How I Made an Extra $350K/Yr in My Service Business

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have over 150 locations around North America and Australia. I'm also the founder of Copilot CRM. And today we're talking about how to create a bulletproof sales process for your home service business. I don't care what services you are selling, this will work to ensure that you can grow your business and continue to grow it to multiple seven figures by having this sales process. Now, what you can expect from this, this talk today, this little presentation, this video, is an extra $350,000 per year. You say that's incred. That's crazy. Well, that's approximately what that house on Zillow costs right now. And I do believe that you'll be able to increase your revenue by that amount every single year after this presentation. Now, if you're like, well, I don't really want to buy a house, great. Well, it's going to save you a whole bunch of money on marketing as well. $17,500 per year on ads, actually, which is the equivalent of what it's going to cost you to pay. Basically feed a family of six the entire year. All right, so let's talk about the sales process. Let me make this a little bit larger so you can see exactly what I'm looking at. Okay. Up here in the top, you can see where we start with the sales process. An estimate request. Former ERF the prospect is going to contact you. They could call you. The email or phone call or, you know, however you have your process set up, they could chat with you on your website. But again, a prospect comes in the door. Next is the office is going to reply via phone call. Because if we have an estimate request form came in from your website, the office is going to contact them back and set up an appointment. Then third there c. Assess the property. You're going to assess the property, see what exactly the scope of work is going to be. Then you're going to create and send the estimate. Then you're going to. The client is going to receive and accept the quote. Then once they accept, the office is going to respond with scheduling so when they can get the job done. And then you're likely going to need a deposit or a credit card on file if that part of your process. And then finally, the job is scheduled. So let's work our way through each of these steps because I truly believe the sales process can be improved. Now, at every transition and step of that process, there's leakage at Every single time we move to another step. So stop trying to increase leads, Just trying to get more people in the top of the funnel and getting more and more estimate request forms or more and more leads. Stop that. Because just plug the current leaks and you'll be able to get just as many customers at the end of the process. So here's the thing. When we talk about leaks in the sales process, a lot of us think about close ratio. That's the number of estimates that are accepted divided by the number of accept of estimates that are sent total. And so a lot of people say, well, my close ratio is 50%, which means one out of two estimates that I send are going to be accepted. That'd be a 50% leak. But guess what? That's just one step of the entire process. At every single step in this entire sales process, there's leakage. For example, at the very beginning, maybe they don't submit their form, they estimate request form on their website, only fill out some of the, the, some of the fields. Maybe they miss you miss their call and they don't leave a voice message. Did you know only 37% of people that actually hit your voicemail are actually leaving a voicemail? So there's going to be people that are leaking out there. Maybe they submit the estimate request form, but they give you bad contact information, a bad phone number, a bad email address, the address is incorrect. Maybe you play voicemail tag with this person back and forth and finally they give up and they don't get a hold of you again. Maybe you actually do all these things, you assess the property, but because now it takes you four days to actually get the proposal to the customer, that's going to cause a leakage. There's going to be people that don't accept your estimate. They don't do business, they don't get through the rest of the sales process because of a delayed proposal. Then maybe you actually send the proposal, maybe you do so quickly, but it gets lost in their email. It goes to spam, they saw it at work and they forget to ever. You'll get back to it and you never follow up with them again. They could be confused by your portal. Maybe they actually want to accept, but they click on accept and they've got to submit a username and a password and have five security questions just to be able to set up their account and accept their estimate. That's insane. And they just end up leaving. You don't even hear from them. Okay, well now even after they accept the estimate, offices responded with scheduling now, if you require a credit card on file, if you require them to pay a deposit, it might be, well, now you've got to send them an invoice, or now you've got to ask for a credit card to be on file using a different form. And now all of a sudden, there's leakage. There's people that will actually accept an estimate, but they won't ever get a card on file. And so you never actually get to schedule them. You never actually get them, get them on service. And furthermore, you might get them all the way to the job being scheduled. But in fact, there's still a matter of leakage, because guess what, there's times you're overbooked, the customer accepts, they put a credit card on file, they pay their deposit, and you suddenly realize you don't have enough labors and you're so far booked out you have to cancel a job. So every single one of these stages, there's actually more leakage than just the 50%. Because it's tough to figure out all these different steps. You know, when it comes to, you know, your close ratio, it's relatively easy. But when it comes to all those leaks in the sales process, it's difficult. And so what's measurable? You know, if it's, if it's something like lead count, it's super easy. Just count how many leads came in, how many people wanted an estimate. Close ratio is also pretty easy, right? Number of estimates that were accepted divided by number of total estimates that were sent. Now, lead efficiency, though, and that is the amount of people that actually started gave a estimate request form all the way to being scheduled. At every one of those steps, there's leakage. Determining what your lead efficiency is is actually a lot more difficult. Now what gets measured gets managed. And this is why people obsess in home services about getting new leads. And really, in my opinion, lead efficiency remains neglected. Instead of trying to actually figure out where is the leaks in the sales process, we are looking at one singular leak, and that is close ratio. Because here I see, I think that I'm, hey, I have a 50% close ratio. Half the customers. That one estimate from me, I get accepted when reality, if you actually take all the leaks in the sales process, all of a sudden you actually are losing 85% of your customers because of all these leaks in the sales process. That is insanity. Going from what you think is 50% close ratio to actually being 85% of customers that want to do business with you never get to actually get on your schedule and you collect revenue from them simply because of all the leaks in the sales process. So on a $1 million business, every single year, you're going to be losing out on that $350,000 house every single year. If you do the Math, on a $1 million business, if you go from a 50% close ratio to, to an 85% loss, which means like 85% of your customers are leaking out of the sales process that is costing you $350,000 every single year. So how do we plug the holes? All right, we've established first and foremost, like duct tape, close ratio is a poor substitute and it's an incomplete way to fix your sales process. I think that close ratio is the number one most important number that you must know in your business. Let me be very clear about that. It is extremely important to know your close ratio. However, it can sometimes mask the issues that are with all the other steps of the sales process, because someone accepting the estimate is just one step in that process. Let's move forward here. So now we're going to enter Operation Leakage. And our goal is to look at every one of these steps in the sales process and figure out how can we reduce the number of leads that are leaking out of this process and improve the, the number of sales that actually get through the entire system. So let's look at our estimate request forms. All right. On your website, you can minimize the forms, the number of fields that are required. Don't have this, like, long, 30 different fields they have to fill out. You'll get more information if they buy from you. You know, if you go to a lot of tech companies, they'll literally ask for your name and your email. And that's all you need to get set up, because they'll get your card information later, they'll get your address later. So also focusing on above the fold. When customers come to our websites as home service business owners, they're not coming there to just look around and see your website and see pictures and video. They're coming to usually ask for an estimate. So make it easy for them to request the estimate. Put the estimate request form above the fold on your homepage. If you want examples, go to lawn carewebdesign.com or homeservice web design.com and just go to our work. That's my company, and we build websites. You can just see almost every Single1. Our S3 request form is above the fold. That's when you get to the page. You don't have to scroll down to find it. This is a way to increase the amount of people that get to your website that actually will submit an estimate request form. Now the next step. Step is the office needed to reply back to the customer and set up an appointment. All right, don't give them a precise time, give them an appointment window. We'll be at your property somewhere between 12 and 1 o'. Clock. Just make sure that you're not running around ragged trying to do estimates. Give them a two hour window. If you need to do it within 24 hours though as fast as possible because you're going to be able to make sure they don't go out and get other estimates from prior to you showing up. Also do reminders remind them of the appointment. Whether it be automatic reminders. You can use Copilot to set up automatic reminders or you can do manual reminders like just call them on your way there. Hey Mr. Jones, I'm on my way. I'll be there in 15 minutes. Text them. You can send text messages or emails through COPA and remind customers of a scheduled appointment that's upcoming. Also, the number one way to increase the amount of people that will actually get an appointment with you is, is just increase the amount of availability you have. Instead of just being available for two hours every evening, try to increase your availability. All right, now the next step is you assess the property. What can we do to minimize leakage? Well do over the phone estimates so you don't even have to go to the customer's property in person. You can get the estimates out much faster if you do it over the phone or you can just do price ranges like what we do at Augusta and I'll show you in a moment here. We simply just take a picture of the the of small, medium and large sized properties and we ask them which one kind of looks like their property and we'll give them a price range. We round it's like, well it's not accurate. It's a distribution. There's gonna be some customers accept a price that's larger and higher than we would typically charge. The very worst we just the prices after the first visit. Now qualifying the customers is also a way to ensure that you don't have leakage at assessing the property and you actually qualify to make sure the customer's the right customer for you so you don't waste time going to their their house and and find out they don't really need your services or they're not a good fit for your company. The next step of the sales process is creating and sending the estimate. How can we minimize leakage? Well, create the estimate in the driveway. Don't wait till tonight, don't wait till this weekend to create the estimate. Do it in the driveway. How can you do that? Have an estimate comment template. So have already in the template you can do a Word document. You, you can have this inside of your CRM like Copilot and have it just standard language that when you select a certain service it already pre populates all the notes for that service. You can literally just make it in your notes app and copy and paste the notes for your specific type of services from your template into your software. So it's very quick. Instead of waiting till the weekend, waiting till the evening and then you forget and you start getting a little fuzzy on what the details were. Also take an estimate video before you leave the customer's house. Take a video of the property so you never have to return to the property again to show the customer, show your employees the job. And furthermore, you'll be much more accurate with your estimate notes if you take a video of the property and put it on file. Okay, next step of the process. The client receives and accepts the quote. What can we do to minimize leakage here? Don't make your client portal have a login copilot. We literally made it where you don't have to have a username and login. You can just directly to the estimate. Except you don't have to. You can get a PDF attached to the email. So if they have any issues with their mobile device or they're just not tech savvy, the PDF is still in the estimate. The estimate is still attached to the email in a PDF. And also like if you're going to have contracts, just realize you're going to be adding friction. It means it's going to. They're going to have to like sign something, have to put a signature on something and that causes friction. You're going to have more leakage by having a contract being required. Also realize that sending your estimate via SMS or text message, just that alone is going to increase the open rate. The amount of people that actually get the estimate will increase in case it goes to their spam filter. A lot of people, their email inbox is so cluttered and there's so much garbage going in there. Sending it via text is super helpful and that's why in Copilot we have it where you can send it via text or email very quickly. Office responding back now that's the next Stage Next step of the process is you got to respond back with scheduling. Use the budgeted hours for every single task in your business so you know exactly when your next available day is on the schedule. All right, so if you have budget hours, how many budget hours can I complete in a day? How many budget hours can I complete in a week? How many employees do I have? Okay, If I have four employees and they all do 30 budget hours this week, that means I can do 120 budget hours, which means I'll be able to tell large way in advance my labor capacity. For I should be able to get an alert basically saying, hey, in three weeks from now, you have 140 budget hours on schedule. That's a problem. You're overbooked. In copilot, when you book any job, it's literally going to add the budget hours for the next four weeks and it's going to alert you if you're overbooking your schedule. This is important to be able to use budget hours and accurately predict what your schedule is going to look like. Also have an organized route pattern. If you do jobs that are on a recurring schedule and you have a route like mowing or pool cleaning or janitorial, you're going to have some sort of route that you follow in a date. Like, don't just be driving all over your city or town or county every single day. Figure out, okay, on Mondays I'll figure I'll work on the left side and then on Wednesdays I'll work in the middle, and then on Fridays I'll work on on the right hand side. That's how you progressively move so you're not driving all the time. These are ways to reduce the friction, reduce the, the amount of people leaking out of the process at every one of these steps. The next one is deposits. If you require deposit for a big project, for example, we require 50% down on any project over a thousand dollars. Or if you require a credit card on file for someone so that you can just charge their card every single time you come to their property. If you're going to have that, here's what you can do to reduce the leakage so that you don't lose customers when you send them another invoice to pay the deposit you ask, you have to send them another email or a text message to get their credit card on file. Have a credit card requirement for acceptance, which means before they even accept the estimate and you get notified, they have to already have their card attached. And when they go to click accept Estimate, it just reminds them, hey, put a card on file. That's what's required in order to get the job on the schedule. Same thing with an integrated deposit threshold. We have both of these at Copilot, where credit card requirements and integrated deposit thresholds are there, which means if over a certain dollar amount, it's going to require the customer to pay that deposit before accepting the job. So when you get an email saying, hey, this estimate has been accepted, their credit card's already on file, the deposit's already been paid, and you're ready to put on the schedule, there's no extra steps required. And you can do. If you don't have Copilot set up email and text automations to at least remind the customer to put their current card on file, remind them to pay the deposit, because otherwise you get an estimate accepted and it's caught in limbo because they never paid the deposit. And finally, the job is scheduled. Now, we talked about trying to, Trying to, instead of trying to increase leads, just plugging the leaks in the sales process, but there must be a better way. Instead of trying to plug the leaks, let's avoid the leaks entirely. And so this old process that we just talked about, the sales process, has eight different steps. We talked about getting estimate request form all the way to getting the job scheduled, but that's a problem because every single one of those steps, there's leakage. So. So I want to compare the old way of doing things with those eight steps versus the Augusta way that we use as a sales process. So first off, we use over the phone estimates so we never actually have to assess the property. We're going to use AI and rounding of prices so we don't have to create an estimate. We don't have to have the office set up a time to go visit the customer. Why? Because we're using AI and rounding prices. So right from the ester request form, they see their prices and they accept them and, and they skip all these steps in the sales process. And later in 2024, Copilot's going to be building drone mode where you can actually automate the scheduling process so you don't have to do any of this other stuff. And what's really cool is we already have one part of this and that is the deposit thresholds and the credit card requirement on file is already there, so you don't have to have that step in the process. Now, this is what's crazy. Without leaving the page, without ever having any back and forth with the customer, they have Submitted their estimate request form, accepted their estimate, and their job is scheduled without ever having to go back and forth the customer or having any leakage whatsoever. The old way has eight steps. The Augusta way that we use will have only three steps. On the estimate request form, the customer accepts the quote and the job is scheduled. So this is what it kind of looks like, the estimate request form. This is what it looks like at Augusta Lawn Care. You can go and check it out if you like. We have over 150 locations and this is what their estimate request form looks like. We when you fill it out, you're going to say, hey, oh, you want mowing? Great. Go ahead and accept your estimate based upon the fact that here's a small, medium and large size property. Which one looks like your property? Oh, the medium one. Great. Your prices are here. Go ahead and accept the estimate, submit it and you're good to go. And coming in later, 2024 is when we'll have what we call drone mode, where the job will actually get scheduled. So this part's not 100% finished. However, we do have deposit thresholds and credit card requirements. So when the client accepts the estimate, you don't have to wait on back and forth communication with getting a deposit or a credit card on file. So this is what the sales process should look like. And by doing that, by making sure that every single stage of the sales process is streamlined and instead of just plugging the holes, you skip them altogether. By using new technology like AI, like making sure that you can do estimates over the phone, you, you can ask the customer enough questions to be able to do it on the phone, close the deal, get their credit card right away. These are the type of things that are gonna allow your business be able to grow and you're not gonna need more leads. Everyone goes immediately to I need more leads, I need to go get more customers, I need more advertising and spend more money. The reason we do that is cause it's easy to track. It's easy to track how many leads come in. And there's a whole industry built around trying to get us more leads. And they like it. Cause it's very easy to measure and, and they can give us their cost per click and their cost per lead and all of these things very easily. What's much more difficult is to actually look at your business and change the whole process of your sales system so that you're able to not just plug the leaks, but skip the leaks entirely. This alone can double, triple your business without spending a single dollar on marketing and advertising.