's. I could use this.

Contacts.

Okay, let's see here.

Oh, I just realized I'm not sharing my screen. Sorry, guys.

This is the question that's being answered right now.

Mr. Hutchins.

Okay, let's see here. There is.

So what I would do if I was you right now, I would make a custom field for your salesperson. And then you could, you could keep track of it that way as to who did it. And then if you lost a level billing contract, you could have some sort of incentive. Let me think about that for a second. Okay, Right off the bat, Connor, I can't think anything automated to do this, but you could keep track of who sold the job. And then when someone churns, you could, you know, check who sold the job and do something around churn.

You could also just incentivize based on churn rate. So again, what percentage of recurring customers churned out? Or if you want to do it just on level Billing, okay, what number of level billing customers, how many turned out this month and then giving some sort of a comp scaled plan based upon churn. So hey, there's growth, there's profit and then there's churn. Those are your three basic metrics of a business anyways, it's like incoming revenue, how much churns and then how much turns out profit. So those are like the three cornerstones of a compensation model is revenue, churn, profit. So you could, I would probably honestly, especially if someone's juggling a bunch of different things because what you don't want to happen when a new sales person comes on is if they're not, if they're, if they're not compensated now based upon keeping old level going contracts they don't care about. And so what you don't want to have is like, well I didn't sell the job. So like you know, if they lose, if they leave, who cares? It's, it's not on my, not on my comp plan. So I would probably say hey, here's the benchmark of percentage. If you get above this and below this and have it some sort of sliding scale just like hey, it's 2%, 4%, 6%, 8%, 12% churn and then some sort of sliding scale or bonus system. This is exactly how we do it. We literally at co pilot for support. It's based upon their percentages of churn.

Okay. Will there be improved UI on follow up calls? Yes, yes, this is in the short list. I think being able to track it on the job without editing and putting internal notes would be nice. Maybe like a checkbox. The first five follow ups. Connor, I think I mentioned this elsewhere. Yes, this is, this is on list and so it is obviously near and dear to my heart in terms of what I've talked about in my content. It's something that I think we can really, really improve. And that is from the estimates page be able to see at a glance when and how many follow up calls have been done and make it really, really integrated. So yes. All right, last question. Last question. Number nine is from Mr. Deng from all ashore. Where did you get your hockey jersey made? I think we asked this question before. Good apps and resources make branded card stock literature. Just about any online printing company is going to have card stock. I'm a big fan of doing printed to do card stock and just get paid extra. It feels so much more premium and anything premium means I get to attract things. You charge premium prices. So.

Dope marketing, Vista Print this is like literally a good thing. I really honestly canva they're expensive. I really like the fact that I can design and immediately get them printed from the same page. Very cool. All right, folks, fantastic. First mastermind using the form. If you have more questions, again, that form is up in a featured post of the post top of the Facebook group and go check it out. I appreciate you all for being here this week and we will see you next weekend. Take care of.