Copilot Mastermind 10/05/2024

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome another Copilot Mastermind. Let's go ahead and get started. If you would like to submit a question for the Mastermind, this is now our second week of doing this. Go to the very top of the Facebook group, underneath the featured posts. There is a post there that gives the link to a Google Drive, a Google form, and you can fill that out anytime. And so in the past we've made it where you have to come on live or you have to post a comment on a certain post. Now it's always there. So anytime you have a business question, you can drop it in the form. Couple updates quickly from Copilot's aspect of things software. So, as we talked about last week, here's a news thing. We have the lowest amount of bugs we have had ever at Copilot. So we have made a huge strides. We were down more than 80% and we, we still want to reduce our current bug count by another 70, 60 to 70%. There's always gonna be bugs in any software, but we need to get to a manageable threshold and then below that. And so that's what we're working on. However, that's one of three teams that we currently have working on the engineering front. We also have two other teams. One work on more backend infrastructure and another one working more the front end. And a lot of things that you're going to see. And so their first release is gonna be in the next six to eight weeks. I'm really looking forward to sharing that with everyone instead of kind of sharing what that's going to be. I just want to be able to release it and have it where it's more of a surprise. Not a surprise as much as I just want to get back on the track of being able to deliver based upon the feedback we get from members instead of just promising that we're going to be offering stuff down the road. So I think it'll be really, really good and deliver on the things that we've said in the past we were going to do and we had to pause for, for 2024. And so I'm really looking forward to it. So keep your eyes peeled for that and let's go ahead and jump in to the questions. So again, if you want to submit your questions to this form, just go to the very top of the Facebook group. There's a featured post where you can submit your questions. Let's go and get started. From Aiden Hacksica. Sorry, I apologize for brutalizing the name. From Duck Pond. Landscaping. I have a key employee that has real GM potential. He's graduating next year and plans to keep working with me. So I feel I need to give him that promotion to keep him around or he'll seek a better opportunity. I'm doing 250k this season. Should I double shoot to double next year to make sense of having a working GM or risk losing him for one more year to keep profitability higher? Okay, so this is a good question. Is it like, really the question is, do you build the business around a person? In general, I don't recommend doing this unless they have proven themselves in a role and then you're adjusting the business model to accommodate them because you don't want to be involved. For example, a lot of times I see people get a general manager and the general manager is just kind of stressed out of their mind. And if they just made the business a little bit smaller and increased prices, they make the business more profitable and the GM's personal capacity would be matched. And, and so I see that one work a lot of times because the GM has proven themselves to be a great gm. You're trying to modify the business to match them. What I don't recommend in this case, I don't recommend this. And that is changing how you're going to grow the business. Because the reason is because contraction. You can sell off assets, you can reduce your advertising spend, you can increase prices and make the business smaller and more profitable. If you're going to go out and buy trucks, buy equipment, hire more people, expand the business, do marketing and sales to get more leads, you're expanding, you're going to take a big risk, and they might not be there in a year or two when the business actually can afford a general manager. I would also say at 5, 600,000. I don't think your business needs a general manager unless you're not going to be there. And so to think that you need a General Manager at 500,000 means that that general manager is going to run the daily operations without you being there. And you're going to be an absentee owner. Otherwise, if you're going to be in the business doing sales, et cetera, you don't need a general manager at 500,000. So in my opinion, this is one man's opinion. A general manager can do a great job between 500 and $800,000 in annual revenue without losing their marbles. I see this as the most profitable range. Have I seen locations do general managers at 250, 300,000? Yes. Usually you're going to be topping around your profits around $10,000 a month. You just won't get much more above that. Typically there's not enough meat on the bone, which is fine for some people. One of my executives has a location that literally he does that with and $10,000 a month just prints that profit pretty much every month. And he's okay with that. But if you're going to try to get a little bit more than that and make more profit, you're usually going to be looking at 500 to $800,000 in revenue for one general manager. And when you start getting above 800,000 is when I see most of the time, uh, you almost enter the second wilderness. We always talk about 200,000 to 500,000 revenue and revenue being kind of a wilderness. He's like, stare on that 2, 300,000 or jump past 500,000. Because I don't see a lot of difference in profit between that, that size of business. The same thing is true between 800,000 and 1.5 million. And the reason for that I think is, well, now I'm seeing this more and more. So I'm very confident in saying that between 800,000 and 1.2 to 1.5, it's a bit of a slowdown of profitability. The reason for that is because you usually need a second management position. And so a general manager can, typically a good general manager can manage up to 800,000. If you're like, well, I'm, I'm an owner and I'm doing 1.2. Yeah, you're the owner. But typically a general manager that you're paying a salary to and they're not an entrepreneur, then you're usually going to be looking around 800,000 as where they start kind of getting above their capacity. And so usually what you do is you go hire an office person, you lease it an office space, you go get another an estimator, et cetera, well, that's fine. But now you've got to get past 1.5, like 1.3, 1.4. But I just say confidently 1.5, you've got to basically double the business to accommodate the fact that now you have a second non revenue producing person in the business. And so in my opinion, the only reason I would double the business is and put this general manager in place is if you are leaving the country or like leaving the state or like you can't be there and you, the only way for this business to survive is for you to grow it to the point where a general manager can run it. Otherwise, I would grow it sustainably. I would focus on profitability. I would keep growing. I would create. Creating systems in place. I'd keep educating this person. And if you're afraid of losing them, be really honest about them, with them, about the trajectory of the business. Hey, we're planning to do 350, then 500, then 700. Around that third year, I'm gonna start transitioning to general manage management position. Because what you don't want to do is start building the business around someone and then they leave. And all of a sudden you're caught with the fact that you don't have a general manager anymore and you've built the business in a precarious or risky way. So just be careful of that. I'm not saying you shouldn't. I just made that mistake early on.

Kevin Ginty from Wink Exteriors. Very cool. I like the name. Here is a link to a limit word count, a Google form response to prevent longer questions like mine from last week. Oh, I'm not gonna do that. That's fine. That's hilarious. That's awesome. So you can actually limit the word count. That's funny. Google forms word limit. That's funny. She's a word limit in the description. Let me see this. I'm sorry, I'm just scrolling this article he sent in. He's basically tattling on himself. Come on now. Oh, I see. Regular expression. That's funny. You can put the code in there. Set an error message. Oh, man, that's funny. That's okay. Don't worry about it. It's all good. It's all good. Kevin, your. Your question last week was really, really solid and unfortunately audio. Last week I was in a coffee shop. Wasn't great, but the question was good and I think the material is awesome. So I'll let you know if there's anything that's way above across the line. Okay. Marco from Estrella Lawns. Shout out to Estrella Lawns. Posting some good, great pictures in the community. Recently on the Facebook group, when you were in operations, did you ever attempt to directly call your database to cross or was it always one click? Email text campaigns. Does Augusta send a video to a new lead, educate them about that, about why they should choose Augusta? Okay, so how we look at this is this is a level A distribution of effort and effectiveness. So the more effort you put in, the higher effectiveness you're going to have. It simply comes down to time. Like if you have a lot of time on your hands, and you're not getting a lot of leads. I would recommend the most intimate form of follow up, which is literally walking to their house and knocking on the door. Because if you're only getting one lead a week, that's what I'd be doing. Then it's like, okay, well if I'm getting a one or two leads a day, you know, it makes it super inefficient for me. Okay, now then, now you're going to call them and then it's like, okay, well can I do anything better than that? Yeah, you might. You actually text them a video. Oh well can I use Copilot to do that? Yes, go into Copilot, you can send them a link to a loom video and walk them to you. Their estimate, you can like there's, you can use that or if you go even further, use your imessage and you could actually send them an actual imessage. Because most people have iPhones, they see the blue and like, oh, this is a real person. Even further. So it's like what level do you have in terms of time, in terms of follow up and in terms of going after new leads in terms of cross sells and upsells, which we're talking a ton about this specifically at blue Collar summit, so highly recommend you come for that. But if you're cross selling or if you're upselling, yes, you can do upsells automatically inside of Copilot and have the templates. And if you have more time, I would just use the button. So on the upsell feature inside the app, someone can click the upsell button if they think the customer needs a service. You know, click on what service they think they need and then you can make it where it shows a little handbag on the dispatch board. And every time you see that like, oh great. Oh, the, my crew thinks they need a mulch installation, for example, I'm going to, instead of just sending the template, which you can automate, I'm going to actually make the customer a video and send them an imessage. Like almost every person watching this mastermind has got a video from me. I would say almost every single one. And I make those right here every morning, usually between 3 and 5am I'm making videos right here. And so those are real, those are, those are not fake. And that is coming from me. And if I was going to another level, because right now I email those to everyone, if I was going to another level, I would send those to imessage to my customers and like, well, how am I? I don't want all my customers having my. My phone. Get another phone line. This will cost. I just got a bunch of iPhones for my my sales teams. $45 a month. Cause I'm adding more lines. It's gone from like 60 to 55 to 50 to 45. Like it's worth it. Trust me, if you go get a phone from like Grasshopper or any phone line, you're gonna be paying easily 30, 40, 50 bucks a month. Just go get an iPhone, use imessage, have a separate phone so you can turn it off and customers can't bother you if you're worried about that. So it's like what level of time investment are you willing to give is really the determination of. Do you mass email? Do you text? Because text is going to have a higher response rate, but it's going to require you in your inbox responding back to them. It's not going to be a one click where it's just like automated completely. Then it's like, okay, well if I'm doing upsells, do I have it automated where immediately send out a template. You can set that up inside of copilot or do I want to do it where I just see on the dispatch board and I make an imessage for that customer? I think that would crush. Like, I highly recommend if you're not using the upsell feature inside of copilot, watch the videos inside Copilot University. Make it where it doesn't go automated. Which again is all a matter of time. If you have 10 of those being sent out a date, you're not probably going to have time as the owner to be sending out imessages. But if you have one or two upsells coming from your career every day and you need work on the schedule and you're not booked out far, make them a video and send them via imessage and I guarantee you you'll get a response like, hey Bob, Mike over here at Augusta Lawn Care just wanted to reach out. The crew's over your property that they just left a couple hours ago. But they said that you look like you need some molt installed on your property. We'd love to get that installed for you if you would like that done. Go ahead and just send me a message back. I'll get an estimate within the next couple days and we'll get that installed for you. Boom. I guarantee you that will outperform any email, text message or anything else that is automated. So it's just a matter of like, what level of automation do you want to have? And I would be looking at how far you booked out and how much time do you have as the determining factors of what level, what scale. On that sliding scale, are we going to actually interact with the customer?

Jose P. From Crystal Green Lawn Care in Hutto, Texas. How do you go about training multiple people at the same time for the spring rush? One person training them overhiring would affect the efficiency of the team and lower their P4P. How would I keep them incentivized during that period? Great question. So let's handle this two different ways. First off, how do we do multiple people? All right, you got to have a system for the interview process. You got to have a system for their first day of work. If you're going to hire 3, 4, 5, 10. I've done up to 20 people. You did a little bit more before. So at command center, we've done more. But in the field, I think I've had up to 20 people in a room for the orientation day. And so orientation day is fully stacked with everything from culture to how pay for performance works to training out in the field to safety, et cetera. That's when we're doing a whole bunch of people. Because I don't want to spend an entire day with one person 20 times. I'd rather do it one time with 20 people. And so the more people you have in terms of onboarding, the. The more I'm inclined to do a mass training. An onboarding day, you can make it really detailed and go really in depth and spend an entire day versus spending like, say three or four hours every person and wasting, not wasting, but spending an entire week on those. Those individuals. Especially if you're hiring frontline team members, a good chunk of them aren't gonna last more than three to four weeks. This how it's going to work. And so you. It becomes a waste of time. And because of that, in your brain, you start to devote the value and reduce the quality of your onboarding experience for the team simply because you start to be questioning the validity and the chance of them staying with you for, you know, three, four, five months. And so because of that, you start. Your onboarding gets less and less and less because you have. You're tired of expending energy and then someone not showing up to the next day of work. And so that's why I do. I'm a fan of group training for your team members in the field and then make it really, really good. Like crush it. Do an entire day, take them for lunch, do the whole nine yards, safety in person, outside training, et cetera. And then the after that as well as throughout the year when I'm just sprinkling a couple crew members to basically fight attrition, then I am going to have a really good training system for your trainer and you have a trainee, the trainer on pay for performance. To answer your next question here is they are going to get a per hour bonus manual adjustment inside of P4P. You have no idea what I'm talking about. Mike. Andy.com P4P it's free training, walks you through how pay for performance works. If you want to use the software, it does integrate with Copilot. It's kind of cool in terms of incentivizing the trainer. We give them a per hour bonus when they're trainer when they're training and then they also get a bonus if their trainee makes above base pay on their first paycheck after being trained. So we keep track of this every single day of their first two weeks we have a checklist of what they're supposed to be learning and their trainer is supposed to has to sign off on that in order to get their bonus every single day of those two weeks when they're with their trainee.

Kevin Ginty from Wink Exteriors Window Cleaning what is a good pay structure for someone to get out? Instant quote. Door hangers say average ticket price is $400 for annual or semiannual. What CAC should I be looking to stay under? So your average ticket price is a piece of the pie, right? Because you gotta, you also gotta know like how often are they gonna come back to you? Like what's the lifetime value of the customer? Because if it's $400 for annual, for example, and that's your ticket price, let's just say it's semi. So like let's say $600 is your average annual ticket. You know, average annual value. You know, if it's $600 per year, do you usually do people for two or three years? Well then now all of a sudden your lifetime value is fifteen hundred. Well, if you have a fifteen hundred dollar lifetime value, your customer acquisition cost has much more flexibility than if it's just $400. So really this is dependent on your ability to keep people from churning and keep them from leaving and your ability to upsell them into other or cross sell them into other services that would increase this ticket size from say $600 if they only stay with you for a year to 1500 2000, $3000. The company that has the highest lifetime value is able to spend the most money on customer acquisition cost and still make sense of it. And those are the companies that grow really big are the ones that are able to increase the lifetime value farther than any of their other competition and thereby making sense of being able to spend more than any of their competition on acquiring new customers. And this is why people go into markets and they spend gobs of money buying out competition and buying out leads is because usually, usually they have perfected what it means to upsell, cross sell and keep customers. So the lifetime value of the customer is two to three times what their competition is. And their competition is like, how do they even make sense of buying customers for three $400 customer acquisition costs? That's crazy. And they're running ads and TV and billboards. Like, how are they making sense of that? And if you tear back, there's training for sales, there's training for their crew on upsells, there's, there's, when the technician goes, they're assessing the property, they're when they do the walkthrough, they're selling them on the next service, they're upselling them into a better package, they're cross selling them into a different, other type of service that's adjacent. This is what the biggest companies do. And the reason they do it is because they're able to increase the lifetime value of the customer. And if you increase the lifetime value of the customer, you're able to outspend your competition. And if you're able to outspend your competition, you will keep marketing when everyone else stops and you'll be able to take market share. So very cool. Great Mastermind today. I hope you all have a fantastic rest of your weekend. Look forward to next week. Again, if you have any questions that you want answered on the Mastermind, go to the top of the Facebook group. There's a featured post and you can enter your questions directly into the form. I love you all. Have a fantastic week and we'll see you next weekend. Take care.