Copilot Mastermind September 7, 2024

All right, so I recorded this whole thing and then realized that my microphone was off. So I have seen all the questions. So let's do it again. I'll probably. Usually I re record stuff. It goes way faster. So the first one was long. Yeah, sorry. Microphone was off. Re recording. So here we go. We're gonna do the. They were gonna do the mastermind once again.

Let me share this. Cool. All right, we'll come back to that. So probably Monday or Tuesday, I'll have a video come out on the Facebook group. I want to make a couple edits to the community to make it more productive and make sure that people are not avoiding the group simply because there is a. There's been a few times this past week where people have come in and said something that kind of alerts a ton of people and it's not true. And I already know as small business owners we already have enough crazy stress happening in our day. I don't want some one user in the Facebook group being able to immediately get 900 other business owners freaking out when it's not true. So someone said emails weren't going out. Sure enough, check their account. They're going out just fine. They just sent a massive blast and they're throttled over the course of a couple hours. And same thing with text. Same thing with someone saying that the credit cards were getting compromised. It was nothing to do with copilot. So those sort of things being thrown into.

The Facebook group, we kind of want to moderate that because I don't want people avoiding the group simply because they don't want to have be stressed out by things like that. So I want to be careful. Obviously I want to do it the right way. I don't want to feel like there's any sort of censorship or people that want to share things that are the frustrations about Copilot, those should be able to be voiced. So. So I want to make sure I do it in the right way. But I saw a few like three times last week it happened. Automation not being set up. Someone's saying automations aren't working. No, they're working just fine. Your automation is set up incorrectly. And so even if it's just a way for us to be able to funnel them through support, make sure that they're able to. If it's a one off situation with one person, just help them directly call them up. So I want to make it really smooth. I want to make sure I'm not. We're not censoring anything that's never the objective, but that we can have a much better community dialogue instead of having it where those sort of things become a stress to us as small business owners. Because you have enough customer issues, employee issues happening every day. So I'll make a video about it probably Monday or Tuesday. I want to be very thoughtful about how we handle it and so I'll roll it out next week. All right, let's jump in to the questions that I have already answered.

I apologize for that. First one is from Adam. How do you handle P4P and budget hours while doing Christmas lights? Obviously you would have a set number of budget hours for the initial install. But what about any service calls to fix the lights that happen in between when you install them and take them down? How are you providing an estimate to the customer? Do you give them a one price, give them one price. That includes install service calls, takedown storage, or do you line item each service for them? How are you factoring service into the estimate? Yeah, I'd keep your pricing really simple. So I'd do it based upon the size of the house and then like good, better, best model. And then I would probably bake your budget hours based into that based upon the price per square foot. So linear feet of, of lights for example, can just be converted into budget hours. You could also just set some, set a certain number of budget hours per package that you sell. So you're like okay, the, the, the medium package, the mid priced option is going to take two budget hours to install, half an hour to take down. And then I would probably treat your service ones based upon like it's this base pay and people go out and it's a manual adjustment on P4P. That's probably how I would handle it. If it's your first year, you might not have the most accurate budget hours. So you might want to take the year and do a little bit of analysis to make sure that your, your crew is, is able to do it. Now if you're only doing like three or four or five houses, I probably wouldn't do P4P cause I don't want people on the top of a roof going as fast as they possibly can. But if you're going to do 100 houses, 50 houses and they're going to be doing very repetitively, then you can assign the budget hours. I'd bake that into either. You can take any unit in home services and just convert it into budget hours. So I was talking to a user of PVP software the other day. They do over $20 million a year in roofing? Well, in roofing squares is the unit of choice that everyone works by. And so he just converted everything from squares into budget hours. And so he's like, well it's not gonna be exact cause some certain types of shingles or whatever, it's like look, this unit metric is super standard. Just convert it into budgeted hours. So I do the same thing with linear feet, with something like Christmas lights or. And then you take that kind of average range of linear feet into your packages and then your package would have a budget hour for install, budget hours for takedown. And I would probably treat everything in between those service calls. It's kind of like not yellow slips because it's not usually your employees fault if a light bulb goes out. But I'd be treating it like a manual adjustment to go to the property. That'd be my two cents. I'm sure there might be other people that have good ideas too though. Ezra Heinrich, what's your 10 year vision for Copilot? I really think the next 10 years like the focus is AI and.

It is how do we give business owners what exactly the decisions should be in their business in terms of hiring, pricing, which services they should be using, what, which ones are making them the most money, where to raise prices, which employees are the most effective and efficient versus not and actually giving them the information they need to just make decision in the business. And then I would say in 10 years robotics is going to be important. And I think that a software like ours in 10 years will be in a good place to be able to actually interface with the robotics. Because for example I talked to a lot of robotics companies for example in mowing. But there's robots in a lot of different industries. But a lot of times you need good UI and a UX user interface for the software to run the robotics. So for example, with a robot mower to be able to choose which direction the mower is, is mowing and then switching it, the striping of it on a weekly basis for example, should be done through software. And so I, I think that copilot could really be the thing that aligns with the robotics as they start to take hold. And I believe 10 to 20 years, but the next 10 years will be pretty busy just doing what I believe is the most important thing right now, which is AI, which will tie into like automated scheduling and automating a lot of the processes that are currently locked up inside the brain of the owner. What's the question you wish people ask more that they don't I don't really have one specifically. People ask good questions and I'm happy with that. Ezra, I know a lot of business owners who unfortunately end up getting divorced. Are you currently looking for a relationship or hoping to wait? The grind somewhat slows down? Personally curious in your thoughts? For me, like, the grind won't stop. I'm pretty honest about that when it comes to choosing a relationship. Like, I'm sorry, like, I'm not going to slow down. My, my time allocation throughout my day will change. Working more hours necessarily isn't the best thing for me now going forward. It's like I need to make good decisions and so if, if that means working a little bit less so I'm not completely exhausted in my mind that that's what I should do. But like.

I still work like, hey, five to six, seven through four, eight to 11. So like four.

I still work like a solid like 11 to 13 hours a day probably. But like, it's. No, definitely not like physically exhausting like it used to be. And it's much more about, like, how do I tap into the talents of other people that are far more skilled than I am?

So in terms of. So I'm not waiting on anything. I'll have a video coming out in a couple weeks. I'm turning 29 in a couple weeks, so I have a video coming out. Like, what did I learn in my 20s? And like, my advice to someone that would be 20 years old today, basically 10 years ago, is this. When I started Augusta Lawn care, I was 28. So like, what have I learned since then? So one of those things is pursue excellence and not women. I believe if you do that during your 20s, you'll probably have a really, a much better chance of getting a great woman if you have pursued excellence throughout your 20s, physically, financially, spiritually, etc. And so that's what I've focused on. You know, it's been good for me. But like, I don't necessarily think that's what everyone should do, by no means.

So, yeah, you know, I do believe in my 30s, like, I'll have a family and things like that. So, Caleb Bartlett, do you think you'll have a better close ratio using Copilot over Service Autopilot's client portal and estimate form?

Do you think you'll have a better closing ratio using Copilot Copilot over Service Autopilot's client portal and estimate form.

Like, so their client portal? I don't like one part, and that is the fact that it's you require like five different security questions and a very complex security password to just get in. As a, as a customer, I don't believe that it should be like treated like Fort Knox. Seeing a estimate or invoice does not, is not financial information. And you can just encrypt the financial information and show the last four digits of a pin. There's nothing that needs to be secured like they have it. And we just consistently saw people calling in to accept estimates because they didn't want to go through into the client portal and put their car on file, et cetera. And so about 30 to 40% of people that were accepting estimates were calling in to put card information in or calling in because they couldn't get their account set up. And so like it was a pain in the butt. And then like we had screenshots of how to like sign up here and like put your five questions in here. And it was just a lot of people calling in because it was hard to get into the client portal. So. So I do believe their internal client portal is really good, like really, really solid. It's just that one, the getting in part was just like horrible.

There's a lot coming up in COPA about our client portal. It'll probably be the first thing you all see from your perspective of front end UI changes. And so there's a lot I could say about that but like it'll happen. But this is very much top of mind for us because this is what actually your customers are interacting with the most and has like a direct impact on things like close ratio and as a meaningfully understanding the user interface of the customer, what they're looking at, what they're clicking on, where they get confused and what we've been doing on the back end for the past eight, nine months will now allow us to start doing surveys, tracking and analyzing where customers are clicking and being able to actually nail this part. So I would say if I had to compare these two, service autopilot, client portal internally, far better than Copilot's in my opinion. Their access to that client portal is so flawed that like it cost our owners, when I did the math, like thousands of dollars every month in just people calling it like across the system just to call in all the time and have having problems logging in. And we never ever would allow clients client portal logins from the website because it caused all sorts of customer confusion. Whereas now like we can click in there and people can sign in relatively easy using Copilots. I would say in six months this will it'll be more obvious that like we'll beat on both. But right now service outputs is really solid inside in my opinion. How do you legally lay someone off if you're in an at will state? I just tell them that they're fired. I tell them that they are. Their services are no longer needed. Usually when you start giving reasons why you get in trouble. My very first hire that wasn't a friend. I didn't know what I was doing and I illegally fired him because I said, hey, it's gonna affect our, our workers compensation, so I'm gonna let you go. Because he was claiming that he got hurt on the job and he had made it up. We all knew that he knew that, but he knew what to say and made a claim and then basically said that I fired him because he got hurt. Well, you can't do that. And I was trying to be nice because I wanted to fire him anyways. He had a really, really bad performance and no one wanted to work with him and he was smoking a whole bunch and leaving the job site to go smoke. And so anyways, all that to say don't give reasons, just let them go. There's been a few occasions where, where I really wanted the person to be able to succeed well in life and I knew that they would not use it against me. And I did give them specific things that they needed to work on and how I kind of phrased it, usually in the form of a kind of like a letter of recommendation and in there talking about the things that they could improve at and the things that they're really strong at. So that sometimes will be helpful if you're trying to just help them in life. But usually don't have a, having a problem keeping the team motivated to get upsells reviews and win challenges that I give them. I give bonuses for all of these, but they do not put in any effort to do these anymore. So sometimes like monetary reward is fine, but sometimes people do it more for the social part and praising them. For example, you might be like, well I'm willing to pay like, you know, in incentives like thousand dollars a month and like doing all these different things for the team. It might be a good idea to like lease a car and be like, hey, whoever gets the highest efficiency score for the month with Elite with zero yellow slips, you get to have this Tesla. The Tesla is going to cost you like five or six hundred bucks a month plus insurance, probably less than $1,000. I've, I've thought significant like quite a bit about that one and then, or even just like employ the month, like parking spot, like you get a parking spot right at the front of the door or they get like a, they get to put a, like a big UFC belt across their dash and like something really cool like that. So sometimes like I would play with that. Like other things besides monetary value, social credibility, opportunities, like kind of rewards that they might be able to get, like time off for first or they get certain things like that that might be more social credibility. How do you explain PVP to new employees that start for you? I did a poor job of doing this and a lot of my employees still have misconception on how it works. Yes. At the very beginning, all you're going to do is show them a chart of the team and how much they made on P4P. At the beginning, they're not going to believe anything about pay for performance or like how much money the crew makes. So show them the proof, show them the leaderboard and then that's usually going to be like in the interview process the first couple of days. I also made errors in this regard. It made it way too complicated. The bottom line is like, hey, the harder you work, the more money you make and you get a percent of all the labor revenue that you bring to the business. That's really it. And then what I would then do is as time goes on, there'll be scenarios, they'll think things like yellow slips that have to be brought up and then you start to educate them on that. But at the very beginning, it's like, look, when you make more money for the business, you make more money. And if you've connected P4P software with Copilot, they actually see how much revenue they're going to earn for the day as they're on a route. So that's helpful. But a lot of times just showing them that there are people making more money.

And it's real is very beneficial. So a lot of times like I'll pull, I'll just show you what I do. So like, I didn't do this before. Sorry, give me one second. So I'll just be like, you know, I'll explain the basic premise. Like I said that you harder work, harder you work, the more money you make. I'll usually say something along the lines of like, you know, you've probably worked at a place where you work really hard and you make like a dollar or two more per hour than someone else. Well, we don't think that's fair. It's like, you know, if you're working way harder and you're making the business more money, you should make more money, too. And a lot of people, like, yeah, that totally 100%. Because everyone thinks they're a high performer in their own brain. So especially at the beginning, they'll get a lot of buy in. And then I'll show them this, like, hey, this is the paycheck for the team. You can see here. This guy made 30 bucks an hour. This guy made 29 bucks an hour. I mean, $36 an hour. I was like, literally take them through this. Like, see, it's real. Our base pay, 20 bucks. No one's making 20 bucks. They're kicking butt. And here's how you do it. And usually when they start seeing these numbers, like, oh, I should probably listen if I can make $37 an hour. So like, an $800 extra bonus on the paycheck, that's when they start to listen. So that's usually what I have seen to work the best at the beginning. Your browser has lost connection to your screen share audio. Oh, that's fine. I don't need my screen share audio. Making sure you can hear me. That's very. Okay, cool. All right, Sorry. I'm sensitive to audio issues right now. Okay.

Jamar, how are y' all setting budget hours for Christmas lights when the rest of the industry is charging per foot? I think I kind of talked about this earlier, and that is basically convert foot into budgeted hours, and then usually you're going to sell package pricing, and so you're going to convert linear feet into package pricing. Package pricing has a certain amount of budget hours for install and a certain amount of budget hours for takedown. That's what I would recommend.

What are some great benefits to give employees if you can't afford health insurance or you don't want to get into, like, the. You know, if it feels like a pain to you, um, a gym reimbursement program is actually really good. We do it in addition to the medical benefits now. But at the beginning, that was all we did just because we can afford medical benefits at the beginning. And that's like up to 80 bucks a month every quarter. Submit your receipts and we'll refund you for anything health related in terms of gyms. So gym like actual, like, workout stuff, but also they can do, like, tennis clubs, pool clubs, like swimming and stuff. So anything like that that they have a subscription to, we would pay for every quarter. That one actually landed really well paid time off. Actually, people like to it also has in depending on your state will help with sick leave. Kind of getting around a lot of the sick leave rules as well.

How do you figure out how profitable individual services such as lawn mowing, that's when you're going to be looking at really I'd be mostly looking at your effective hourly rate. So like if someone works 10 hours, how much revenue they make in terms of labor revenue, not total revenue for the business. That's usually the easiest way to do it, your effective hourly rate. And that is just labor revenue. So how much labor revenue do you make per clocked hour? Not per budgeted hour. Because if you have something like mowing, you're stopping a lot more. So your effective hourly rate goes down if you take the amount of revenue, labor revenue they earn, divide it by clocked hours. That's the important part. So take out all the materials, take out all the fees, just labor revenue, and then divide it by their clocked hours.

Oh, this is a long one. Okay. I didn't see this one before. All right. Hey Mike, Hate to be that guy asking the question you probably don't want to hear, so I'm sorry about that. That's fine. What causes things to seem like there's not a lot of progress with the software functionality and what makes it happen that sometimes causes the software to get less functional than before? Over overall, I've had good experiences. But for example, loading images, which was one of my favorite features, has suddenly become much more difficult with no apparent reason. And even though people bring it up and report it doesn't seem to get fixed. In the spring, myself and others report an issue where invoices weren't displaying properly on mobile, which seemed like a pretty big deal and it took multiples of months just to fix that where it wasn't displaying the cost of each item only showed taxes and it really confused customers. Can you enlighten someone like me who doesn't know much about software as to what makes this such a lengthy process? I have seen some of your videos where you said you are doing everything you can and using every resource. So I get that part. But what in particular case causes the issues? Could you go into more detail about how the software began and got to be where it is now? Yeah, so good question. So trust me, I'm the I think it things go slower in like I live my life in constant frustration because things don't go fast enough all the time. Not just software, just everything.

So one of my biggest frustrations this year has been the fact that many of the Issues in terms of, quote, bugs that we have had, we have inside of Copilot and that like jumped on us like crazy in January as tons of people, oh, we went to dark mode, folks. Okay, I'm recording this evening. So that's why. All right, anyways.

When that happened in January, I had a lot of long conversations with people that were much smarter than me when it comes to software. And they said, we can do this two ways. We can do this the fast way and we can make everyone happy and fix the bugs. And I can say this now, but there were literally hundreds of bugs that we had documented, recorded and knew about. And for that reason is why we stopped all feature development in March or sorry, in February and basically did not.

Get hit the deadlines. I had promised in terms of certain features because we stopped all feature work.

The fast way would just be address the bugs and start fixing them. And I think if we would have done that.

We would definitely have made people happier. The thing is we needed to fix the bugs to get.

The system usable. At the same time, we need to take a much more long term approach and that is fix the entire root of the problem, which is the fact that we had legacy code that couldn't scale with us past a couple thousand users. The question was, do you, do we want to fix all these bugs, continue to get more users because the system will be nice and people will like it, et cetera. And then basically this is going to happen every single off season when we onboard hundreds and if not thousands of more users. And it was like either a, when we're smaller, do we address this and fix it right and take a year and actually do this correctly? And that is rework the entire code base. We are switching by the end of this year we'll be switched from PHP to Node JS, a completely different coding language. There's over 5 million lines of code inside the code base and a good chunk of that we inherited from Lawn Pro two years ago when we originally started Copilot. That code base had to is the root of all these problems because that code base never scaled. And there's a difference that I've had to learn when it comes to software as a service, SaaS software. And there's a difference between good software that works when you have say 500 or 600 users versus software that work well with 10,000 users. And all the decisions that we are making this year in terms of the back end infrastructure and the changes at Copilot are with the mindset that we are going to have 10,000 businesses using copilot. And if we would have thought that oh, we only need to get to a thousand or two thousand, we would have handled this past year very, very differently. And so.

Because my, my horizon for Copilot and Mike, my participation and what I want from Copilot is very, very long term. I decided to take the approach that we are going to fix and that is essentially rewrite the entire code base and reorganize like restructure everything. And so every one of those projects, when I looked at it in this, this early this spring were 6 to 12 month projects. All the stuff that we need to do, create an API, create a native app, change code base infrastructure, switch to AWS to be able to have more flexible scaling architecture. So when people jump on like they did in December and people join that we don't bog the system down completely rewrite the way we do security and tokenization of users.

All these things are massive projects projects. And we could have just started to address the bugs, but we had to do is instead focus on like 50% bugs, 50% back in infrastructure. And that split attention is what caused the slowdown. And so if you were here in 2023, usually bugs would come up and within a couple weeks we haven't fixed because we were 100% focused on features and bugs. But then when you bring this other thing like okay, we need to rewrite this entire code base, we need to make this scalable infrastructure, we need to bring in massive amount of artillery. Artillery in terms of engineers that are going to restructure this entire thing. You can't spend every. Like if you're. So for example, I'm going to, I'm going to remodel my house and I'm going to tear down the walls and start redoing them. It's like, oh well, like I want the outlet over here, right? It's like yes, that's important. But right now we need to build the wall. And so unfortunately it's not fun to live in a house when it's being remodeled. And so.

That'S what we had to been living the past eight, nine months. I genuinely believe that over the next is like hitting this, this, this off season. Everyone's going to actually see the impacts of, of the remodel. There is so much in the back end and a lot of I don't share because it is technical and you're just like, okay, just saying a bunch of words. But all the things that I just mentioned in terms of the backend infrastructure have been done or are very close to being done in 2024. And so I know that in five to 10 years we'll look back and say, oh, 2024 is actually super important for the business. And it led to what we allowed us to scale. It allowed us to have a much more scalable infrastructure. It allowed us to create features much faster with Node JS and using React instead of the PHP or laravel that we're using in the past. These are all fundamental things that it's like literally rewriting the code base and massive projects that don't bring any immediate value to the current users. And so I've been clear about this and I always stay true to this and that is like, I will not forget the users that join, especially in the first half, like June of 2024 and backwards. I will not, I will not forget that because we could not continue to the business without you all. We don't have venture capital, we don't have private equity backing us. And so we have massive investments into the team. And back in December, we grew massively, like tripled the business month over month for three months in a row, which was great, but created security issues because people got in trying to bog the system down that create a whole bunch of problems, then just lots of, lots of issues.

And we're not gonna let that happen again. And so in order for that not to happen again and allow us to be able to 10x the business again and more users to be able to use it, we have to build the business correctly. And that is strip the thing down, go down to the foundation. And that's what we've been doing in 2024, which has diverted the attention of the team to go like, we have infrastructure projects and then we have to also make sure that we fix bugs, etc. And so I genuinely believe, I generally believe by, by January at Blue Collar Summit, this will become where all the stuff we work, it'll start being seen and it'll be paying off. And I'm not just saying that like I am putting my, my money where my mouth is on this. There's a huge amount of my personal investment that I put into this to make sure this happens. And so, you know, Josh, VP of Product, we had, we had joined the team a couple of weeks ago. Full time is a, it's the first step of many steps towards that progress. And so.

Yeah, I generally believe in five to 10 years we'll look back at 2024 as the fundamental year that allowed us to do what we will do, but it is not fun in the in the meantime. And I who is this again? Pierce, I full heartedly agree with you. The speed at which a bug should be fixed has been slowed down dramatically compared to what we can we can do and what we've done in the past. But like smoothest fastest smooth and smoothest fast or whatever that thing is, we are in that process, we gotta make things smoother. And that is rewriting the code base, modernizing it, upgrading the talent. All of those more fundamental backend issues that we're dealing with will make that all possible. So that's all all I would say to that end.

That was a long answer. That was a lot longer than the first time I went to it. Anyways. All right. I hope you all have a fantastic rest of your weekend and I will. Like I said, I have a video on Monday or Tuesday I want to make. I want to do a very thoughtful way of how, how we moderate the group and I want to be very clear that it's not going to be about trying to keep people quiet. It's actually quite the opposite. When we have a customer advisory board that we're putting together and it's usually our loudest critics, we really, really, they have the best feedback and they're actually being reached out personally by the team. Josh VP of product specifically and having one on one calls and getting those things that's much more, much better for all our users and much more productive than people just blowing up in the Facebook group. So we want the feedback. We need it. I just wanted done in a way where someone throwing stress on everyone because they say something doesn't work when in reality they need to fix a setting or support can hop on a call with them and fix it real quick with them is when I want to resolve that for the community. So I love you all. Have a fantastic weekend and we will talk next week. Take care.