How We Built an Office That Doesn’t Depend on the Owner

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes here. And today I am interviewing my very first office manager. And now she is the manager of all of Command Center with over 50 agents. And today we're going to be talking about a lot to do with hiring your first office manager, your couple first admin people in the office as you scale past $1 million in revenue, as well as the things that break as you begin to scale up the office and the admin side of things. So, Liz, maybe give just a quick background on you coming to Augusta and being the first person in the office. Was it 8, 9 years ago now?

10.

10 years ago.

I realized today that we are starting our 10th Spring Rush together. So yes, I used to work at the hospital and I worked night shift. And I remember when you texted me one night when I was at work and said, hey, can you come by when you get off in the morning? And you told me that you were working over 100 hours just in the office and you still had to deliver materials at that time, do estimates, and you were helping in the field as well. So I said yes. And the next— I gave my 2-week notice. And while I worked my 2 weeks, I worked day shift with you, night shift at the hospital. And the next day I was on a tractor trying to put materials into trucks that I should have never been doing, risking the life, the truck's life. But that was the beginning of it all. That was my first day.

And then our shop space there was like, what, maybe, what do you think, 15 by 15?

Maybe it was so small.

10 by 15?

Yeah.

Had no AC.

Yes.

And it got— it was like a— it had a black metal roof on it. So in the summer, it would just become like an inferno.

Yes. And we had the door open because our customers would come in and order product.

And so AC was useless.

Yeah. I remember us being dirty from head to toe and taking pictures of how dirty we were because our computers and everything were covered with dirt.

Now, at the time, I made sense of your wages by basically having the shop space where people would come, we'd load them up with material, soil, gravel, mulch, etc. And I think we did like maybe $150,000, $120,000 to $150,000 in annual revenue from the material sales. And then a lot of that too, like the actual margin was made on the delivery, like of the dump with the dump truck.

Yeah.

But that's how I made sense of it. We eventually moved away from doing any materials. And so maybe walk me through some of the operational complexities with having that space where people could show up any time, you and I would work like crazy on the weekends just because that's when everyone, all the homeowners wanted their material. But also it's like, what were some of the benefits of having that space for customers to come into?

Yeah, so it was, it was a great place to be to start out and to have a place where customers could just drive by and see the materials and then they would pop in for their stuff. Oh, you do lawn care too? Can you install this for me? I won't have to do it myself. One thing, back to what you said about covering my wages, As an admin, you know that you're strictly overhead and that really bothered me. And so I would try really hard to sell product, sell more product when they would come in than they were wanting, really, and try to cover my wage. And in my mind, I would think, he's paying me about this today. I wonder if I could make this much today. And it always would make me feel good if I could cover the cost and try to help sell jobs or anything. So yeah, the customers would come in, they would order product for us to deliver in dump trucks, or they would come with their trucks and we would put product in, lead to other conversations, build a good relationship with them, and then we would be able to get more services. Plus, we already did recurring mowing, and so those people would then come to buy product.

Yeah, like in theory made sense, added a whole bunch of complexities though. Also, Saturdays was our big day, so we'd work 12+ hours. And those days we'd make $3,000 in revenue selling material. But then very well on the Monday after, we could make no sales whatsoever on the retail side. Maybe one person drives in with their truck. Or it rains, you're in the office the whole day. Fortunately though, you were able to focus on the software side, like routing, scheduling, invoicing, all emails. And so you kind of were balancing, hey, I'm retail and I'm focusing on the customers when they come in., but then when they're not, I'm able to work with the crew. Now that added a lot more stress and pressure as we grew and you had a bunch of employees out on the crews because now you have someone driving in, 3 people stacked up waiting for you.

It was crazy.

And you know that your crew is also waiting for you in the office to make sure that things get resolved out in the field.

Yeah, I remember one day a border guard was trying to call for some, some product they needed installed and he called and I'm out serving a customer. So every time I would get done, I would come running back in check the voicemail, call the people back. I played phone tag with this guy like 3 times, but it was constantly, I'm so sorry, I couldn't reach you. I was out loading a customer. And that's what you and I did. We ran from outside to inside to the computer and we just never stopped for all those hours. Plus, when we had the team out in the field, we're running back in, make sure where the guys are, try to route them together. Get them back to the shop at the end of the day, because also that's revenue there if we can't route them all coming back, helping each other finish up the jobs for the day.

So maybe walk me through some of your recommendations from your perspective being my first office admin. I think the first year you were there, we probably did like $500,000 or $600,000.

We doubled our mowing customers.

Yeah, like we grew pretty quickly in the first year. Just having an office admin was a relief for me to be able to focus on the sales more, but like walk me through like those first few months because at first we were kind of stepping on each other's toes a lot because we were both in the email inbox, we were both kind of doing scheduling, both doing routing, both doing invoicing. And so quickly we kind of realized we need to delineate roles. And one of those things was like me getting, get me getting out of the email inbox completely. And so walk me through the kind of that transition period.

Well, at the very, very beginning, and owners are gonna be frustrated by this because they're the only ones who know everything. And so to me, I was kind of like scared bunny because I, I knew nothing about this industry. What you actually did was answer every single email with me. And it seemed so tedious, I'm sure from your perspective, to have to teach me everything like that, everything about Square and all the materials and every little thing. We did big road fabric pieces. And so the measuring of people's properties and how to, how to do all these things from your bids to prepare their products and things.

But like the transition when I had to get out of the email, I think was probably the biggest.

Yes. And that's one a lot of owners are going to struggle with is because once you hand something off, you shouldn't take it back. Even though I didn't know the answer to the email and needed you to tell me what to say, it was never your email signature again. So the owner should never physically go back in and put anything on with their name on it. If I did that and I put my name on it and answered myself, you just let me fix my own mistake. I'd have to call them and I would have to fix it.

Yeah. And I think at first, like, a lot of people were like, I want to talk to Mike. Yes. And then later on, as you began to delegate, it was like, oh, like, and Tara and other office assistants we hired, Kim and Rachel, etc. I want to talk to Liz. And then eventually it was like, It was handed off to command center. It was like, I still want like talk to the GM. Right. So like, what do you tell an owner when for those first few months when you do hand things off completely? And like, I was out of the inbox and I think the delineation for me was like getting it off of my phone. Yes. And that way I couldn't be distracted. I couldn't see an email coming at 9 o'clock at night and, and respond to it. I couldn't see it coming at 6:30. Like I knew, like I had to rely on you seeing at the office and handling it appropriately. But like, what would you speak to the office? Or to the owner that releases it to an office person or commands it on answering service or virtual assistant. And those first few months when customers are specifically saying, I don't want to talk to you, I want to talk to the owner.

Yeah. What do you do then? Yes. So I look at it like a circle of services that once the owner hands something off, he never touches it again. He hands you the next thing, he never takes it back again. So you have every single person calling your cell phone. So now what do you do? You want them to talk to the person in the office. You want to give them to the office and never take it back. So how in the world do you do that? You can create an automated message on your phone that is in text form, and the ones that text you back, it'll look like an automation. Just text it back to the customer to call the office at such and such a number. Or on your voicemail, you can say, this is Mike, the estimator. Please call the office for the quickest service, something like that. And then what you would do is when they would leave a voicemail, you would forward the voicemail to me and say, Mr. Jones just called me and you would just keep doing that. And every time Mr. Jones did that, I would call him and he's like, well, I need to talk to Mike. And I would say, I promise you, I can help you the quickest. Mike is out in the field or doing sales and I'm the best person to help you. And you train the customers to start calling the office.

I think one thing we kind of figure out too is like as the estimator, telling them I'm the estimator. Yes. So that way it was an expectation that, hey, you're going to hear from the office or on your quote. Around scheduling, around anything, questions you have, and it's not going to be me, even if on the back end I was feeding you information. 100%. Just as clear delineation. And then once the job started, they also understand, okay, the crew is taking care of me. Yes. And maybe I reach out to the office on billing, but like the crew is now my point of contact. And then making it really clear that there is that kind of chain of command and like that handoff between the different roles.

And even then it's going to invoicing after that. So it's all a circle of like it goes back all the way till circles around till the final payment from the first call to the final payment. There's somebody who should take care of that and there's an order that it should go in.

I think it's scary for owners that are solo or have done all aspects of that circle themselves, like the whole client life cycle. I think too though, by having the handoffs, even though at first it feels clunky, at the first it feels like there are gonna be dropped balls. Every time you don't have a system and then you try to pass it off to someone, there's always gonna be some things drop through the cracks. Yeah. Emails don't get responded to, someone says something wrong, et cetera. But I think that the key part is by having the handoffs, you've reduced key man risk so that if you went down, if I went down, if someone out in the field went down, that the customers aren't attached to the person. They're attached to the brand. I think that was the thing that we quickly saw is like we wanted people to see me as the estimator and then they talk to the office, whether it be you, Rachel, Tara at the time, Charity was helping us in the office, Lonnie, like all these individuals helping you. And then there was like, okay, now when the crew shows up, they have a video. And I'm dealing with the crew. So if I have a problem with the work that's being done, I'm going out and talking to them. I'm not calling the office. I'm not calling Mike as the estimator. I now have this new person as my point of contact so that if anyone in that chain left or we let them go or they had to leave or whatever, they've still maintained the relationship with Augusta and not the individual person.

And I think important to that is that every single person on the team puts notes in the CRM so that it doesn't matter whoever touches it, they see a trail of the last person that touched it. Every touch of the customer's should have some note in the CRM.

So for people that are thinking about getting their first admin person, I know like in Copy and Paste Millionaire, the book, I talk about really as you get past $500,000 specifically, but even getting past $250,000, you start needing either a virtual assistant or an answering service or someone helping on the admin side. It's the lowest leverage task in terms of replacement cost for the business. As you start scaling beyond that, $500,000, $750,000, maybe $800,000, $900,000, and thinking, okay, I need an in-person office person. Yes. And I'm willing to take the extra cost. I'm not going to go try to be cheap. I want a full-time office person like I got for you. What are some of the things that you should— you would tell the owner when are some signs they might be needing an office person now?

I would say that the things that are the highest volume, which would be like the phone calls and the emails, to have somebody come in and start with those. And then the things that are the lowest leverage. So like making coffee, cleaning the office, ordering supplies, you don't need to be doing those things. So highest volume, lowest leverage. And then I would say the things that you hate coming to work to do, give them away. So I would start with your admin person doing those things when you just have 10 or less people. Once you have 10 employees, you just really only need that one person. Also, when you can't When you have a capacity of, maybe I can work 18 or 20 hours a day, but then you have a family and they're not going to want you to work that many hours a day. So you can say, in 10 hours a day, can I still get my sales done, my follow-up calls done? Can I get all these things done and be out of here in 10 hours? If I can't, I have reached capacity and I need another person to start throwing things off to.

Are you tired of answering your phone calls? Tired of phone tag with your lawn care customers? Consider joining Augusta Lawn Care where you have access to Command Center where they answer your phone calls, answer your texts, your emails, do your payroll, and do a lot of your office activities so you can focus on growing your business. Click the link below, schedule a call with our team, and see if joining Augusta Lawn Care is the right fit for you. Part of it is not only I save time on say admin so I can focus on operations doing the work or sales getting more work. That's like the leverage part. I think the other part of it is too, the things that sap your energy to where you don't want to work anymore. Exactly. Like the thing that sometimes reducing your capacity happens because I dread going and doing the paperwork. I hate running payroll. I hate looking at QuickBooks. Yes. And so because I dread those things, it now actually reduces my capacity of doing higher leverage tasks simply because I'm doing something that just drains me physically, emotionally, psychologically, because I just hate doing it.

Yeah.

So it's like, not only am I not good at it, but it's something I hate doing. Exactly. Those are the two things like, let's, Delegate those things first. And I think one of the things that we did within the first few years, like, we made a list of all the things that I did.

Yeah.

And like, what are the things that you could take off my plate, whether it be lower leverage, easiest to replace? Like, some of the things, like, you weren't going to learn how to build the retaining walls and do drainage with the excavators at the get. So like, that stays on my list. But then there was aspects that was like, what could she take off my plate? And that was a good thing for us to also prevent us from stepping on each other's toes. Around doing all the tasks of the business.

Yes. So that's where I see the challenge between here's the owner, then the first admin person, and then that admin person getting another person. The biggest breakage points there are going to be now that, that one person, what is everybody supposed to be doing? Everybody needs an absolute defined role. And the first person now is going to need to take on some more complex things for the owner. Let's say you want to start P4P. Well, you need to be able to sit there with your first person and figure some higher leverage things out. And so when your second person reaches capacity, then you're going to need to start handing off those simple volume tasks to somebody else now so that you can now work with that person and give them your QuickBooks, give them your P4P, and start building new processes with that second person. So it's like, here's the perspective from the owner. How does he get his first person? Then how do we go from 1 admin to 2 admin? And then let's say up to 10 admin. Everybody has to know what everybody's supposed to do, or they'll do what we did, where there were times that you and I were just trying to help each other, just trying to get to it before the other person had to do it. And we were like messing up routes, messing up things with the crew. The communication was bad just because we were trying to help each other. So delineating the roles is absolutely important.

I think for a lot of home service business owners, the, their first admin person is their spouse. And so, um, from my perspective, it can be the best thing because they care dramatically about the business. They have stake, skin in the game, and there's no one gonna be as caring about the customer, about the business, about the team, about the finances as there's no one that will ever replace that. And so it's one of the times when even for Augusta, we say, hey, if your spouse is willing to work full-time in the admin role, maybe don't use Command Center because we're not going to be as good as them. We're not going to care. We're not going to be able to pivot as quickly as them. We're not going to customize things exactly the way you want. What are some of the downsides? Because from my perspective, when I do turnarounds, it's one of the— actually, the key man risk associated with having your spouse is huge because now if the owner's gone, usually that also means that your main admin person is gone. And as well as if there was ever a pregnancy, a health problem, they— there was any friction in the relationship, now you have a huge risk to the business. Yeah. And I see that so many times when there is life events or things happening in the relationship and then it causing the business completely to go kaput because there's so much key man risk. But to the person that might be having their spouse in the office, speak to the, maybe the spouse even more, but even the person that is the owner in terms of how to navigate that transition or navigate that relationship in the office.

Yeah, there's so many wonderful angles to having a family member there from the employee's point of view and from the two of you working together. So, having the two of you work together, there needs to be a hard cutoff between your personal life and the business. And you should be able to have arguments about the customer, about the business that are non-emotional from the relationship, but can be emotional about the customers, what the customer needs, what's best for the business, because your employees will watch that. And from the employee's point of view, if I need to complain about you, how am I going to go to the other person? It needs to be a complete— I need to be able to say, Mike, Liz said this and did this today. And so that's So, that's one thing that you'd want to be careful of.

Like the employee's perception of not being able to go to either of the managers because—

Yes, because they're husband and wife and they're going to gang up against me. So, I always felt that was really important. Mike and I are related, and so we understand the family dynamic. We also made, and this will be a husband and wife issue too, when you're with the family, don't be talking about the business the whole time. Let your family feel special, keep it separate. Then there's the element of the husband and wife always being in the business. You can, you can do a hard cutoff that at dinner we're not going to talk about this. My opinion of that is make it a whole part of your life. Involve your kids. It's so fun. You know, let them know that it's fun to have a business with mom and dad and you can sit and talk about it with your kids. But speaking to the husband and wife, with life events and things, you need to, as soon as you can, have somebody else that you can throw that off to and build systems that if somebody could walk in and just sit in your chair and take over. So when you do have a life event, at least you have a part-time person. Your second person does not need to be full-time. You can bring somebody in to just take over the certain task.

Or even just during the busy season when leads are pouring in and you're overwhelmed.

Or you're going to go out of town for a few days. You can set up the routes, you can have your guys run it, but you can have a person in the office that can do basic things on this list while you're gone. It doesn't have to be, oh, this heavy burden of this employee and things. Just get a little assistant for when the times you can prioritize your family and be a husband and wife away from the business.

There's a time when we were doing like $1.7 million at the Bellingham shop. And we had more projects and things going on. But we had you and then up to like 2 assistants also during the busy season. Yeah. I think you were like full-time year-round, but then we had 1 assistant for like most of the year and then 1 assistant only during spring rush because it got to the point where if— especially because the time we were doing material delivery, we'd have materials being delivered or someone out in the shop. So we always need it covered for phone calls because otherwise there were times if you had 15 people come pick up material, you'd come back into the shop and you had 20 voicemails, 5 emails, 3 people from the out in the field, the crew, asking questions. And so before command center, there was times when we had to really scale up admin during the spring rush because just the volume of leads coming in. So when it comes to getting a second person, I like the idea of, especially if you have your spouse being your office manager, making sure that they they do have repeatable processes. Screen recordings is something that we did a lot of, whether it be Loom or Google Drive videos and like creating a repository of here's how we do scheduling, here's how we do cancellations, here's how we do upsells, and just doing screen recordings for the office. Here's how we do billing at the end of the month. Here's how we charge the cards, et cetera. When you're getting that second person, what is going through your mind? And I think this is a great way for someone that might be having their spouse to reduce the key man risk, to reduce the stress on their relationship personally, and have a little bit of redundancy, but also just in general, when I start getting above needing one employee, many times like 1.1, 1.2 million, you start getting back. It's like, I can't just have one office person. Exactly. Because there's times where they're way backed up in the spring rush. So when you start getting your sec— your first assistant, your second assistant, what were some of the strategies you used to make systems for them to be successful?

I think a couple things that you need to keep in mind are what services can I take away to give me actual bandwidth? That I wouldn't need that second, that next person. So if you're considering to bring the next person in, what we did was we took away the material deliveries. We weren't making money. It's taken the time of a person that we weren't making money anymore. It wasn't worth it to do. So you could take, you could simplify services and then you could also take the second person. You could eliminate a lot of what a person does by having a good a CRM and good automations. And then once all of that is dialed in and you still need help, then bring a person in.

So reducing complexity essentially.

100%.

The things that also are harder to train.

Yes.

Because like for example, we are able to train some basics of command centers in a week or two, right? But if it's like, well, if I expect them to know 20 things, now all of a sudden this could take 6 months before they're actually proficient at all of these different tasks. And I think for people that don't have a command center, this is their biggest challenge. Is that an admin person, especially if it's not the spouse that can, you know, be neck and, you know, shoulder to shoulder with the owner all day long.

Mm-hmm.

And at night and on the weekends and know everything in the business. It is very difficult to, to expect an admin person to know how to run payroll, how to do billing, how to do invoicing, how do you answer the phone? How do you email? How do you do texting? Like all the 20 or 30 things that an admin person does. Mm-hmm. And we've talked about, and I talk about in the book is like, you need generalists. Yes. How do I train a generalist when like realistically for them to know all these tasks. Yeah, very well take 6 months and the likelihood they're going to stick with me 6 months is just as great and just as high as my technicians staying with me 6 months, which is hit and miss. What do I do when I have a generalist that I am training in the office and they have 30 things they need to do? What do I prioritize? Do I only give them 1 or 2 or 3 things to do? How do I make sure they actually make the business money and it doesn't take them 6 months to get on-ramp onboarded?

Yeah, so that's a really good question. So what I finally did was you had this beautiful job ad and it was so, so nice and so professional. But I realized I am so busy with trying to route and dispatch that I need somebody who's actually going to take care of more of these simple things and not bother me because I knew it was costing you money if I didn't get the guys routed back the next day. Plus, I was trying to take these jobs that we sold and get them on the schedule for tomorrow and prep for tomorrow. So I also knew it was time for another person because if I'm doing 18-hour days, it was like basically we did all the crew, got them off for the day, but now I'm planning the next day. So having that second person to answer the phone, answer the emails, reactive tasks, the things that would interrupt you. Yep, anything that would keep me from planning the job. And that's what you would call a higher leverage task We will lose money if I am not focused 100% on this task.

Routing, dispatching, putting projects on the schedule.

For the next day.

And looking at the calendar, figuring out where it's going to go.

Yes. And I had to have complete silence. So what I did was broke, broke up the day and I would have my assistant just go through the emails and tag the ones that I had to address. We flagged them in color and then, then they would do those other tasks and just leave those one emails for me to take care of. I would be WhatsApping the guys planning for the day, and they would know that after, at 12 o'clock, I'm starting to plan tomorrow and plan for the guys to come back. So they're not to bother me because I have to think this through.

Similar to like command center where like our goal is like we create a folder called owner address. Anything we can't handle goes in there, but then they are, their inbox and like the noise coming into them is reduced by 95, 97%. So they can focus on 1 or 2 emails that only they can address, but they're not sifting through 40 when you first walk in the door in, in the morning. When a lot of those are just automations, follow-up phone calls, you know, overdue invoice stuff, collections, customers trying to cancel, et cetera.

So as you grow the bill, the, you know, all the stages that, that you've learned that, that our listeners learn from you of when you get at a certain million, you can get your first employee, then your second, and then your third, and how your office grows. Well, for us, then you get to 1 to 10 employees, everybody needs— in the office, everybody needs to be a generalist. Um, but when you get from like, say, 10 to 50 employees, if you're going to need that many, like say for us, for command center, that many people, then you do have to have specialists. So you actually create departments like a P4P department or a payroll department and a phone department. So you have your people that maybe you could hire up in a few weeks and they would be on the phone, highest volume, lowest leverage. You're gonna put them on the phone. And then not that it's diminished in task, but you're going to need other skills for P4P and payroll in those.

Yeah, like we're advantaged now to where when someone comes on, it's like, okay, they're gonna be in the payroll department, or they're gonna be in the payroll department, for example. It's like, okay, 3 to 4 weeks, we know they'll be able to get up to speed. Learn QuickBooks, become certified, be rocking and rolling. For the phones, okay, within a week or two we can get them up to speed, then they have a training period with someone else and then they're, they're good. I think the challenge for most listeners and for people that have their own business and they're not a part of Augusta is I need someone to do 30 things. Yes. So is there, should I slowly do one thing at a time? Like, hey, at first I just want you to do the reactive stuff. I want you to answer the phone and go through my email in the morning. I want you to send out estimates. What's the kind of like the early progression of some of the tasks you'd be letting go and going from just getting my very first office person up and running?

Yeah. And so you're also going to ask like the metrics of how do I, how do I measure like, are these people getting things done? When, when you're small, you're just thinking your metrics is did they get it done is basically all it is. You're not thinking about how much money are they making me, anything like that.. But those first people should be able to answer the phone and then you could have them doing the emails too. Eventually you'd have an email department as you grow. But I think the breakage there that happens is learning your capacity for that amount of people before you add more people. It's hard to, to figure out those matrix because as we teach everybody, when they filled their trucks, with guys, then you need another truck. When you— all of your team is out there working the budgeted hours, you've reached your capacity. But how do you figure that out in an office? When you're small, you're also the same way. Okay, we're starting to miss calls. We're starting to not be able to reply. We need more people. And that's how you just continue to grow. It does not work that way when you get to 50 to 100 employees, though. You have to plan What were your metrics last year? Where were people's efficiency? What were, how many calls we were losing? And to plan for a very large group of people, you actually have to look at your numbers from last year and say, before we hit capacity, we have to have an idea of where we're going and we have to hire to capacity. So I guess that would be growth when you would talk to your business owners.

Yeah, for like, for the person that is getting their first admin, the first office person, I think one of the struggles is you don't know what they're doing because there's no real output in terms of like revenue earned, budget hours completed. It's very hard to track and it's very hard to track if they're going from one thing to another. So for example, it's very easy to track like phone calls 'cause we can see how many minutes they're on the phone versus their clock time. It's same thing like out in the field, it's easy to track budget hours versus clocked hours, efficiency score. I think as generalist, it's very difficult for me to feel good about paying overhead 'cause there's no revenue output and it's difficult to know, could they get more done in a day? Are they being lazy? Like, et cetera. And so like, even when we track in the office, someone that's doing 40 or 50% efficiency, i.e., every minute we track, every second we track, only about 40 or 50% of that time is usually actually doing a task. 'Cause there's so many different things that as an admin person you're switching context. The phone rings, then you're going to email, then you're going to text, then you're doing all these switching throughout the day. And even someone on the phone, if they're on the phone even 50, of their day, like of that clock time, like 4 hours on the phone on an 8-hour day, that's actually really, really good. Yeah. For someone that doesn't have that kind of metrics, we have a lot of insights for every department. We track every single second. For someone who's like, hey, here's your desk, I'm gonna go do estimates all day long. I just need these tasks, this checklist done. As an owner, for a lot of people, they leave and the immediate thought is like, what are they doing all day? Like, exactly. I know the phone only rang 5 times a day. I know there was only a few emails and I looked at their inbox, shame on me. But like, I don't think they're like, they're just twiddling their thumbs. How do I make sense of that? And how can I make sure that they actually are generating revenue or being more of an offensive measure, not just a defensive measure for the business?

Yeah. Yeah. I remember specifically we had hired 2 office people and we were paying them like kind of a high wage, uh, $25 an hour. And I remember you saying, what are they doing all day? What am I paying all of this 4. And so we did what was called a work log is what we started to create. And we had them time the task.

Did we really do that for command center? Yeah.

No, that's crazy. Yeah. And you, you wanted to know, like, um, you know, they're getting a lot done and you know, they were people with good character and that even if you left them alone, they would find something positive to do for the business. But you had no idea what they were doing. So when they did email, I had them time it and put it in a spreadsheet. And there was a dropdown where it said email. I worked on this account for however many hours and I split up the task between them and then they tracked everything they did. And if there was an item that it wasn't really trackable, it seemed like it would be some odd task, I would have them put 000 as something that I could still track. So there was still accountability for their time and I was able to see see then 60% of their day was efficient. And then we had an idea, okay, we pay them $25 an hour, they are filling 60% of that hour with a good task. So we know, okay, now we know what they're doing. And they were pretty upset at first too, like, you know, how could you accuse us of that? And then we realized, no, we are, we are making you look really good by now showing you how efficient you were. And it's just the way you frame it to the employee. It became a positive instead of like, don't accuse me, I'm working so hard for you.

So throughout the podcast, Liz is talking a lot about Command Center. I actually want to show— it's early in the morning here, but so from my office, what you can see of Command Center and then about that many team members is also virtual. So I think overall it's like 70 or 80 agents and we all use Homeworks. HomeWorks allows us to be able to swap between locations, all 200+ of them at Augusta Lawn Care. And so if you are considering multi-locations or even setting up your admin for success using systems and software, highly recommend checking out Home.Works. And there's a demo now on there that you can see for sales, operations, and admin. So check out the demo for admin and how it can help your admin person, your people in the office be more efficient. I think the thing that helped too is when we were like, hey, we need to know when to you need more help and we need proof that like—

That's good.

Yeah. That your schedule is filled. There's so much you can't get to and then we'll be able to mathematically know when we need another admin person. I want to talk about remote. I want to talk about, oh, US-based versus overseas, et cetera. For those that think about that and even AI. Before we do though, I think one thing that people, when they start getting above a million and they start needing a second office person, they sometimes forget this part and that's they know very well that in the field when it comes to a solo, You know, person, one person in a truck, they're gonna be very efficient. There's no distractions. They can hop it out of the truck, especially on their pay. If they're on pay for performance, they're very efficient. You add a second person in there, it's not like it doubles the output. Exactly. It, it might get a 40, 50% increase sometimes.

Yeah.

I think the same thing happened with us is like, when did you get an admin person? I got frustrated because I'm like, there's not twice as much work happening here.

Right.

There's phone call with customer being mad and now two people working the exact same thing. Mm-hmm. And like debriefing after every single phone call or emails or like, it's like there's everyone now we're touching watching everything twice. And so talk me through your thoughts on that because there is definitely periods of time where like you do need someone to answer the phone. Oh my word, another phone call answer gets called, comes in. We do need 2 people. There's other times where people just fill the time. This is what I hate about admins. It's like gas. It just fills the space if you give it. And you could put 5 people in the office and all of a sudden they all look busy. What were some of your things that you did early on with the first couple team members to make sure that it wasn't a matter of just throwing bodies at this thing? And we were inefficient in the office.

Well, I mentioned that you made this lovely dialed-in job ad. Mine was very raw, and I just needed somebody so bad to help me. And so my job ad was, must be able to grind for hours in silence. And I hired a quirky, nerdy college guy, and I asked him what was it that caught his eye, and he's like, that you wanted me to grind for in silence for hours. It was right down his alley. So I could not handle like a girl who was talkative and needed to talk about the weekend or whatever. He never gave me excess conversation and I loved him for it. That's a big thing right there. I don't like any task touched twice. I don't like any words having to be repeated twice. And to me, all of that is money down the drain. So anybody who worked for me knew I was kind of like that. And so that didn't happen. So there wasn't a lot of drama or talking or this was how my weekend was, not a lot of that. And there were— was another list of what you could do. So once you got your main things done, what I was doing at first was trying to help the sales guys. If they couldn't do follow-up calls, I started doing that. We might, I might say, call them and tell them if we can get the job on this week, we'll give them this discount, you know, of however many dollars if we can sell that job to try to make them somehow beneficial. So they had a whole list of what they could do if all the way down the line, the smallest things that they could do if there was time and I needed their day filled, I could let them go home early too.

Yeah, so as we've kind of grown Command Center, now moving past just the one location, we have kind of tried all aspects of office and admin. In person, in an office, we've done US-based virtual, we've done overseas virtual, we've used AI. And I think we are pretty aligned on the fact that like, as you scale up in cost, you get what you pay for. Yes. Fastest training, the most compliance, usually in-house where you can talk to them, you can see what they're doing. It's easier to manage because you can hear what they're talking about. So instead of waiting to listen to a recording or waiting for a customer to complain and being reactive, you can just hear them make a phone call incorrectly and correct the behavior very quickly. So the feedback loop is very fast. I think the thing that we'd made a mistake on when we first started Command Center in like the second or third year is thinking we could go remote very quickly when in reality we didn't have the systems in place to do that. We didn't track anyone's, you know, screens. Exactly. Record the calls. We didn't have AI scrubbing the transcripts, looking for quality assurance. It was very spot check. Like we would go through and spot check people, very time intensive. And I think a lot of times people, they will try to save money on admin and inherently, accidentally, they will spend more in management. So now the owner's spending more time tracking, like listening to recorded calls. They're going and double checking things. They're spending 3 to 4 times longer to train someone because they don't, they're not natively speaking English or understanding the concept of lawn care and landscaping. Keeping or any home service. And so I think a lot of people go cheap on admin because like, oh, it's a, it's a cost. I should keep it as low as possible. When we have actually seen almost the opposite, which is if we can pay people more, if we can keep them around longer for where they're here for years, they gain skills, they gain confidence on upsells, they reduce the amount of management is required. And something we really doubled down on, even like 2022, 2023, it was hard to find people with all the stimulus going on. And we're like, we're going to pay more, we're going to try to keep people. And we took some pretty big L's in terms of financially at Command Center just to keep the team. And I think the one thing that I'm proud of is like the local team now, like people don't leave. Like we, we let people go if they're not good, but like, yeah, people don't usually leave. And I'm very grateful. And I think we made the commitment like financially we're gonna lose for several years, but we need to establish this base of team members. Mm-hmm. Now we are thinking about, okay, we have the system in place, we record everyone's clicks, record their screens, record every phone call. AI is looking at transcripts of calls and grading them and coaching them. And there's a much more re, uh, less reactive approach to quality control. Now we are thinking about, okay, overseas, in the US, can we do remote? Can we get 24— well, next week it starts 24/7 answering, humans answering the phone. Walk me through kind of your evolution on, and like, your perspective of managing virtual versus in-person. And, and try to think more back the first time we tried. Yeah. When it was a bit chaotic. Because I think a lot of people go to that immediately, think that they can do it, and it's, it's all saving money. And then they realize that there's way more management, onboarding takes way longer, you have to educate the person about things that seem like common sense, there's miscommunication, and then you spend more time as the owner just managing instead of doing the task yourself. And so it keeps people small because they just say, I should just do it myself because it takes them 3 hours, I can do this in 5 minutes.

Well, you're building some— we are building something from scratch, something that hasn't been done before. And so it's not like we had people to talk to on how to do it. So we hired our first group of US agents and we ended up firing everybody but one, and she's still with us today. But things you've never thought about are going to come up and there is no control. You hope that people are like yourself and are very accountable for their time and make sure they're working and would say, hey, I'm not doing anything, should I hop off? Very difficult to find that kind of quality of people. We take all the blame. We didn't know what we were doing the first time. Then we started, we wanted to get all US agents so they would have US accents. You would think that would be better, right? But what we found is there's people in Canada that have different accents than those in the Deep South, and they didn't like each other's voices either. So you just can't win in that, you think. So I thought if I hired Philippine agents, and I taught them to have their voice be more vanilla and worked with them on their accents, that we could hire some Philippine team members. So we did that. And they have qualities that a lot of people in the US don't have, and that's they are so appreciative of the job. And so they are really striving to do well. They would work hard on their voice and their accent.

And knowing that that's a little bit of a hiccup for people in the US, And so now we really pivoted to like, let's just lean into everyone's strengths, which is let's not have them on the phone. But they're usually doing a lot of the backend tasks because they're so efficient. They're like people with master's degrees.

Incredible.

Doing this. Incredible. Very skilled. And it was like, okay, if we can just take the accent away, then maybe we just need to make sure that US-based agents are answering the phone. But then we can have virtual doing these other tasks that are very much more like heads down in the numbers, meticulous, very detail-oriented, and it worked much better.

Yeah, that's, that's worked really well. And it's basically a promotion for them because they've tried so hard for all these last couple of years. And now we promoted all of the people on the Philly team to admin tasks. And so, and then I've been able to have the Phillys themselves who are incredible, top-notch people that could work in the 90% for efficiency scores. They are the ones who trained them. And so I'm so proud of them that they were able to do that.. So it comes with the training also that the people who do train, that now has to be handed off. So my philosophy is that you, you have an employee, you have a team, you have a department, and every single employee should be able to replicate themselves in another employee. Yeah. And so that's how you're gonna grow fast, or you're gonna have one person, they call them batchmates is what they call them in the Philippines, that everybody who was hired with me, becomes my batchmate and they always watch out for each other and make sure that they're communicating with one another and that particular coach for them to have a sustained support, which helps for the growth.

If you need more leads for your home service business, go check out homeservicewebdesign.com. There's no contract, there's no upfront fees. You can cancel any time. And more importantly, you keep the domain. Go check it out today. I think they're really good use case too, is like to do those tasks that someone might not be able to get to during the busy season. So the challenge for us is like, we are okay with paying more for a local agent. There's way more costs. However, we also can't get a building and everything that has to do with an office for 200 people. Right. And so like we have 60 or 70 here, but if we can get 30 or 40 remote, whether US, Philippines, etc., we're able to keep us from exploding in overhead and then having to pass that cost to the owners. And that was really the conversation like, hey, How can we make sense of a lower cost structure to make sure that we don't have to pass this permanent cost down to the owners, but still be at a really high level? And it was like, let's be— we have to take the strengths of all these different aspects because like, it's great that they can answer the phone. Oh, our time, 1 a.m. Your time, it's the middle of the day. But like, is answering the phone the best thing for that role? Or should we be having agents in the U.S.? And so even one thing I was thinking about when it comes to even now is hiring U.S.-based virtual agents. To again prevent the overhead bloat that would increase cost at command center owners. One thing that I think we're doing differently this year too is we're doing W-2s instead of 1099s. That's right. And so I think a lot of people, again, it's like cost cut, like it's admin, reduce cost. And so when we first did it, it was like 1099s, you're a subcontractor, less control. It's harder to keep them accountable. It's harder to track their device. There's all these other aspects. So now it's like it does cost us a lot more to register in every state. Run payroll in every state, be compliant with every single state law.

They get medical, they get a 401(k).

Like all of that's way more expensive. I think the retention's gonna be better. Mm-hmm. But I also believe that the, um, the compliance will be so much better cuz we now, we have more control and they feel like they have more skin in the game cuz they're W-2 and they have benefits. Yeah. And so it's one of those things is I just constantly think it's funny how people like the lowering admin cost, the better. And if you're looking at strictly a defensive measure or cost, I agree. But I think the thing that we've really looked at this year, especially on the phone, but even across all admin, is if you can do a superb job, it can actually be your unique selling proposition. Yes. And then using the phone specifically to upsell every single customer. And so now, even this past week, upgrading the website, it actually says words that our agents say, which is a 10 out of 10 question. It says it on the website, on the homepage, right up front. It says, we answer every call. And we know that now 24/7 humans are doing that. Yes. So these are things that I think we can take what is looked at as an admin, a cost, an office. It's expensive. And it's looked at as like, if I can crush that as much as possible. And for someone that might be doing $100,000 in monthly revenue, it's like, well, if I can get, instead of paying $7,000 or $8,000 for wages and a couple thousand dollars for office, I'll just go get someone for $2,000 and it'll be way cheaper. But it's like, wait, that's about $4,000 or $5,000 cost savings. Great. But what if a great office person, well-trained, in person, really felt part of the brand could take you from $100,000 in revenue to $150,000 in monthly revenue because they're upselling, they're constantly trying to save customers when they're trying to cancel, they're promoting your services more, they're pushing harder when there is, when they're doing follow-up phone calls. And so from your perspective, just to wrap it up, how have we turned command center and office and admin in general from a cost to like, how can we actually prove to the owners? I know this is the audit later this year coming on. Like, how can we actually prove to the owners we make more money in the defensive measure because we are upselling, we're saving customers, and we're trained at a high level now. And how can people think about their office and admin a different way than just as a cost structure to be reduced?

Mm-hmm. I think that you could actually completely cover the admin cost and those people that are what they seem like are overhead or costly. You can completely take that cost away by the way you train your phone agents.. So for instance, we require 3 components of a phone call. The first one is a 10 out of 10. So they must ask, what can we do today to make your experience with Augusta a 10 out of 10? And secondly is a thoughtful upsell. So I encourage the team by saying, you're not cold calling, you're not doing a hard sell. They're already calling for something. So all the business owners, they're already calling for a specific service of some kind. And I call it a circle of services. So they'll say, I would like mowing. Well, wonderful. While we give you this bid for mowing, would you care for a bid for some treatments? You're just basically saying, over here on this shelf, I have something else that will complement this. So now they've asked for a property cleanup. Well, would you like a bid for some mulch while we're giving you this? Or if they're calling for a landscape job, well, then you're going to need mowing after that. For maintenance. So there's always something that you can thoughtfully offer them as an upsell to the service. So can you imagine if your office staff asked that on every single phone call, the difference that would be? You're going to ask what the third component is, and that is a thought, is an upbeat tone, a positive tone. Well, you're not even going to hire somebody who doesn't have that. But the thoughtful upsell, I believe, that you could have your admin sell so many jobs that way for you without you ever going to do anything, because they can do over-the-phone estimates, they can measure a property, give a price, and then have a matrix to go off there and actually give treatment prices.

And then like the difference is to like, yes, admin is a cost, but like if you can increase the average customer value on an annual basis from, say, $1,000 to like even $1,500 by getting them one extra service, one extra upsell from this, that likely not only does it increase, like in this case going from $1,000 to $1,500 per year, if you did it for all your customers, that would increase revenue by 50%. Mm-hmm. It would also increase dramatically the efficiency of your marketing. 'Cause now you can make sense of spending more money on ads when you have a customer that's making you 50% more every single year. Mm-hmm. It makes the enterprise value, the business actually gets better and more valuable when you have a higher annual customer value. And so I think so, so many of us get very, very much like, Do they finish these tasks? Like, did they answer the phone and close the deal? That could be a check and you get the $1,000 per year customer. Mm-hmm. But the extra effort, the extra upsell part is the part that committing to the higher wage, giving them benefits, giving them W-2, investing a lot into training in, in, in AI to like help with quality control and coaching. These are things that get them from the $1,000 customer to the $1,500 customer. Mm-hmm. And it's so hard to track. It's so hard to track the difference that your training is making, the difference that your coaching is making, the difference that W-2 versus a 1099 makes.

When you have that commitment to an office employee. And what I tell owners from Augusta is you can have your, your own office person and they can do that for you. But if you think in terms of having somebody who already has all of this training, who does it, you know, they answer 120 calls in a day that is that skilled and bringing you those jobs. Imagine if you could multiply your person that's in the office. And you have 15 phone calls coming in at the very same time for your services, and all 15 of those people are selling jobs for you. So now at Command Center, with the people I've hired now, we have over 80 agents. And can you imagine them selling jobs for the owners? It's just, it just is exponential.

Yeah. What can happen. For someone who doesn't have Command Center, last question. Um, they're thinking about adding a new, uh, one office person. They're thinking about adding a second one. The way that I made sense of it very early on was charging what we call E fees. We still have them today at Augusta, and we expect that E fees or estimate fees cover the cost of Command Center.

Right.

I think for anyone who doesn't have Command Center, where they're, they're hiring answering service or virtual assistant or hiring their own office person, one way to make sense of it financially is to charge estimate fees.

And so I think at the beginning, I think we charged like $25 or $30. I think we even started it at $10 even, but it was Yeah, it was such a smart idea.

And now it's scaled up towards $100 at the Bellingham shop, and it's a profit center. They cover far and above with their A fees what they get— they charge— get charged at Command Center. But I think for someone that's starting out, what I recommend is inside of your pricing, every line item that is going to be one-time jobs, any sort of project, when you're doing the estimate— so basically if it requires an in-person estimate or a drive-by estimate, I am adding per line item an estimate fee. Right. And that estimate fee could start off at $20 or $30. It's very easy. Take how many accepted estimates you had last month and then take the cost of your admin person and then just take the cost of the admin person, divide by how many accepted estimates. That's approximately what your e-fee should be to cover their wages. And so, we determined at the beginning it was like $20 or $30. We were doing hundreds of those every single month. And now it's scaled up to where it's $50, then it was $80, then $100 e-fees for every single line item. And that covers the cost of admin. That way you kind of can make sense of just like, I know my estimate fees cover admin. So even at the beginning, if it is painful to get it off your plate, by doing that, it unlocks you the ability to focus on sales, growing the business, hiring more team members, better training for the technicians, higher quality for the team out in the field. And so that would be the first step I would say to people is like, if you've got to make sense of it financially, start wrapping it up in overhead recovery, right?

In the form of anything. But the owner's going to then say, then I can't say I'm offering free estimates., but you still can because they won't actually pay that e-fee until they accept a job and it's just wrapped up in the cost.

It's overhead recovery. You could very well call it a fuel surcharge. You could, you could increase the amount that you're doing on overhead or material markup. You could increase the hourly rate, but ultimately we do as an e-fee so that way from our brain we can be like, that money has been set aside and I can pay for an admin person.

And so I think that's a good first step. That's a great idea for people with just one person, two people, the pain is not so much to have an office person there.

Absolutely. All right. Well, thank you for joining me here today. If you guys have questions about office admin, getting your first, specifically your first person in the office, feel free to comment below. I think we'll have more team members in here talking more about like the command center side and scaling the systems at a very high level. I know for the majority of people, getting their first one, two, and three admin people is the challenge. So in the comments below, if you have any questions for Liz, put them down there and we'll be sure to respond.