Copilot Mastermind 12/13/2024

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to their Copilot Mastermind. We're gonna go ahead and get this party started. I'm actually recording this Friday evening here in the office. Looks like we got five questions came in on the Copilot Mastermind form. Again, as a reminder, in the description of this video, you can find the link to the Google form. You can, you can also go to the Facebook group, go up to the featured posts and there is a post there that you can use to submit your questions. All right, let's get this party on the road and share this screen here. Thank you to the Customer Advisory Board. They've scheduled their first call. There's going to be looking over the new client portal and the estimates side of things that is being redone. We decided to also, along with the client portal really just focus diving deep in the estimate side of things. So we've taken a lot of feedback from everyone that has been submitting that over the course of the past several months as well as the Customer Advisory board at that meeting. We'll be able to give information about how those are set up, but I'm really looking forward to sharing with you. I looked today at a meeting with engineers and it's just looking really, really solid. Just so many different user interface and design changes. But also ultimately rethinking how the customer portal looks, feels and ultimately leads to more sales and increasing your close ratio. So I can't wait to share with you in January. It's going to be pretty sick. Let's go and get started though. Will Kelly has a question. Military lawn cuts for a holding company being created in Wyoming. Should be an LLC or an S Corp. How do you have yours set up? I'd recommend doing an S Corp, especially if it's going to be a holding company with a whole bunch of LLCs underneath it. I'd probably go ahead, take the extra time you're going to be filing one tax return. But talk to an attorney as well as an accountant and they will probably have further instructions on exactly what they recommend for that. Next question is also from Will Kelly. Are you able to share a picture of your daily weekly time block and schedule? I wanted to build something similar. Yeah, you can just go to mikeandys.com calendar and you'll see it right there. You can download it if you like. I think it's still up there. Yeah, feel free. It's just mikeannies.com calendar. That's my PDF. I have it my like my slack where you usually put like your your title or of the company in the company or whatever. I just put my URL mikeannies.com calendar takes you right there. That's what my current, you know, the last six months has been. Ken Hobby from On Hand Lawn Care I purchased this business this year 2024. The previous owner had an outdated CRM and did not understand research, management and how to build efficient routes. He essentially had one route and just sent the crews to an area of the city to complete all the jobs in the area before moving on. Our service area for lawn maintenance is also huge, covering over 200 square miles. Mercy Kenneth we do have a good route density in some of the neighborhoods on the outside of our service area, but windchill time is an issue in this situation. Do you recommend starting a second location centered on the edge of my current service area and building on the current customer base? My goal is to start P4P but I still have so much work to do, clean up these routes and building processes that are repeatable for our current 1000 plus customers. Would it be an issue if I started the second location on P4P? While the established business is not.

Okay, I'm hesitant to start starting at second locations unless you have a lot of industry experience.

So because you just purchased the business this year, so assuming, let me make sure this is good, we have okay in this situation.

Man, that's tough. There's so many variables going in. It's like what you paid for it, what the pricing is, whether or not we need to leave as a lever for price increases or is this a matter of needing to optimize for growth and like what the terms and conditions of that sale was. If you took debt, if this owner finance, there's a lot of things that would go into my advice on this in terms of what to do next here.

In terms of like your actual question, would it be an issue if I started the second location on P4P while the established business is not? No, I don't think that would be a problem. I would just make sure you keep your crews either separated or very clear to them. Like when you're working here, you make P4P. As long as you're keeping your crew separate between these kind of two pseudo locations, then you're fine. But you can't do P4P on one and then other one do hourly and then the crews are getting mixed up because their hourly rates and bonuses like it's just not going to make any sense to them. They'll think you're cheating them. So I would only do it if you're going to keep the crews completely separated, in which case if you're doing that, you probably want to have a second location. So at 1,000 plus customers, I would probably go ahead and split this. There's a huge service area. Um, the 30, 40 minute drive in between is going to crush any sort of pay for performance for your team. Um, and it's also.

Going to lead to just a ton of windshield time in general in terms of profitability and efficiency. So even if they don't not are not on P4P, I'd probably be recommending splitting this up like 200 square miles is 20 miles by 10 miles. It's a pretty big service area. And so it depends also if, if it's like that square or if you're talking about like a 5 mile by.

20 mile, like if you're doing a really long strip, I'd even be more inclined. If it's relatively square, it's not so bad. You're probably driving 45 minutes tops, so it's not so bad. But if you're starting to have like what I imagine is probably a little more elongated of an area where you can drive an hour between, I'd probably start thinking about splitting this up. It's sizable enough to be able to do that even if you chunked off one, one part that was only doing say, you know, 800,000 in revenue and make it a really good profit center. Throw a GM in it with one admin person and increase prices, for example. I'd probably end up turning that into like kind of and then doing kind of satellite locations. But that's just kind of how my brain works in terms of keeping the structure simple. But yeah, it just kind of depends. I would need more information like how you acquire these customers.

Is that service area elongated or is it relatively squarish? Those become some of the things I'd be thinking about and how much you're paying for that, if you have debt on that acquisition, etc. Pristine green lawn and landscape. What is the best way to keep track of which customers have had their service paused? In our automation process that attempts to collect or to collect on unpaid overdue invoices, it sends an internal email to the office to have them pause service. What's the best way to go at tracking when these invoices have been paid and resuming their recurring service without it being so manual? What you could probably do is actually just make a tag for this and then whenever they have the tag and then they Pay an invoice. It tells your office to basically go in there and resume their recurring service. So you could probably just make an automation that when a tag is added it. It's essentially, you know, they're in the automation and then when the invoice gets paid, it just triggers that based upon that tag being added to tell your office to restart service for that customer. That's probably the most, the most on me. I can think off right off the top of my head to be perfectly honest.

Yeah. Use tags when they go into like, hey, we've paused service. It's probably part of your SOP for your office. Like, all right, I'm putting a tag on their account and they have an automation, the backend that basically moves the tag and sends an email to the office as soon as the invoice is paid. That's what I'm thinking. My brain. Adam, also in the new client portal, when it comes to invoices, this is something we want to address specifically. Make it really clear to the customer and really highlighting paying their entire account balance in case they have two or three invoices that are actually overdue. Because I've seen that be a bit of a friction in a lot of different CRMs is like they pay the one invoice, they think they're done but really had three or four overdues. So Adam Burkett has another question. What is the best way to keep track of which customer? Oh, we already did that one. Sorry, number five from Naomi from Terrazz Terrazaz. Sorry, landscape. Hello, Mike. How often does Augusta Lawn Care bill its recurring clients? I'd like to get your opinion on the best billing option for context. We currently provide weekly maintenance and have billing customers on a monthly basis. Starting January 2025, we plan to shift to weekly billing. However, some customers are concerned about their cars being charged 52 times a year instead of 12. Customers are also annoyed about receiving multiple emails email receipts from weekly charges. What are your thoughts? Thank you. So first off, you don't need to send them an email receipt every time. Just tell them to log in their client portal if they really want to see the charges. But they know what it is if you charge them every week. I would not send them emails 100% not because then any sort of marketing emails or texts that I get to them kind of get freshened on the carpet because they're used to getting so much emails and correspondence from me. I really want to keep as much of my emails as possible because to being the marketing emails, I need them to open up to upsell and cross sell them other services. And so I'm going to try to stay away from this 100% and that is emailing out invoice receipts. You could, you could, you could do this for stripe, potentially even like send them an actual receipt. But I would avoid any communication around this. I would be like, hey, we charge your card and if you want to go into your client portal, you can go ahead and I check it out. I would, I would recommend that there's a lot of like utility companies and other bills that you pay that you do not get an email every single time they charge your account. You just log into your account, you see the charges. So that would be my recommendation. Especially if you're switching to a weekly billing cycle. If you've done monthly, people are okay with a weekly or a monthly invoice. When you start doing it weekly, you're going to increase, churn dramatically and you're going to dilute any chance of your marketing emails and, and marketing text messages or any communication actually being noticed and received. So I would be very careful of that. Awesome. Bit of a shorter segment today. Again, if you want to have a mastermind question asked in the description, there is a link. Click on that. Submit your question. I'll make sure I get answered next week. I appreciate you all. Hope you have a fantastic Christmas season and a very happy new Year. I'll see you though next week. Take care.