Customers Won't Open Your Emails

One question I had is I saw the email deliverability was there improved from I think it was 91 to 95% on the graphics earlier. One issue we had with single ops was actually deliverability quite a bit like 95%. Is that pretty industry standard for CRMs or are you trying to get it up to more like 99 or like where, where do things stand in that regard?

Yeah, so a big reason why the 5% doesn't get delivered is the way that they're designed. So if you go into the, the help articles, I actually wrote a whole article about this and that is like 10 reasons why your email is not getting delivered. The first one is really the basic part of like just setting up your DNS records correctly inside of your domain, hosting wherever you're getting email, and we walk you through how to do that. That's a big one. But the other parts are things like, for example, the first email they're getting, if it has a bunch of links and a bunch of pictures, there's a very good chance, regardless of how good our, you know, deliverability is, their, their email. Like this is an email that has a whole bunch of links, a whole bunch of pictures, a whole bunch of videos and attachments. And we've never gotten an email from this person. It's likely going to go to their spam or spam detected folder. And so that number, yeah, we're always trying to get it higher, but Honestly, anything above 90, 93 is usually considered decent. The thing that I like to do though, Max, is like we always on the, on the text messaging side, our first, you know, email is usually going to be for an estimate, we're sending it all via text. We're doing a text and email, text and email. My goal is always for them to open up the emails because once they open up one or two emails, they'll get through. It's that first one or two, especially since February 2024. So February 2024 is when a whole bunch of new stuff got enacted around email filtering and deliverability. And it started off with like Outlook and Yahoo and Gmail got it. And so it's just gotten harder and harder to get through. It's going to be a constant battle. But the number one thing you can do is reduce the amount of links, text links, pictures, video and attachments. And so we've purposely actually stripped out a lot of that extra fluff in our transactional emails, which is estimates, invoices, and then we go heavier on the marketing side when it comes to.

Marketing stuff. So emails that are blasted, I might have pictures and videos in them for example. What we actually did to help with this max is we actually have two completely different servers for marketing messages versus transactional emails. So this is the big thing that we did and we need to make sure that every single email and invoice is opened up like every single one. So that deliverability is probably 98%. If I had to guess, the marketing ones are going to be lower. We use a completely different server and how we distinguish this max is when you send an email, if it's one person, we know this is a transactional email. So automations invoices and estimates. If you're sending out a mass message to 3,000 people that's when we now are going to know this is a marketing message and we send it through a completely different email. So if you actually look at it kind of like the, the from email address that we use, one of them is like copilot mail@copilot.com or whatever. There's a different one for the marketing ones versus the transactional. So that's why like that's one of the improvements we've made. But also just like spam detection, people will get in and if you say like dollar signs in a title it just crushes your, your email deliverability. And ultimately what was happening before, like when you were in it last year, people were doing that with marketing but then it affected the, the transactional emails. And so now we've completely separate like they're completely different services like SendGrid versus Mailgun. So completely different services.

That's great. Yeah, that's good to know. And that, that's, that's very cool. It makes a lot of sense. And so you think but after if you send like a real bare bones email as your first message, the likelihood of then if you want to include some, you know, like a video link to a YouTube video you did or something in future emails making that first one highly deliverable makes a difference 100%.

I would really index on anything transactional being minimalized and then anything that is more marketing heavy I kind of go a little bit more free flow with it knowing that you know, maybe 93% get through but I want to have a video I want to present about my bark mulch installs or whatever. But I'm seeing people right now across the system just strip out everything of emails so they can get a hundred percent deliverability. Like I know I can sell someone if I get in front of them. If they don't get the email, I have a problem. And so I, I, I'm very pro this right now. And that is like, strip out anything that has, like, widgets, anything that has a bunch of columns, anything that has a whole bunch of links. Any sort of tracking of those links will immediately get flagged. So I have an article about it. It's pretty lengthy inside the help articles that kind of walk you through overall design stuff.

Okay. Do you think having the company logo on the signature is still okay? Like just a small company embedded logo?

Yeah. Yeah. How I kind of explain that in that there's no right and wrong or like, will this get through or will it not? It's like, what level of design am I willing to give up for deliverability? Right. So for me, I still want my logo because I want it to be associated with my brand. And so I'm willing to take a slight little hit, maybe 10, you know, a few percentage of. If I'm scoring myself out of 100, I'm willing to take a little bit of hit to get my logo on there. And some videos, some emails. I'm willing to take a larger hit by putting a embedded video, but I know it's coming at the cost of deliverability.

Right on. Well, that makes total sense. Well, I'm excited to drop mailchimp and be able to use, you know, copilot for marketing. So appreciate your time. Thanks a lot.

You got it, Max.

Hey, thanks for doing this. Something I'm struggling with right now is, like, shop space. And so I was wondering, what's your thoughts on, like, renting versus, like, just going out and buying land and, like, just having a shop built?

Yeah. So keep in mind, if you're gonna actually start buying land, building land, or buying any sort of property, you are now entering a different business, and it's the business of real estate.

Right.

And so I believe that the vast majority of people, if you spend, it's not so much make everyone makes sense of their rent versus mortgage. Almost all of us can make sense of that.

Yeah.

And they'd be like, oh, I'll have more flexibility. I can do what I want with the space, etc. Cool. It's the, the killer is the down payment. Because if you were to put 25 down on a 500, 000 property, my question is, if you spent 125 grand on your business, what would it do to the business? Like, would it double the business? If you spent half of that on marketing and got a few more trucks, would you literally double the business? Because if so, I think that that business that doubled the size would be able to afford a bigger shop space at renting. So it's the down payment that I hate. And it also depends on your market. Some places, one of our owners in Texas got a location for $90,000 with an office space, had like eight trucks there. Super cool that that would cost me literally 800 grand in my market if I could find it. Right. So it also depends on that a lot. But I would. Most of the time when people are talking like what. What are you considering right now, Tanner, in terms of size and like what the. The buying price.

Like there's acreages. I'm in Iowa, so there's a bunch of acreages around us. You know, you can find something like 30 acres for like $200,000 or. But it has no shop on it, you know, so then you're spending another 200,000 in the shop space.

So I mean, it's like that's. I'm just stuck right now because we have like our equipment is spaced out from three different facilities. Like I'm using some of my friend's space, some of our storage units, some of my place. And it's like getting to a problem where like I don't feel like we're an actual company and like a team where I can like actually have our whole staff come in and then like actually have board meetings and whatnot. Like, so I'm just struggling with that and like I'm very frugal with money so like I try to save as much as I can and I. It's like biting me in the butt right now.

So the challenging part with this is usually, this is what I would say. I would say usually try to get the two hundred thousand dollar land, go super bare minimum in terms of like operative conex boxes and shipping containers and just like gravel the lot and do that. The problem with that is usually a bank won't give you a loan. They want to have a building on it. And so what you might be able to figure out is some sort of a loan where it's a construction loan and they give you like a two or three year term on getting it built. Then what you could do is you could go get the land, do the gravel part, get all your stuff moved over, and then actually build up the cash reserve to afford like the, the draws on the, on the building. But what size of business you do now, Tanner? Like what revenue?

We did 400,000 last year.

Okay. Yeah. So if you were to get this loan you're basically have to put 100 grand down. And so you know, it just, it simply comes down to like if you spend 100 grand on the business, would you grow up to 800 grand and then afford the rent by its, by you know, doing that?

Well, our, like our goal for next year is to do like roughly almost 800.

The problem I'm having right now is that we're getting like big massive bids that we're supposed to do. Like we're supposed to bid on like a two and a half million dollar job for this year. And I have no idea how I'm going to manage all that. Like going from were at to doing almost $3 million in just one year. Like with having cash on hand. That's what's scary about buying something versus like just me renting. Because I don't, I really don't know the future yet because we're still putting bids out but like there's some large bids that we're supposed to be doing.

And it's yeah like if first off I wouldn't make any buying decision until there's actually something signed and like I know that million is coming in but, but I would also say I would be questioning whether or not we should even be taking those jobs on. Like any job that's five times revenue might not be the job for us. And if you get it and then you lose it the next year, all of a sudden like you've got this massive soft space and everything's invested into hard assets. The reason I don't generally like any sort of construction build is because it increases your fixed assets or your fixed expenses. Anytime you're talking about fixed expenses, like I get so stared out like crazy when it comes to seasonal businesses. And so if you're going to go from 400,000 to 800,000 next year, like can you wait, let me ask this question. Can you get land and not have to build? Like can you already have loans that you think you get for just the land?

Like I haven't really done much talking. We did like me and my accountant went into a bank meeting and they were like wanting us to actually buy a commercial building versus us. Like yeah, going and buying a land.

Yeah, it's safer for them.

Exactly. And so, but, but that's usually gonna.

Be a five year balloon. That's usually a five or ten year balloon.

Yeah.

And so we're talking about like your monthly payment probably being what, six grand a month? Seven grand.

Yeah, roughly.

Yeah.

So that, that's what I'm like, okay, could we go rent somewhere for four grand a month with lower fixed expenses and still grow the business to a million plus? When we get to a million plus, all of a sudden need a bigger shop space than the one we would have built. True.

The problem I have with, like, the shop space around here is, like, it's either completely way out of our way, where we're like driving almost 20, 30 minutes just to get to our designated spots.

And that's like, worrisome for me, like for fuel expenses and. And, you know, just guys messing around on the clock. And I. I don't know, there's just all sorts of worries there. And then like, finding the space as well. Like, there's really limited space around my house.

If you're having to go, say, 15, 20 minutes outside of town, Right. You're paying the tax every single day for having that shop. So he's being a little further out. So the, the difference of like, okay, I'm saving five grand a month by renting instead of building, you're chipping away at the everyday. As the business grows bigger, that tax gets bigger and it makes more sense to go buy the land and build the shop. That's why I believe if you build the business bigger and now you're having the 10, 15 employees that are wasting 15 minutes a day now it starts to become a real conversation. At your size, currently three or four employees a day times 15, 20, 30 minutes doesn't move the needle. Right. So I always, like, generally default to grow the business. You can turn into profit mode for like one year. So now it's really profitable. And then go drop that cash. Because in the long term, it's usually a good idea to get land. It's usually a good idea to get the shop space. But there's a reason why, like, they want you to buy and not build, and like, the bank will really, really willing to collateralize that. So that would be my recommendation. Grow the business bigger. It makes more and more sense. The more employees you have to be able to take that extra fixed expense for the time savings. I would also say if you switch to pay for performance, their drive time doesn't get paid for.

True, true. And that's why I switched to, like, we just switched from Yardbook actually to your software. I'm still trying to get everything onboarded, but that's kind of the reason I switched over is so we can utilize the P4P.

Yeah. Because if you have P4P, they're not getting paid for drive time. All of A sudden that's not. That's a non equation when it comes to the shop.

Exactly.

Too. And it might mean that you get shop space for half the price because a little 15, 20 minutes further out drive. But because you have P4P implemented, you're not as worried.

Right.

But that. That's a hard lift. Like the P4P thing. If you can't get done this year. Let's go. That's a huge Dom.

I'm gonna try. I'm definitely gonna try.

Good stuff, man. Thanks.

But hey, I appreciate it.

You got it, man. Jordan, go ahead.

Something I've been trying to figure out now for a little while is just how to standardize my grass cutting prices.

So I've gone over in the last two years essentially a time every time we're on site figuring out kind of exactly how long a place took. And then what I've done is like just using kind of Google Earth, measuring out square footage and just essentially trying to see if there's a pattern to be able to standardize this. So essentially somebody else can start giving out estimates.

But the fact of it is there's no pattern I found between square foot size and. And the time it takes. So I don't really know how to teach somebody else to quote because right now it's just like it has to be me and I have to go out in person. So I got to like leave kind of like the office drive there.

It's.

You know, it takes an hour to give out one quote.

Yeah. We all know. Nothing to do with that. Mercy. Okay. All right. So.

First off, are you trying to grow right now? Are you trying to make the business as profitable as possible?

It's a bit of both. I'm trying to.

I'm trying to grow. It's one or the other. Are we trying to grow revenue this year? Are we trying to raise prices?

I guess Raise prices.

Okay.

Actually profit. I want to essentially want to make myself irrelevant this year is essentially the goal.

Okay. What size is yours, Jordan?

We made 300k last year.

All right. All right, go ahead.

Yeah, so three. We had 300 essentially. But nothing can happen without me there. Like I tried taking one day off last summer and it was like it was a nightmare for everybody involved.

So it's just the goal for this summer is obviously to make a little more money. So increase the profits. But like I said, make myself irrelevant. And then next year we can work on growing from there.

Great. So in order to achieve this, we need systems in the business in order to create Systems, there are two things we do and two things we avoid. We avoid complexity and we avoid.

Custom jobs. Anything custom, and then we run towards simplification and standardization. So when it comes to pricing for lawn mowing, if that's the current constraint we're trying to talk about, we can throw this into this matrix and say, okay, is this simple, is this standardized or is this custom and is this complex? And so right now, you visiting the property and having to look at every single one, every single job is custom. You're like, well, it's just mowing, it's simple. But every single job is going through Jordan's eyeballs in order to come up with a price. And so what I would recommend is how do we simplify this process? Yes, we could measure the property over the phone and do it via Google Maps. I think we should. I would say, can we simplify this more because there's gonna be times people miss, miss a section of property, etc. I would say, can we just have a small, medium and large. Can we just say any property that's under 5,000 square foot, is this between 5,000, 8,000, is this between 8,000? 12,000 is large? Anything above 12,000, I'm gonna do a drive by, for example. And so that way there's way less room for error. And you're like, well, what if it's inaccurate? It will be inaccurate, but what it will also do is prevent you spending an hour going to the pro customer's property. Because right now that's costing you 80 to $100 to do that estimate. Like, oh, it's free. No, no, because right now the alternative to you doing the estimate is doing the work and generating 80 to $100 in revenue. So if you have to go drive out there, you are paying the, the, the val the equivalent of 80 to $100 to go do the estimate. And so I'm okay being inaccurate. The very worst case scenario, the worst case scenario, if you do an estimate over the phone, it's slightly off. Is the very worst case scenario is you have to raise the price to the customer. We do it on less than 1% of customers inside of Augusta. When we do pricing over the phone, less than 1%, that's the worst case scenario. Now what we like to do is take the price. After three months, we're going to go on copilot, we're going to the budget hours and we're going to look at the actual hours. And the ones that we're not hitting budget hours, we're going to raise Prices. But now I've created the system and that is very simple. I have three prices, small, medium, and large. And then they're going to fall in with those baskets. And then in three months, I'm going to have real data as to whether or not I need to raise their price. And then I'll do that based upon that. By the way, there's going to be people that will accept the large price for $79 a week when if you would have gone to the property, it would have 59. And we're not going to lower the price. We're going to roll with it. But they're happy to pay that because you made it simple now for them to get an estimate fast, for them to get an estimate and your close ratio up because people don't want to wait for you to come to drive by the property, send them the quote, etc.

Yeah, I mean, that, that makes sense to me, but it's more just like, okay, so how, how do I determine the prices in a sense for that small, medium, large?

So I would be looking at your, your current properties. I would take. How many do you have? How many customers you hit do you have now, Jordan?

I have about 62.

Perfect. So we're going to do an X axis and a Y. I'm sorry, Y axis and the X axis on the X axis, going to do price on the Y axis. We're going to do square footage from zero to whatever square footage you have. And then just literally go in Excel and do a plot graph of all of those. And you're going to find very quickly they follow a general trajectory. And you're going to say, okay, these ones are small, these ones are medium, these ones are large. And you're going to look down on the excess and see where does that fall in the square footage and have a very good range as to what small, medium and large looks like.

Cat.

And then.

Obviously, like, I think we all know, like the biggest time thing is trimming. That's the biggest. So do you like, factor in. So, like, would you do like a small, medium, large? I'll try the axis idea.

And then just kind of based on, I guess, sort of what I know from doing them, I can sort of make guidelines on. Like, consider this, like an easy trim, this normal trim, and this like heavy trim type thing.

I wouldn't even do that. I would do it based on square footage. I would do it based on square footage and, and realize that, yes, your accuracy will go down when you do this. Your close ratio will Go up because you now you get the estimate to the person immediately over the phone instead of them waiting a day or two. It saves you $100 for every single estimate. So like, what if we lose a customer? What if. What if I'm a little. What if I'm $5 off? That's 20 mo's that you just saved. You could do their property for 10 times and then raise their price and still be ahead of spending an hour doing a drive by estimate for them.

Okay?

Doing drive by estimates stinks. Doing in person, that's what you meet. The customer really stinks. The cost of doing that is. We don't need to calculate because I just calculate your time little on the fact you have another vehicle running there. You have tires, brakes, etc. You're talking about $150 to do a drive by accident on a mowing job. If you spent that on marketing, we double. You double your leads. You know.

Okay, so I'll give that. I'll give the access try, I guess.

Yeah, I'll save you time. I save your time. Jordan, I tried it out. It works, I promise. Okay, we did. Across 170 locations last year, every single one blew it out of the water. It's not even close. So as long as you're okay with a slightly less accurate estimate, knowing that in three to six months, once you've proven your worth to the customer, you'll raise prices and 95% of them will stay because you do a good job. You're good. You got it, dude, let's go. You got it, Jacob. Go ahead. Next up. Sorry, I accidentally clicked anything.

Can you hear me?

How you doing, Jake? I can go for it, man.

I'm good.

Can you sit up? Can you, can you bring your camera down a little bit?

My camera's on top of my monitor.

I can't, like, hey, look at this guy. I can, I can see a us flag. I think a commons. Okay, we're good. Let's go.

No, that's. That's a Michigan state flag. That's my alma mater.

That's where I went. Ah, okay. Okay, we forgive you. Okay, go ahead.

Okay, so right now this is a software question. We're using Housecall Pro and Chirp mainly because Chirp allows us to do our email and messaging campaigns. But also they have like a call feature where instead of having a separate phone for our office manager, they just forward those calls to her phone. And that way, like, it's separate from the business, if that makes sense. And I was wondering copilot right now. You know, we would be able to take those two services and put them into one.

Right.

Because Copilot has the marketing and the CRM tool, but it doesn't have the phone feature. And I was wondering if that's coming in the future.

It's not on the horizon right now, Jacob. Mostly when it comes to our roadmap, what we're thinking about is like what's the greatest impact to our current members. It's like the reason we started with like literally redoing the way estimates are accepted and declined because every one of your estimates get hit, like every single customer gets hit here. When we look at phone integrations, it's something that you can kind of do a zapier. Not the way you're talking about though, but like there's a certain amount of integrations with. You could use with Zapier. Like when you carry a customer in one, it hops over the other calls, come across notes, et cetera. But it's not like you've seen Housecall Pro. We don't have that in the horizon right now, to be perfectly honest. Okay. That's all I needed, but I do love it. It's a cool idea, especially as you get bigger. It's something that certainly we would consider, but it's nothing that's currently on the roadmap.

There's certainly other services you can use that are just phone services that would be cheaper than something they.

So.

Right, yeah. That's the thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right. Thanks, Ben.

You got it, man. All right. Christopher.

Yes. Just another quick question on integration. So I was looking at the enterprise features and it showed that there's QuickBooks syncs but you can use just a normal Excel sheet. I just only asked that because my mom slash controller does a lot of the bookkeeping side of things and back office stuff, so. And she's just comfortable with using Excel sheets over something a bit more complex. Just with her time area when she was raised in learning accounting and all that.

Yeah. So like I would say you can sync with QuickBooks right now. We don't really recommend it until we have finished their one way sync. It's currently a two way sync and just about any software you talk to People sync with QuickBooks, they say it's horrible. Once or twice a year just go scatterbrained. It's very difficult for a two way sync to actually work correctly. So we are working on a one way sync. When that comes out, we'll let you know. But that being said, you're not even trying to do that. Well, I would say just export a CSV, things like your revenue reports, etc. She'll probably take that as an Excel junkie and be able to like do what you need with them. Definitely have her book a call with ATC and they can kind of show you different options in terms of exporting reports, how to export invoices based on customers. Because she's a spreadsheet junk. She, she. There's a lot she can actually dig into in terms of exporting.

Okay, and that does that. Do you need all that to work with like the job costing features or all that? Or is that all inside copilot separately?

That's all inside copilot. You won't need to export, but there's ability to export it. If she's really wanting it in Excel for some reason, she can.

Sounds good.

You got it. Next one up is Jeremiah. Go ahead.

Yeah, quick question for you. On the Zapier and the APIs on the back end. I'm looking at ways to try and improve SEO on the website. And so I'm wanting to kind of suck in maybe before and after pictures from the crew. Here's where the crew's at today. You know, here's a before and after in this city. Here's a, you know, a new mulch job just done. Do you know if the system allows for any of that?

So when we have the offline mode of the mobile app done here in Spring Rush, it's gonna be called Field Force. That's the name of the app we're doing that will be offline. That will allow us to have the API completed, which we will then allow the documentation for people like yourself that might be a more technically inclined to be able to connect into it. Do I know if there's going to be an endpoint for that specifically? I don't know that. For before and after photos, I don't foresee us making that like an inherent feature. Mostly because whether or not you want someone to see the before and after pictures could be hypothetical. Right. But that sort of thing. I think once the API is completed for the offline mode and it's open up documentation, that's when I could give you a really solid answer on like what can you actually pull from. But I, I know your head's going and I like it in terms of like having that like almost stream of before and after photos, et cetera, there would need to be a way to like distinguish which ones you want shown versus not on your Website. But once that ap. Once you see Fuel Force come out, Jeremiah, know that the documentation for API is coming pretty soon and then we would be making sure that's formal formulated for developers you'll tap into and other softwares. Awesome.

Fantastic. And even if not pictures, anything city names, job name, our name, you know.

Changing stuff.

Thanks. Some of that too. Jeremiah, if you're a zapier fan or zapier fan, you could probably use some of that based on tagging right now. I don't know about the picture part, but in terms of like which customers. For example, I want an email to go to the office based upon if it's in this area and it was completed this type of job, that sort of thing you could probably build in right now. But yeah, once the API comes open, someone like yourself would probably be able to dig into it. Awesome. Thank you. You got it. Next one up is Drew. We'll take one or two more.

Hey, thanks for the question.

So in the coming year we're touching base on Quick Master Routes specific to kind of routes. Will that be able to integrate with like a Quick Dispatch template? Reason I'm asking, We are very big in the snow industry coming from Buffalo, New York and when I did the onboarding with Christian, he was showing me like Quick Dispatch and it was a great feature. We were supposed to go with follow Soft this winter to kind of mitigate that coming from jobber jobbers. Dispatching was horrible for winter. So we're trying to look to be the most streamlined as we can coming into our next winter. So do you know how that's going to kind of lay out with those new master roots?

So you'll see a lot of this before it's done. And what I would say, Drew, is if you have strong feelings on this, when you see us start releasing kind of like the beta or like hey, here's what we're thinking, that's when you can reach out to the product team and they'll, they'll ask for people like yourself that have strong opinions on Master Routes. Well, the one that's coming out before that, it's going to be kind of like, kind of like Master routes with me, Quick Dispatch kind of upgraded. So as those come out, you'll definitely feedback is super valuable for it. And usually how we will do is we will release something, take a lot of feedback and then do another iteration. All of that to say the Quick Dispatch isn't going away, it'll just be enhanced. There's also two videos on Copilot University that go over snow dispatch, specifically depending if you do it based on per push or per inch, etc, and those would be super valuable because they do use clickback dispatch a lot. But when that time comes, which is probably, if I had to guess, spring, like the first half of 2025, you'll see, like, kind of like us peeking at it, and then we'll open it up, usually for some sort of customer advisory board to join on a call and give feedback on it.

Okay, great. Thank you so much.

Yeah, you got it. Absolutely. All right. Love you all. Hope you have a fantastic weekend. We'll see you in the Facebook group on the Mastermind and in the Copilot universe, we'll see you guys.