How to Spend $30,000 to Grow a Lawn Business (Coaching w/ Mike Andes)

I'm trying to figure out what the best way to employ a $30,000 budget to grow. I want to grow fast. What would you over budget for? What are some expenses that you wouldn't have expected before, you know what I'm saying?

Like the thing that you have at your advantage, the one skill you have right now, or like the piece of data you have a, that is more than you did a year ago, is that, you know the data on door hangers. So I would, I would really be encouraging. You just do more of what you're currently doing. You have 1500 door hangers. Out of that we got, I think it was 11 customers. All right, so then it just becomes 19 jobs total.

Yeah, 19 jobs total. But eight of them were one time jobs.

Yeah, love it. All right, so we got eight time. One times. Got it. Okay, so what we're going to say here is basically out of every SO20, you have to deliver about 80 door hangers to get one new customer.

Yeah.

And then it's a matter of, okay, great, I'm able to do how many door hangers per hour you think? 60, 80.

I have a, I can do 200 on my scooter in an hour and a half.

Okay, let's be conservative. Let's do 160. 160 door hangers per hour. That means every 30 minutes you're going to get a lead. So then it's a matter of how can I actually operationalize this? You're if you have 30 grand, either a, you do this and you pound pavement, what's likely going to happen? You're going to do that, fill up your schedule, and then you're going to go hire someone to do this. And if you systematize it where it's like, hey, I know that every hundred, every single hour you should be able to do 160 door hangers. And every hour you should be getting about two customers from that. You can run the math on this very quickly and you probably have a $40 or less customer acquisition cost. So by the time you pay them per hour, then you pay them per accepted job. So I would just keep doing that. Like if you would have told me you got three customers from 1500, you know, and I'm okay, like, we gotta figure something else out. But there's no reason to go spend 3 to 30 grand on Facebook or Google when you have something that right now is producing probably 30 to $40 customer acquisition cost.

Okay, and how quickly do you think it's. I mean, because I, right now I Plan on buying, not 15,000 at once, but I was going to budget for 15,000 door hangers and probably 8,000 EDDM. But I feel like that would even be overkill for just a solo guy if the response is anywhere close to what I got off of the first round. And the first round was done in October, November, when grass is kind of slowing down. And I'm about to start again in the February, March. And I feel like the response is going to be higher. Even I don't. I'm not sure, but I feel like it will be higher than.

So that constraint, once you hit it. Right now we don't have the constraint of so many leads and jobs coming in, you can't get the work done. So focus on getting those, and then we'll address that constraint when it happens.

And you don't really. At this stage, you're not thinking about things like, because I am a very analytical guy, I have built some businesses before, and I'm thinking, like, two, three, four years down the road. And I feel like that's. Is that hurting me to be able to. Like to start planning for things down the road now instead of going out and just getting the customers before I do all that?

Yeah. Like, it's like, if you're like, I want to have a kid. There's other steps before having a kid, right? Like, you gotta date someone, you gotta marry them, you gotta get them. Like, there's a lot of steps here. And so I would say before we start figuring out what crib we're gonna buy them, let's figure out, like, a girl, right? So, like, I think when it comes to, you know, the state planning, I'm a. I'm a huge fan of planning, but you don't even know what that's gonna look like in three years. Like, let's figure out the first step, which right now is get so busy you have to employ somebody. That's the goal. Just focus all your time and attention on that one constraint. Because there's going to be constraints that cannot constantly change. As you go to business, you have four, four constraints that are gonna happen. Either liquidity, leads, labor, or leadership. Right now, your constraint is leads. You have $30,000. So it's not liquidity. You need more leads, and you already have a path to get them. So just focus on that one thing, because what's going to happen, you're gonna get so many leads, eventually you will have to hire someone, and then your constraint becomes labor. Right? And eventually you'll get enough labors to where your next constraint will be. I need a leadership like I need a general manager. And so just focus on the next constraint and then that'll help you grow the business. Okay.

And I know you probably get tired of hearing this, man, but I am absolutely obsessed. The world was robbed of a world class doctor.

11 years ago. Thank you for all the work you put in, man. It really is. You seem to be a very selfless individual, and I really appreciate everything you do.

You got it, brother.

Thank you, man.

My pleasure. Next step, unmute yourself.

Mike.

Yeah, If I could jump in here, go for it. So I'm actually not on copilot. I'm trying to make the decision of switching. I'm in LMN right now. I believe you're familiar with lmn.

I was wondering if you could talk a little bit like about the differences.

And I know I, I had a meeting with one of your sales reps, Christian, and. Yeah, yeah. So I think like, one of the big constraints for me was like the budgeting and whatnot. Like how element is very like, in depth in like, itemizing all the equipment and whatnot and like building out that estimate. So I was wondering, like, from your mouth, if you could, you know, break it down a little bit better, like the differences and whatnot.

Totally. I'll go over the differences first before I do that. When it comes to your business, are you mostly doing projects right now?

No. So I, I'm doing more maintenance, but I plan to grow more into like the installs and projects. Like, I, I, I kind of want to focus more on the bigger jobs versus the, the reoccurring jobs.

Gotcha.

Not like completely let go of the reoccurring. Just even it out. Even out the scale.

Yeah. Like, to be honest, our focus at copilot is much more around recurring work. And not to say that we can't do projects. A lot of our owners do large 10, $20,000 projects. But if you're going above 20,000 and it's a consistent, you know, you're doing 50, 60, $100,000 installs, I would probably stick with something like LMN. That's their strength, is the budgeting and the building of estimates for using raw materials and having that dialed in. So I think that's like their biggest strength. I 100% agree. On the budgeting side, you can do the budget for free inside. But actually building your estimate to your point, I do recommend keeping that one if you're doing big projects. Now, the reason that I haven't focused on Budgeting very much is because most people's, the budgeting numbers they use are completely wrong. Like I know this from even doing like just workshop with people around budgeting. The numbers are wrong and if the numbers that you input are wrong, the outputs you get in your estimates are also incorrect. And so I've seen plenty of people that on their estimates it looks like they're making money and I look at their bank balance and there's no money. There's. And that is because your budget is only as good as the inputs you give it. And many times the inputs people are giving it are completely off the charts wrong. And I have a fear of even putting that as software inside the software because I'm then telling them that we're gonna make profit and then they don't. And so I'm much more of a fan of I'm going to look at budget hour capacity and when I'm hitting budget hour capacity it means I can raise my prices or I go buy trucks and more equipment. And so we really, really focus on budget hours inside of copilot. It's the basis by which we schedule. It's the basis by which I believe you raise prices and it determines prices. It's the basis by which close ratios should be determined. And that's really my focus. It's not the budgeting side and not to say that's not important, especially like the, the asterisk next to that is like the bigger the project, the more that is very valuable. So I would just weigh that out if I was you. Like if you're really focusing on big projects, those big ones, you might want to just stick with element if the budgeting has been super useful for you because it's not going to be a focus in terms of budgeting inside copil.

Yeah, yeah, it makes sense.

Any follow up to that?

Yeah, I mean, I don't know, I just feel like.

I'm not even sure honestly like I.

Do you want me give you the pros and the cons? Is that what you're looking for?

I mean as well? Yeah, I just, I'm just thinking like obviously ideally like all of us on this call probably are trying to grow and scale the business. Right. So like what we're doing today, like Ben was saying, like planning out three years from now. I mean I've been doing this for, for you know, going on 15 years now. So you know, I have a pretty decent foundation, you know, I mean but like I am trying to look at those projections and look out a little further and try to move the puzzle pieces around. And like, you know, so I guess like that, like for the projection part of it is kind of like, I guess where I'm kind of stuck on.

Totally. Yeah. Like the dynamics of a business are so volatile. That's why we even do the projections, you know, on the calls every year. Because I will do quarterly projections with you and in a year you're like, okay, things have changed. All of our work came as recurring. And so the projects we're not going to focus on as much, Things just change. And so projections in my mind are much more around what's my capacity. Because my capacity is made up of my assets, my trucks, my equipment and my labor. And that's going to be the determining factor of how much I grow. And that paired with my cash on hand. Because if I, if, if I'm getting all these leads coming in, I want to buy trucks and hire more people, but I have no cash. We have a problem. And so the main two things I'm always looking at is like, do you have money in the bank? Because that's going to fuel the growth and how full are we in terms of our capacity? So I take a little bit of a different approach on this one. Mostly because I just see the amount of people that do budgets and how many of those people that do budgets don't have money in the bank. And it's because the inputs they put into those budgets are just completely off, unfortunately.

Off as far as like what you're projecting numbers to hit or like the, what your insurance cost, like what your fixed expenses are, like putting in that data. You're like what you think you're going to make on maintenance or installs or irrigation and whatnot. Like they set that number too high.

Yeah. Like a lot of times, for example, they'll start the year off. I've seen budgets where it's okay, we're going to debase about our marketing budget based on our revenue. It's like, well, what happens if all of a sudden you get customers for 20 or 30? Because like Ben, you do this door hanger strategy and all of a sudden you got this gold mine. Am I going to not spend more money on that? Absolutely not. I'm just going to go all in on it. And so I'm not opposed to projections, marketing, budget, et cetera. Like, that's why we do the goal session. But I'm much more a fan of like, look at the macro zoomed out picture of a budget and a projection. Because I see when people Start getting too granular with like individual jobs and individual things, they start going off on rabbit trails that are not actually leading the business forward, which is growth. Like, I know that there are only four constraints in a business. You get more leads, you get more employees, you get leaders, and you continue the cycle and that's liquidity and you raise prices. And so I really try to stay focused on those. Like, just really zoomed out. And I know for some people, like, especially if you like the analytical side, like, all power to you, I think it's really good to be able to have that skill. The vast majority of owners, I just see, they overlook, you know, the budget. They go for the budget and the projections instead of like, does this get me more money? Do I get more leads? Do I raise my prices when I hit capacity? And that's what I focus on.

All right, thank you.

Yeah, cool. Someone else had unmuted themselves. Was it Brian? We got a couple. Just, just start talking. It'll be good.

Mike, I, I actually put my question in. It was more of a comment in the chat, but we can't, we're coming from Jobber. I'm not gonna lie to you. I love Jobber. I like, I love the, the user interface. But I, I also commented in chat, brains over beauty. Right. I think number one, you're, you're, you're heavily involved in, in the, in the software development, so that's a plus. And number two, you know, I don't really care what it looks like as long as it's functioning. Their, their automations. I'm not a huge fan of their automations. I don't think they're as built out as well as yours. However, one thing I do like about Jobber, I really love about Jobber is they help me because we do some projects, not, not huge projects, but each employee that I have on, they can clock in through Jobber, start their timer and their timer, my one fee covers them all. I don't need them. I give them minimal access. Do you foresee a solution in copilot rather than adding 15amonth per user, having a dumbed down user where it's just, hey, you know what? It's. We're going to help you with tracking your time. Time tracking. So that's.

Yeah. So totally. Yeah. So I don't think we'll ever chunk down. And I'm not like saying we never will in terms of like, hey, this, this account has five users. This one had 10, this one has 15. We probably won't ever do that. There's several reasons why, but like, in terms of the use, you can put an employee inside of Copilot and you can assign them to jobs. They just won't have mobile app access. So as long as you have like one crew leader that can, like, see the job notes, you're good. The main reason we did this is because when there's other features inside the software, the thing that we could also alternatively do is just lock every single thing behind a payroll. And this is the part where, like, when we started doing job or stuff is like, I was going to have to pay $450 a month for mailchimp to be able to send out text messages. And so copilot, that's not there. So it's a different monetization vehicle. Like, obviously we're doing it by user because it's based upon usage. It's like if you have a bigger business, you can afford the higher payment, but then what you won't get in Copilot is like, oh, I've got to pay an extra $40 for the email, mass messaging, and I've got to do a mailchimp integration for the texting. That's the part that you're kind of getting around. So it's just kind of a pro and con. I understand that aspect though, a hundred percent. One thing that we are going to be doing, Brian, you'll see probably middle of 2025, is allowing for one crew member to be able to clock in everyone else. And that will probably be if you don't have a lot. If they don't need a lot of access, that might be all. All that you really need. So you just need one user. But yeah, it's a different monetization vehicle and I've just gone more the user route instead of trying to nickel and dime for every little feature. Yeah.

If I can. A second question.

So we.

Where we live, it's actually. You guys have a location up here in London, right next door.

Everybody there, they're great. They wave back. They're very friendly as we are. We try to be the same way. So. But we tried door hangers, and I'm not going to lie to you, we maybe did 40 to 50 houses per hour because most of the areas that we want to hit, they're just the houses are, you know, we're 800, 900, a million dollars. The driveway is as long as my road, you know. So what. What would you think would be the. The other than door hangers? I know that's. That's one of your favorite. Because of the low cost, what do you think would be more effective? We. We're thinking targeted Facebook With.

With staggering. That's. That was my. And then also Google.

Yeah. So. So first off, when you did the door hangers in the past, how many did you put out?

We put out over the course of a week. We did like 1500 and we ended up with four responses.

Got it. Yeah.

So, like, we got calls that we got call. You gotta remember the houses were like, you know, don't put this on my door.

Yeah, I got you. I got you. So. So I would do two things. One, usually when I do a test, I will do at two different times. So the week is the part that I'm. I'm questioning because I want to have it spread out, usually by at least four to six weeks, to see if it's a seasonality thing. That being said, especially with that low, like, that's extremely low. Assuming that the offer is good, because that's another aspect of response rate, then I could probably move on from this. This marketing channel. But the two things I would probably still probably testify was like trying to actually see if it works is seasonality, like, different timing and then a different offer. If that still didn't check out, 1500 is a decent sample size to kind of know if you only got four calls and they're all say, like, don't touch me. Don't do this again. Probably gonna move on. And so, yeah, every door direct mail. Like, if you're doing. Only if you're. Let's just say you're doing 40 houses an hour, that's like 50 cents per delivery. If you're doing 20 an hour for someone to deliver them doing door hangers. And so now we're talking like double every door direct mail. And so you. I would probably say every door mail, you're looking at 16, 17 cents per delivery. So if you're not able to deliver at least 100 door hangers per hour, it's usually cheaper to do every door direct mail. The thing is, with every door mail, people are standing over their trash bin handing everything else in the garbage. So usual response rate's a little lower. Incident pricing is more possible with door hangers versus every door direct mail. Unless you do QR codes on the. On the ever door direct mail. And that goes to a form, which I do recommend. So I would pro. I would agree with you. It's like, hey, do heavily targeted Facebook. I do every door direct mail. Make sure that it's a killer offer with Instant pricing on it. That will convert twice as better, twice as good as. Just like, hey, these are general services and I'm Brian. Like, that's fine, that's cool. That does not work. I would do an instant price form. I would give instant pricing and they close from a form.

Yeah, instant pricing. Something that I feel is difficult in this area because you'll go out to a house, you go out to a properties. Our average Property is probably.

10, 10 to 12,000 square feet. But when you, when you look at it, you can't tell if it's hills. It's hard to tell how hilly it is. We've got some properties that are, you look at it, you're like, oh, that doesn't look too bad. You go down the Google, you know, the street view and Google Earth. Google Earth. It doesn't look too bad. You go out there and you're like, whoa.

So those are, those are, you know.

Yeah. The worst case scenario, the worst case scenario is you have to change the price on them. And so in your, in your, in your, your verbiage, you can just say, hey, look, after the first pri, after the first visit, your, your price will be confirmed. And usually what we do in our first visit is we charge.

Good idea. Yeah.

So even in a market like yours, because I know Londonberry, like I'd say maybe one out of 20, they have to change. And then what you do with the other 19, you know, half of them are higher than you thought. They're like, oh man, they accepted a higher price, let's go. And then others, it's like, okay, they're a little low. I'm going to mow them for three months and I'm going to increase their price. Yeah. And usually we have about 85 to 90% of people stick with us even once we raise the price. And so it's just a matter of like, what's the response rate? Because if you do a split test between one with instant pricing, one with not, and the instant pricing gets three times as many responses, I'm okay with a couple that drop off once I have to raise the price.

Right, that makes sense.

Yeah. So, so I'm not like saying it will work. I'm just saying I would test it. Right. And I think only if you're only able to do 40 or 50 per hour door hangers, the cost of delivery is just so high. Yeah.

Because we could, we could in eddm, we could see the routes and then go drive those routes and say, on average, what do we think the average Price would be. And then maybe raise that by like 10, 15, drop them and then what?

Yeah, what you're going after there is the price insensitive customer that is tired of calling five people and they want to scan the thing, fill out a form and the price is accepted. Yeah, scan this to accept it.

We're going to try to pull up the hot springs of them and say, you know, you know, like somebody frustrated, like are you sick and tired of calling around for like, you know what I mean? And then on the other side, flip the card over to see, to see and it's going to be a nice lush lawn and you know, the sun's shining and you're playing golf and you're taking back your weekend and you know, so yeah, I got a marketing background.

So yeah, I love it. Two things. First one is I would recommend for everyone is always keep in mind that the vast majority of your customers are coming from people that are switching providers. Especially at the beginning of the year you will get some people that for the very first time they decide because they want to play golf on the weekends, they're going to have a mowing service. Just keep in mind the vast majority of the people that are coming to your service had a landscaper before. So the value we're adding is actually not the fact that they're going to be playing golf, it's the fact that we actually show up, we have a credit card on file, we say what we're going to do and we deliver a high quality product. And so by doing instant price forms, it kind of sets that expectation that this is the standard we operate at. And so okay, now that's one thing. Second thing is here's the tactical on the, what I just mentioned with the door hanger thing or the, this QR code, QR code on a postcard. That QR code goes to a jot form. You can do paper form if you like it. Jotform is nice and easy. It's super cheap, really, really customizable. That's going to be a form. They have to take a picture of that to confirm their price. So you can do multiple prices still Brian, between different postcards and do different routes. Totally fine. They take a picture of it that then goes into Copilot through Zapier and then you could have an automation that as soon as it hits from Zapier it texts them and basically starts the, the orientation process. So they, they scan it, they hit confirm, they're getting a text message, they're in the system and that, that, that text back to them could simply be a link to their client portal asking for a card on file. So. Okay, cool. Anyone else feel free to unmute yourself.

Hey Mike, I'm over in Langley, British Columbia, just around the Vancouver area and I quick brief history. I bought into the company back in July or bought the company rather back in July and they haven't really done very well on the winter services. And as you know up here like you know, salting and snow is kind of, it's a bit of a gamble in terms of where.

Oh yeah, this year not happening much man. No smelt and snow this year man.

No, not at all. Could you, I've listened to some of your material on like the winter services, but could you maybe just do like a quick recap or maybe some services that you would start on or.

That type of thing to just start that reoccurring revenue through the winter, you know, winter packages or winter services, stuff like that. Yeah.

Is your main, your kind of core service mowing throughout the year, Dirk?

We do bigger projects but yeah, it's like mowing hedging like you know we do, we have residential and then we do quite a few strata buildings and commercial buildings.

So I do two things every single install. I'd be trying to sell them recurring jobs on the walkthrough. So if you just install a paver patio, you've probably done demolition, you probably have installed beds, you've probably done some irrigation. I'm going to sell that on the, on the walkthrough. I'm also going to give them a discount on the project if they sign a 12 month agreement for me to do the maintenance. I will also give them a warranty on the project if they have me do the maintenance. So for example, I will say let's just do a project, for example of irrigation. I'm installing a big irrigation system. I'm going to give them three prices. One is to install it, one is to install it and fix it. Another one is to install it, fix it and maintain it. And those are gonna be three different packages for them to be able to do this otherwise have been a one time install. And so I'm going to be trying to focus as much of my time and how do I focus on recurring because if I can sell that irrigation system for say 15 grand. But I say hey, as long as we do the blowouts, as long as we do the startups and as long as we do quarterly inspections, we will fix any, any repair whatsoever will be covered 100% as long as you're on this quarterly system and as long as we're coming every quarter to check on the system, and that's going to cost you 250 or whatever it is. I'm a big fan of turning lifetime guarantees into service contracts. People do this with roofing. They do with H vac systems, etc. It's like, hey, if we just come and do this inspections, we will warranty this job in perpetuity knowing that the average person only lives at their house for eight to 10 years. So I can give a lifetime warranty to a homeowner on their house knowing that the h. The. The roof will last 20 to 30 years. And they're not going to be here in 20 or 30 years. They'll probably be dead. Like, let's just be honest. So that'd be the first thing. The second thing I would say in terms of converting your mowing into winter services is the mindset change that for me helped was you are not selling them a service based upon what you're actually doing. You're selling it based upon insurance and you're selling it based on pricing. And so what I mean by that is the insurance part is especially in our market like yours, because mine's the same as yours. Like people that leave their house for the winter, huge opportunity. Secondly though is pricing. So what we do is we simply compare the price of a fall and a spring cleanup versus us coming every two weeks on winter services. And usually they're saving like $700. And then what we do is we don't just say, hey, hey, do you want the service? If so, click here. We don't even now do opting out where it's like, hey, we're going to merge you. This is what we used to do. We going to merge you from mowing into winch services. And if you don't want that, opt out here. And then we had a better retention rate. Now what we do is we actually sell it to them. We will go to them and we will compare the pricing. We'll do videos with loom inside of copilot. We'll make a loom video and compare the price of their fall and their spring cleanups versus staying on winter services. And so doing this has gone from about a 10% when we just like, hey, hey, if you want the service, let us know to about 25% by saying, hey, you go out of this service and we're going to roll you into it to where now at 70 to 80% of our owners are able to convert that many customers to winter services by pitching it. And then we're going to do it based on price. We're going to tell them like you are going to save 6, 7, $800 if we just come every two weeks instead of fall and spring. Oh, and by the way, now your property looks good all year round instead of just twice a year.

Yeah, Gotcha. No, that's perfect. I appreciate that. Thank you.

You got it.

Hey, Mike, Dan, Dustin, what's up? How are you? Good, good.

So I did my first small claims court today.

Yeah, it was a lot of fun.

That's good. I got another. I got a big. In my briefcase right there. Let's go.

Go ahead. Sorry.

No, you're all right. So I'm just trying to figure out a way to keep better notes when I. When we think something like that's going to happen just to make the process easier. Luckily, today nobody showed up, so I won by default.

So just the next time if somebody's there, you know, trying to tell you we're lying, we keep good records and everything. I just wonder, is there something better to do in that situation?

Records in terms of what was done on the property. Records in terms of. This is an employee thing. Like what, what aspect specifically?

I guess the records. We just keep the state, what was charged, you know, the total we send out every. An invoice, every month we sent out or we took the emails trying to reach out to the lady, text messages, things like that. Just proof that we've been in contact, that she'd paid previous.

Yep. So yeah, I don't think there's anything better than that or totally a few things. First off is prevention. So like, I want to prevent this as much as possible and that is like I want to require cards on file. I want to have deposits some people are now doing where like the deposit threshold is 100%, so they actually have to prepay. Essentially it's prepayment. At that point you're going to see in the new generation of the customer portal, we're going to really push customers to pay in full instead of just doing a 50% down. We did some testing and like the vast majority of people, if you just give them the option with no discount extra, they'll just pay the whole thing up front because they don't have to come back and do another payment at the end of the job. So first off is prevention. I'd be trying to get cards on file. I've been trying to get bigger chunks. Deposits. I'd be doing like if it's a larger job, I'd be chunking down the estimates. Not just 50% up front, but 50%, 20% and then 30% the job, stuff like that. And then in terms of actually record keeping, this is where like keeping all in the CRM is important because you, you're able to see if they open up the email, you're able to see if they clicked on the link. So we've had it before where people like will dispute stuff. It's like, look, I have a full record of you opening the email, clicking on the link, and then I can see you inside the system and you clicked on reject or whatever, accept. And I have all tracked and here's the timestamps. So if you ever come into the counter with that, like you want help from atc, they can definitely like walk you through all that. It's all inside there. This is also a reason why if you have a bunch of people in your office, I do recommend everyone have a different user because then you know who's touching what. At all times. They leave a call note, it has their name, it has a timestamp. If they send an email, it has their name, it has a timestamp. So we do the same thing here with all of our, of our reps at command center. We know who's doing what at all times. That's good.

Okay. Yeah, that's, that's a good way to do it.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah.

Thank you very much.

Got it. Anyone else? Feel free.

Hey, sorry, Michael, if nobody else has a question, I'll jump back in just on the invoicing side of things.

So you were talking about getting the credit card on file. A lot of the customer base that I purchased, they were doing monthly invoicing before. Do you have any suggestions on transitioning them? Like what invoicing interval do you go with? Or would you recommend going with and then any feedback or thoughts on transitioning them into that interval?

Yeah, so I would say first off, you know, moving to weekly is not that difficult if you have a card on file. So first off is the current obstacle. Getting cards on file or changing the billing frequency?

Combination of both.

Cool. So I would focus first on getting their cards on file. And if you, if you pair these two up, you might have a little bit of kickback. So I would first off get their cards on file. I would do that by using their first invoice from Co pilot is when I'm get their card information. I'm not going to just send everyone an email like, hey, Put your cards on. No one will do it. Like literally less than 5% of your audience will, your customer base will do it. If you send it with an invoice and the invoice says attention like action required. And then they go into it, cause you gotta let them open it up. You gotta literally write like a sales script, like they gotta click on the thing, get in there and then I'm gonna be telling them they gotta fill out this form, give me a card information. I would recommend that way. And then use your follow up sequence to an overdue invoice inside of copilot to slowly merge, like ratchet up the heat of like you gotta cut out a card on file. But I would start with an invoice that's overdue. And then what I would do is as time goes on or even in next season, you could do this, just start charging. You could just send an email at the very beginning saying hey, by the way, instead of us charging at the end of the month, we're not going to charge you each week. And if you ever want access to your client portal, see your charges, here's a link to it. Because they can just log in through the client portal. Okay, so what I recommend, the reason I say that is because what I've seen some people do is they switch to bi week or to weekly billing and then they start sending paid invoice receipts to customers every week. Do not do that. You will dramatically decrease the open rate of your marketing emails. And, and you're higher likely of going to spam because they're not opening up your emails. And so my main objective when it comes to email is I want my sales emails to be opened. If you're sending more than one receipt a month. So monthly billing, I recommend do not send an invoice. Just say you're charging your card and if you have any questions, here's a link to get, you know, log into your to your portal.

Perfect. Awesome.

Thank you.

You got it. Dan and Dustin, I think unmuted. Go ahead, don't jump over the cake. Sorry.

Mike, what would you do with somebody who's trying to get a card on file and they're giving you a little bit of pushback. They don't want to do it because I mean again you hear a lot of well, you're a long company. I don't want to do a credit card.

Totally, totally. Yeah, it's like, hey Mr. Jones, that I totally understand. We actually have you currently on the price for ACH or credit cards. If you Want to pay with check? That's totally fine. We do have a different rate for that. It's usually around $5. And that just covers the cost of our admin and our office having to take things to the bank and the delayed time in our, our being able to collect on the funds. And so that's how we pitch it. It's like this is a discounted rate because of you, you being on car on file.

Okay, with, with a card on file, do you charge the customer the like price, like the percentage price or does it automatically charge the credit card fee?

You can charge them the credit card fee inside Copa. I don't recommend it. I would rather just eat the cost and raise the price by 10%.

Makes sense. That's good. Yeah, sure.

Okay, go ahead. Kate?

Yeah, Mike, I was wondering if you could dive in back to the winter services. I kind of break that down. I was trying to wrap my head around it where you said if they kind of eliminate their fall and spring cleanup and kind of just do like every other week, you know, checkup, what not picking up sticks or trash or whatever, they floating around the yard. You said the customer would save like you know, 4 or 5600 bucks or whatnot. But wouldn't that 4 or 5600 bucks come out of your gross profit? Like.

Yeah. So yeah. First off, are you coming to Blue Collar summit next week or not?

No.

Okay. All right. Big segment on this. Okay, so let me try like nail it down here. So yes, you will make less revenue. However, it'll be recurring revenue. And furthermore, I will not have the spike of fall and spring rush cleanups. And so what I'm trying to do there is saying, okay, when I have a project and I have to go do an estimate for a fall cleanup, guess what estimator has to go out there. I'm doing a walk through, I'm like, there's debris removal. It's a project, it's a one time project. When it's recurring basis, I line them all up and they drive for two minutes from the last property and come do the job. And so the, the, the margin on recurring is usually higher. But more importantly, it's stable revenue throughout the off season. Cause if I can have that stable revenue, I keep my employees, I'm able to continue marketing, I'm able to continue growing. And furthermore, I can sell winter services after your fall cleanups. That's what everyone shuts down for three months because they don't have anything to do until spring cleanups. And so it's Just simply a matter of, like, we do services that don't include mowing grass. It's like we're going to trim the bushes off of your house, we're gonna check your gutters, we're gonna do a visual inspection, we're gonna put pictures in your client portal. We're going to, as we get closer to spring, we're going to pull any weeds that usually don't show up, and we're going to spend the same amount of time on your property as we would if we were mowing. And so you're going to spend the same amount of time on their properties as if you were mowing. And. And it's going to cost the exact same amount as if they were mowing. So there is no price estimate that we have to send them. Like, hey, Mr. Jones, we're converting over into winter services. Instead of mowing your grass, we're going to spend the same amount of time. It's going to cost you the same exact amount. And we're going to do all these other services and we're going to start at the top and work our way down. And sometimes we only get through one or two because there was a windstorm last week and there's a whole bunch of branches all over the place, but sometimes we might get to the bottom. We're actually putting salt down on your steps just in case it gets cold. For example.

There'S a bunch of content on this on YouTube if you want to look it up on my stuff. But we are going super deep talking about how to do this with instant pricing and advertising as well. And if you got a warm market versus a cold market. So, for example, if you're like, in a market where it's snowing, you can integrate snow in with the winter services and again, show massive discounts in terms of prices, but also give you recurring revenue throughout the entire year versus hoping and praying that it snows or being under contracts. So one thing is like, if someone's paying 200 bucks a month and no matter if it snows or not, well, guess what? If it doesn't Snow, they paid 200 for, in their mind, nothing. So you pitch all of them on, hey, are you tired of paying for snow services and it not snowing? Why don't you use winter services where even if it doesn't snow, we show up to your property and we do all these things.

So you can always pitch it both ways. Yeah, so I'll get. There'll be a bunch more content coming out in February about this too. So even if you can't make it next week, I got you.

Is that.

Is that seminar in person or is that online?

In person, maybe? It's gonna be great. I do recommend being there. Even. Even if you stay with Element, we'll forgive you, but you can still come.

Where? Where is it?

It's. It's in Seattle. It's next week. Starting Thursday, John Taffer from Bar Rescue is going to be there. It's going to be great. So the Friday, the Friday, I'm doing a full day workshop. And a big chunk of this is this. Basically, we're going over the off season. There's five ways to fix it, and one of them is essentially recurring revenue. And we're going to go really, really deep on this. And you'll create, actually. Well, I just mentioned, like the checklist and your pricing and your offer. We'll create all of that at the. At the workshop.

Nice.

Yeah, I just came across all your content this past year.

Last few months, really, I really been getting into your YouTube videos and whatnot. And like Ben alluded to it earlier, I mean, it's definitely a wealth of knowledge and I appreciate all the. The free content and whatnot and your integrity definitely shows. So.

I mean, I can't make it next week.

If you can't make it next week, don't worry about it. Go to landscapebusinesscourse.com it's free. And inside of there, I do have a couple lectures specifically on what we just talked about.

Absolutely.

Okay.

Cool.

Cool. All right. Ben, do you want to wrap us up?

Yeah, man.

Oh, wait, then I didn't get Marshall. Ben, can I come back to you?

Yeah, yeah, go ahead, Go ahead.

Go ahead, Marshall, Go ahead. And then we'll go after Ben.

Yeah, so I. I'm about to hire two technicians for the business, and I was going to pay them on P4P and have a group chat of 10 helpers that I could just put a job in there and say, hey, you know, this chick Fil a is going on and whoever wants to sign up for the job can. So will this affect how I do P4P for the techs? Is that a good idea? Because they'll get paid more and then these helpers would only get a flat rate. How would you tackle this situation?

Okay, I am not comprehending. My apologies. So we're gonna have a chick Fil A show up and be like, we need service. And then you're gonna have a chat of 10 people that are working with you, or they're just they're not working for you full, right?

Yeah. I can reset it. So I'm gonna have two technicians that are on W2 and then I'm gonna have a group chat that will have 10 helpers and I'll put a job that they can sign up for in there. So I was going to pay them a flat rate. And my technicians that work under the.

Company P4P, is that going to essentially the same thing? Like when you say flat rate, you mean per hour or do you mean per job?

I was going to pay them just an hourly rate. Or should I. I got you pay the $50 that you guys have on copilot for all 10 of these people?

Yeah. I don't recommend. Oh, oh, okay. These two different questions. Let me first talk about P4P and then I'll talk about users. So I would first off, would not recommend paying $15 for a user that you might only have a one or two jobs for. I just either print them the thing off or have another member on the crew show them their phone. In terms of P4P, I don't recommend having a crew that has P4P people and people that are getting paid per hour because your W2 guys are incentivized to move and hustle. Your helper guys are getting paid by the hour. So one of them is getting paid. The faster the job takes, the job takes, and the other is getting paid more. The longer the job takes. We have a problem. You will have a lot of cultural problems with that.

So I would either a what I would probably do because these helpers could be 1099 people. So what I would do is say, hey, this chick fil a is coming up for sale or coming up, you're going to be getting X amount to come help them mow the grass. And then you make sure your W2 guys are on P4P. So the yellow slips, they're the quality control guys. But everyone's moving the direction of get the job done as quickly as possible. Your W2 guys are ensuring quality is upheld, but they still want the job done quickly because they're on P4P.

Got it.

So I think this could work if you did flat rate 1099. And what I would do, Marshall, is I'd take a percentage of the job and say, hey, this job is up tomorrow for to use your example. And I would take 20 as and allocate that to the helpers and be like, hey, this is how much you're gonna get if you show up and you get the job. Done with the crew.

Got it?

Yep.

Thank you.

All right, Ben, wrap us up. Let's go.

All right. So sorry I got excited earlier and forgot to ask. I feel like Leonardo DiCaprio is teaching me how to act right now, but.

You got the wrong guy, buddy.

Like, man, I've watched when he says the landscape business course. Guys, if you guys haven't been through. I've been through it twice since you made it through free on Christmas. Like, I've. I have a full business plan up to seven years marked up, but I. I just really. I really wanted to get a little bit more clarity on the allocation of the 30,000. And right now I have 8,000 allocated to, like, logos, branding, uniform trailer wraps, website, all of that stuff to get all that professional. And then I had 12,000 to marketing and then 10,000 to business operational costs. Would you. Would you expect that I would need to spend more in the marketing area, or do you think that would be okay to get me going? Because my. My total business expenses are only like 35 customers or something like that covers all of my business. I'm breaking even at that point. And I don't think. I think that myself, I can handle around 60 to 75 customers a week working four days. And I'm just trying. I'm trying to make sure that everything. I know that there's not any definitive answers. I know you can't tell me, yes, if you do this amount, you're going to get this result. I know that, but I'm just saying, do you think 12,000 is enough to get me there and then cover. Just in case I need to do some additional. As far as getting a location off the ground? Because I do want to. I do plan on hiring someone pretty quickly. As soon as I reach my capacity, personally, I'm going to start looking for someone quickly, and I'm trying to do that in the first two months. So I'm just wondering how you would necessarily. Would you. Am I spending too much on branding? Am I like, what would you recommend?

Yeah, so first off, I would make sure, like, if you're gonna spend a dollar on marketing, I want your website looking good. Because every dollar you spend on marketing will be twice as impactful if it. When they come to your website, it converts well. So that's the first thing I'd be doing. And if you're gonna have that much money, I would get a website. I don't really care if you use lawn carewebdesign.com but go there, see the rwork page and copy one of the sites. Go on. Just figure it out. I would say this, though. You. You're getting a little ahead of yourself because right now, if we assumed. Right now, we assumed based on previous math, at $40 per customer is what you got, you got for door hangers. Let's step back for a moment and like, be more conservative and say you only get 10 customers per 1500 door hangers. That means in order to fill your capacity, like fill your schedule, it's 70 customers, then we simply need to put out one 10,500 door hangers. So the only thing you can control is inputs.

Right.

So the only thing I want you to do is do 10,500 door hangers. Okay. Because if you do that, you will get 60 to 70 customers.

Okay.

And if you do that, we will then be at capacity. And if. If we get to capacity, we will then have the option to either raise prices or go hire somebody.

Okay.

And so whether you spend $12,000 is a function of. Do you need to spend a dollar and 20 cents per door hanger? I think not. You're put most of them and they cost 10 cents to. To. To manufacture.

Yeah.

My, My worry was that if I didn't get the same response rate and close rate that I did on the first and it took me, let's just say, three times as many door hangers to get the same response I did the first time, I want to make sure that I'm not wasting my money in areas that I can't.

That there's one way. There's one way to guarantee you will get. Get a lower response rate, and that is to do nothing. And so we have. What we have done in the past has worked. We are getting a $40 customer acquisition cost. And let's assume it's. It was half as good. Let's assume it's half as good. Even though we're going into spring rush, half as good, you still will be with $8,000, be able to get to over 70 customers.

Okay, good. All right. Yeah, I'm just. I'm. I'm freaking out. I'm. I'm just worried because I'm. I've ran in business, like, insurance businesses, nothing in the service industry at, like, the business level. And this is just so different. There's so much new information. I've become obsessed kind of with this whole process.

Just focus on the next step. I would literally stop listening to my content. I would stop reading books, I would stop listening to podcasts, and I'd go do 10,500 door hangers and deliver them and that's it. And stop until you don't know what to do next. Okay. All right, great.

Thank you so much, man.

All right, everyone, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your weekend. The recording will be sent to you. Do book your goal session call. They are booking out pretty quickly, so I think you can't even get one for the next few weeks. So please do schedule that though and we'll have more conversation around your goals and your planning session. I wanted to say thank you for joining Copilot. I do appreciate it. Given the past, especially the beginning half of 2024 was pretty brutal in terms of bugs and so I really do appreciate everyone's support for myself and for what we're trying to do in the long term vision of Copilot. I really do appreciate it. So look forward to seeing you inside the community, the Facebook group on the Mastermind. But I appreciate you all tremendously. So have a fantastic 2025 and we'll see in your goal session.