Copilot Mastermind 12/29/2024

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another copilot Mastermind. Today is just a few more days left in 2024. Let's go ahead and get started. If you haven't seen it a few days ago, Josh Kael, our head of our VP of product, released a demo of what is coming to the customer portal and the estimates side of things. And so looking forward to be able to share that in early 2025 with everyone. And there's a whole lot of updates coming down the pipe as usually a month or two before they're coming out. We'll demo it, get reactions, get feedback. And so thank you to everyone that made some really good feedback on that specific post. If you haven't seen it, check it out on Facebook. Let's go get started with today's copilot Mastermind. Down below. If you have questions, there's a link in the description. You can follow that and that will get you access to the form where you can submit that question any time of the week and then I will answer it here each weekend. So let's go ahead and just jump right in. Let me make this a little bit larger and we'll get started. First question comes from Adam Burkett from Pristine Green Lawn and Landscape. Is there, is there or will there ever be a way to transfer customers card information to a different Copilot account? The application would be so that we can start taking customers in the area that we want to open another location in before officially starting there. But have not. But have not, but not have to have customers read their card when we officially start another location in that area. So doing this would be really on Stripe's end. We don't handle any of the cards. So you would want to talk with Stripe. There is a way to do this. We have not attempted this and I personally wouldn't take the extra time. I would just ask them to redo the card. Honestly, I would wait till the next invoice especially because usually you're going to start that second location during an off season. The next, the first invoice, that new location, once I broke it off, I would just, I would ask them to redo the card. The reason I mostly would do this because I've seen some people do this in contact Stripe and use the tokens and try to bring them all over into their new Stripe account. It's not so much that being the difficult part as much as making it sure it's inside of the customer portal of Copilot. And that's the tricky part. And so there's a lot of security stuff around this and pci. You don't see their card information ever. So it's not like you just enter it in on the new one. I would just recommend, obviously I like the strategy of, you know, start a location kind of remotely get 30, 40, 50 customers and then start it and actually break it off the year after or two years after even. I like the strategy, but I would recommend just getting that car information from 30, 40, 50 new customers. Doing so is less painful than doing manual token transfers with Stripe. And we don't handle any of that car information whatsoever. And so I can't really comment wholly on that whole process other than that the people that have tried it, I've seen with Stripe, they have usually just gone reverted back to like, hey, let's just ask all the customers for it. Make a good automation based upon an overdue invoice for the first couple and it's worked pretty well. You call them if needs be, you can send them out, text messages, et cetera. Connor Johnson from Wolf Window Cleaning. Two questions. As a window cleaner, most of my clients call for one time service. How would you go out creating a service plan to get them on a reoccurring schedule? Would you do a percentage off or something like increasing the perceived value with free service add on service frequency ranges from biannual to monthly, though it seems like most people feel anything more frequent than quarterly might be unnecessary. Right. So I would recommend doing is they get a discount if they schedule their next service with you and they get a further discount if they go ahead and go into quarterly. So you know, I think of this as one time reoccurring and then recurring. You want to get them to recurring as much as possible. So they're on a schedule. And so I would recommend when you leave your next window cleaning job, you say hey Mr. Jones, you can call me anytime. You know the price. Now let's go. If you go ahead and schedule today though, I can give you 10% off if you put it on a reoccurring schedule of every quarter and don't. And don't schedule your next one, but actually put us on a schedule of quarterly, then you get 20% off. That would be my recommendation number two as far as next year goes, is it wise to get a CPA at the beginning of the year or just at the end of the year when you have to file? This year was my first year. And think of getting a CPA next year, like really it's a matter of like, do you want do you need them for strategy or do you need them to file your taxes? Most of the time I've seen value in both. Usually I can cover the cost even in new any business usually 50 or 60,000 revenue honestly can cover the cost of assuming you're profitable. Okay, profitable. Assuming you're profitable, usually it makes sense. You can cover the cost of getting a CPA to file your taxes by simply the extra savings that they bring in terms of the strategy side. That's where as you grow there's a lot more value at the end of the year because they're determining, you know, doing estimates of what your taxes are going to be. When you have like 1 LLC or 1S corp, it's usually pretty straightforward. You can look at your P and L and note your projected kind of take home pay is or net adjusted income since these are past three entities LLC and an S Corp. However that's I would say like strategy end of the year running filing your taxes beginning of the year. That's what the value is. And I just you know consistently see even for companies that are doing sub 100,000 an accountant can save them extra thousand or $2,000 which usually covers the cost of that account filing their taxes. And for me I just like peace of mind knowing it's taken care of by a professional because I might make a mistake if I file myself honestly. Marco from Estrella Lawns I tried looking for the winter service instant quote door hand longer media file. Oh I think you, I I saw your comment on this Marco inside the group and you reached out to the media team. It is in there. It might just be might not be seeing it inside the long term media. Kevin Lupardio Lupardo from Lawn Domination Working on instant quote option for my website that I'm trying to get done before spring rush. What's the best way to have this important to copilot without having to manually enter the customer's data? Was wondering if this can be done using Zapier that you could do is using Zapier 100%. The thing I recommend for anyone that just trying to dip their toe in instant pricing is just start with price ranges. So you could do small, medium and large for say mowing. You could do small, medium and large for say fertilization. You can do small, medium, large for pressure washing. Show pictures of a home. Use a form like jot form and you can do one of two things. One have a button on your website that goes to a jot form especially if it's a little bit Long, depending on your service. If you're trying to bake it directly into your site, try to keep it as small and light as possible so it doesn't take a long time to load and it doesn't take a huge amount of space on your website. That would be my recommendation. But yes, Jotform paper form. Those forms look really, really nice and you can fully customize the design of them into your site. That would be my recommendation. I've seen some do this with a button. It works really good actually, especially if you just want to keep it lo fi and not spend a lot of money. Is a button to a jot form. That jot form, you can have pictures, you can have video, you can have price ranges. But if you're just trying to get started, very basic. I would just do ranges of prices for different size properties. That'd be like my go to get started is price ranges, essentially.

Kevin Luparo asked another question wondering what's the best way when using Instant Quote door hangers for customers? What? When I have their email, should I have them email me or have a QR code that they scan and it takes them to a Google form drive? I want to automate this so there's less data entry when importing into Copilot. Yeah, you could definitely do a QR code, scan it in. This is something we're going to be playing with as well where they scan the QR code. The challenging part is you want the pricing to be on the door hanger still. So there's already a manual part of either writing that down or. Or if you print them off with it wrote down on there in terms of pricing. So I usually want the scanning of the QR code to actually be them redeeming it. Like accept, accept this estimate by scanning this QR code. That would be my recommendation. Don't make it like, scan this QR code to get your prices. Less people will do that than saying, here's your price. Scan this QR code to accept it. And then when they do that, you take them to a form. Like I said, it could be a jot form, Google form, anything you want. Use Zapier. Integrate that into Copilot if you want. Again, I would not. People get really, really hung up and spend. They'll spend hours and hours creating a form to save them. Like literally 10 seconds of copy and paste on each form. And so like, literally you need thousands of leads to come through just to warrant the extra time saved of like trying to piece this thing together. So I See, people overcomplicate this a lot. I Copying and pasting literally takes you five to 10 seconds. And and so just know that if you spend three hours doing something, you literally need thousands of leads to make up for the time spent in just trying to piece something like that through. Zapier again, if you'd like that though, Cool. Awesome. Zapier will work. Yes.

Marco from Estrella Lawn so far with the Windows service instant core door hanger, what type of response have you been seeing so far? I know you mentioned you're testing right now, but I'm curious to know how your response rate has been for these door hangers currently. I saw this question. I think it was on lawn care business owners on Facebook. Marco yeah, we haven't had an entire year with this yet. The bottom line I would recommend is do a price comparison. Show the price of winter services compared to not having winter services. That's really the advantage. And so if you're just saying, hey, here's all these services we're going to give you and here's the price bi weekly, it's the same as your mowing, etc. It's challenging to do that to someone who doesn't already have mowing and you're converting them, that's easier. But. But if you're just trying to sell them services they don't need, they feel like in their mind, like the grass isn't growing, the bushes in their mind are not growing, et cetera, it's hard to sell them. On the maintenance side of things, when someone submits a photo for their winter service Instant Quote door hanger, do you send an email explaining more about how winter service works? To avoid any concerns down the road, clients may end up thinking that we are going to clean up more than we suppose with the winter service, we still create an estimate and put it on their profile market as completed. You could set up an automation if you really wanted to just have it sent to them. But. But I would really recommend that your door hanger be sufficient enough so they're accepting the estimate. If you're just making it's where it's like, hey, I'm interested. Well, they could have just called you. They could have submitted an essay request form. If you're going to do instant pricing, it makes no sense to the customer if once they literally see the price, accept the job and send it to you, that you then respond back to like, hey, let me explain more about this. It just feels weird. So you might want to change the wording of your Instant pricing, whether it be an online form, a door hanger, etc. To ensure that it's actually capturing this information.

Like and not confusing to the customer.

Give me one second, I'm going to make a note on something I said, an idea about something. Sorry, one second.

That kind of sparked an idea I had instant.

Okay, next up we got.

Another Estrella lawns. We are in Washington just like you are in Washington just like us. We have found that takes around 19 to 22 minutes each guy in a two man crew to push mo edge, blow and bag clippings in about 2600 square foot lawn during the spring growth season. My question to you is if there are production times.

You see for a lawn of that square footage in Washington with your locations, is there room to be more efficient and bring that time down? Obviously P4P would help, but in this track time that I'm referring to, it was me mowing the lawn with a team member. So it's not anyone anyway was slacking off. For reference, if you have a lawn mowing request for 6,000 square feet lawn, the weekly pricing of the customer could be somewhere between 105 to $125 each week for basic lawn mowing. With our production time that we have tracked so far, is that the price range you typically see your locations being at with this size lawn? Yeah. So your production rate can completely vary based on so many different variables. Based upon things like how is the grass, how far away is the grass from the road. It can deter be determined is there a sidewalk or is there a ditch? Are there ditches? It can also determine like the size average size, not just the average size of the lot, the average shape of the lot. And so there's a few things that you can always hold true. Number one, if someone's paid to go faster, they will get done faster pay for performance. If someone is paid to do a better job in quality, they'll do a better job with yellow slips on fever P if you use bigger equipment on average, you will go faster. Now the diminishing return of bigger equipment is especially felt when you have smaller properties. 2600 square feet is not super large and so you might not necessarily see that production rate increase. Having less men on a on a crew is also going to increase the production rate per minute because a two man crew never finishes exactly at the same time. So there's. Those are like the constants that I know are true. How long it takes, it just varies by so many different things that it's difficult to Kind of give a response there. Marco has another question. We are in Washington market. Myself in I'm question, I'm curious to see what square foot lawn you would consider for small, medium and large. Yeah, it literally it changes from location location. So for Augusta for example, every single location has a completely different definition of what small, medium and large is. What you want to do is your market you know best. Like what is the average size lawn? Medium, what is small go way lower and then what's large go way larger. And your goal is really to get people to go to the median and then they only choose small or large if they are significantly beyond that and then having another option that says like other so that if in case it's like they are huge, you don't give them a price. If you're doing instant pricing.

Does your Washington location offer furlage region control furloughs? Does your Washington locations offer fer weed control? If so, do you have one specific higher spraying lawns? If your existing customers want a weed free lawn, et cetera, do you refer them to Trugeans? They only focus on that. There might be other companies who do weed fur and weed control, although they also do lawn mowing. So it wouldn't make sense to refer those leads over to them. We don't really think of it like this. Like you know, if someone's doing mowing and we're doing mowing, we don't do weed control. But they do. It doesn't necessarily mean I'm not going to refer over to them. It's not really how we think about it. So we always have people referring partners that are local and you know, it works really well. But we don't do, you know, we don't do a lot of weeding control and fertilizer. I'd say maybe about 30, 40 of our locations do. So I shouldn't say it's, it's negligible. But as the restrictions get more and more it's harder and harder to get employees that have the certification. You're basically just tying yourself to the business. If you as the owner, the only one that can actually do fertilization weed control and even though it's high profit, you still are stuck in the field. It's hard to scale. Since I haven't seen this on your door hanger templates, I wanted to ask what your thoughts about adding the text taxes and processing fees may apply to instant quote door hangers. A $69 door hanger can usually can actually be $77 plus after sales tax and card fees. Do you feel like adding the plus taxes and fees would decrease the response rate? The door hangers you pass out. It is best to send an email. Is it best to send an email stating how much it would is after all taxes and fees after they contact you to schedule. Once someone sends a photo of the door hanger, you still need to get their card on file and you tell them in the email that it's more than the door hanger displayed. I feel like it would demotivate the person to put their card on file. You know, if you're in a state where everyone requiring sales tax for your services, it kind of goes without saying like if you go to the grocery store they don't say like hey buy two get, you know, buy two for 50, $55 on some sort of product and then be like plus taxes and fees. You just assume you're paying sales tax. And so I would not put plus sales tax but we don't charge card fees either. So if you're charging actual processing fees and charging that to the customer on every single invoice, then yes, you'd probably want to put on there something around, around, you know, extra fees could apply. But whenever you make something super oblivious like extra fees will be tacked on, you're going to reduce your, your, your close rate. Especially when you're expecting them to just literally take a picture and accept the job. It's going to decrease if you start adding things in that are like kind of gray and could be malicious, maliciously used. And so if you're just saying like extra fees could apply, they're going to be a little bit hesitant to just click a picture and send it to you. But the tax side of things, I think most people understand that if they're required to pay sales tax, it's going to be added to an invoice just the same way when you go to a grocery store. Ephraim Avraham from Simple Lawn Care Services. Can copilot be used for a garage door company? There's a few companies that are using it as using garage services. Garage door services. I would probably say if you were doing like over 3 or 4 million in garage doors, you might want to think about service titan. But they are going to be like five to 10 times as much in terms of cost as copilot. Jeremy from Klein Lawn Care and snow plowing. How, how is your all meat diet going and what are the pros and cons? It's going very well. Um, I've lost a little bit of weight. The. The pros are I have pretty good energy levels despite this being like my lowest levels of sleep I've had in years. I'm just getting prepared for Blue Collar Summit and several other initiatives we're working on in terms of Copilot and Augusta. So I'm not sleeping a lot. I'm working more hours probably than I have in the past, but I feel very good in terms of my energy levels. So that's pro. Cons.

What are the cons? Cons are like, you know, occasionally I want to eat something else, but I don't have cravings. And like, once I've kind of set my mind to do something like this is how it's gonna happen. It's easier too if you have someone else that's doing it with you, especially if you have a partner or spouse that's also doing it, because then it just makes it so much easier because they're just, they're eating the same thing and like, you don't want to let them down either. And so highly recommend getting like some sort of accountability partner if that is your spouse or significant other. That's excellent. But cons, like, I don't know, like, there's not a lot of cons. I meet a lot. Before going exclusively carnivore, I eat a lot of meat. Like, I like literally the meat. I had this saying, like, eat meat and lift heavy things as like the way of simply, simply thinking about health. And I think that still applies today. So I didn't like, go through like the withdrawals the first couple weeks. I cut weight pretty quickly. I really enjoy me. It never gets old. You keep it fresh. Like, so like I had carnivore pizza the other day. How do you make that? You literally take ground chicken for the, the. The base or the crust. And then we. They also did a crushed up pork rinds for the crust as long as well as with like cream cheese. So, you know, it's, it's. Get creative with it. You can keep it pretty fresh. Meat sticks and jerky is really helpful for like snacking. But like, the pros are the fact that you literally can eat so much food and always feel very satiated. You know how to like, tra. I don't track my calories. I don't worry about like not eating too much. I probably eat more calories now. Eh, probably not. The thing is, like, once you start cutting out all the empty calories, you know, there's just not a lot. Like, you don't. You can't snack Very much. And so you have to have more diligent meal prep. So that's probably a con, I guess, actually is like meal prep. You gotta do better meal prep. Cause it's very hard to find stuff like on the go traveling. Very difficult, actually. And so, like when I travel, it is much harder to do carnivore because, like, most everything has stuff added to it. And you can't have, like, you can't have stuff added to even beef jerky. Almost all beef jerky you can't have because it has sugar added. So if you just conceptually carnivore, you could, you know, be eat beef jerky. Like, yes, it is meat, but it has like sugar added to it. And if you go out to eat and you get like teriyaki, you're like, there's all sorts of sauce all over it. So how strict do you want to be, though, honestly? So, like me, I do carnivore plus greens, so I'm allowed to have spinach and kale. I love spinach for my spinach. Spinach, not smoothies, omelets. So that was my one big thing I wanted to keep in was greens. Just makes sense to me, I guess. Jeremy from Klein Lawn Care and Snowplowing. What are the most effective ways to use a lawn care business? To do as the good and faithful servant in the parable of Matthew, by taking five bags of silver and turning into 10 bags of gold. Ultimately, this is return on investment. I think that we are all given talents. In the Bible, it talks about talents and it kind of uses the parable of a servant and a master. I think if you think of the master as, as God giving you talents, we are, we should be good stewards of whatever is given to us, whether that be, you know, people in the world now call it privilege. Cool. I think that's a. That was something given to you. And you know, the Bible also says, like, to whom much is given, much is required. And so I think of that as, like, who. Who whoever. Like, for example, one of those people. One of the. In this example, he had, I believe it was two talents and he came back with four. Right. So he actually got an increase of two. And so the someone else, though, had five talents and they came back with 10. So you have five, five, an additional five talents.

What's interesting me is that there, there could be enough. There could have been another servant that had five talents and then came back with seven. And they also got two more. But because the person that was given much, they were, they were Required much of. We required five additional talents. And so I do believe that true and like. And so whether it be you are giving privilege or you were able to have a good education or a good family or good upbringing or the opportunity to start a business in a country like the United States or Canada or Australia, like these. These are abundant countries that we are very, very privileged to be able to be in. And so those are. Those are talents, those are things that are given to us. And it's like, what are you going to do with it? If you, if you're Christian and. Or have faith in God, like, if you believe that God given has given you those talents or giving these opportunities or giving these businesses or giving you these responsibilities, then the return on investment should come in the form of what is pleasing to him, which is many times the impact that you have on others, the impact that you have on your community, the impact you have on your family, the impact you have on.

Your employees and things like that. So.

In terms of a lawn care business, yeah, like, you are. You are a steward of all that's been given to you. And so if much has been given you, your business is growing and expanding, well, then, like, you're required to, like, be accountable and responsible for what. What do you do with it? And so, you know, I take this pretty seriously when it comes to, like, the content. Okay, so we have all these eyeballs and thousands, millions of people that watch every month the channels, and at least a million, I think sometimes we get as high as like, 4, 5, 6 million people will watch the channel every single month. And so that's a lot of talents that have been given to me. What am I doing with it? Like, am I squandering it? Am I just trying to bury it? I keep it for myself? Am I, you know, living frivolously, I. E. Not getting return on it? And so this is the thing I think about. I was very privileged to be able to go to school very young, have a really, really good family. They didn't have a lot of money, but they had just a lot of really good upbringing and still a lot of values in me. And so, like, I. I believe that I need. I am responsible to get a return on that. I escaped death twice in my life when I was really young. Three and one when I was. This would have been 21. And that one I remember very distinctly. And that's what changed the trajectory of Augusta Lawn Care. And so and the content and everything, that's when I started. So.

You know, I. I feel that was a talent. That was a, you know, something that was given to me. I'm a student of like my time and so yeah, I like, I work a lot and I don't sleep a lot sometimes because I have the pressure of like, I'm trying to gain return on that, on that.

That opportunity. So that's how I look at it. Is that it for today? That is it for the day? 14 questions in the book exactly at 25 minutes. I hope you all have a fantastic rest of your holiday season. A fantastic New Year's this coming week. Looking forward to 2025, not only for the fact that I'm really looking forward to the fact that we, we have now been almost 11 months from the time that we stopped making new features at Copilot and in the 12 months prior to that, we created like over 30. I'm looking forward to now in 2025, you know, get back on the track of innovation after restoring so much of the back end and infrastructure. And I'm at this time of the year, end of the year 2024, very thankful to everyone that has supported us throughout that time, even that. Stay with us through all that, those struggles. And I'm really looking forward to be able to deliver on everything. You know, we're a year behind, technically, like a year behind of what the plan was and what I wanted to be in. And that's discouraging and you know, I want to make it up. So I really, I really believe the team that we now have is capable of doing that. The restoration of the back end infrastructure and the stability of the system is there. And so as we ramp up into January and February, you start seeing some stuff that I really have been looking forward to. And it is a year behind, but I believe that it was the right move to just set the foundation, infrastructure and the stability of the system. So as we make these features, everyone can actually be happy about them instead of wondering and worrying about the stability of the system. You know, of emails and texts, etc. So lots of stuff coming down the pipe. We got a lot of announcements coming out. The first one, the demo that was released last week, was just a snapshot of what's to come. And so I appreciate everyone tremendously. Looking forward to that. Also looking forward to seeing so many of you at Blue Collar Summit here in just a couple of weeks. There's a really cool announcement around Copilot there. So looking forward to be able to share that with you. Yeah, it's gonna be great. I appreciate you all tremendously I hope you have a fantastic new year and just continue to grow your business. And that is the goal here in 2025. I love you all, and we'll see you next week. Take care.