Copilot Mastermind 11/01/2024

Hello, copilot family. Hope you're doing good. Let's go and get started on this weekend's edition of the Copilot Mastermind.

So again, if you have not submitted questions before from the Facebook group, let me go ahead and show you how to be able to submit your questions. Let me share this tab real quick.

All right, so when you're in the Facebook group, you make this a little smaller. There you go. Inside of the Facebook group, right at the top here, you're going to see the featured section. Go ahead and open up this post right here. It's the one about the Mastermind. And right here you can get this Google form link. If you click on this, you can submit this question, a question to the Mastermind anytime you think of something throughout the week. So you don't have to wait until we are live. You don't have to wait until you get the recording. Just anytime you think of it, go there, leave a question about your business. And if I can help, I would love to do that. So let's get this party started. I'm going to go ahead and.

I need to get a different tab, stop that screen and present this one. Okay, looks like we got seven questions today. Go ahead and change this up. There you go. Make it a little smaller.

All right, first question. Oh, there we go. First question is coming in from Mike Eisenhart from Mike's Professional Lawn Care from Facebook group. Looking for some answers to a wait list would be great to park jobs. Okay, I think I responded back to this one, Mike, on the Facebook group. But let's go ahead and go over it here. Looking for some answers to wait list would be great to park jobs and then be able to call on them or better track approved estimates for jobs that need completed without assigning them a specific day and having clients falsely notified. Great. So there's two ways to handle this. I will say the wait list is something that is on our 2025 priorities. And so there'll be some announcements coming out in later November about the timeline on that. But it is on our agenda if you don't know what a wait list is. The nice thing about having a wait list is if an estimate is accepted, sometimes you don't know exactly where you want to put the job on. And so you just want to put like, hey, it's accepted, it's going to get done. I just don't want to put it on the schedule yet. Totally fine right now. The problem with that is if you just throw it on a random day, there Might be automations tied to notifying the customer. You, your office staff might get confused if someone calls in asking what day of their service is and they tell them the day and you would just put it there to kind of put it on the schedule somewhere. So it's also really helpful for chemical applications when you don't really know the weather and you kind of bunch them all together and throw them on a certain day. You don't have to have them out in three, four weeks from now. All of a sudden automation goes out, et cetera. So that's why you have a wait list. Big projects get accepted, you're booked way out, you don't know exactly where you want to put it yet. You can put it on the wait list. So it's coming. And in terms in the, in the meantime, what you can do is first off, you can just leave the jobs as accepted, not put it on the schedule yet. Because remember from an accepted estimate, once it's accepted, you have the little pencil icon once you to edit a job and the plus icon if you have not yet scheduled it. So the first thing is like just don't put it on the schedule. And then you just keep track of it in like an Excel doc. So for example, if you have four or five projects that are kind of on standby, on a wait list, you just put the name of the job, how many budget hours are, and then when you have a time slot, you go there, check which one you want, then from there go to the estimate and schedule. Not ideal, but a potential workaround. The second option you could do is to just put the job way out in the future. So for example, for us at my location when we do treatments, we would just throw a bunch of them on the week generally that we thought they were going to be happening. And a month before we would actually move them around on the schedule to where we want them. So also not ideal when you're used to the waitlist where you can just drag from the wait list into the schedule. We are working on this. It's coming. And again by the end of November we'll have some clarity in terms of exactly when.

Sam Gustin from Troops Mowing. If you had to identify what absolutely most important three KPIs for each of the following positions, what would they be? Crew leader. Okay. For a crew leader, the only thing I really care about is the efficiency of their crew because that's like their main thing that they can control. So on all of these I'm asking like, what can they control? So crew leader, I'm probably looking at their efficiency score and if they're beating budget hours on big projects. General Manager I'm probably looking at close ratio. I'm looking at their efficiency score of their team and I'm looking at how far they're booked out. Regional Manager I'm looking at how many budget hours are their GMs completing versus being doing sales. And that's going to be dependent on the size of the location. So if the location is doing 800,000amillion dollars, that GM is probably not going to get any revenue producing hours. However, I'm going to be starting them at 30 budget hours that I expect them to complete a week out in the field and then I take away an hour of that for every estimate or interview that they have that they need to get done. Now over the phone estimates, they're not handling, instant pricing from the website they're not handling. But in person estimates do take their time. And so if they have 30 estimates in a week, I don't expect them to be out doing work in the field. But if they have five and they have one interview, I expect them to be doing 24 budget hours worth of work out in the field. That is 30 budget hours minus five, minus one. So that's how I kind of do it. And I'm going to be holding my regional manager accountable for that. I'm also going to be holding them accountable for their marketing budget and the projections and the growth of the overall my locations. Office Manager I'm going to be really focused on the efficiency of people in the office. So what percentage of their day is on the phone, what percentage of their day is not being productive. Their efficiency score, same exact thing. I'm going to be looking also at what are they doing during their downtime. Is there any way I can make that profitable? If someone's on salary or you're paying them hourly, I need to make sure that every minute is being effective. And so what are the five tasks that can get done when they have downtime? Because they have downtime, I promise you. And if you don't have something for them to do, they will fill it with a lot of other things. And so offices can get very, very wasteful, if not extremely vigilantly.

Assessed and monitored and reported on. And so every single pay period, just like we have guys out in the field on P4P, our office, we are tracking what percentage of their time are they actually productive. And these are benchmarks just like we have out in the field in terms of what percentages we expect them to be at and if they're underperforming, we can tell very quickly. CEO, I'm really looking at cash flow. I'm really looking at.

You know, what, you know, my distributable cash. I'm looking at what capital investments are required. I'm looking at what was my return on equity. So Roe, how much when I put money in, what's my return back out in terms of capital.

Not just my gross including debt. So I actually like how much cash. When I put cash a dollar of cash in, let's say I get $3 of equity because I get $2 worth of a loan. Well, I want to know what my return is on this and is that risk adjusted actually going to be a good return.

On my money. So. So we could. We'll call this the big three. And each role will have complete ownership over their three KPIs. Yeah, so I know I kind of gave a hodgepodge there. I think this was. Will Sam give you a bit of a hodgepodge there? I don't think it's anything new to you, but I do like where your head's at. And I was like, give each role a few KPIs and that's what you measure so highly. Recommend. Very cool.

Caleb Bartlett. And there are definitely other ones we would be measuring. For example, gm. I put a lot of those other ones on my GMs because they've really run the locations so they're still tracking things like, you know, what's your hourly rate, what percentage of labor revenue is going or what percentage of revenue is going to labor. There's other track things we track, but I try to give you the highlight there. All right, Caleb Bartlett from Spruce Lawn Care. First question, when to hire an in person office assistant? We are currently going to do about $325 annual revenue in 2025. Okay. So next year currently use call boss and an AI assistant for calls. But considering I have an actual office assistant, should I do at my range Want to hit 500 or 600k next year? Okay. So in my opinion I would use the other platforms until you pass 500,000. Because your main focus to go from where you're at like 325 to 500 is going to be can you sell and you spending time training someone on how to send emails and answer the phone is a horrible use of time. If you're trying to grow a business, it's great to make it more efficient, make it more profitable, potentially down the Road, but you're trying to grow like you're saying 325 to 500, 600, you're almost doubling the business. That happens because you focus on sales, not because you focus on teaching someone how to create a folder in Google Docs. It's not going to make you any money. And so I would personally, if your goals are what you just stated, which is growth, I am going to be fully invested in how do I spend as much time as possible on sales and not on training an admin person. There's just as much turnover in an admin role as there's guys out in the field. And it takes longer typically to train someone in the office compared to out in the field to be effective. Especially if you have everything. If you want someone to do phones, do email, run payroll, go down the list, do text messages and sell, create estimates, do invoicing, do billing, do collections. If you want them to do all those things, well, you're looking at three to six months before someone's pretty good at their job. And so be careful because the churn's there too. So if they leave after four months and you're doing this whole thing again, it's not really their time. It is the fact that you spend 40, 80, 100 hours trying to get them up to speed and that time is otherwise spent in the field or it is spent doing sales. So if your goal is growth, I would probably stay in growth mode, be okay with a little bit lower margin because you're probably paying these, you know, I know call bosses, they'll probably charge to $4aminute depending kind of how much you're using them. So it's expensive, don't get me wrong. But right now I need you to focus on growth. If your goal is the 5, 600,000, I'd do that. If you're like, hey, I'm going to take it a few years, I'm going to make it a little more profitable. Then maybe you get an office assistant for two or three hours a day or part time, they do a lot of the bookkeeping, all this other stuff that you're doing at night so you can focus on sales. I want you doing follow up phone calls, I want you doing sales, I want you sending out more estimates, doing door hangers because that's what's going to grow the business. Number two, when should I switch to all customers to a weekly only schedule? Currently offer both weekly and bi weekly. Would like a weekly only schedule. Not sure if I'm ready. However, worried it will slow growth as my goal is to grow currently. Yeah, so usually when you're in growth mode, you have excess capacity in terms of trucks and employees, which means you could take more jobs on. When you hit profit mode is when you hit capacity, you can't get any more jobs without getting more trucks and employees, and yet you raise prices in order to damper the number of customers coming in. So alternatively, instead of raising prices, what you can do there is increase the filters of which customers you want to serve, whether it be service area, type of services, in this case frequency of services. You can change that and add more stringent filtering when you hit capacity. So I would recommend doing Caleb is.

I would keep growing your business until you literally cannot get any more customers without buying more trucks or hiring more people. When you're there, you make the decision, do I keep growing because I love this and this is going great, or is it such a pain in my neck about this weekly, bi weekly thing that I'm willing to forego a couple months of growth because it's going to dampen, I'm going to lose some customers potentially and I'm going to go require weekly. I would probably encourage you to first do price increases on bi weekly just to make it where it's horrendously expensive for them and if they leave, who cares? If not, you're making good money and you're happy and you're profitable and your guys are crushing on paper performance. Kevin Ginty from Wink Exteriors if I upload all my receipts to each transaction in Relay Financial online banking platform receipt management, do I also need to upload those same receipts to each transaction in QuickBooks? No, you don't. As long as you're keeping track of those receipts, you're good to go. Um, either way, I would follow whichever path is easiest for you. If you like QuickBooks as you're used to it on the mobile app, et cetera, it's usually pretty good at matching receipts, but it's hit and miss sometimes you gotta it takes a little more categorization. I've also used Relay Financial, so whichever one you prefer, I just stick with one or the other. Don't need to do both. Kevin also asked, do you think there will be more or less demand for home service businesses from the 70 plus trillion dollar wealth transfer from boomers and older generation to Gen X, millennials and Gen Z which will happen by 2045? And what are some of the advantages and disadvantages for home service businesses as it starts to happen? Honestly, this topic would make for a killer YouTube video. I agree, Kevin. There is a video coming out in this in the next few weeks. I've already recorded it. The video is negative or the title is negative, but the video is positive because that's what YouTube likes. People watch more negative content. So the video title is why home services is a bad business. And I go through the first probably 15, 20 minutes of like why all the bad stuff about home services? And then the second half of the video I say how those negative things allows you to grow much larger if you do X, Y and Z. So for example, the vast majority of home service businesses don't have a CRM. Just having a CRM alone, when you take the averages more than five X's the size of the business just by having a CRM. And so.

That one thing alone is like, oh, I can make this a massive opportunity. Even though the industry as a whole is way behind on technology. Credit cards, CRMs, field management software, routing automations, texting, like, way behind. Great, that's an opportunity. So when it comes to.

The next 15, 20 years, home services I think will be great. Because as these people age, it's not just a matter of whether they can afford it, it is a matter of it is unsafe for them to do a lot of the work that we do for them to get on a ladder. There's over 500,000 ladder related injuries in the United States every year and over 200 deaths due to ladders every year.

A lot of those people are seniors trying to do home service work. And so there's a huge opportunity to be able to do work that no one really enjoys doing and is actually now not just unenjoyable, but actually hazardous to the health of the people that have all the money. This is why creating a service that's higher end and goes after the right customer in my opinion is the right move. Because if I can go after the person that looks to this as a preventative health insurance program instead of me cutting grass and making it long, long grass short, we've got, we've got ourselves a product that we can charge a higher premium, have higher prices, be able to pay my guys more, be able to offer benefits, etc. Etc, etc. And so in my opinion there are just a couple things you need to do in your business and home services to separate yourself. Number one, have a great website, you're going to get more leads, have a optimized for Google, optimized for mobile, etc. Quick plug homeservicewebdesign.com or lawn careweb, design.com. seriously, if you do that and you have a CRM, you are immediately in the top, like 10 to 15%. Like look at the all the websites I assess on my channel of home service businesses. They're atrocious. You don't have to like the bar is so incredibly low in this industry and there's so much work. There's so much work to be had and the bar is very, very low in terms of professionalism. That's a huge opportunity. This is exactly why Uber and Lyft, if you go back 15 years ago.

There was a very fragmented market when it comes to taxi services and cabs. And now you fast forward, today it's extremely dominated by Uber, Lyft and a couple other competitors. They take massive market share because they adopt a technology and they do it. What was fastest and best for the customer. Customers value their time. The right customer values their time. Like no one cares about how much time they're saving. They only care about the price. The right customer cares a lot about their time. And so being able to have text messages, having credit cards on file and having auto charge, these are all types of things that to the right customer are valuable. To the wrong customer, they could care less. And I will move on. Cause if they're comparing me with some price, I don't want that customer. So.

Next question is from Will Kelly. Military long cuts number one. RGM gotten us a paint swap bumper to bumper accident going 8 mph at a stop sign. The lady put an insurance claim and the price is $2,200 to get her scratch repaired on her door. Should I pay out of pocket or file an insurance claim? I would personally. This is not financial advice. I would personally, if this happened to me, I would pay out of pocket. Because this will follow you for a few years, it's likely to increase your premiums by a little bit. But over the course of few years, you pay for this thing two or three times over. Secondly, if you actually get a real claim and you have this one, like a lot of it depends a lot on your insurance company. But I know for example like Liberty Insurance, I had three claims in a matter of like one year. Two of them were less than two grand. Then I had one massive one and they dropped me. I asked them like, hey, is it because of the big massive one? They said no, it's because you had three claims in a year and, and we immediately default to swapping regardless if it's $200 or $200,000, like. Oh, noted. And then it was very difficult to find another provider because I had to go to like a.

What's it called?

Extended lines. No, sorry, I should know this. I used to work for State Farm. Kind of like extended lines. It's not extended, though. It's a different word. But other lines of insurance that cost significantly more. And so personally, unless something is like five, ten grand, I'm trying to pay it out of pocket. I do not want that going in my insurance. I end up. You end up paying for it some way. Just like pay for a big, you know, pay for this $3,000 claim. Like, oh, yeah, like over the next three years. He'll pay us back. No, they're going to adjust your. Your premiums at some point in time.

Okay. Number two, I have auto insurance completely separated between both LLCs. Should I cancel one and just add all the trucks to the main auto insurance and do monthly manual entries? If so, should I cancel the one with the accident on it? Lol. So the accident will still follow you? Because what's going to happen is you're going to. When you apply for the. Typically, you could probably. Okay. All right. So typically, if you apply for insurance, they're gonna ask, have you made any claims in the past 12 months? So you're gonna have to say yes. So if they didn't ask you that for some reason and you went to a different company, maybe you get around it for like a year until it gets onto your account.

But I wouldn't recommend, like, trying to navigate this around 2 grand. Honestly, like, don't switch companies even for auto insurance over two grand, I wouldn't do that. I try to stay pretty loyal with my insurance companies because when I have a big claim, I want someone to go to bat for me because they've seen I've had a track record of loyalty and I've only had to really have one time where someone. I need an insurance claim. People have really got a bat for me, and they did. And it's because I stuck with them the whole time. I never left them. And so I would recommend that first off, secondly, in terms of getting auto insurance on one policy, I do recommend, mostly because you'll get a lot of. You'll usually get cheaper rates. So if you have four locations, all of my five trucks, and you have 20 trucks, if you have all 20 trucks on one policy, typically you'll get better rates. So, you know, talk to, talk to an insurance broker, have them run the rates both ways. But from what I've seen Most of the time when you put them all together, you get kind of some economies of scale and in, in deeper discounts.

Chris. Ugh, I'm going to mess this up. I'm so sorry. I'm going to call you Chris. Chris G. Chris G is coming in hot with fresh cut lines. When you talk about role of the owner at different revenue levels, does this factor in currency? I assume you talk in USD, I'm in Australia and, and use AUD or Australian dollars. We should hit 250k in revenue and wondering if now is the right time to transition out of the field a bit or do we need to hit a higher revenue first? Yeah, so I use the revenue markers. Some people really get caught up on the fact like, oh my currency is a little different. Okay, let's assume that you're 30 to 50% more. You know, that puts you at, you know, 250 to 280 instead of 200. Right. When I talk about the different stages of growth and the revenue that correlate with the role of the owner. So you're probably getting to the higher end of being where you're in the field all the time, but you're the very, very, very beginning stages of being a manager. So I'm assuming you probably have one employee, right? Maybe you're getting a second one, but like probably one if you're profitable. So what that means is realize where you're at, that you're probably going to be in the field most of the time, but that, you know, there's going to be days where you got to go manage your crew or do interviews or like do other things in the business. I would not overthink this. Just realize that if you get to 5, 600,000, you are going to be where only maybe 30% of your times in the field most of your time is becoming a manager. You're managing the crew. You have four or five guys. So you know, if you want to just take my numbers and move them up by 20, 30% because of a currency, that's fine. But like it really doesn't matter. It's a Met. It's the role actually corresponds with the number of people you're managing. If you have 200,000 or less in revenue, usually you have one employee backs. If you're running a profitable business. That's why I say up until then you're focused on being a laborer. After 200,000 up to 800,000, you're being a manager. Most reason I say is not because the revenue, it's because you're usually managing between like three and six people, three and eight people. During that time, you have to learn the skill of management. And then after 800,000, again, pretty nebulous. If you're in a million, $2 million business, most of your time, you are not spending time in the field working as a laborer. You shouldn't be. You should be strategically working your general managers, training, hiring, creating systems, creating procedures, creating standard operating procedures, etc. So, yeah, the currency issue, you can use round up or down based upon what you think your currency is, but I don't think it changes the actual those 200,000, 800,000 kind of markers as general guides of what your role is in the business. I talked to a business yesterday. They joined copilot. They're doing $2 million in revenue as an electrician, and they have eight people working for them. So you can do the math. That's like. Well, that's like $240,000 per employee. But again, if he was at $200,000, as he gets past that, he would be hiring his first employee. He'd have to learn the skill of management. So that's why I kind of made those numbers the way I did. It scales pretty decently in terms of what skills are required to get to that next level. So in general, if you're going to go from 200,000 to 800,000 revenue, you will have to manage somebody. It isn't even a really profitable business. You'll need at least a few employees. So I have yet to see a home service business that has $800,000 in revenue doing the work.

And like actually having customers, not being a contractor that does 800,000 without managing some people. And even if you're a subcontractor, you have subcontractors, you're managing the subcontractor. So it's still a skill you'll have to learn. All right, everyone, hope you have a fantastic rest of your weekend. We will see you next week. If you have questions, as always, go to the top of the Facebook group, go to the Features tab and submit your questions on the Google form. Love you all. We'll see you next weekend.