Copilot Mastermind 10/12/2024

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to another copilot mastermind. Welcome to everybody. This is our third mastermind where we submit the questions via the form. And let me tell you, I just opened it up and we have 23 questions for today. So buckle up, it's going to be a wild ride. But we'll jump right into questions that have come in from our members here at copilot. Let me just share this. There we go. I think that is sharing well. Okay, now let me just format this correctly in terms of size. A little bit better. Very good. All right, let's get started. 23 questions. We're gonna pound through this. Thank you everyone for this, for your participation and let's rock and roll. Carl. Caleb Bartlett says from Spruce Lawn Care, would you recommend taking a business alone or line of credit out for $20,000 worth of marketing? Had success in the past, just didn't have enough cash asking for a friend. Okay, so I would only spend money on marketing and get a loan for. If you absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt knew your customer acquisition cost very, very confidently. The reason for that is because with something like a truck or a piece of equipment, if you go out and get a loan, yeah, it might depreciate by 10, 20, 30% and then you have to sell it. If things go bad with marketing, since it's gone, like you will get no residual value from that market, those marketing dollars. And so if you're not very confident, okay, If I spend 100 or 150 or $200 or whatever it is, I will get a customer. If you don't know that and be very careful about spending money on marketing and going into debt for it. I should say, I think most people should spend more money on marketing. The vast majority of people should spend more money in market. I'm very confident in saying that. However, if you don't know your customer acquisition cost and you're getting debt, that does not go away and you will keep paying residually in interest and principal on that loan. Whereas there is no residual value to paying money on ads unless you get customers. You need to know what that dollar amount like out of that $20,000. Will you get 100 customers? That's $200 customer acquisition cost. Will you get 150, will you get 200? Like you really want to ask yourself that question and know it before getting any debt whatsoever. Easy Lawn care for Ezra. You Recommend Average of 3 months Revenue for cash on hand. Is that. Is this also the case for slow season or is that increased based on fixed expenses being proportionally more during the winter. No, I do consider it, you know, still a benchmark during the winter because the average of your last three months of revenue is, is going to be lower during the winter. Now keep in mind, if you're going to go from winter where you're not, you have a lull and then go into the spring rush and you're trying to expand, you're probably going to need more cash. So for, for Augusta Lawn Care, like when we talk to about talk about distributable cash and, and general managers, we have it in the compensation agreement around profit sharing that going into that quarter if the owners to the owner's discretion, they can with withhold and not have distributions go out if they think that the company needs more cash to get into the winter and expand. So from a cash on hand perspective, I don't think it's a problem. I would say for the vast majority of us, we just put our energy towards like fixing this problem in terms of Q4 and so that there is no slow season. I say in my book, like off seasons will keep you poor. So at conference blue collar summit coming up in January, I really recommend everyone be there. I genuinely believe we will fix this problem for every small business regardless of what industry. And so we're going to take a very kind of theoretical approach and take five different ways that you could do it and then we'll have scripts and really practice every single one of those and run the numbers on it. So highly recommend just fixing the off season, quote unquote problem because the number one reason why in my opinion H Vac has recently gotten so much money invested in it from outside is well, two things. One, they're very tech enabled. Two, they have a very, very good counterbalance to heating when it's really, really cold outside and air conditioning when it's really, really hot outside. And so because of that they get great valuations and a lot of money is poured into that industry.

Because of the.

Seasonality gap has been removed. And so that's why a lot of money from like private equity is poured in there. Kevin from Wink Exteriors I've seen before that it is smart to run your business from day one as if it's going to sell one day. What are some things I need to really focus on to make sure it's worth something 15 to 20 years down the road? Does it matter if I don't technically have contracts but more of a pay as you go, slash cancel anytime model from a Valuation standpoint, customers are on recurring plans like annual, semi annual, quarterly with cards on file. Yeah. So like you know, you're, you're, you're zeroing on one aspect of selling. I think that yes, having contractors is going to help evaluation. The thing is this, if the new owner comes in and does a bad service, they're going to keep everyone for, you know, quarterly or for the rest of their annual contract and they're going to leave. So it's more a matter of do you have the systems in place to retain customers regardless of whether or not you have a contract binding them to the business. So you know, if you're, if your churn rate is say 20% a year, a lot of that is people moving, etc. But like can we get that down to 15%? Can get that in 10%. If you can get your churn rate from 30% down to 15% or from 40% which once I get above that level, to that level, I know there's customer service problems 40% in it depends on the industry, but just in general 40% like if I can get that to 20%, I will double the lifetime value of the customer. And if I can double the lifetime value of the customer means I can spend twice as much on marketing in order to retain, in order to make the math make sense still. And so generally the company that can spend the most per customer will dominate because they can continue to outspend their competition. And so I would really look at it as like if someone was really going to buy your business and try to scale it, that's what they're going to be looking at is like what's the lifetime value of the customer. And so whether you hold them, do a contract or not, that lifetime value is determined by whether or not you keep them and whether or not you have churn and your pricing. Kevin Ginty from Wink Exteriors. I heard you talk to Sam Gustin about having an S Corp and all your locations as separate LLCs under them. If you were me to just getting started and plan to eventually scale the multiple corporate owned locations down the road, would you set up the structure from the start or wait till it is relevant? Also, is the main benefit from an admin accounting perspective to only need to file one tax return on the S Corp. Does this give the same benefit of an LLC tax as an S Corp? Yes, you're exactly right in terms of the latter. It gives basically the same benefits of an LLC tax and S Corp. There is a little bit more red tape and legal Stuff that's required in terms of like annual minutes. You have articles of incorporation around your S corp. It's handled slightly differently if it's actually set up as an S corp versus just being taxed an llc taxes and S corp. I would not set this up until it actually makes sense. I would say once you pass three locations, it's probably something you want to look into mostly from an asset protection perspective, as well as the fact that you can take a W2 from one company, that is the S Corp, the holding company, and then you can not have to file tax return for every location. So we have 10 locations. It could cost you an extra 20 grand just in filing fees for the taxes, let alone all the other stuff that goes into keeping all of those entities actually where they're going to the government. But also the. Because you still got to maintain the llc. And I still want the LLC in order to have asset protection. So I don't want one location that say has five or six trucks. They get an accident and then someone can come sue me for all 50 of the trucks inside my, my entity. I want to have the LLC that are very, very separated as much as possible, like different bank accounts, different insurance, etc. So it's asset protection slash. You save, you know, two grand a year on filing fees with the IRS in terms of one tax return. It's also just nicer to have one W2. Also you can take losses to offset the gains of other LLCs underneath that one, like all of, all of those deductions and all of your expenses and everything going into one tax return. So if you have a really, really profitable location and then you start a new one, you can just offset the gains of the first one with the losses for the first year or two of the second one. And that's really, really nice. Instead of having whole bunch of returns and some of them have negative, negative dollar amounts to the irs. Now some people will say that matters, some will say it doesn't. I don't like to submit a ton of years back to, back to back of negative returns for a specific entity. So what I can do is I have one entity and I'm going to have multiple inside that are profitable, others that are, you know, growing and they're negative. But I don't have to worry about the fact that these ones might say negative for a few years in a row, which can, can get fishy to the irs and then they audit you. And if you've been through an audit, you never want to be one through One again, I would just recommend everyone pretend as if you need to have an audit tomorrow. Like just always be that way. HomeService CPA.com it's my firm. Brad is the CPA that I use and I highly recommend and I think it's really worth it to do your taxes correctly. Uh, I've seen way too many businesses and these are the stories everyone hears about because no one goes on after getting an audit and going out of business because of it to like brag on social media. No one. Like everyone just goes into a hole and dies. Like like literally in their mind, they get me out of here, they'll go get a job, they'll go into bankruptcy court and just try to figure it out that way. And so I just, just please do everything as if you're going to get audited. My recommendation. Speaking of him, Sam from True Smelling Follow up question for how to transfer funds between LLCs and S Corps link below is a diagram of how we are thinking about transferring funds. Primary goal is to ensure our GMs are getting bonuses on distributable cash. The owners are getting distributions and the amount left in the S Corp to deduct to dedicate to future growth of locations. Can you please provide any insight on if I am way off? Okay, so this is basically if you didn't see this, I did a coaching call with Sam Gustin. It is on the home service Millionaire channel. Feel free to look at it. He is now sharing this document from Canva. But how he's going to share money within the company. So let me just. I haven't seen any of these questions by the way. So give me two seconds. I am going to dive into this. Give me one second here. So we got three llc. We're going to an S Corp. You're looking at your total monthly cost from command center wages. Okay. Revenues. This is ideal case. So this is probably like your 2026 look, I'm guessing because I think right now your second location is smaller. Your first one just. This is probably a couple of years. Okay. All right. So monthly revenues. You're looking at your revenue share. Okay. Command center expense found at six grand a month remaining cash minimum working capital distributable income. There's your distributions to the S Corp. Okay, so what's the green? Okay, there we go. Top right. Okay. Monthly S Corp distribution is around that. Shareholder distribution is 75. Remaining amount in the S Corp is 4,000. Okay.

Yeah, that'd be fine.

That'd be fine. Just keep in mind Any money that goes into that, like that the S Corp, Okay, I see you're doing here. How you move this cash is irrelevant from a tax perspective. Just FYI, like, your tax situation will not change here because an S corp is still a pass through entity. The money that goes, whether it's in the LLC or in the S Corp does not matter. Everyone that says, like move money to this account, it doesn't matter. It's a pass through entity. Like any money made in any of these LLCs or transferred to or from this S corp is all going to show up as one P and L to the irs. And so whether or not you take the distributions, whether or not you put the money in the LLC or in the S corp, you're going to be taxed the same. So that is a completely different subject. Just FYI, now we're talking about like, does this make sense from a distribution perspective, a general manager profit sharing perspective? I am looking. Okay, so there's the bot at the bottom. That's the money going to them.

So 5600. So LLC 3, we have a S money. Okay, that's. Oh, I see. Oh yeah, I see. The red is command center cost. I see.

That's smart. Okay, good. And a $3,000 S Corp distribution.

Post GM profit sharing. Oh, okay. This is post GM profit sharing. Got it. Green going into the S Corp. Got it. And then you would take a distribution of 14,000. Yeah, I think it's cool. And then the money that would be retained so that we retained earnings instead of S Corp would be what you use for future locations. Yes, I think that is very good. I know several people have, have liked your diagrams in the past, Sam, in terms of what you've shown. So that's cool. I think that is good and I approve. So yeah, and like that's 7, 8. You're gonna. 8, 9% cost for command center. So that's good.

And.

I think that's probably gonna go higher than you think. Just to be, just to be perfectly clear, I looked at what you were spending on wages and stuff. I do believe that's probably gonna go a little higher. Joe. That'd be the only thing I would, you know, as a warning flag there. The cost of that as you go to four people and then five people is probably going to be required, especially during spring rush. So especially during spring rush, that number that you have for the cost of Command center will probably go up, I would say 30% higher at least.

Okay, next question is also from Sam Gustin. Can you please provide advice on offering health insurance coverage to your employees. What is the average monthly expense per employee for the company typically? What phase of business should a company start offering this to their employees? And is there any specific policy advice you should get could give for a company that's unfamiliar with this. So I would honestly, I've seen like a ton of health plans. We have one that we go through for all of Augusta Nation that is kind of like a preferred vendor and they give us a little bit of extra benefits. But honestly, the vast majority of people, whether you use QuickBooks, whether you use ADP, whether you use Gusto, any payroll provider, any of those, most of them have an easy way to just quickly add healthcare benefits. I would honestly just use those. They're easier to be able to sign up for. They're usually pretty tech enabled. So it's easy to sign up. It's super straightforward. It's easy for your custom for your employees to log in and out of like the app, et cetera, et cetera. So like and get their health card information, et cetera. So highly recommend that I'm going to switch over to my Ethernet. Give me one second. This might bug out for just a second. I'm going to go off my wi fi.

Okay. Are we back? Okay, cool. All right, next question is from Caleb Barlett from Spruce Lawn Care. What would an iPhone video message for a cross sell be like? Yep. So basically you're going to make a video on here, not making it on your, you know, you're not going to send it through Copilot as a link. You're not. You can send like a loom or a video link from YouTube. And in copilot the problem is it's not going to be an imessage. So if you want to send it as an image, you got to record it and send it from your imessage. Whether that be on your desktop or your phone, you got to actually send it through the app. So usually you're going to have to compress it or have it under about four minutes long in order for it to be sent.

Cameron McNulty Keep in mind the one downside to doing that is if they don't have an iPhone, sometimes that can get pressed a ton and go through text and and it gets really, really blurry, just FYI, depending on the device. Cameron McNulty, Bloomington MOE and Snow how does business valuation work in the lawn care space? For example, a location that has 600,000 800,000 in annual revenue with a working GM in place. My guess would be a business model like this is a higher multiple than one mammoth location with a lot of key man risk. What would someone's net worth be with a business like the one I just mentioned? 6 to 800,000 with a working GM. So there's several things you gotta look at here. How many assets are in the business, but also what is the amount of profit. So a business that is doing in home services that's generally under 5 million is going to be mostly looked at from a profit perspective and a multiple of that profit. And so the multiple of that profit is determined by all these other variables. So for example, if someone's like, well you know, I'm going to pay two times earnings plus the assets. Okay, well then if this $800,000 business can produce $150,000 in profits and distributable cash to the owner, then we would say that's $300,000, two times that plus the assets, which maybe assets are 400 grand. This business would sell for 700,000. And so how do we get that multiple higher than one or two is going to be? The owner never shows up. There's multiple managers in place, there's a regional manager over, over the general manager and there's multiple locations. And this is not a matter of being more profitable. This is a matter of getting a better multiple on the profits that are made. For example, I would rather have a business that is ran without me, has managers in place, et cetera, and is doing a million dollars in revenue. Let's do, let me do like a more distributed model. I know a lot of people like doing it. So let's do five locations, 600,000 a pop, doing 3 million each with a regional manager over top of that. I am not involved in any of the hiring, marketing, spending, budgeting, anything like I literally never show up to any of the locations. I don't even hire the GMs. I would rather do a 3 million dollar business and on that business be 10% profitable. That's $300,000 in distributable cash. And that's gonna take you a long time to build, just FYI. But let's assume that we build that and it's making $300,000 distributable cash. 10% is coming to me as the owner. Let's say it takes me 10 years to build it. I would rather have that model than a $3 million one location that has a general manager, an office admin person, a salesperson, a project manager and a mechanic at one location. The reason for that is because two things. One, the key man risk of my mechanic leaving, my project manager leaving and I have to cut services, my admin person leaving because I built out a complex services model to get to 3 million, there's dependencies. Also if my general manager goes down or my estimator, I'm going to have to probably go hire someone from outside the company instead of having career progression inside the company as well as be very expensive. So I would prefer the model where it's more distributed, but not just because of the $300,000. Let's assume the $3 million company does $450,000 in distributions to me as the owner. I would rather have the still have the distributed model where I'm not involved. Because I just don't see a lot of $3 million companies where the owner is completely removed from the business. Like it's passive. I don't see that very much. And so the reason for that is because usually they know that if their general manager goes down, someone's going to step in and it's going to be the owner. And if you have that business, your multiple is just lower. So I'd rather have a $300,000 business with a 4x multiple on the business in terms of my valuation than a model where I'm involved. There's a lot, a lot more key man risk and I get more profits, but I only get like a 1x multiple or maybe a 2x multiple. And so from a valuation perspective, if you're thinking about that, that's why reducing key man risk is important. Having where like there's no dependency on the owner, you don't have to show up. And if something bad happens like someone else is there, keep in mind this is at a larger size business, you're not going to do this if you have one location. So like if you have one location doing 600,000 to 800,000, I don't think you're going to have a general manager with a regional manager. That'd be what you would not make profit. And so you're still the backup in this case. And so I would say like the next level after this is to have a backup to the GMs. That's, that's when your multiples will go higher. But at this size of business, you're usually gonna get 1 to 3x multiple on profit plus the assets. That's like the general rule of thumb. One, two and three is very different. Right? So one is probably gonna be like profitable business. Been in business at least five years, has a steady stream of leads, et cetera. Step two is probably going to be the fact that you as the owner.

Are just the backup. You're not there in daily operations, you are just the backup. 3x multiple. This is very general by the way. I'm not like giving everyone financial advice. This is like generalized number three would there is a backup to the general manager and if anything goes bad, you are not involved or brought into the discussion as the owner and you are not involved in any money or hiring decisions. That's probably what you're looking at to be perfectly honest. And again, as you scale up that multiple increases, if you're doing 10 million in revenue, that's being different versus if you do 500,000 in revenue.

Caleb Bartlett from Spruce Lawn Care Should I still do PVP in the wintertime or just do base pay only? I'm doing winter services by the way. Yes, if you're doing winter services where the team is kind of fixed based upon the timing, there's still a lot of opportunity for people to pay for performance because they can cut down on the jobs, the time between jobs and that's where most of their waste is. So getting the jobs, getting out of the truck quickly, etc. Is still a huge opportunity for them to be able to cut out waste. So I would still institute pay for performance. There's probably a cap. They're not going to make it like an extra $15 an hour on pay for performance during that time, but they might be making extra 3 4$5 an hour during the winter still Jarrett from Diamond Lawn Care and Snow Service I implemented one click estimates with help from Copa University do you ever recommend cold outreach via email or phone call to get home service customers? I've seen some new tools especially with calls which automate calling, qualifying and setting up a future appointment for prospects. Is using one click estimables or AI calls as a form of outreach viable for a home service business? Or is the value of pre qualified intent to buy more? So I am not opposed to this. I think this is good. I would be very careful about using bulk email from your URL, especially from Copilot because it's going to bring down your URL Email deliverability Be very careful. I've seen a couple of people this inside copilot already because we don't limit anyone on emails and they get in there and they just will like take a scrub a list from their local area and throw it in a copilot and send it out and then if 1% of those get marked as spam immediately. Now, your estimates don't get to in the boxes. Your email, your invoices don't get into customers inboxes because they all be marked as spam. To be very, very, very, very careful with the strategy if you're going to use other tools. I would probably keep it outside of copilot. I would keep it on a different URL or domain name because I've seen this over and over where people trash their URL and then they literally have to change their website because none of their emails are getting to customers. To be very, very careful. The same thing as text messages. I've seen a lot of people do this inside of copilot too. Like they're blasting out text messages and then deliverability is just tanking. So be very careful with this. Yeah. Sam Gustin from troops mowing. I'm able to find. I am able to get the following data by leveraging a few reports and manually tracking data outside of copilot. Can you show us how to calculate the following with the tools and reports readily available to us within copilot A locations churn rate? Yeah. So right now, this is actually something I have in the features I want to include copilot down the road. Basically all this would be is you're taking the number of recurring customers that you have at the beginning of a month and then how many customers leave during that month is what you divide it out by. So for example, if you had 100 recurring customers at the beginning of the month and 18 of those people leave this month, you have an 18% churn. So you look at the number of recurring customers at the beginning of the month. So right now you'd probably 100. April 1st. Cool. Right now in copilot, there's no way to go back in time and see how many recurring customers you have. So that's something we want to do down the road. But that's how you do it at the beginning of each month. I would just be like, how many recurring customers do we have? And then keep track of all the customers that leave. So cancel service and you could probably do a filter on canceled services and then a date range of customers if you want to do that, the end of the month. So if I was you, beginning at the end. Well, beginning or end beginning of the month, I'd be looking at how many customers do I have. That's a data point I need for the end of the month. And I'd be looking at last month. I mean, how Many customers left. And it's basically how many people paused or canceled, depending on how you're setting things up in copilot their recurring service and then date range it and then that would be your number for last month's turn. Keep in mind, that's gonna be very seasonally impacted the average amount of month or year the customer stays with you. So this is actually just indicative of number one. So if you take your churn rate and you divide it out, you come up with how long do they stay with you? So for example, if you have a 4% monthly churn rate, they're on average gonna stay with you for 25 months. So two little over two years. So if you just know churn rate, you actually figure out how long they stay with you. And to your point, number three, then you'd figure out your lifetime value or customer. So all of, all of this is kind of dependent on each other. So you can take, you know, what is the average monthly annual spend and multiply that by how many years they stay with you. So for example, you have a churn rate of 4%. That means they stay with you for 24 months or, sorry, 25 months. And so that's, let's just call it 2.1 years. For the sake of this example, let's say that you on average customers spend $1500 with you per year. So, so $1500, multiply that by 2.1, you're looking around a 32, $3300 lifetime value of that customer. And that's just gross revenue. If you want to figure out your lifetime gross profit, then you're going to take out your, what percentage of wages, direct labor is coming out, material costs, et cetera. We're doing this exact thing at Blue Collar Summit. I'm going to figure all these numbers out, FYI. Um, but right now, is there a way to do that in copilot? No, it's definitely on the horizon. I want, I want to do some lead tracking stuff down the road that would tie into that and make it a little more automated. You kind of got, you got to kind of track your leads in order to make that super efficient. David Binder from asap Earth Landscaping and Lawn Admin is the worst headway headache in the world to us. What is the ETA on AI Max and will he be available to non franchise owners? Yeah, so we're not going to make available to owners outside Augusta Nation. There's other tools already out there that you can get off the shelf for a couple hundred Bucks a month that are pretty good. You're not going to customize it quite as much like we do with Max and like integrate it into our services, into Copilot and stuff. You're not going to do that. But there are services out there that you could get. They use Zapier to connect and we connect a ton with Copilot CRM in terms of Zapier, so. So I would go that route. It's gonna cost you a couple hundred bucks a month. We are not opening up Max AI to the public. Yeah. We're just not like. It just. It's very expensive for us to modify little things that makes it customized. And if we opened it up, we'd have to like dramatically decrease how specific Max is able to be on the phone. And that's kind of what you get when you get these out of the box ones. Right now you kind of get like templatized stuff. And it's fine. It's better than not answering the phone. So if I was you, I would probably just set it up to where like after hours it gets routed to that line. That's probably the route I'd go.

And you know, usually like Max is like more than 50% of the time, Max is not distinguished as AI. But we tell people we're a virtual assistant. A lot of the ones out of the box people can tell right away. So you just tell them right off the bat, hey, we are out of the office. But I. I'm the IA agent and I can take your information. We'll get back to you like, that's fine. But they're usually not going to be able to distinguish between things like Christmas lights versus lawn care versus mowing versus an unhappy customer and like split everything out that's just not quite there yet. So yeah, we are doing some cool stuff next year with, with Max, but I think a lot of those services that out of the box will get better as well.

Steven Thurston from Thurston Landscaping llc. If we do multiple properties at the same time, how do you suggest we do time tracking? I have a few routes that have eight to 10 houses in a row and haven't been able to figure out how to track it. Can we cluster start jobs and have the cluster run as one ticket when trying to budget hours, or is there a better way? I'm just missing. So we don't have this right now. I know this is on the roadmap for some people that do this. The thing is, even if you do bulk, like where you have Multiple people clocked into one job or sorry, you're clocked into multiple jobs at the same time. Technically, the time tacking isn't accurate if you're just dividing that number by five. Right. Because some people say I park my truck and I do five houses. Well, unless those five houses are exactly the same and taking the exact amount of time the same. If you clock into five, it takes you an hour and it just divides it by five. It says 12 minutes was at every property. That. That's not accurate either. So right now we don't have the cluster to your start in. To your point. Cluster starting jobs. It is something we have thought about. I want to do it in a meaningfully way. A meaningful way. Right now. I would. I would say probably right now, like, yes, you're probably going to have to edit the start and end times if you're doing that to make it accurate or just have your crew like your crew leader people that clocks in, out as you finish the jobs. But if you're kind of doing all at the same time, that's tough, that's difficult. I understand that.

So we do not have the ability to cluster start right now.

Steven, CSA lawn care and plow. Why does copilot not have an option to give a credit customer a credit on their account? A credit that does not affect payments like it currently does.

So you could put a credit and then just hide it on their client portal. So there's a setting where you can have it where they don't have a credit on their. They don't see that on their client port and they can't add the credit to another bill. Now, I would talk to ATC over this because they see a lot more than me. We don't do a lot of credits, to be honest with you. So I don't see a lot in my businesses. But talk to them. But what I think you would do in this case is you would hide the ability for the customer to see in the client portal and then they can't apply it to a future invoice. And then you could just. However you're trying to do this, I'm assuming.

Credit that does not affect payments like it currently does. Yeah, I might be on the same path as you, Stephen. So book a call with ATC Air traffic control on Zoom and see if they can find a better way than I just mentioned to you. But I'm. Yeah, I might be barking up the wrong tree, but I would probably say hide the ability for the customer to apply it to an invoice you, you can do that as a setting in the client portal and then on your end you'd be, you'd be able to just not apply credits to an invoice as you're making payments. Probably what I would do. T.R. pirsch from GAZE on boys. You once said that when you start a new location you budget 80k. Can you break down what you spend the 80k on to help anyone thinking about starting a business? Thanks Mike. Yeah, so now I'm usually more than 100,000. 80,000 was a few years ago and now I'm really, I, I personally want to get my location above 30,000 as fast as possible because I know it starts to become profitable once I pay a general manager salary, etc. And to get there in a few months you got to spend a significant amount of marketing. And now two trucks I'm going to buy usually pretty close to new, I'm going to spend 30k on those. Now do I think that you should do that on your first location? No, but I'm doing multiple locations. I want two new trucks, I want new dump truck, a new new dump trailer. I'm spending a lot more so I'm looking more that 100 to 120 range. Now when I'm starting a location I want to spend 20 to 30k on marketing. I want to blitz the market, get it above 30k as fast as possible.

So if you want a full breakdown, search, multi location empire. Mike, Andy's on YouTube and I give a budget not just for one location but for like six locations over the course of 10 years. And how to build that using that budget?

David, from the lawn care company, what are the capabilities of your existing API? Oh, you're getting into what I'm sharing as a data driven platform. What kind of push do you intend on having regarding the availability of an open API or major increases of the capabilities of your API? Okay, so I don't want to spill any of the beans. So there'll be big announcements about this David, before the end of the year I will say that by having our API actually created, which is the first step, then we can do several things. First off, we can create an offline mobile app so that when people are at job sites they can take pictures, add notes, start and stop jobs and still it all collect the data and then once it get back, get back in service, it'll sync. It can also using the what's called REST API, we can also open up to integrations with other services, other softwares, et cetera. So this is all in the works. And by the end of the year, David, you will be a happy man. Now, over the course of time, as we grow larger at Copilot, it becomes more attractive for other services to want to connect to our API because they know they'll get more customers if they connect to us. So there's little like ancillary SaaS, products, software as a service that you might like and they're not a CRM. And so a lot of times they'll do connections with Zapier, which we do now. But having an open API basically allows much more integration and their development teams will then be able to tap into Copilot. So this is on the horizon. I am pro open API. If you want to. If you're asking about that, we would like to be able to connect to other services and allow them to connect to us and et cetera. I don't want it to make it where you're dependent on them because I don't like when I buy like a. Oh, this is only $100 a month and I got this $50 a month and this $100 a month, all this sort of thing. It's one of my biggest beefs against one of the CRMs in our industry is you can't do mass text or email through their platform. You have to connect to Mailchimp. Mailchimp alone from one of my businesses will cost over $700 a month just because of the amount of contacts that I have in the database. And so like, that would be like double the cost of just the CRM. And so, yeah, I don't want to make it where you're dependent on those third party providers, but I do want to make it where if you love a certain tool that they, they can build a connection through the API.

Will Kelly military long cuts. When you send a mass upsell text out and a lead response with stop, do you delete their account or add an unsubscribe or do not tag. Do not tag market. If you do tag them as do not market, why keep their info on file? All right, this is a really good question. There's actually a.

A help article. Let me see if I can find it in like 10 seconds. All right. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. All right, we're going to grace period. Could I just, just pull up? Boom. Why can't I open this? Sorry, I'm trying to find slack. I should have just gone straight to the. Okay, I'm just gonna go straight here. Okay, secure I'm opening up copilot. I'm going support, I'm going help articles. Yeah, this is way faster. Okay, so here we go. So we're gonna go to text.

And you stop.

No, let's do. Oh, unsubscribe, unsubscribe. There you go. Unsubscribing from SMS text messages as a customer. Boom.

So this is what you're looking for, Will, right here. How customers can unsubscribe from text messages, they click the word stop. If they do that, you've been successfully unsubscribed. Keep in mind.

It'S not going to tag them or anything like that. However, what it does do is they cannot get messages from you. So it's like it's actually on Twilio's end, which is how we send out text messages. They will like not allow customers to get back in. But what's cool, they can reply start and it will resubscribe them. So yeah, if you really wanted to tag someone, keep in mind you're going to get this message inside your copilot inbox. And so if you wanted to tag them, you absolutely can do that. But you don't need to to keep them from getting any text messages. But keep in mind it will block them from all text messages that are coming through.

So yeah, this is the one you're you're looking for in terms of.

In terms of a help article. But yeah, it's going to keep all messages going from them. Like they can't get anything from, from your text. So keep that in mind.

Okay. And we're back. What would you say if you tag them and do not market, why keep their info on pile? I would keep it on file so you can call them. Right. So like you still want their phone number but what's cool is like if they click stop, it'll prevent text messages from going through, but I still want their phone number so I can call them and it'll prevent like any mass texts from going out as well. So they won't get marketed to Will Kelly from military long cuts. When a GM sends out a mass monthly upsell text, I'm talking to two K plus leads and he was supposed to manage that workload Command center or the working gm? If it is the working gm, he doesn't know how to map a property or do admin. But without the gm, existing command center gets slammed with work. How do you handle responsibility between the working GM and command center? So yeah, we put the responsibility in command center to manage the Inbox. But again, like, you know, we have enough people at command center and not all of our locations send out text at the exact same time. So we're okay. But. But if all of them sent out a text blast and we had thousands of leads that would really burden us. But they don't like people spread them out throughout the month. Some of the beginnings at the end, different types of offers. But I would put this on your command center in terms of managing the inbox. Otherwise like someone on the field as a general manager would be just annoyed if they. You're literally getting 40 text messages the day after you send that. They would, they would be pushing away from doing that marketing method when it's very, very powerful. So I would probably put most of that. You also respond faster if you're a command center and you have your computer pulled up. So.

Caleb Bartlett from Spruce Lawn Care should bonuses beginning cash gift cards are just added to payroll. So technically the answer is added to payroll. You need to be paying taxes on them. Now there is ways to be able to do. I think it's up to $600 per employee. Don't quote me on that. Look it up in your state. I think it's up to $600 in cash bonuses you can give out to employees. There's a rule around it. I forget what it's called. The law thing was passed. But yeah, you can give a little bit of cash out, but you're not going to be able to take this deduction underneath wages on your P and L like when it comes to taxes. So talk to your accountant. There you go. Sam Gustin from Troops Mowing. Can you provide effective taxes to get verified for Google Maps for a new location? We love to keep our admin costs down and avoid getting a hundred thousand dollars a month office in the area for the sole purpose of getting verified. Yeah, you know, ultimately Google wants you to have a real location. They just do. And so I genuinely believe that they're just going to keep cracking down on this more and more and like all the loopholes will get closed. So whether it be getting a UPS store and getting a suite, they block that one. Now you got to do verification video like the address. There's. There's a lot of ways they're trying to crack down on this and ultimately like if you don't have an office, I think eventually there's, it's just gonna be almost impossible. Now are there current loopholes? Yeah, like you could try to like verify at someone else's address and put your Sign in the window or like park your truck out front or whatever and like kind of trick them into it. I believe that down the road they'll have the ability for customers to be like, say this, this is like a false address. And there's already ways to like report certain profiles and if someone pulls in the address and you're not there, they report it and Google will suspend your account. So there's an ongoing thing. I actually am in favor of it to be honest with you, because it will make the legitimate company stand out and so I am a fan of it as much as I hate it when it happens to anyone. Anyone.

Being suspended from Google is like just an absolute pain in the neck and I wish it on no one. Not my worst enemy. However, it is one of those things that I think is actually good for the industry long term. So it will allow, it will allow the companies that are more established and are legitimate and insured and bonded and have a.

An actual office to stand out. So do you need an office? No, you just need an address. So when you go out and get your shop space you just. Does this place have an address? So just keep in mind you don't need an office, you need a address to be able to verify and that can just be a barn on, on a, on a, on an, on a commercial lot or it could be on a farm. Like you just need the address and you need to be able to say this is the road, this is the sign. Here's my, my, my shop, here's all my trucks. And usually you'll get verified. So Ben, from all ashore, any recommendations or precautions for making a booking calendar on WIX website for people scheduling their own free estimates? Be careful.

Changes your site speed. Be very careful depending on the booking stuff software that you're using. Just be very careful with plugins and slowing down your site. That may my first thing you can definitely for example you can use calendly connect with Zapier and then Zapier connects to copilot. So you could definitely do this. If you want to have more people book, totally fine. Just be very careful at your site speed. I've seen some people do this stuff and they take in a site that was ranking number one on Google. They they add a couple of long forms in they add a couple of these plugins from around scheduling and all of a sudden they've got themselves on the fifth, sixth spot of Google. I would rather have the first spot of Google and not have scheduling and I have to call my customers and schedule Personally, because I know the value of first place versus sixth place on Google is like triple. Like I'd pay three times as much to get on number one versus number six. So so, and I mean triple like number of leads, attention, brand awareness, et cetera. Adam Burkett from Burkett from Pristine Green lawn and landscape. Oh we go so's a long question. We've been utilizing P4P for two and a half years now. As of the season we have had some quality issues while mowing where the crew are being super quick and missing minor things on some properties, small areas of weed whacking or blowing, et cetera. Because these are very minor issues, customers don't contact us to let us know anything has been missed or they don't notice or care to complain. I know nothing is ever going to be perfect quality wise, but I feel as if they have. They have figured out how to beat the system while going super fast and skipping over minor details here and there to make up time. We do internal yellow slips as well whenever other team members or myself will notice these things, but it's never really enough to make change and there's only so much I can and I want to check everyone's work. I'm curious on what your thoughts are on this topic of doing enough to get by with no complaints but still falling short of what I would like out of quality standards to be. And I understand the argument that if a customer will ultimately dictate if they aren't happy with their service, so if we aren't getting complaints that means they don't have any issues. But I think there are a lot of instances where customers may not even notice these small mistakes or just don't care enough or have the time to contact us and let us know. Thanks Mike. Yeah, so I like the fact that you balance this out with the fact that like if your turn is very, very low, keep in mind, like we are, you might be the perfectionist and you might be actually trying to go above too far above the standards of the customer. I would also say you're a hundred percent right on this other element and this is when you need to penalize heavier for yellow slips. So right now you're probably just making them go back to the job site and they know that one out of five customers will actually complain. So the other four saves more time in skimping on their property than just going back to the one I would start penalizing from what yellow slips. In other words, there's an actual deduction of P4P for every yellow slip. And I would do that based upon. Okay, usually out of every three complaints we lose a customer. A customer costs US, acquisition wise, $150. Okay, $50 is coming off your paycheck in terms of pay for performance. Your PvP, not your base pay or overtime, just your PVP for every yellow slip. I think that will be enough penalize for them to think twice because now it's like a couple hours worth of labor instead of just like, oh, no problem. If I have a mistake in this route, I'll swing by this place tomorrow, knock those out on my way to my next route in like 10 minutes. So just penalize. Last question from Adam Burkett. Pristine green and lawn landscape. How do you handle damage cases while on P4P? Specifically, when one person is entirely responsible for damage to something on a customer's property or company equipment, do you split the damage case with the entire crew no matter what, even if the certain crew members are not involved or responsible? Or are there any instances where you would not split the damage case amount? How do you deal with pushback from your employees who are not involved or responsible for the damage that one of your co workers caused but therefore got penalized for it? Yeah, so this is a case by case basis. Generally I like to split yellow slips between all of my crew, but a damage case tied directly to one person, I'm probably just going to go after the one person. So if someone backs up the truck over a tool, if they break a window and the window costs 500 bucks, it's coming out of their paycheck. It's very singular to them. A callback though. A yellow slip, not damage case, just a yellow slip in general. I am going to call back unsatisfied service, unsatisfied customer that is going to be split between the whole crew. So that's generally how I've done it. But again, inside of the two page document, you want to make sure that you give yourself the flexibility to make these changes based upon your, you know, the gray areas when there are kind of something subjective. And this is an instance where I would be using that discretion. All right, everyone, I hope you have a fantastic week ahead and look forward to seeing you on the next Mastermind. Great participation. I really appreciate it. The questions continue to get better. Everyone's staying nice and concise, answering pointed questions. I think this sort of information is valuable for everyone. The more detail we're able to share, the more information about our businesses we're able to share. My answers will get better and the information for the rest of the community will only get better. So I appreciate you all tremendously. Have a great week, and we'll see you next weekend. Take care.