Copilot Mastermind 10/20/2024

Hello, Copilot members. Mike Andes here, founder and CEO of Copilot CRM. And today is another mastermind. Every weekend we do a mastermind. And if you want to submit questions to the mastermind in the Facebook group, at the very top there is featured posts. And if you go in there, there is a Google form where you can leave your questions. So you can leave questions there anytime. Let me actually really quickly just show you exactly how to get there, just in case you've never submitted a question before. Today it looks like we got five questions that came in on the form, but I want to show you how to get there just in case you've never done it before. Let's see here.

Let me share this present.

Okay, so if you've never submitted a.

Question to the group before for the mastermind, just go right here to the very top of the Copilot CRM members group and you'll be able to see this right here, this post. Open that up. And this link right here is where you'll be able to submit questions anytime. All right, so this, it'll look like this all of the time, and you can simply leave your question. And if you leave it there, I'll record it and make sure that gets answered on the next Mastermind. So with that being said, we're going to answer the questions of individuals that left their questions this past week. And there's looks like there are five of them today. So let's go get started.

First one's from Kevin Ginty from Wink Exteriors. Question for Mike at CommandCenter. Do you all get many spam calls and what are some of the measures you have in place to prevent them from wasting your team's time? Do calls that are flagged to spoofed numbers even make it through the command center? Or have you all figured out how to block those? We use basically the transcript of the calls in AI to basically keep them out because usually if there's a robo call thing going around, it'll hit most of our locations. So if we can track it like I think it's 10 times, if a similar call with a similar voice comes across, uh, we can keep it from getting through the rest of them by just blocking that right off the get based upon their transcript. But if you don't have an AI agent at the front, that's difficult to do. Um, I would just probably, yeah, have like a filter. If you think it's spam that it doesn't answer, just realize you're going to get one out of like 20 customers that have like a Google voice number or they have something like that that they're trying to use that might not get through to you. So just keep that part in mind. But it can be overwhelming where like to the point where one in four or five calls starts to become spam if you don't have something either AI related or just blocking those numbers altogether. I would say if you don't have like an answering agent on top of your stack then I would probably make sure that you just block all those because otherwise you will literally waste 20 to 30%, 15 to 20% of your office's time on the phone is, will just be spam calls. And then they don't really know like. Cause what happens is these robo callers get really good. They'll be like I need to talk to the owner about X, Y and Z. Or they'll say I need, I have a job and I'm trying to find someone to do the job. And like you know, your office is trained to take leads and like talk to customers and get information and set up appointments for you. And so it can be very frustrating cause they get smarter and smarter on how to get past the agent and the frontline. Team member.

Kevin Ginty from Winking Series has another question. If my plan was to really scale simple services window cleaning, would it be a good move to start building a training program using an LMS system Using video. Exactly. Show how to do the job. Do you think this is the right approach for this? Videos, on site training, written exam, in person, in action exam, two weeks of experience, team member with them grading if they're ready. Yeah. So for labor positions out in the field. I have not seen this work super well where you just sit them in front of videos for the first day or two. Most people want to get out and do training in person and the reason I know that is because I've tried it. I have tried in the past to do a eight hour training video program where I did walk them through every single aspect of their job and it's very difficult for them to stay focused. A lot of the people that are working out in the field, they like working with their hands. They don't like school, they don't like watching videos about training resources and they'd rather go do the work and they want, they want to be out in the field, field. So we've much more leaned on each day they're graded by their trainer out in the field on certain tasks and it's more of like a continual Learning over the course of two weeks. But they're graded every single day. And at the end of two weeks they are given a grade like a passing pass or fail from their their trainer. So we've seen that to work a lot better than the videos. I'm not against videos, but I would say if someone has to watch more than 20, 20 to 25 minutes of videos, they're checking out and then you're going to have to redo the training out in the field anyways because they just don't retain it.

Again, we're talking about people out in the field. If you're talking about office staff, like they are usually that type of person, they're willing to sit down, they're willing to watch a screen, they're willing to, you know, put in headphones and watch and observe and absorb from a screen. Frontline team members in field services, I have not seen that work super well. Grow green weed control. I'm not posing a video for a few minutes like on a team meeting on safety or certain training aspect, but long form video, anything above 20 minutes, I just haven't seen it work very well. I've taken the time to understand the details of P4P, but it doesn't seem to align well with lawn applications, specifically fertilizer and weed control. I see how it might work effectively for lawn mowing. In our case, we conduct eight applications each year and each application can vary in complexity and duration. For instance, one round may involve using a push spreader and spot spraying, while another might be solely blanket spraying the lawn. The spray with spreader and spot spraying could take two or three times longer. Currently, I use a combination of base pay plus production and sales bonuses. I'm exploring whether P4P could be more advantageous for both me and my employees. However, I rarely come across concrete examples of lawn treatment companies successfully implementing P4P. Could you provide a video on this topic or explain it in more detail here? Thank you. Yeah, so when it comes to lawn applications, keep in mind a lot of you're gonna have, it's a very high margin service. Most time you have a, you're gonna spend more in the marketing like the acquisition of the customer. And so also you have product costs, so you have chemicals, you have fertilizers, et cetera. And then there's higher levels of certification required for that employee as well. So usually what we do is we consider a percentage of the revenue as product cost. So we do it 50% just to keep it simple. So 50% of let's just say it's a $70 application, 50% of it, $35 right off the get is going to consider product cost. And so $35 is considered labor revenue. So they're only getting a percentage of that revenue. Now I would really be encouraging. As long as, as long as your seven step program or your eight eight step program that you have for the year, as long as you have budget hours assigned each of those, you, you should be fine. Like, as long as you're not just like, oh, it's $500, you get eight applications. Like ideally you've broken down how many budget hours are assigned to each of those eight applications. As long as you've done that, it'll work just fine. And then you'll just assign a percentage of the revenue as product cost versus labor because they only get a percentage of labor revenue on P4P. So this is doable 100%. It just means you will have to break down how much revenue or at or budgeted hours per visit of those eight applications are. You can't just say P4P won't work and be accurate. I should say if like, oh yeah, it's 500. Divide that by eight. There's our price per service. If you actually have a price per application and it varies based upon this timing and based upon the complexity and duration, etc. Then you're good. Even if you don't have budget hours, even if you just have the amount of dollars that each service is costing that makes up a maybe a contract value or a one time ticket that you're selling, as long as you have that, you can make this work just fine. So totally fine. Marco from Estrella Lawns Relief cleanup season do you ever run into sending do you ever run into you sending the quote the client a quote for weekly or bi weekly leaf cleanup and not and them not accepting it. Do you guys still mow the grass even though the leaves were over top? Because typically the grass is still growing here in Washington and the leaves start falling on top of the lawns. Yeah. So we basically have it where it's like, look, if you, for our crew we just tell them like, look, if you're mowing and there's leaves on the grass, just keep going. But if you have to slow down, then we're going to stop like just mowing the lawn for them because we have to bag clippings. So for people like this doesn't really matter. Just mow over them and mulch them up. We have to bag the clippings. So if you have leaves on the lawn, we actually end up having to bag them. And it can create way more debris. So that's why he's asking this question. And so for us, we've just had it where if the crew feel like it's going to slow them down dramatically, they're allowed to stop, take pictures, make notes on the job and in the dispatcher notes. And then we are going to call the customer and we're going to set up an estimate, or give them an estimate, I should say, for a leaf cleanup. So that's how we handle it.

For us. Fortunately, like in my market, maybe 1 in 20 lawns, this becomes a problem for like a week or two. But usually it's not so bad. But it's also like, usually it's also very obvious. Like if someone has tons of leaves on the lawn, the guys won't even start. Those, like, take a video. They'll make notes. Dispatcher and be like, hey, this person needs an estimate. Here's a video. And then we go ahead and send the quote to the customer and just tell them, like, we can't mow this lawn because there's so many leaves on it. And we do have to bag whatever the clippings are. So, you know, it looks really bad in our market when we usually bag clippings to then just mulch the leaves. It usually gets pretty gross, especially because very wet. So.

Estrella lawns. Another question. If you are operating a $300,000 lawn care business.

Is a high school diploma really necessary if the plan is to pursue the lawn care business and much rather focus your time on it? You know, I struggle to tell someone whether or not to get a high school diploma. I think it might be kind of table stakes as like a backup plan. But for running a lawn care business, I don't see a huge benefit to going to high school. Um, when I went through high school, I sped through it pretty quickly. Um, did I retain everything I was supposed to? I don't know. I don't think most people retain a whole lot in high school anyways. So I don't think in terms of running a long care business, you're going to learn much in high school that isn't required to run a lawn care business. Now, if your lawn care business fails, you might have to have a diploma just to get any other job. I think this is going to become less and less of a thing, though. The same way that college has become less and less of a thing is like a certified accredited school. Whether it be High school or college being something that people care about just doesn't matter. And I've hired a lot of people, and I've never looked at their education, like, not one single time. Whether I am talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars that I pay for engineers or whether it is frontline team members that are mowing grass and getting started in their career, I do not look at their education. So I am looking for a lot of other things besides their education. And I don't believe this will play into whether or not your career, quote, unquote, is successful. Because if you do a skill, really have a really good personality, or you're able to manage or you're able to sell, like, if you're able to do these skills, you will have. You have value in the market. A piece of paper saying that you graduated and passed these with, you know, passed these crazy tests that they have now that are standardized doesn't do a lot to an employer. And so I don't think you'll need one. But I would not use that as a way to, like, try to get out of what you're trying. Like, a lot of times, the reason people try to get out of high school specifically is not because they want to go make money or because they don't see the value in the education. It's because they're trying to get out of something they don't want to do. And that's the most alarming thing to me is doing hard things is a good skill and a good muscle to have, because the rest of your life and in business and in relationships, you will need to do hard things that you don't feel like doing. And so I think sometimes graduating high school or college is just a proxy for I do hard things and I get through it. Because if you can do that, that will lead to success in your career. So. All right, so a quick short Mastermind. Last week we had 23 questions. Today, we only had five. So if you have a question anytime throughout the week, the form is now at the very top of the Facebook group. In the featured post, make sure to leave your question and I'll answer it here on the copilot Mastermind. Thank you all, and we'll see you next weekend. Take care.