How a Landscape Business with 75 Employees Operates with Copilot CRM

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes and today we are actually going to be talking with a $5 million landscaping business that has 75 employees out in the field and more than 12 full time employees in the office. We're going to be discussing how they can use software and specifically Copilot CRM to make sure they get more efficient and can continue to grow the business. The past three to four years they've been stagnating growth and the owner is trying to grow the company. He's brought in Brennan, who's a young guy that is trying to make sure he can implement software inside the business to make it more efficient. Growing the business now at a $5 million business with 75 employees that have been using paper to clock in and out paper for job notes and switching to a mobile app and all the functionality of software, it can be very, very difficult. So if you're thinking about switching to a CRM, if you're thinking about changing software or just implementing any change inside of your business, this will be a great listen as we break down not just the software aspects of switching to Copilot, but also how do we get the entire organization to adopt this change and make sure it's a positive win for everyone. Let's go ahead and roll the tape. Thanks for helping on, Brandon. Yeah, I know, I know that some of the people in the Facebook group are interested to see how you guys kind of adapt and things, but I more or less just want to just focus on you guys in terms of how we can make sure Copilot adapts to you. There's certain things that we can take what you guys currently are doing inside QuickBooks and make it work. And so maybe because I have a little bit of brief understanding, I've looked at your account and things, but maybe give me like a two second snapshot of what the businesses is, is at and what was kind of currently using. Just so I have a little bit of frame reference and then we'll jump right in.

Yeah, so I'm still kind of catching up to speed. I just got hired, gosh, month ago to basically be the one that's doing all of the co pilot integration, all of this stuff. So right now. So they have a tried element, Arbor.

Gold.

And one other one I don't remember exactly. No. So we've, we, we've been in meetings with Aspire and that was the other one we were seriously considering. The cost was the biggest downfall to that one. Um, so yeah, they've tried.

How, how has it been the fact that within a month you have to make this massive change. This is a big business to make that change on. You're a month in. Has that been difficult? Just, like, your perspective, just me asking you.

It can be kind of overwhelming at times, I think, like, I stepped into the role knowing it was going to be tough, and I'll have to be the bad guy to a lot of the managers who have been doing stuff a certain way for a long period of time. And I'm okay with it, honestly, it's okay. I have a relationship with a lot of them, so it helps a lot.

Are they pretty open to it? Like, they know it needs to be done? Just a matter of, like, how do we make it work?

They're more open to it now because there's been two or three failed attempts. And so they're like, we're just. We're going to go full fledged. Hire someone to make sure that it goes full fledged. Tell us what needs to change. Tell us what we need to do. We're going to make it work this time. That's kind of their mentality, because it's failed twice already or three times already, so.

And when it failed, Brandon, do you think it was just a matter of lack of everyone, like, actually having that mindset, or do you think it was the software didn't work correctly or it wasn't just, like, no one fully committed to it, essentially?

A little bit of all of it, I think. Okay, yeah, they'll. They'll say the software, I think, but I think there was. There was a little bit of the other factors as well.

And so it has just kind of built up to the point where they know, like, we have to do this, we have to tear the band aid off and, like, it's going to hurt a little bit.

Yeah. Because they've been trying to grow, like, intentionally trying to scale or grow over the last three to five years and really have been at a plateau as far as revenue goes. And basically what I told them before I got hired was like, you're only going to be able to grow as much as you can manage. And with a paper system, you can't manage everything efficiently. Things are going to fall through the cracks. Everything is limited by human error or human ability or capacity. And if you're not using a software or a computer system to do a lot of this stuff, you're seeing the fruit of it.

It's.

It's like this so and so from.

Their perspective, Brent, just so I can kind of get where they're coming from. Because how I want to make sure that the implementation goes well is that we actually like to their perspective of what, where, why the business is stalling out. Do they think it's more of a churn problem? Do you think it's more of a getting more leads problem? Or is it simply a matter of like managing the. The massive amount of like to dos, contacts, jobs, et cetera?

It's. It's the last one. Yeah. I don't think they've got sales team that does a really good job generating leads. The quality. Quality of work is really high. It's. It's really just being able to manage things and not let stuff fall through the cracks.

Got it. Cool. So I'm. It's really a constraint admin. And from that admin perspective, how many people are currently in the office?

2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. I think 13 or 14.

Okay. So 13 old timers. Let's just call it that in office. Got it. And then how many in the field right now, Brennan?

Oh, gosh. It's like, well, we're slowing down. So now it's. Now it's a little lower, but kind.

Of on average, like if you took like kind of peak season.

75Ish. Got it.

Perfect. Well, ultimately like pretty good ratio, honestly, like the 13 to 75. So I don't feel like it's bloated. That's the positive aspect, right?

Yeah.

If it's a matter too of like, can we keep the staff at 13 in the office but still grow the business by say 30 to 40%? That's where the. I think it makes sense on the software side. So. Okay, cool. I'm aligned. Let's jump in. Because I know you have workflows and specific things you want to go over. So just fire away. And then what I'll do is kind of take it from business perspective. And then Parker, I know he's been sitting here silently, but he will. He'll jump into your account or show you things that I'm talking about. And he has access to be able to share his screen. So we'll just see how much we can help. And then if there's some workarounds or things we need to adjust, we'll try to work through it with you.

Yeah. So really the biggest thing that we're concerned about is trying to find or be able to see the data on the back end, see as much of that as we can, as specific as we can, because that's been what's allowing them to make certain Business decisions as far as rate increases per customer per line item. And also just seeing crews what they're billing per hour on certain services to be able to either motivate them to get better or cut them off. And so that's really our biggest.

In my mind, the most valuable piece of the software is tying in obviously all of the being able to manage things, schedule things, optimize stuff. Whatever software we choose is going to be able to do that. It's getting the value from all of that data that we're using to automate certain things and manage certain stuff to be able to tie that into all of that post work information to know what decisions need to be made. And I know that there is, you can see revenue like bill dollars per service and stuff like that. But there's certain metrics that I think they've been used to over the course of 30, 31 years in business that they're really just in tune with. And one of those is bill rate per hour per service. So they know we're aiming to Bill$65 an hour for mowing. Anything lower than that, we're going to be pushing it as far as losing money goes. Anything better than that is going to be obviously a good thing for us. And they've got a really good pulse on all of the services and the bill rates per hour. And that's just kind of like the information that they really, really want to be able to see. And I know that that's not in copilot currently, but I think there's a good way that we can somehow be able to export that information that we're getting from copilot to still see this information.

Yeah. Like my, my mind goes right to the fact that like using budget hours because the budget hour really is ultimately just a function of what is my hourly rate target. Like, that's all it is. It's like if I'm trying to shoot for 80 bucks an hour and there's $160 of labor, there's two budget hours. So whether or not I hit that $80 per hour marker is simply whether I hit budgeted hours.

Yeah.

So I would be really looking at that as the metric. Cause it's, it's already in there. And then do they, do they track efficiency score at all right now, Brendan, across crews or not?

So it's not necessarily an efficiency score. What they've got is all the crews per service. Because obviously like our lawn care techs are going to bill a lot higher dollar per hour than our mowers are. And so they're able to see every crew's bill rate per hour and use that as their metric. Say, hey, this guy's billing 85 bucks an hour for mowing. He's obviously doing something right. Or in some situations, their customer. The customers that he has are a lot easier to mow. The properties are just a lot easier to mow. So that's kind of the metrics we have per crew to motivate them. Yeah, yeah.

So, like, right now, Just so I have a clear understanding, how much of. Is it commercial? And are they using budget hours on everything right now or it's not really. Using budget hours is not a thing right now. They're.

So they're using budget hours 80. About 80% commercial is where we're at.

They'll budget hours into the cost, like, as in the estimate and stuff like that. And most of it's contracts.

So they'll not the individual visits.

Bingo. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Because that's the most accurate. Because then. Then we can simply be looking at budget hours Divided by clocked hours, every crew member, and it's really, really clean. It gets difficult if you have that many contracts that are commercial and it's baked into the estimate, but not really individual visits. So I would say really looking at budget hours versus clocked hours on a per visit basis Would probably be the fastest way on a daily to run a report on that. Doesn't exist now, Especially if there's any big gaps with the contracts.

Okay, Parker, did you have any other ideas on this one? Because my mind is mostly revolving in budget hours, world and efficiency scores. But if a bunch of their stuff is commercial and they don't have budget hours per visit, it's going to be inaccurate. Yeah.

The only thing I was thinking While you guys were talking about this Was on the schedule here, Being able to see, you know, your total. If you sort by today, week, or month, or however frequency you want to, and then looking at the columns showing, like, overall, we've had this much, you know, track time, this much budgeted hours. But like you said, if it's. If it's tough where you're not tracking, you know, semi or fairly accurately on. On a per visit basis, that kind of. That one goes out the window. Um, yeah, I think that that would have been my only recommendation for what we have now.

Cause he could technically do that, Parker, for like, a week or for a month for like a. A crew, and just filter out by crew. Like, filter by crew the whole month. Okay, Ken. Okay.

So then Would we have to change. I'm thinking of stuff my mind immediately goes to, like, what's gotta change in our current workflow to.

The most.

The most accurate, Brandon, is if you can figure out a budget hour time for each of those visits. And even if right now, like, you guys are already kind of assuming a certain amount of hours are going to be on a job. Yeah. You could just kind of use that for now, even if they're not actually taking it from the estimate. Because, like, in the perfect world, when you take. Okay, there is 3,000 budget hours we're assigned to this contract. In the perfect world, when you create the level billing agreement, we would create the jobs with budget hours attached to them.

Yeah.

That would be probably a bigger change on, like, the sales team. That would have to happen. But for now, you could be. You could take a week to say, hey, let's go through these contracts and let's guesstimate, because we already are doing it from a scheduling perspective. Yeah. How many budget hours should we be spending on these jobs? If you can get that in there, then the most accurate form of that report on the dispatch board is budget hours versus actual hours. And then just filtering by crew on a weekly, monthly, daily basis and figuring out, where is everyone at?

Okay. Because right now, I think so. I actually just learned this. Within the last couple weeks, we've got. We had our IT guy kind of set up a smartsheet system to be able to get to that, like, pull a lot of data, honestly. So, like all of the individual cards that they get. So we're on a paper system right now. So we'll print out a card with all the services, all the property information, all that stuff. And then the crews, the foremans will track the actual hours and all of that stuff. And then the managers then will get those cards and go to Smartsheet and enter in all of this data into smartsheet. And that's kind of how we're pulling a lot of. A lot of the information that is valuable to the owner of the company, to be honest. So in my mind, that might still have to exist, at least for a little bit and overlap because. And maybe forever, honestly, because he's just translated a lot of his business decisions from that specific kind of data. The build rate per hour.

Hour. Yeah. If the, if the, if the crew manager, though, clocks the entire crew into the job, you're still going to see that in the track time. So you could still run a report. Yeah. From that dispatch board. So that might be helpful. And even too. If you do like some sort of a transition period, even if they kept doing the paper thing for now, you could just manually input that on the job as track time. So.

Yeah, that's going to be, that's going to be a beast. The amount of contracts they have. So I think that it probably like the guesstimate of member budget hours is probably going to be your closest because yeah, your scheduling department is doing that. They, they just don't have an exact number. They're kind of doing it. And then I would really recommend trying to go to your schedule or to your sales department. Like, hey guys, you guys are coming up with budget hours to come up with the price. I need that on every single visit. So when the crew shows up in the mobile app, they're not seeing the entire contract because I'm assuming right now when the crew goes to a 12 month contract, are they seeing all the line items of the contract or what are they seeing?

Oh, it depends. Some contracts. So if it's, if a contract includes mowing, pruning, edging, weed control in the bed or bed care stuff, then no, each crew will only see what they're doing. So we've got a mowing crew going out. They're only going to see the mowing side of it. Like they're going to get a car that shows the mowing and where they're mowing and stuff like that. And sometimes you'll have a crew do a little bit of everything. So you'll have a crew that will do the mowing and the weed control. But very rarely, like if you could.

If you could set all up your contracts as level billing agreements and then inside of them put the visits with the budget hours and ideally go back to the estimate and be like, okay, there are 3,000 budget hours. Let's allocate these between all these services. I think also what you'll find too, Brendan, it'll unveil some pricing issues. We're like, okay, this job is way under price because I know it takes 11 hours every single week and I do not have that in the budget hour, you know, budget to be able like work backwards. So that'd be my recommendation. We did that for one of our, our franchises that had a ton of commercial big ways. You know, it take two, three, four days to do. And it was just a matter of like, hey, what's the price? What's the budget? Hourly rate. And then here's our budget of budgeted hours. How do I fit all these other services in? And he came to the conclusion you had to raise prices on a lot of them, like 20, 30%.

Yeah, okay.

It'll be a beast. That's a big job, though. But, yeah, you have the off season. If you have that many people in the office, you could just break them up. But I have a feeling if you didn't do that, which would be the most accurate, which is like actually work from the estimate, budgeted hours allocate for every single service, you could just ask the scheduling department, like, how long should this take? And they'd probably know pretty accurately.

Yeah, I might. That if that's the route we go, we might have to. Or I might have to schedule a call with support or something to be able to see kind of one or two of those. That process laid out. And then once I kind of get a feel for it, I can just blow through those in the winter.

I will put. Go ahead, team, mute your next one. Brennan. I'm gonna put a link, though, in the chat. It's actually me doing one of them. It's from a few years back, so it's not like the best video, but I took a big contract and I just worked backwards from budget hours. It's a. It's not like a great edited video, but it should work. So feel free to move on, but I'll get the link and I'll put in the chat for you.

Yeah.

That'S really the only big questions I have as far as getting the data. And I know that there's going to have to be some translation because they've been so used to seeing data from a paper system for so long and making business decisions based off of bill rate per hour. And I was talking to the manager not too long ago, I was like, well, go a step further and find a way to figure out profit per service or profit per hour. And yes, it makes sense, but they just. They're so in tune with that bill rate per hour number that that's what they've been making decisions on. And so I know there's going to have to be some translating in that regard.

But one thing, one thing that'll help too, Brendan, that we do have on the roadmap is which will make what Parker just showed you in the dispatch board a little simpler is visits reports. So in that case, it'll be like, hey, let me just pull up one customer and I want to see all their visits with budget hours versus actual hours. And it'll actually tell you, like, on average they're 10% over budget. And then that would Be the easiest way to benchmark it based upon an hourly rate that your target is. And then in terms of price increases, doing bulk price increases based upon that. You could do a percentage or dollar amount based upon that. But with contracts, usually you're going to do it one by one still. But that is coming basically to take what Parker just did with filtering. It'll be in one report that you could set up as like, hey, I just want to send a report to the owner and he's going to see all the contracts of whether we're ahead or below budgeted hours. Yeah.

Okay, then the only other really big question I have is like what would be the recommended process from transitioning from kind of a paper system with some managers doing input and stuff like that? Because I know there's, I mean there's a checklist of stuff, a whole lot of stuff to do. As far as we've got to go through all of our customers that got imported through CSV and make sure that all the information is correct. Figure out a way to tag the customers that will be effective for us to be able to know residential, commercial, lawn care, mowing, stuff like that. And then we've got to go through all the items and services, kind of clean those up a little and all the properties.

So it's just like there's a lot of to do's and moving pieces in this off season. I just, I'm trying to figure out the most effective way for someone in our situation to get all of that done. What makes the most sense. Because I don't want to just kind of blindly be asking our office manager to go through the customers and our general manager to go through the items and services. Like I want to make sure that we're, we're doing it in the order that would be best.

Yeah, like what's cool is you got basically two months for the end of the year. Where my head goes on this one, Brendan, is spend November making sure that you do the back end stuff. So items and services, you know, all the little things that you just mentioned, you got to kind of clean up, make sure the CSV got in, all the data is correct, the job is set up correctly. Personally, I would run December with one, maybe two crews on one service. So okay, we're going to do these two crews. One's going to be lawn care, one's going to do landscaping projects, like projects and one maintenance crew. And just these two crews are going to be on copilot because if you roll it across the whole system, you have you have the likelihood that if one thing goes wrong, it just completely stops everything. That's what's happened in the past. And like, they just don't back up. Versus, like, let's do it one or two. It's a small piece of the company. If something goes wrong, we will figure it out, we will work it out. We'll make sure we get. We adjust, and then we will iron it out before we roll it across the whole company.

Okay, would you want. Would you recommend doing the. The cards, the paper cards alongside that process?

Well, what's cool is like, you could start off in December, for example. Hey, the first week, guys, we're going to keep the same cards and just open up the app. If you have questions, it's going to be there essentially. And then you're only running the back end of like completing the job, making sure it's all coming through, the invoices are aligned, your invoice settings are the way you want it, all that stuff. Then I'd be like, hey, guys, let's try without paper today. Just log in on the app. Here's your login. Click start. You'll see the information. Feel free to take a picture on there. Here's some other things you can do. I'd do like a quick video for them. Share it with just those two crews. You don't want this being 75 people. Like, you're just gonna get shot because there's gonna be one thing that they liked about the paper that you don't have. And then all of a sudden they're like, they reject it. Like, you just. You want system adoption. And so if we get one or two crews to love it and iron out all the kinks in December, when you roll it out across the system, now your office is in love with it. And then that crew becomes your, you know, evangelist of the system.

Yeah. Okay. Would you recommend that even with snow? Because, like right now, I mean, in the, in the winter months, really, most of what we're going to be doing is snow removal.

Yeah. I would do it with snow. And just because I'm assuming. Lowest commercial for snow.

Yeah.

So it's going to be. Show up, you do the whole property. It's a matter of when you put them on the schedule. So whether you are doing it based on are you doing it triggers or is it just like.

Yeah, it's like half inch, half inch of snow. Inch of snow, basically is what triggers that.

Yeah. So there's a couple ways we do snow, and those are in the University A couple of different options, but even that, like, the guys typically hate paper when it comes to snow because they get wet. It gets. It's just. It's a pain to have the big mittens on. So, like, even, like, if you pitch it to the crew is, hey, guys, we want to trust this, test this out. Because we know people hate the paper when it comes to the snow. And you got mittens, stuff gets shuffled around the truck. It's middle night, especially middle night, they have to turn the lights on to write. Like, you just got to pitch it in a way where the guys want it and, like, what's. What's in it for them. And it's a matter of, hey, this makes it easier for you. You have to worry about paper and pen anymore. You know, we can track your time much more accurately now. We can see where you're on a map. So while you're doing snow, if you break down, we'll know exactly where you're at. Like, you're just trying to pitch it to them in a way where they, okay, this is a good thing for me.

Yeah.

Because. Because humans just don't like change. So whatever you do, even if it's the best thing for them, that if you constrict them, like, you must do this, they're just going to think, let's figure out why this does not work.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And then the last question I had then really was with the accounting side of things. So, like, since we're using QuickBooks essentially as a CRM, which makes this a lot harder.

Yeah.

We have all of the different services able. We're able to see all of the different services on our income dollars in QuickBooks in separate accounts. So, like, we have an account for mowing, and even inside mowing, we've got separate accounts in there mulching stuff like pruning. All of the income is able to be tied directly to a service. And with what you've recommended, what I've seen, at least on their videos, is with stripe, it'll send batch income streams into QuickBooks.

Is there any other workaround to be able to tie those incomes into a specific service?

Yeah, so if you really want it towards specific service, I actually do this. So we use. At the franchisor level, we use copilot to get franchise fees, collect for a command center, initial fees, the whole nine. I want the same thing. I just simply go with my account at the end of the month. Why don't the account goes in at the end of the month and just reconciles out stripe versus copilot and just does a journal entry. It takes him about three or four hours for our whole system. So once he nails the system, it doesn't take too long. So I think it cost me like 2, 300 bucks a month. And it's going to be where if I want that all the stripe revenue reconcile dollar for dollar, penny for penny. And then I know stripe matches up directly with copilot. That that is possible. It just matter. It's going to be a manual thing because stripe is going to drop into quickbooks. All your money at the same time.

Yeah. Okay.

Cool. That was the only. I mean that's really all the only questions I have. I. I just see, I always picture this like it's. It's like a mountain in front of me. I know I've got to get to the top. I know the top has a beautiful view and it's well worth it. It's just.

Yeah.

Which path do we go down? And, and yeah, what, what workflows do we need to really focus on changing and stuff like that.

And if their accounting department or accountant, they like, hey, I don't understand how that can be a journal entry. Just send us an. Like, I don't even mind if I hook you up with Brad who's home service epa. He can just like literally show you what we do to break up all my revenues. And you probably have like 20 to 30 services. And so it's just a matter of like, okay, at the end of the month or end of the week or whenever they want it reconciled. He can do it. So it is a matter like you said, it's like hitting those one things as you climb the mountain one at a time. I would just recommend, don't try to scale the mountain. Just get through the foothills, which is in this case like one or two crews, because they will. Everyone's going to reject any sort of change even if it's better for them. So I had to learn this hard way. Even last year, for example, when I rolled out AI at command center, I was like, this is amazing. This is great. I can see all the numbers. I just rolled it out there. There's owners and franchisees. They're like, I don't want that. And I had every proof and evidence that it was better for them and better for their business and they're going to get more leads. And the list just kept going. But they rejected it because I forced them into it. And so I would, I would. Even if you could, if you could. Depends on the Managers and stuff. I would try to make it where they get to opt into it. If you can do this, you'll get way better adoption of your managers and then the crews. So if you can say, hey, you all, you. You guys can try this. I would probably do this after, like, you know, testing it out, making sure that you get the kinks out. Test it out. If you like it.

You can roll right into it. If you don't give us the feedback and stay with the current system, we'll iron out those kinks for you, and then we'll. Then we can try it again. Instead of being like, this day, we're all in. Like, no one can get out. They'll just feel trapped versus feeling like you're working with them to actually come up with something that's better for them. Okay.

Is it hard to run like a paper system alongside copilot with some crews?

No, because as long as your backend is running the jobs, running the invoicing side, you can still be printing stuff off, giving it to them, clocking it out in there. And then it will just take that, what you're currently doing, which is manually entering in time clocks and jobs being completed, et cetera, it can still be done, but the amount of savings of time is really on the back end of that not needing to be done once the guys are all in. But yeah, right now it's like, okay, forget about the savings on the admin side. Let's just make sure operationally they like it and they do it, and then we'll recognize those savings of time once everyone's inside of it.

Okay. So I could take the card data from the crews that haven't bought in yet and go into copilot and put that info in.

Yep. And when. Even if you. Even if what you want to do, you can even connect Parker and like, when you have a set of cards, like, hey, I got cards, Help me put these in. And he can just walk you through. Here's the time cards. Here's where you'd mark all the jobs complete. Here's where you can put their times in for the job. So it is tracking the time. Totally possible.

Okay, cool.

So, okay, man. Well, hey, best of luck. You're turning the Titanic. I know, it's a tough one. Yeah, no, best of luck to you. Got two months, though, till end of the year. End of the year would be nice to have everyone in, but I really recommend if at all possible, like, it sounds like the managers are pretty on board, but, like, I would even try to get to there where like you present this as an optional thing.

Okay.

Once you think it's like, hey, this is good enough. All right. This is an optional thing. All the crews, you can do this if you want. Here's the advantages. You are not forced to. If you want to go the old way, totally fine. You know, if they come back to you like we don't want it, they'll give you three reasons why. Okay, great, great point. We're going to fix all those things. Whether it be like we don't like the way that this looks or this, the title here, great, we'll fix all that stuff and then you'll get everyone to buy into it way better. That would be my recommendation. Like just from a, not a software perspective, just like getting people to adopt what you're trying to enforce.

So yeah, yeah, I think we'd like to buy spring season. Have everyone kind of bought in is ideal. But yeah, thankfully we've got six, eight months till we, we have to get to that point. So.

And what's nice is because you have the snow season, you can even look at like spring rush when you switch out of snow as the kind of, that's the hard switch. But if you convince them during snow that it's a better system, they'll forget about the old paper thing. They'll get used to clocking in. Like you need, you need two weeks of them just clocking in on an app before they don't even think about the paper anymore.

Yeah.

If there's something, Brandon, like just put in the part in the mastermind because there's other people that want to hear this stuff and they don't even know what question to ask because they're not quite at your size. They just drop in the mastermind, which is at the very top of the Facebook group under featured, there's a form. You can drop a question at any time and then I'll answer on the weekend, so.

Oh, okay, cool.

I'll drop a link in the, in.

The chat, any sort of business related things like that, like just drop them in there. Even if like struggles with like manager adopting the software, anything like that, just please drop it in and I'll. Now that I know your situation too, I'll be able to give more detailed feedback.

Okay, cool. Thank you very much.

You got it, man. We'll stay in touch. Best of luck to you.

You do the same. Thank you.

Thanks Brandon. Take care. Bye bye.

Take care, dude.