CUTTING EDGE CONFERENCE (November 9-11, 2023)

Hey everyone, and welcome to the Mike Andes podcast. This is himself, Mike Andes. And today's a really special episode because we're actually going to share a full length webinar that I did a few weeks ago at a conference that in this specific episode I think is super important because it's gonna talk about what you can do to increase revenue and get more customers without spending a bunch of money on marketing. And so many of the time I see people spending a bunch of money on Facebook or on Google and they're really just like putting it mindlessly in this black bo, hoping and praying that comes out the other end with customers. And so many of the times I see it's just a massive paper shredder of profitability and people just wasting money on these ad platforms. So today I'm talking about upselling customers, taking existing customers, how you can sell more to them and giving you extremely just things that you can use, very, very tangible tactics that you can use in your business to sell existing customers more jobs, put more services on the schedule, increase the lifetime value of the customer without spending any money on marketing. I truly, if you actually take the principles we talk about in today's episode and apply them to your business, you'll be able to double the revenue of your business without spending a single dollar in marketing and without having to go get new customers. So not doing a gazillion estimates and.

Having to hire another office person just.

To accommodate all the new leads coming in, this is the most profitable way to grow your business. And I think it is massively undervalued and underappreciated and we don't talk about enough because we always are so concerned with the next shiny customer. So without any further delay, sit back. The next 45min is just an absolute knowledge bomb and I really hope it is helpful for you and for your business. Here we go.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to Cutting Edge Conference. It's going to be a fantastic time. I'm going to stall for the next 30 seconds while we let more people in. We did fill the thousand people registration, so I did go ahead and put this on my secondary YouTube channel, the Mike Andy Show. So if you want to watch the recording or if someone else tried to get in the webinar and was blocked from getting in, feel free to send them the link to my secondary channel. I'm going to stream them there there as well. However you want to be registered here on the webinar portion and I'll explain why momentarily. But this is live this is not recorded. I'm actually going to prove that it is. It is live by switching networks for about one second. So give me one second here because I was on WI fi and I need to switch over to Ethernet. So I'm going to drop you all for about 10 seconds in 3, 2, 1. See you soon.

All right.

Hey, you want to come say hi? Come say hi.

All right. It's going to drop out, I think, for a second.

Also need to make sure that this is. There we go.

And we're live. All right, we're back. This is Stephen George. He's from the co pilot team. He's with me in the room. He'll be moderating the comments so no one gets unhinged. So thank you, George. But this is live, this is Thursday morning. I'm really looking forward to it. And I'm going to give some background on how Cutting Edge Conference came to be. And then I really want to talk today specifically and go very much depth about growing your business. So let's go ahead and get started. First off, how did Cutting Edge Conference come to be? Why is it called Cutting Edge Conference and what was the idea behind that? So this is what happened. There's another conference happening this weekend starting exactly right now, and it's happening in Dallas, Texas, and the name of it is Service Edge Conference. Now, I like Service Edge Conference. I've gone there many times and I've gone there because the company that puts it on used to be Service Autopilot. It's now called Explore and it's now called Field Edge. But all of that being said, I used to go there quite often because it was really a time for me to understand where the software is going and it was really the place to get where the product roadmap was and things like that, because there wasn't a lot of other places to get that information. However, this year they blocked me from coming. A week ago they said, we are not going to allow you to come. We are canceling your ticket. And I did not like that very much. And so I was like, well, we're going to create our own conference and it's going to be called Cutting Edge Conference. So over the next three days, we are going to be releasing three of our very best features at Copilot CRM. And I think they're going to be really, really cool. But in addition to releasing those features, I want to actually explain some keynotes and topics that I did not get to at Landscape Summit just a few weeks ago that we had in Person and down in Louisville, Kentucky. So I'm really looking forward to being able to share these with you and without any further delay. Let's go ahead and get started. Before we do though, make sure you register for day two. All right. You can go to mikeannies.com day two. If you're watching this on Facebook or you're watching this on YouTube and you're not on the actual Streamyard webinar platform, you need to register. All right. Mikeandys.com Day two. And if you're going to take advantage of of the bonus that at the very end of the conference, you have to be registered for all three days. All right? So even right now, if you want to, you can do it. I'll remind you at the end of this webinar as well, you need to go to mikeandys.comday2 to be able to get access for tomorrow's lecture. Tomorrow's lecture is gonna be amazing. And I will just leave it at that. I'll leave it. I'll drop a few more breadcrumbs crumbs at the end of today's lecture. But I really think you'll want to be there. It's I'm having someone special on and I think it's be really, really educational. You'll definitely want to bring your profit and loss statement and really start digging into some of your numbers. But in order to get the bonus at the end of cutting edge conference, you will need to be registered for the all three days. And furthermore, I only am going to allow 250 people to take advantage of the bonus because I don't want to go broke. All right? Because the bonus is more than my house payment. Now, I had to make sure this is actually true. So I did check my mortgage yesterday. My mortgage is less than $1200 including escrow and the taxes and all the rest of it. I bought it a long time ago and did a rehab on it. So that's that. Also, I rent for myself at my apartments and my apartments is fifteen hundred dollars per month. So therefore I am accurate in the conclusion that this bonus will be more than my monthly house payment. Now today I want to talk about is how to double your revenue in your business with $0 spent on advertising.

Good water.

Let's go. All right.

How this presentation is going to make you money. You're going to be able to get new jobs without marketing and avoid the paper shredder that is also known as Google and Facebook. Now sometimes obviously working with Google and Facebook, you can build a awesome business. You can get more customers and get more leads that way. However, I find probably 70 to 80% of people in the home service industries, when they spend money on Google and Facebook, it is literally like putting it into a black box, crossing your fingers, holding your breath, and hoping to God that you're gonna get some leads. And the vast majority of the marketing dollars spent on these platforms, I find, has been wasted, and it is the equivalent of putting cash in in the shredder. So today I'm going to talk about how to get jobs without marketing. And yes, you can grow your business faster by spending more money on advertising on platforms like Google and Facebook and door hangers and every door, direct mail, and all these other platforms. But today, specifically, I want to talk about how to not spend any money on marketing, but rather instead do it without going out and putting your money to through the grinder and the paper shredder of Google and Facebook. Now, literally last week, while I was preparing for these keynotes, I had a consulting call. Should I plug that? No, I'm not gonna plug that, because right now I'm having a hard time fitting people into my calendar. So I'm not gonna plug the fact that you can get consulting calls. What I will say, though, is that he was spending $1,500 per month for management. So there's a agency that will basically do these ads for you. He was spending $1,500 per month on that, and then an additional $3,200 per month for the actual ads, like your ad spend. And then you have management when you go to an agency. And here's what was crazy. Now he's technically spending, what, $4,700 per month on Facebook and Google Ads through this agency. Here's what's insane. The business was less than $400,000 in annual revenue and has not been growing the past few years. I would say that he is wasting, what is it, $5,000. That's $60,000 per year he is wasting on these ads and spending on this agency. How in the world are you paying $60,000 per year and your business is not growing and it's less than 400 or $500,000 in annual revenue? Blowed blue, blew my mind. It was absolutely insane. And this is what I want you. I want to prevent from happening to you, and I want you to avoid if you don't have an agency. And. And I know it's not about the agency. There are good agencies out there that do a good job. However, a Lot of times, whether it be giving money to an agency or you doing it yourself, I find people in this situation burning money. Literally, they'd get better use of their cash if they just went out, burnt it in the wilderness and used it as a source of fuel because it is doing them absolutely no good. And furthermore, they're overspending and their customer acquisition cost gets ballooned. Their cost per click gets ballooned because they're spending way too much. I told this person specifically, if they spent $300 instead of $3,000, they probably wouldn't see a marked difference in their area, especially on Google. Because if you're spending more than 10, 15, $20 per day on a Google Ad, likely you are simply just giving more money away to Google. There's ways to track that. I'm not going to get in that today. All I will say is the vast majority of people I see spending money on Facebook and Google are wasting their money. So over the years I've observed which leads cost the most to acquire at over 140 locations for Augusta Lawn Care. Now most of you know me, so I'm not going to go into a big dialogue. We have over 140 locations at Augusta Lawn Care. Seven of them I own personally, the rest are franchise. And this is where this data comes from. We have tracked everything, pay per click on these different platforms like Facebook and Google. Flyers, door hangers, advertisements on billboards, radio. I've done Spotify ads and Snapchat ads and TikTok ads. We tried it all. And to date I have noticed that the lead comes from one of five different buckets. All right, so this is the time when you might get out a notebook. The next three days are going to be fantastic. Really looking forward to be able to share this information with you all. And it's not going to cost you a single penny. There's not going to be any sort of like drop $10 to get tomorrow. That's not happening. Just sit back, take some notes and I think this will be really valuable. The lead source is typically coming from one of five different buckets. Let's go through the buckets. The first bucket is what we call prospects. Now are there better terms for this? Probably, but this is what comes to my brain and this is kind of what I came up with. All right, five different lead sources, number one, prospects. These people, you have never contacted them or say they have never contacted you. So obviously you've never contacted them. They've never filled an estimate request form. They never called you. They have Never ever given you their information. They are prospects. The second.

Lead source is failed leads. These are people that ask for the quote, they're in the market. They have literally said I need your services. However, they never accepted the estimate. So if you have a 50% close ratio, that means that 50% of people got their estimate and did not accept. Those people are still in your database. And I would call them failed leads. The reason I in this definition consider a lead as someone who is giving you their contact information because they said I want your services. Therefore they are in the market. All right, the third lead source that we're going to be talking about today is canceled recurring customers. Now the vast majority of owners in the home service industries, we have projects one time work and then we also have recurring customers. Now there are customers that will cancel recurring services. I'm going to use mowing as an example because that's what the language I taught. And so if someone is mowing every single week, they are a recurring customer. They will cancel sometimes. And so is that fun? Is that exciting? No. But they are still a lead nonetheless. They are in our database and they have canceled a recurring service. So what can I gather from the fact that they have canceled? Well, first off, I know they need the service because they asked me for the estimate. But furthermore, they actually performed service and gave me money for the service. So they are willing to pay for the service. That's very cool. But unfortunately in this case, they canceled. Whether it be bad customer service, bad product, whatever it is, for some reason they canceled and they will need to be reactivated in order to do business with them. Again. Number four, one time project customers. All right, one time, one and done. They got a project. You nailed it. And now they're sitting in your email database. But they're a past buyer. You're not doing them every single week or every other week. There's no recurrence. They are a past buyer and they are a one time project buyer. All right, so this is the fourth bucket of lead sources. Let's move on to the fifth one that's recurring customers. Now these in my opinion are fantastic. We love recurring revenue. It is the basis by which you build a high value business and a business that runs without you and is usually much more economically fireproof, weatherproof. There you go. Despite what happens in the economy, typically recurring revenue is going to do better than one off projects. Typically. And just last week Jim Houston was was speaking at our landscape summit and he specifically noted the fact that across the massive project based businesses that he Is consulting with and works with. They are seeing a dramatic drop, as in his words, drop off a cliff of new project work coming in. And these people that were working through their backlog of 612 year or 2 of backlog for projects that is no longer happening. So what is that usually indicate? Economic trouble. And I've talked about this for a very long time. We saw a very brief amount of this in 2020 of spring when everyone thought the world was going to come to an end. And all of a sudden projects dried up, but they came roaring back because the Federal Reserve said, let me give you some cash. And now in this environment, that's not happening. High interest rates. The government's definitely not printing money right now because they want to avoid inflation. And so projects, they are going to be a little more tough the next couple of years. Are they a bad business investment? No. Should you avoid getting projects? No, I'm not saying any of that, But I am saying that recurring customers for home service businesses is what we should really be striving for to build value in our businesses. These are active buyers. They are literally every single week, month, potentially week, whatever your billing cycle is, giving you money. They are the fifth lead source that we want to talk about today. Now, this is what's crazy. Getting leads from these individuals because these are different groups of people, right? We've got everything from prospects. People have never contacted. You literally have no idea who you are. And then you have recurring customers that are literally giving you money on a recurring basis to advertise to these different individuals, they are the cheapest. If you go after people that are literally giving you money and say, can you give me more? Versus going to people who have no idea who you are and what services you provide and how great you are and asking them to buy for the first time. All right? So when you look at these different buckets of where leads can come from, I truly believe you will be able to double the size of your business by marketing the people at the bottom end of this group of this. This category right over here, like so, number one, look at that. I'm trying to point. Number one, prospects never contacted you. Very cold leads. They're very expensive. You got to spend on Google and Facebook and rent the space on Google and rent the space on Facebook to break into their world and say hello, because they don't have an idea who you are. Whereas these people literally see you on their property every single week and pay you every single week to be there. But most of our time and resources is spent on the first one, when I talk about marketing and advertising, the vast majority of that budget and your time creating, creating creative. Very good. Creating creative and pictures and video and your website, all of that is being geared towards the very first lead source and lead bucket, which is prospects that have never contacted you and are the most expensive. Because you're gonna have to spend money to break into their world versus the people at the bottom of this list that you literally are on their property every single week.

Very good. All right, next slide. What is more profitable? I ask you this question, it's somewhat rhetorical because it becomes so popular, but would you rather have two times as many customers? Would you rather double your customers or double the spend per customer? Because everyone's gonna be like, yes, I know, I wanna double the spend per customer. I wanna increase the lifetime value and the annual value of the customer. I wanna increase the ticket average. All these other terms. And we have, we have grown to know that is the case. However, our behavior speaks otherwise. When we spend thousands of dollars, thousands of dollars trying to get double the customers, increase customers from the prospect list and turn them, those prospects into customers. That is a very expensive transaction. Versus focusing on trying to get your existing customers to spend more. Why is it better? And why is it more profitable for your business to focus on getting your existing customers to spend more? Why is that more profitable than trying to go get new customers? Because there's less admin and sales sales required for those that bucket of leads. Also, you don't have to spend money on advertising. You don't have to spend the agency $1,500 ticket. You don't have to spend the $3,000 on ads. All of that now goes into your bottom line. And for a small fraction of the time and money spent on going after those prospects, if you deployed that same energy against going to your existing customer base, whether it be database context or whether it be people that are actually every single week giving you money, if you could just focus on doubling the amount of money you get from those customers, you'll be much, much more profitable. And why is that? Less admin. They're not calling in to ask for service. You don't have to go meet and see their property. You don't have to advertise and spend money to get them to click onto your website. They're already doing all of these things because you have their contact information. Now. This is all achieved. Doubling the spend per customer is achieved through upsells. All right? And that is simply how do I get my customers to spend more money with me. And people are going to, well, is this Cross sells? Is this upsells? I just want you get the customer to spend more money with you every single year. All right? So don't get technical on me. I want to be able to just simply say, say that upsells is the thing that will allow you to achieve getting your customer to spend more money. And yes, you can call them cross sells if you really want. I think upsells makes more sense. I think upsell sounds very cool. And for that reason, we're going to talk about how do we upsell customers? All right, because everyone talks about upselling customers and getting your existing customers to spend more money with you. But today we're going to talk about exactly how to do that.

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes. I hope you've been enjoying the episode so far. I have a really important announcement I wanted to share. If you're listening to this in December of 2023, please just take this moment here because this is a special announcement I wanted to give specifically for the podcast, and that is that at the end of this month, we are raising prices at Copilot CRM. So if you've thought about joining Copilot CRM, I highly recommend doing it now. The reason for that is because not only are we going to raise prices in January, if you sign up before January 1, 2024, you're gonna get the price lot guarantee for life. And what that means is that monthly rate will never go up, assuming that you join the enterprise level before the end of 2023. So if you're listening to this in December 2023, please join now. If you've been thinking about it or you're kind of going to join the next couple months, I just want to give that heads up. So that way, no one's unexpectedly getting the price increase. But furthermore, if you join in December of 2023, you're going to be able to have that monthly price locked in forever. So as long as you stay with Copilot, that monthly price will stay the same. Now, if you leave and then try to come back, obviously that's not going to be in effect anymore. But if you want to get the price lock guarantee for life, you'll have to join before January 1, 2024. We've done a lot of work at Copilot and really moved at breakneck speed. We have done so many new features this year. It's been incredible. And, and because of that, there's obviously been bumps and bruises in terms of bugs, there's been times when the system's gone down for a few minutes and it's not ideal. However, as we move into 2024, we are now switching over to AWS as our cloud service provider, making it much more stable, much more fast. We have a system now for better code review, testing as well as a beta group so that when features are released it goes to the beta group before all the other users. These things will slow us down a little bit in development, but honestly it's going to allow us so much more stability and these extra costs is why we're raising the price. At Copilot. We are very confident the value that has been added over the past year is far in excess of what we're going to be raising prices. But I wanted to give a heads up so there is no unexpected changes without you knowing. So if you've been thinking about joining Copilot and you need help with your scheduling, your invoicing, your routing automation, automating things inside your business to be able to make more money, make it more profitable, get more customers using things like Upsells and all the features we built, I highly recommend this is the time to move go to copilotcrm.com youm can actually book a one on one call with the team and actually walk through your account. Look through your business and if you're not sure if Copilot's the right fit for you, just go to copilotcrm.com quiz.

And you can answer a bunch of.

Questions about your business and it'll tell you if joining Copilot is a good option for you now or if you should wait a little bit longer. But I did want to give this update just because this is the last month before we are raising prices and this is the last month to join with the price lock guarantee. So little PSA public service announcement for everyone. Let's jump back into the episode. I appreciate you all very much.

Now in the past and already existing in copilot and other CRMs is what I call one click estimate emails. All right. And yes, I think that is an original term. I will say that I've used it for a very long time because it makes sense. And that is simply the fact that when you send an email to somebody there's a link that says click here. If you would like an estimate for this service, they click that little link. That link triggers an email or a text message back to the office and says this customer wants this specific service that you sent them an email about Fantastic. Now the problem with this is that it's still very bulk. You're going to let you like my first location for Augusta has 12,000 contacts in the database. We send out one click estimate emails every single month and we will get 80, 100 plus clicks on those emails. And that can lead to thousands, tens of thousands, potentially even hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of new revenue simply because of sending out these one click estimate emails. And so again, this is simply an email pitching one specific service with one call to action. And that call action is click this link and we will get you an estimate for this service. All right? It's very important that you have one call to action. You have one service. You're not all over the place like we offer all these services. Click here if you want an estimate. Bad news. Why? Because when they, when you, they click on that link, you don't know what service they are wanting. You're going to literally have to call them again and ask like, oh, did you want the pressure washing the roof gutter? Clean out the mowing, did you want the bush trimming? Did you want the window cleaning? You don't want that pitch. One service per email, have one link, they click on it, you get notified and bam, you can get them an estimate very, very quickly. Now, one click estimates are fantastic and unfortunately the vast majority of home service industries do not send them out. I would venture to believe that 95 to 99% of people in this industry don't even get this far. So if you don't send out one click estimate emails, I recommend you pause the webinar or maybe just stop here and watch the rest later. And that is, you need to be doing these first. But I do believe there's a better way because honestly, when you look at one click estimate emails, the only people you're really targeting or the people you are targeting is number two through number five when we talk about these buckets of lead sources. Great. I'm glad that you're not spending any money to send this out because it costs you nothing. If you're sending it to your CRM, you select all your customers, you send it out an email. Fantastic. But the problem is you're kind of sending it to all of these lead sources. Failed leads, canceled, recurring customers people have done a one time project with and now they haven't got any more services with you. You have recurring. Everyone's kind of lumped up into your CRM and this massive list. So it's still a very wide net. Now you might be Saying, well, this can be narrowed through segmentation or I can filter down. So for example, in your CRM you could filter your customers and be like, I only want to send this email to my recurring customers. Yes, you could do that. I want to filter out only the people that have done projects over $5,000. Yes, in most CRMs you can do that and then send them just a one click estimate email for a specific service. However, this is still a form of mass marketing because you're using filtering and especially if your business grows, you might have 50, 100, 5,000 people in a specific filter. There are people using Copilot CRM for example, and in Augusta that thousands of recurring customers. So even if I filter down that by that, it is going to be a very, very mass marketing approach. Even if I segment to just that fifth category of lead source which is recurring customers, or if I go like I want to email people that did a project with me last year and are no longer doing recurring service, great, you can segment that out. But now it's all still hundreds of people and maybe if you're smaller, dozens of people in that list. So it's still a form of mass marketing. So there must be a better way. We're going to be talking about the better way because in the perfect world, every customer would get personalized recommendations of what their property needs. In the perfect world, literally they would be like, oh Mr. Jones, you need this specific service in your property because we noticed X, Y and Z on your property. We noticed that your gutters were overflowing. You need gutter cleanout. Would you like that? Yes, that's the highest way to like the highest close ratio and the most personalized way of giving a recommendation to a customer. You will get the best results. Why? Because tailored to their property. And so the problem I have with even one click estimate emails is the fact that it's very difficult to tailor it to the individual one on one property of an individual customer. Now in the perfect world, also the crew, especially if you're not an owner operator, the crew, when they're on the property, they're going to tell you what else the customer needs. Because these are the low hanging fruit, these are the customers that you're literally on their property and you just open your eyeballs and look at what other services are needed and give them a personalized recommendation. You could easily, easily upsell them. You literally are on their property, they are paying you every so often. There's enough trust for you for them to let you on their property. You've already got through all these gates of trust and the fact that they are willing and able to pay and they need the service and all these things that otherwise are not true when it comes to prospects, people that don't have a clue who you are, you've gotten through all these gates, and now you're literally looking at a way to make more money on their property. And in the perfect world, the crew would tell you what the customer needs. Now, if you're an owner operator, the perfect world kind of happens because you are the crew, and so it's a lot easier for you to be able to upsell. And I remember being out in the field and just. It was like, every single job, I could sell the customer on something else. Every single job, I would like mowing the grass. Like, oh, they need weeding. Fantastic. I'm going to go knock on the door. I'm going to send them a text message. I'm going to give them a phone call. I'm going to send them an email and be like, Mr. Jones, I was at your property today mowing your grass. I noticed that there are weeds in the flower beds. I can take care of that for you. Would you like an estimate for that? Very, very simple. And I would close so many jobs over this. All of a sudden, when I added my crew members, even though I incentivized them to try to get these jobs, it just didn't happen. It was like when there are leaves on the ground and the entire neighborhood has a windstorm and there's leaves everywhere and we are doing one customer on that road, There's a really good chance if you know how to do upsells, you could sell everyone else on that street if you went, knocked and talked to them. It's a really good chance that if you're mowing the lawn for somebody and there's a bunch of leaves and I could easily sell them on a leaf cleanup. So why aren't we doing it? But in the perfect world, your crew would tell you, Mr. Jones, need a leafs cleanup. Can you give him an estimate, please? In the perfect world, that would be happening. So why doesn't the perfect world not. Why does the perfect world not exist? Well, let's talk about it. So far, we have established that if we look at the pyramid of kind of like where leads come from and what's the best, the holy grail at the top, the base of what we spend most of our time and energy and money on, at the bottom, advertising to prospects. We spend most of our time Most of our energy and the base of the pyramid is that we advertise and spend a whole bunch of money on these people have no idea who we are. Now, what's better than that is mass messaging the people in our database. Why? Because it's free. You don't have to do a single thing assuming you're using certain CRMs that can actually have the capability to mass email and mass text message. Assuming you do that, you can have a much better close ratio, a much better customer acquisition cost. And it usually doesn't cost you hardly anything because you have their contacts already and you're already paying for the software. Just send out the messages and have the technology. When they click on one button, they get an estimate sequence started. That's a lot better than spending a bunch of money on advertising to people who have no idea who you are. And it boggles my brain. Let me just make this thing. It boggles my brain when people spend gobs of money. And sure enough, the person I was speaking at the beginning of the keynote as doing a consulting call with last week, sure enough, I asked them, when was the last time you tried to upsell your customers? When was the last time you sent out an email or a text message blast to them asking to upsell them on a specific service? Because everyone in the neighborhood need it. Everyone in your county needed it because there was a windstorm. It's a really good time to ask your customers. And if they want leaf cleanup. But yet they're spending thousands of dollars going after people they've never done service with. They don't have their contact information. They've never raised their hand and said I need service. Every single person ask for a quote, they are admitting that they need service. No one calls for quotes for the sheer joy of it, besides your competition. So let's just put those one or two random people in your contact database aside for a moment and let's just look at the fact that the vast majority of people, if they say I need service, there's a really good chance that they are a potential customer and they have the deed for your services. Now, do they have the ability to pay, I. E. Do they think your pricing is good enough? That's a different subject. But they've at least said, I need these services. Like I'm not the guy that's going to go pull the weeds myself. I'm going to go call a service and get a quote for it. They've already raised their hand to do that. Then if they're already paying you to do that, you, they have now demonstrated their ability to pay their, their credit card goes through, they send a check in the mail, their ACH gets cleared. These are the things that you're looking for and you've validated this very, very high value customer. And yet we spend all of our time focusing on advertising to prospects who have no idea who we are. Now there's still a better way. That is personalized recommendations. And those are the things that we wish in the perfect world we, we would be able to have our crew do. And in the perfect world, if I was on every single crew, I would literally go talk to the customer. Unfortunately, the vast majority of them are gone when we are at their property. So usually I would email them or I text message them and give them a personalized recommendation of the services I could sell them that I believe their property needs. Because I'm the expert and I know what services are required to make their property look the best. This is the holy grail. This is what we all want. And in the perfect world, we would be able to do this on a personalized one, on one basis to all of our customers, which would lead to the greatest outcome in terms of upsells, more revenue and more profits. Because I'm not spending as much money on trying to convince these random prospects to come do business with me. And if you do this, I truly believe based on the data I have seen that you'd be able to spend $0 on ads and you'd be able to double your revenue. So that doesn't sound good. I don't know what does. I just can't believe that people spend all this money on advertising and somehow think it's okay their business doesn't grow when they're neglecting the thing that without spending any money on advertising, can literally double the size of your business and make you more profitable. In doing so, you're not spending as much money on admin sales or on the actual ads themselves. So why don't we do it? Why do we not give personalized recommendations to upsell our existing customers into other services?

Simple three things. Number one, it takes more time, especially if you have a big crew. There's a lot of properties being serviced giving personalized recommendations like exactly what that property needs instead of just mass marketing sending a bunch of emails out. It takes away more time. Second, it's harder with employees because you got to convince them to actually take note of the things in the flower beds and the bushes and what's on the house. It's like well, boss, it said to mow the grass. Yes, but did you not notice that the tree was fallen over the lawn and almost hitting the house? That's an easy upsell. We could have made $150 by cutting that one branch.

So it's harder with employees because they're not as incentivized as you as the owner to go out and actually find more revenue on the properties of your existing customers. The third reason why it's harder and why we don't do upsells and personalized recommendations. It's got the manual process. Typically, this is kind of how it looks like either imessage or WhatsApp to boss. Hey, boss, I'm over at Mr. Jones property. Looks like they. They aren't home. I tried to knock on the door. Don't see them, but the bushes are overgrown. There's a bunch of weeds in the bed. I think we could probably get them on a mulch cleanup, but just letting you know. Thanks so much. Okay, so now you get that message and like, okay, great. I got to go into the. The software, make note of that, send them an email tonight, hopefully. I remember that. I got to put down my reminders list. Maybe I go visit their property tomorrow, but if they're not going to be home, maybe I'll just go ahead and ask them tomorrow, set up a time to visit with them, make sure it's actually what they want. It's a very manual process. Now, in a better format, the. The employee would leave job notes. All right, so like in copilot or in a lot of CRMs, you can make visit notes on the individual visit, and they'd be like, Mr. Jones needs weeding services and bush trimming and leaves. Fantastic. And then send. Now, let's hope and pray that the dispatcher, the office person or the owner, whoever is the one responsible at the end of the day to close things out on, the dispatch board actually notices in the note, then takes action on the note and sends the customer an email asking if they would like a quote for those services that the employee, the field crew member, actually came up with and wanted to recommend to the customer. This is why we don't do it. This is like the. All the friction involved in it taking more time. It's harder to do it as you scale with more and more employees. It's a manual process of note taking, Sending a voice note, texting the boss, then creating that. And then it's all very manual until now. Dun, dun, dun. Introducing upsells in copilot CRM at copilot, we're trying to make this as simple as possible. See that little button right there? Oh, man, I can't point at it. Well, the arrow kind of does. All right, that little teal. Is that teal turquoise, little blue thing with a little handbag right there Is now on every visit of copilot on the mobile app. So we are introducing upsells in copilot and in three very easy steps, we make these personalized recommendations very simple for you. Number one, the team puts the recommendation into copilot. How do they do that? See that little fancy dancy drop down over there? You will be able to put which services you can. You allow them to upsell. Fantastic. They need fertilizer, they need a landscape cleanup, they need mulch install. And with two taps, they're able to, number two, copilot, send the customer a text or email. Whatever you choose. Third is the customer says, yes, give me an estimate. And now all of a sudden we have automated the ability to be able for you have eyes on the property with your crew and give personalized, not mass marketing, not advertising to prospects, but personalized exact recommendations for the property and that customer. And all of this is customized by you. A lot of people like, well, I don't want to. I don't trust my guys to upsell. I don't trust them to knock on the door. I wouldn't want my customers seeing my employees face to face more than anything. Less than 100ft away is probably going to be a problem. And I don't want them knocking on the door. I don't want them calling them. I don't want them texting or emailing them. Great. We custom all of this. You will be able to customize. You can see on the right hand side, this is an example from the yard guy to the customer saying, hey, mike, our team completed your mowing service today. We noticed your flower beds had some weeds. Would you like a free quote on adding weeding to your weekly visit? And you're like, man, did my. My employee had to type that out? No, this is all automated. It's all built in the back end of copilot upsell service options, which means you're able to choose which services you allow your customers, your employees to upsell. And you're able to dictate whether it's an email or a text message that is sent out. And you create the template. So with two taps, when this, this employee saw, oh, I'm mowing the grass, I seen they need weeding services. With two taps they can quickly send this text message to the customer that has been pre templatized by you as the owner to say whatever you want. And yes, here's a little secret I'm not really talking about today. You could put pricing in there and make these essentially quotes being sent to the customer. You could do that 100% and I would recommend it. However, even if you're just asking if they want that service, it's absolutely possible. Furthermore, you're like, well some customers, some employees I don't even trust to do this, like I don't give them access to anything. Now you're gonna have user permission. So only specific employees, if you want that can send out these upsell notifications to the customers. Also we're making sure that you don't bog down the customer in a whole bunch of these emails or text messages by making sure that only one upsell per visit max. Now some customers kind of like knowing that you were at their property like on a mowing service or a fertilization service and they just like knowing you're there. I'm really thrilled that there's automations that can tell people we were at your property because it's simply looking at when the job was completed. But what none of these things do and what where automation and technology sometimes fails is personalization. Because what I want is eyeballs on that property and saying you need this other service, tap tap customer getting that one recommendation for that specific service because their property needs it. I like that. And I would rather have that than a notification saying your service was done. I'd rather have your service was done. And we think that your property needs this additional service. Would you like us to perform that? And potentially even. Here's the price. Now at the very beginning of this keynote I said how this presentation, I promised that this presentation is going to make you money by getting you jobs without marketing and avoiding the paper shredder of Google and Facebook. So where's the money going for marketing? I have a suggestion. In the new upsell feature we made it to where instead of spending money on Google and Facebook and giving them money and cashew love from your business, now it's very easy to track which of your service members out in the field and the team members actually sent that upsell notification to the customer. So on the dispatch board it's a little bit small. I have the arrow they're pointing at. It's going to show that little handbag on any visit where an upsell was sent by the crew and what I recommend is that you offer your team members $10 if for every upsell that actually gets sold. So that way they actually are incentivized now to keep an eye out on the property. Again, this is like the gold mine for your business. If you literally thought about your customers as the gold mine, like, literally gold chips and nuggets laying all over the place, like, oh, they need this other service. They need this other service. And if your employees are going there without any incentives to pick up the gold nuggets, guess what they're going to not do? Pick up the gold nuggets. So now we say look for literally four seconds of your time, which is drop down, which services this customer need, tap one of them done for. In Exchange for those four seconds, Mr. Crew Leader, Mr. Crew Team Member, you will get $10 if the customer accepts that estimate from that notification. That pretty incentivizing for a crew member. Because if they do 15 jobs in a day and they send out, let's just call it 10 upsells, because they see 10 different services that could be offered to their customer, and let's say four of them accept, that's a 40% close ratio, by the way. And also that's $40 for literally a minute of their time and a little bit of more awareness on the project. And guess what? You didn't do that. $40 would otherwise have cost you probably 80, 100, $200 spent on Google, Facebook, et cetera. So now instead of spending money on Facebook and Google, you're spending on the people that make you money. That is your team. And they're the people that if you could just compensate them and incentivize them to keep their eyes peeled for personalized recommendations upsells, they. They would absolutely crush it. And I've had the system. Here, let me do this. I've had this system at my business for a very, very long time. However, it was too much friction for them to type out all the notes or have to, like, send a voice note to the estimator or text the estimator like, hey, I'm at Mr. Jones's house. Their property looks like a, you know, chaos just came through. Would be good for a leaf cleanup. All that typing gone. No bueno. Now with two taps, they'd be able to send the customer a notification asking for a lease service, and they'd be able to get 10 bucks for that two taps they do on the app. All right, so offer them the upsell. And literally, when you toggle over that little handbag thing on the dispatch board. It's literally going to say mulch. Upsell was sent by Mike Andes on November 8, 2023. So very easily, if that person accepts the estimate, you'd be able to go back and say, oh, Mike sent the estimate or sent the the upsell notification. $10. And guess what you're going to do at the next team meeting? 10. Cashewla going out to Mike because he got upsell. Oh, by the way, I have 10 other stacks of tens that I'm going to be handing out at a team meeting. Guess what that starts to do? Starts to get a culture of team members that are looking for more work. That is the most profitable part of your business. The revenue sitting in the yards and on the houses of your customers. Property that just needs to be collected is now incentivized. Buy your crew to actually go get that money. So the question is, cool. You're like, mike, Mike, that was really, that was really inspiring.

I'm going to spend less money on Facebook and Google because they are shredding cash, shredding machine. I am going to do more upselling. You have convinced me. But when is this technology, when is it going to become available in terms of copilot and all the upsell features that we've done? Well, let's see here. So cool. So when will this technology be available? The response from copilot and me right now is it's available on copilot right now. Very good, very exciting. But how much will it cost? Everyone's like, well, I know what this whole thing is a setup for. Mike's gonna try to sell me on something really expensive. It's free. So if you go to co pilot, you will get this for free. Even if you are a trial member or the starter version where you can have up to 50 customers for completely free, you'll be able to try out these upsell features. Why did I do it in the free version? Because I'm so confident that if you do upsells, you'll grow your business to the point where you probably need other features inside of copilot. So I'm very happy to be able to give you this for free. And furthermore, we're giving you the templates for free. So we're going to get you. We're going to start you off with a few email and text message templates in case you don't know how to script those yourselves. Those will be in a bundle in the marketplace for you to be able to download and use one with your customers. But you could create your own. You can create some really, really cool text messages that have pricing. You can actually tell your crew, hey, I don't want just leaf cleanup. I'm going to offer leaf cleanup 1, leaf cleanup 2, and leaf cleanup 3. If it's a small property, click on 1. If it's a medium sized property, click on 2. If it's a large property, click on 3. You know, on the back end, you've already done the pricing in the template that when it is sent to the customer, they are literally clicking a button for accepting the quote. This is the type of technology that is needed to be able to actually move our businesses forward. That's why Copilot exists. But as of right now, you can go into Copilot CRM and for free in the free version, see upsells be able to utilize this technology and the templates for that. The id. The ideas for you to get started are already in the marketplace. Now for tomorrow, I have some homework. All right, so we've been at this for 40 minutes. Tomorrow's gonna be longer. All right. It's gonna be about a little over an hour. And I'm really, really looking forward to it. But I do have some homework for you. Do not leave yet because there's still a couple slides I need to share. But for homework for tomorrow, before we get finish it up with those, I need you to, if possible, bring your profit and loss statement for 2022, also have your profit and loss statement for 2023. If you have no idea what your numbers are, that's okay. Please still come tomorrow. It'll get you started. I'm going to give you the roadmap to how to get to your break even if you've never done it before. But if you have these two documents, please bring them tomorrow. Whether if you want to print them off or if you want to have the digital copy PDF to be able to refer to. Because tomorrow we're going to help you find your break even point in terms of hourly, like, what do you need to charge per hour to break even? And I have a very special guest and I think you're going to really enjoy it. It's going to be a fantastic. I've already previewed what we're kind of talking about. This is the stuff that people need to see and it's not going to be me jumping in as excited as I today, but the numbers of your business are so important. And tomorrow we're going to give you the foundation for exactly how to do that. But you will need to register for tomorrow. Go to mikeannies.comday2 and you'll be able to sign up for tomorrow. And you'll need to sign up for all three of these days when I give you the registration links in order to be able to get the bonus at the end of the cutting edge conference which is coming this Saturday. So if I'm very happy today, day one in the books of the conference, this is what you can expect tomorrow. We're going to go a little bit longer and then we're going to go a little bit longer on Saturday. But Saturday at the end, there's a bonus that I want to give everyone. Well, I can't give everyone. I'm only doing it for the first 250 people. So please go to mikeanny.com day two and sign up today. The big release is upsells and whether or not you're in Copilot or not, I don't really care. I just want you to focus on the five buckets of where your leads are coming from and realize that the vast majority of your time, money and energy is being spent on prospects which cost you the most and bring the least amount of profit in your business. And I think that is a bad deal. So try to focus on the bottom four. Ideally you focus on the fifth one, which is recurring customers and you tailor and personalize recommendations of services. You could upsell them every single time you come to their property. I think it's going to crush. I'm very, very proud of the team here at Copilot for building this feature and coming up with it. I think it's a very simple thing, but it's going to absolutely drive business results. I thank you all so very much for being here. Part of day one of cutting edge conference. Make sure you get your homework, number one. Number two, mikeandys.comdaytoo so make sure you register. And the third thing is try to get someone else on these. This event tomorrow, it's completely free. I'm trying to help the community. Whether it be a competitor, would be someone on the side of the country, whether another business owner. People can learn from this stuff. So please share this. Put it on a Facebook group, a WhatsApp group, maybe text someone else, you know, that might think this is helpful. You know, you don't want a competitor knowing all this stuff. Great. Send it to someone else in your community that's a business owner that you think could be, you know, find value. That's how we get stronger. And that's why Cutting Edge Conference exists. Thank you all so very much. We will see you tomorrow morning. Cutting Edge Conference wrapping up. Let's see if we can't get some music. All right, guys, we'll see you later. Take care. Have a great day. We'll see you tomorrow morning.