Copilot Mastermind 1/11/2025

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Copilot Mastermind. This is our last mastermind before next week's Blue Collar summit. So very much looking forward to seeing a lot of you in person. It's going to be Thursday, Friday and Saturday. John Taffer from Bar Rescue is going to be heading up the very first keynote. I'll be doing a long workshop all of Friday, Saturday, 30 minute slots for a really great lineup of speakers. Really looking forward to it. There are several more tickets available because we moved out the dining area. So now it's just one conference center that will then go out, get the food and come back. So we do have some more spots available. So if you want to go back there, blue collarsummit.com feel free to book your tickets at that event. We are going to be voting on the MVP award which if you have not seen that, you might literally have 12 hours or less by the time you get this. So just go to copilotcm.com MVP we're going to be voting on who had the biggest personal and business transformation inside of copilot circumstances CRM in the past year in 2024. So whoever wins, we got a $10,000 check to go to Italy with their family and then everyone that applies or submits their video is going to get a day, an invite to come out here for a day to the headquarters with myself and I'll help you hopefully with your business and just do Q and a, et cetera. So really looking forward to it. Blue Collar summit next week, the MVP award. It's going to be a fantastic time. You'll also be able to see the entire copilot team in the booth outside at the venue. They'll be showing a lot of the different demos of things that's coming in 2025, getting feedback, surveys, et cetera. So really looking forward to seeing you all in person. Let's go ahead and jump in again. As always, if you have a question with the Mastermind you can always submit a question just in the description of this video. There's a link, it goes to Google form. You can submit that, that that Google form link is also bookmarked and at the very top of the Facebook group. So if you go top of the Facebook group underneath featured posts there's has this form that you can tie into any time of the week, submit your question and then I'll answer it here on the Mastermind. First question is coming in from Christopher from Great Lakes Lawn and Stone. Do you charge the same amount for all services? For example Should I be charging the same hourly rate for lawn care and gardening services? If not, how do I decide the difference on these prices? Thanks. So as you add more complexity and services, typically you do have to have varying rates because the amount of inputs in terms of labor are different for a different skill levels. So if you're having someone pull weeds and turn bushes versus someone that does excavation and installing paver patios, you're going to have different rates that are required of the employee. That being said, on pay for performance, if I'm giving a percentage of revenue to the employee, by having different, varying skills of labor, I'm able to charge a different rate for the lower skilled labor and a higher rate per hour for the higher skilled services like excavation and trenching, irrigation, etc. So I tend to like to have approximately the same percentage for the different services. The caveat to that is if you have a very product driven service, for example chemicals, I'm not going to give 25, 30% of the revenue to the technicians. The reason for that is because higher customer acquisition cost, usually a lower annual customer value compared to other services and so usually maybe 10, 15, 18% is going to the tech. So but in general, as a broad brush, if I am charging a higher rate per hour to the customer and it's a higher skilled service, I then need to pay my employees more that are doing that work. But the percentage of labor revenue I give to them can stay relatively constant. So for me personally, if you have to have start having varying degrees of base pay, varying degrees of a Percentage comp on P4P if you have to start doing that, I would really question whether or not you're, you're adding too much complexity to the business. But I think much more in terms of like how do you build a business that runs without you? If you, if you like custom build, if you like doing big projects and you like being part of it, and you like being a project manager, you will probably have to start installing different levels of compensation throughout the organization. But I would personally tie it to a percentage of the labor revenue. That way if it's a higher skilled service that I'm charging $200 an hour for, then they're gonna make more money versus the person that I'm only getting 80 or $90 per hour for, they're gonna make a same percentage of revenue, but therefore a lower hourly rate. So that's what P4P kind of fixes this. That problem is you can still charge a higher rate for different types of services and then the corresponding pay to the employee does go up.

Next question is from Marco from Estrella Lawns. Hey Make I'm curious to see your opinion on us hiring a call center that is a fixed $300 per month plus 50 commission for every lawn mowing or project one. I believe it includes a human answering the phone and getting quotes on the spot, support calls and AI answering service. Is it worth it compared to paying for the for the minute with Jill's office? I spoke with someone they mentioned when trying to grow to 7,800 thousand dollar marker. If I focus on sales and estimates only, no infield work, I will still be able to answer phone calls and do all the estimates and sales since my day isn't going to be filled with pure estimates with Jill's office to answer anything that I can get to and charge only for the minutes it took them. So is it so if I'm able to answer the phone the majority of the time we will have a fixed expense of $300 per month without utilizing it much. So.

The thing is whether or not you can do all the estimates and sales and still answer the phone calls comes down to what kind of services are you doing? I would be pushing you to well, if you're like well I do mostly simple services, well then why are we not doing instant pricing like from the website? Just give them ranges to be able to choose from. That would be my go to because it's very difficult to be answering the phone throughout the day when you're doing sales because if you're talking to a customer for 20 minutes, your phone rang three times and then you get back in your truck and you're late for the next appointment so you put those off and it starts piling up. So typically reactionary things like email and phone call I want to be able to hand off and you know, the flat $300 a month it does hurt, especially during the off season. I get it, but I don't think you're going to be able to. I have not seen most people be able to do a 7, $800,000 business, do all the sales, all the admin and run their crew. Now if you had one other overhead position like a crew manager or a operations manager, maybe you can make that happen. But usually I have not seen it happen. Unless you have slowly grown the business over time. It is extremely simple service. I'm talking one to three services max. And you've automated your sales.

In terms of using this per commission for a call service. I'm not a fan. Most of the time because I see these services not do a great job on customer service because they're not incentivized at all. So they're incentivized to get the message and hang up as quick as possible if you're just paying them by the lead. So they usually don't do a great job of collecting payment information, doing work order changes, going back and forth on a customer that's unsatisfied. So as much as I don't want someone sapping the time, I understand that notion. But you can usually hear that if that's happening on phone calls, like if someone's putting someone hold for 20 minutes, like, okay, they're sapping the clock unless they man, sometimes they'll manually take that timeout. We do the same thing at command center if someone's on hold, like we're not going to charge a franchisee for that. So the bottom line is if they're only follow, if you look at the incentive, you see the outcome and the outcome here is going to be that they will do a great job on getting you more leads and they'll probably do a great job of upselling. But when it comes to an unsatisfied customer, they're not going to be looking to take care of them. And I've seen usually these services do a poor job of billing, invoicing, complaints, anything that's not related to like an incoming lead. And so my question is, what would it be better just to automate the sales part, if that's what you're looking to try to do, and then be able to spend that money on getting someone who answers the phone and is thrilled about solving the customer's problem. Also, you're betting against yourself here because the bigger the business gets, this $50 can get abhorrent. Like my location, this would cost.

20. It's going to cost like 10 to $12,000 a month at least in the peak season. We'd probably have 15 plus thousand dollars in just this, like incoming leads from the phone. So it can get very expensive if you're going to grow and you're going to expand. And if you tack $50 on every sum, every single incoming lead that you pay for, that's going to be expensive because like and most, most time, if you can get a customer for under 100 bucks, I'm like, go for it. Especially if you have a good customer acquisition or a good lifetime value, a good churn rate. If you can get a customer 100, I'd back up the truck and usually pick them up. That being said, if you're, that means that in order to hit that mark, you've now got to actually get them for 50 because you had an extra 50 that when they do call in, you're getting charged for. So this could literally double, actually think, probably more, but at least double your customer acquisition cost. And that could cost a whole lot more than, you know, a thousand or $1,500 for someone to answer your phone by the minute. So I've rarely seen the per minute pricing be more expensive than these commission based ones. And usually the customer service side lacks when they're being paid based on commission. And I've looked at these like a lot because it's a huge thing for us at Augusta Lawn Care and it's a, you know, thing that we really, really track and monitor. So I've looked at these a lot. I've tested Jill's Office and Call Boss and all these other companies to see what works. I've seen their price structures and what are the incentives for both parties. And usually especially if you're smaller, if you're gonna, if you're gonna have a $5 million business, doing per minute is probably gonna cost you more.

Not compared to like commission, but compared to just doing your own stuff. But if you're under a million, it is very difficult to warrant paying someone's salary, getting rent, buying equipment, et cetera, instead of paying someone two or three bucks a minute. Especially if you've automated a lot of your sales, automate a lot of your automations, you can automate your billing. A lot of that stuff can be done automatically. Website, you'll get there. Given the pricing from the website. A lot of this can be automated. Um, and so as that continues to happen, I think that the per minute pricing is just, just gets better and better for smaller operations. If you're doing under a million, like generally it's very difficult to, okay, I'm going to pay someone three or four thousand dollars a month minimum, plus their tax and everything. Let's just call it five grand for a decent office manager, for five grand for that, and then two grand for an office that is bigger and has actual office space, utilities, Internet, water, sewer, all the stuff that's required for an office, another thousand. All of a sudden you're literally looking at increasing your, your, your fixed expenses by seven, eight thousand dollars a month. Well, extrapolate that out, that's like eight, nine, it's like ninety, ninety thousand, a hundred thousand dollars a year. So now quickly, very quickly, 10 12% of your revenue is going out to the door to that. And I'm being very conservative. There's a lot of businesses that I see that are spending a minimum, minimum of 15 to 20. I've seen some 25 plus percent on just admin. And so it's very difficult to pair that against a permanent price because it's, it's a variable expense. That is when you get busier, yes, your rate will go up and yes, it's like, oh my goodness, they're so expensive. But then when your leads go down by 60 and 70%, you're, you're, you're, you don't have a fixed expense, so it just goes down. So yeah, that'll be my 2 cents on that. Brian Fox from Fox Pro Landscaping Best practices regarding naming conventions for services and products. Last year I was in, we had so many services listed and some of them were overlapping, et cetera. Example, trimming versus pruning, while different, they are pretty much the same. Then we had mowing for less than 5,000, 10,000ft, et cetera. Yeah, I'm a big fan, whether it be of profit and loss statements, whether it be of balance sheets, whether it be of any report, minimization of categorization. And the reason I do that is because if I can't chunk it down and it like, generally speaking, if it's less than 1% of the P and L, for example, I want it wrapped up into something else. It does me so little good. If it's like, well, there's 1% went to this and 0.4% went to this and 0.3% went to this. It's like we're talking about one or two transactions a year when we're talking about P and L. I would say the same thing when it comes to items and services inside of copilot is I would just keep it to where it is. Okay, how much did we do for mowing last year? Oh, that's very easy because there's one item called mowing. And I've seen some people where they literally have 50 to 60 different items and services for mowing. Like mowing front yard only mowing backyard only mowing at 3 inches, mowing it 2 inches. Like use tags, use custom fields, use job notes. I would recommend that mostly for the sake of reporting. So I'm a huge fan of reducing the number of categories you have in any report because that's when it becomes useful. And if you don't have if it's not useful because it's so split up and broken up and there's like literally pages and pages of categories and pages and pages of items and services. You have a useless report. So the reporting can be accurate and be useless because it's simply so broken up. So I just recommend I would look at your services and be like, okay, what's a service that we do? We do mowing. Great. Everything to do with cutting grass is there. Okay. Bush trimming, property maintenance. Like you could even lump, like property cleanups. Bush trimming, weeding, brush clearing, spraying weeds. Like all that could just be under property cleanups. It's like anything to do with like just cleaning up the property. But throw bush trimming into it, throw weeding into it, throw anything in the beds and shrubs into it. I would rather see that and only have like see 6 to 10 different items and services compared to I've seen some that have 10 to 15 for each and every one of those. Like trim small shrubs, medium shrubs, and it becomes like just a maze when it comes to reporting. And then that's when reports mean absolutely nothing is. Is they're so broken up. So this is my $0.02. Not necessarily the right answer, but that's how I think about it. Nathan Kyle Hart from Hart and Sons Landscapes. It seems that there's not the ability to have subline items under the services listed in the estimates. For example, on a service autopilot, we have the service and then we have a dump fee, credit card fee, and drive time added to sub lines and are not shown to the customer. Does copilot have the ability to do that or are we missing something? Yes, you're thinking of what we call sub components of or components of an estimate. We do not have that yet. Basically, it's where they are hidden items from the customer that make up the main item. So this is something that is in discovery and throughout 2025, you'll probably see a message from the product team. Be like, hey, if this is something you used in the past, we'd love to get your feedback on what we're building out. And so the new estimates, designer side of things inside of the the customer portal, that'll be the first thing that comes out. And then there'll be iterations on top of that. And a big part of that is line items. So there'll be a lot of discovery around this in 2025, but we do not currently have it where you can hide pieces and subcomponents of an item inside of it. We don't have that ability right now. What I would recommend for now is like you'd build out your, your pricing structure or whatever inside of say, you know, Excel document, for example, like all the different stuff you put in, how many of each one you have gives out the price and then you use that inside of Copilot. That would be something that potentially might be helpful for you to actually build out the pricing itself. But we don't have some sub components or like those hidden items that make up an item inside of an estimate. We don't have that yet.

Mr. Anonymous from Klein Lawn Care and Snow Plowing. What are the pros and cons you experience when having employees work on a rental during downtime? What would make doing this successful as well as fixing trucks, doing shop work, maintenance, et cetera in an efficient way without their, without being there to guide them along. This is like the most inefficient use of labor. Basically you're, you are paying them to stay busy. And so I would recommend because I did this for a long time, I actually bought my very first house. I think I was like 19 or 20. It was a rundown, it was 90, $95,000 I think I bought it for. And I did it simply to keep my crew busy and we just like worked on it throughout the winter, et cetera. Horrible use of funds. Horrible use of funds. I went way over budge on that. Mostly due to the fact that it's just my, my labors, they're way less efficient than someone who does it every single day. And so I do not recommend doing this. It opens up for liability issues as well. By the way. Unfortunately nothing happens to us. But like I've seen this happen before. Someone gets hurt doing construction when it's like you don't have that on your workers comp or your insurance. So as a note there, secondly I would just say like most of the time what will work better financially is giving them a return to work bonus. So I'm going to be talking about this a ton next Friday at Blue Collar Summit. Recommend you be there. But one thing is like you can calculate what your return to work.

Dollar amount should be which makes it relevant based upon like how much does it cost you to replace an employee. And I generally believe that the majority of your team will come back to you in spring if you simply tell them when you come back we will give you X amount as a bonus. And, and furthermore you might pay for their health care benefits over the winter, etc. And so even if you have to spend two, $3,000, it's still a Lot cheaper than keeping someone on payroll for three or four months. That is 15 plus thousand dollars. By the time you look at taxes and wages. It's a lot cheaper to give them two grand. And so if you don't, you had a good workplace. If you pay them well, if you pay them above market, if you have good benefits, etc. They'll come back. And especially if you incentivize them. So I've just time and time seen, again, it cheaper to do that compared to doing things like construction work or having them do projects around your house just to keep them busy, because that's ultimately what you're trying to do. And I understand that. But I, in the past, I would spend 70 to $100,000 of cash every single off season doing that. And for that reason, I can never make a profit. And so do not recommend do that. All right, everyone, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your weekend. I look forward to seeing all of you at Blue Collar Summit. There will be no mastermind next weekend here at Copilot because we were going to be in person. And I'm looking forward to. We do have one specific Copilot presentation from Josh Kale, our VP of Product. He'll be on Saturday. Just a quick one and 30, 30 minutes, right after we hand out the $10,000 check for the MVP award. So if you haven't submitted your video, which you don't have to be there in person, you can just submit your video. If you're not able to make it, you can still submit your video. Just go to copilotcrm.com MVP and I look forward to seeing you all in person. It's gonna be fantastic event. Make sure to see some of the engineers and the support team, sales team, inside of the booth at the Blue Collar Summit. If you do show up, we're gonna be doing a bunch of surveys and showing you getting feedback on a lot of the stuff that we're gonna be planning for 2025. And a lot of it is mostly improvements, but there's some other things that we want to get some feedback on as we do some discovery work. So appreciate you all tremendously. Have a fantastic weekend and we'll see you at Blue Collar Summit. Take care.