If you want 2026 to be the best year of your life. Please watch this video

If you want 2026 to be the best year of your life and you have a home service business, please watch this video. My name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care that has over 200 locations around the world. I'm also the founder of Homeworks software, where over a million dollars of daily transactions are made for home service businesses. Today I want to talk about something I learned in 2025, the hard way. Sometimes the hardest lessons you learn are the most expensive and they're also the ones that take some time for you to learn the hard way instead of just learning from other people. So I' Today you can learn from my mistakes and avoid the same problem in your business because it cost me hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, and probably a lot more than that in terms of the opportunity cost of not doing this correctly. The fundamental truth and what it really boils down to is that many of us look to support as a cost. We look at it as it is required in order to be able to get customers and we need to have some level of support in the office is really what I want to focus on today. But ultimately, supporting a customer, from the journey of beginning as a customer to solving their problem out in the field, we try to cut costs as much as possible as business owners. And you look at a pnl, it's like, how do I make number at top big and numbers below that expenses lower? What I found when I look at billionaires and people that have been very successful in business is they're able to turn a cost center into a profit center and they realized that cheaper is not always better. So I'm going to give you a couple examples of where I made this error. And I looked at a cost center in the business support and tried to reduce it as much as possible and how detrimental that was the business. So hopefully you don't do the same thing in your company. So let's first talk about command center. So command center, based upon the time of year, has anywhere between 20 and probably 60 or 70 agents that are answering the phone, doing QuickBooks transactions, sending out estimates and all admin tasks for owners of Augusta Lawn Care. I thought, especially once I came out, it was like, oh, we can totally automate this, make it cheaper and reduce the cost dramatically. I also looked at the fact that we could move a lot of the resources overseas and save a lot on money there because I might be able to pay $1,000 or $2,000 per month overseas versus 5 or $6,000 per month if I'm paying someone locally, local, not to mention like taxes and office space and computers and just a lot more costs in person versus overseas. I've ran this experiment. I'm pretty confident in saying the distribution is very much heavily focused on in person and human. Let me explain. When we talk about answering the phone, it's probably the biggest thing that you can differentiate yourself from your competition when it comes to home services. If you call five different providers, there's a high likelihood that only one or two will even pick up their phone. And given the fact that 70% of homeowners say that they choose the very first estimate and they accept the very first estimate they received, just in terms of speed, it's probably a good idea to answer your phone. And despite the fact that we'd all love people to come to our website and just submit to their text us, still a lot of people will use the phone. Mostly because our target audience for a lot of home services is the baby boomer generation. And they still like to go on your website and instead of filling out a form, give you a call. A large portion of your estimates are still going to come through the phone. And so we have tested a lot in terms of which one is the most cost effective and the most effective in terms of what the use case of support is. The use case for support, in my opinion, is the customer is happy and I make more money. And so I'm going to look at through that lens. And so when we look at the phone calls being answered, I looked at AI versus humans versus the voicemail. The problem with voicemail, if you miss a phone call is that only 37% of people are going to leave a message. And this is across tens of thousands, hundreds of probably millions of phone calls that we have at Augusta Lawn Care. But it's pretty close to what you can see in trends if you just look this up on chatbots. Now, that is a blended average. If a new customer calls someone who does not has not done service with you in the past, their percentage of leaving a voicemail is lower than 37%. The reason it's 37% is the average though, is because a higher percentage than 37% will leave a voicemail. If they're an existing customer and they have a service request like, I changed my credit card information, I need to cancel tomorrow's service, they will be more inclined to leave a voicemail. When we looked at new leads that are calling and hitting voicemail, only about 20 to 25% of them are actually leaving a Voicemail. This is why it's so important to answer the phone. Because, like, how do I 3x or 4x the amount of leads that I get, just answer your phone all the time. So instead of 25% of people that are new leads asking for service and them leaving a voicemail, instead of 25%, I can get four times as many if I just answer the phone. And so voicemail was the worst. It was 37%, on average, of people that hit voicemail would actually leave a message. For us there a step up from that is using AI. And there's a whole bunch of services out there we have customized over the past two and a half, almost three years, our AI at Augusta. And so we have honed it in quite a bit. We have it to 72%. Some locations are higher, some are lower, but the average is 72. And so again, this does depend on if someone's complaining, if they're asking for new service, etc. But right around 72% of people, if they hit the AI, will actually go all the way through and, and submit their email, their phone number, their address, everything. Now, it's a little bit higher than that because a lot of times, if they don't leave all of it, we can call them back and get that information maybe the next day. As a blended average, if someone just hits AI instead of a voicemail, it almost doubles the amount of people that you'll get that lead from. So you're like, well, I don't like AI. Well, it does better than voicemail, which is you not answering the phone. So you can go from 37% of people that hit a voicemail, leave a message, all up to 72% if you just have AI answer the phone. And we have found when it comes to AI, if you don't tell them that it's AI and then they find out later, because a lot of times they can they say something weird or the AI might interrupt them or there's a bit of a lag time, and they start realizing, oh, this is a robot, this is. This is AI. They can feel tricked if you haven't told them upfront. And so we found that if we didn't tell the customer that it was AI, but most of the time they would not know. The trouble was if an existing customer called in and they found out that it was AI and they felt somewhat tricked because we didn't tell them, that left a negative impression on the business and led to some bad CSAT scores, that's customer satisfaction scores, and I remember I am looking at the throughput, but I'm also looking at customer satisfaction. And one of the things we saw with AI is that the customer satisfaction dropped a lot. And we ended up telling customers up front that this was AI, but we knew that would reduce the amount of people that would get the lead all the way through and submit all their information. But we also knew that if we did not tell them that this was a virtual agent prior to collecting their information, if they found that out later or it was an existing customer, they were very unhappy. This was the number one negative response that we. We send text messages out to our customers after we call them. The negative response that was by far and away exceeding everything else was, you didn't tell me it was an AI agent. And I found out later. So we ended up putting it where we let them know that this is a virtual agent prior to them giving their information to us. There's another level, though, and that's humans. Humans have a great option, and that is they pick up the phone and you have 100% of people that will give you your information. There's obviously probably a small percentage, less than 1%, that don't give their information because they're afraid to, like, give their address over the phone. But you can pretty much assume that if a customer calls in having a problem and they're looking for an estimate, for example, we can get 100% of the time for them to give their information to us. And so when I look at the cost, it's very apparent that the cheapest form is have a voicemail. I don't have to set anything up. It's likely free or coming comes with your phone service that you pay 50 bucks or $100 a month for, and they just leave a voicemail, and that will get you 37% of the way there. And so from a cost perspective, it's like, well, of course, I don't want to have to spend hundreds of dollars or thousands of dollars with either AI or a human agent. So therefore, I will have a voicemail only. Fine. You will be at 37%. You will also be part of the huge percentage of home services that don't answer their phone. And immediately by answering my phone, I can set myself apart from the competition, again, adding value to the equation. And I can get AI agent. And is it cheap? No. Is it pain to set up? Sometimes, yes. Does it cause some trouble sometimes with the ticket being incorrect or does something incorrect? Yes, it happens. But if I can go from 37% to 72%. I almost double the amount of people that are submitting leads to me when otherwise I would not have them. If someone calls and I can't get their information, I can't give them a quote. It's a non starter. And everyone's like oh my close rate is so high. But what about the people who wanted an estimate but but they never even were able to submit their information cause you'd never picked up the phone. The reason your close rate is so high is because the only people you get to actually submit estimate to are the ones that club you over the head while you're out on a job site and beg you for an estimate. And so making it easier for people to give their contact information, that is answering the phone is actually a huge value. And so if I can go from voicemail, 37% of people actually leaving a message to 72% by investing in something like AI or, or a virtual assistant to all up to 100% by having a human agent, the question is what is the real value? Because the real cost is so much greater, potentially 50 to 100 times more expensive to have a human operating the phone compared to a voicemail doing absolutely nothing besides recording the message. And then somewhere in the middle there's AI that also costs money. It's more struggle to set up more of a system, but also allows you to increase the amount of people who that are asking for a quote. So one of the things that we learned when we looked at the command center is that we are willing to spend more money in order to have a better customer satisfaction as well as turn this defensive measure of answering the phone into an offensive measure. One of the things that we've started to really use AI for is compliance as well as teaching and quality control. You can use AI to look at all the transcripts of every single phone call, everything that's happening on someone's screen and give them coaching as to how it can be more improved, how it can be better, what their tonality is. There's a lot of things that AI can be useful for. So you're like, well, are you saying we shouldn't use AI, we should only use human agents? I'm not saying that. I'm saying that you can enable your team with AI to likely become as effective as two agents that are human in the past. And so I can turn what used to be a cost of someone answering the phone, but now I'm getting more leads because a hundred percent of the people that call in, I'm able to Convert and as well as potentially upsell and do a lot more with that phone call than just taking the lead information. One of the things that we found when it came to support and this cost is how do we actually quantify whether or not support was good? Because only a small fraction of your customers are going to tell you whether or not your service is good and give you a survey or give you feedback or give you an online review. And so what we did internally is we got to know, is this phone call good every single time? And so we created what we call a 10 out of 10 call. And a 10 out of 10 call only has three measures because using AI, we have all sorts of measurements of tonality and a whole bunch of like, there's like 40 different metrics that we are tracking on every single phone call. Like these are things like, did they say their name? Did they introduce themselves? Did they say, have a great day at the end of the call? All these things. But a 10 out of 10 call for us was very simple. It was three things. Number one, do you have an upbeat tone? Number two, do you have a thoughtful upsell that was given on the phone call? And number three, did you ask the 10 out of 10 question, which for us is what can we do to make sure your experience is a 10 out of 10? If we do those three things, we consider that a 10 out of 10 phone call. And what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to take an expense support, in this case admin, and I'm trying to create a system by which I know whether or not I did a good job of supporting someone on a phone call without constant feedback from the customer. Because you will only usually get 5 to 10% of your customers to leave a survey, leave a review, give you feedback on how you can be improved? And we do send text messages asking customers, what is your feedback? However, if I can every single phone call know whether or not it was a 10 out of 10 or a 9 out of 10 or an 8 out of 10 and actually score every phone call I can turn a cost something that cost me something and into something that actually makes me money. So that was command center and it has always been answering the phone and admin for almost all of us as home service business owners is considered an expense. But you can turn it into offense, you can turn it into something that actually generates revenue. Because at command center, we're able to actually upsell them on every single phone call. And when they answer the phone, we are selling mowing well, I'm also going to do a thoughtful upsell for treatments or a thoughtful upsell for bush trimming. And this thoughtful upsell notion actually has a logic and a system behind it. Because if someone's asking for snow service, I'm not going to try to give them a thoughtful upsell for a spring cleanup. And if they're asking for a bush trimming, I'm not going to give them a thoughtful upsell for snow removal. I'm trying to make sure it's a thoughtful upsell. Meaning if they ask for A, here's what B and C options are. If they ask for C, here's what B and A options are. Having an actual logic and a system for what a thoughtful upsell is allows me to turn a cost and a defensive measure, like answering the phone and admin into an offensive measure. When we look at the three different areas of any home service business, sales, operations, and admin. Most entrepreneurs love sales because it's an offensive measure. They love scoring points, they love doing the touchdowns, getting more yardage from the running back. Those are the positions in the NFL and in football that get promoted because it's offensive and it's exciting to watch. The operations is kind of like it's got to get done right? Like, we know it's got to get done to a certain level of quality for the customer to be happy. Admin is the thing that we all poo poo on is the defensive measure that is required. But if we look at sports, defense, defense wins championships. And I think the same thing is true when it comes to admin. And a lot of areas in our business that we look to as expenses could actually be turned into a profit center. I just use one example like admin. But the same thing could be true for your truck wraps. Like, it's just a truck, it costs me money. Or I can turn it into a moving billboard. These are the type of things that I take a cost center and then I look at it from the lens of how can this be improved to be offensive and actually make me money. The mistake that I made at command center was just thinking that, oh, we should just all save as much money as possible because a dollar saved is a dollar earned. But ultimately a dollar saved could lead to the jeopardization of four or five dollars of revenue. And that's what I was missing. I was trying to optimize for save money instead of how can I spend more of this money and actually make it more expensive by having human agents but then train them on how to upsell services on every single phone call, that turns my $1,000 per year customer into three or $4,000. Because if a customer calls your service, let's call it three or four times in a year, if every single time I'm able to offer them an upsell, and half of those times that's two times a year, they accept an upsell that's going to take that customer that I might get $1,000 for per year mowing their grass, and turn them very quickly into two or three thousand dollars of annual revenue. Because I sold them Christmas lights, I sold them winter services, I sold them a molten stall, I sold them treatments, I sold them some other thing. And I did that because of human. You say, well, I could do this. Upsell response rate is not just dramatically lower, it is a fraction of what a human agent is able to do. Because they have empathy and they have shown that they are human. Humans want, want to talk to humans. As soon as a human is talking to AI or talking to your voicemail, they're not going to get upsold. Like, once they know it's AI and they're collecting information and they're texting their email back to the AI, Cool, great, I'm getting better than voicemail. But they're not going to be as inclined to also accept three other offers that I have in my chamber ready to go of other services. I can sell them, whereas with a human agent, although they cost more, if I can take that cost, but then give them the skills, give them the training required to do upsells, I could turn that $1 of cost into $5 of revenue. Now that was command center for Augusta Lawn Care. Shame on me. We've learned and we have improved the system dramatically. But I did the same thing again. And this is support at Homeworks, formerly known as Copilot CRM. If you want 2026 to be the best year of your life and your business, it's time to finally get inside of a CRM that allows you to scale. And I believe that's Copilot CRM, soon to be Homeworks. And if you actually think about the best time of year to join any software, it's right now January 1st. Everything before that, you know, is in your old CRM. Now going forward in 2026, everything is inside of Copilot, soon to be Homeworks. So if you have trouble switching software, we'll help you. We'll go right through the whole process. We don't charge any onboarding fee. We will move all Your customers over for you and even your stripe customers that have their credit card information will. We can port that all over to Copilot. So go check out copilotcrm.com today. Book a call with the team if you need to and we'll make sure it's a great fit for you. Originally we went very much overseas. It was like, look, if we're there overseas, we can offer support at hours that no one else can. And so when someone's beating their head up against the wall at midnight, we can still offer chat support. Whether you talk about the Philippines or Mexico or wherever we went outside the US we're really happy with the fact that, hey, we have a really fast response time, a matter of minutes instead of hours or days like it was compared to other CRMs that we used in the past. And so I started looking at what was happening at command center and realizing that as we pulled from voicemail to AI, AI to human agents, human agents, to in person in the office, and seeing the level of customer satisfaction improve at every single level along with my cost. But also this is the challenge part. It's very difficult to attribute that new revenue to the cost. It's very difficult to say, oh, I spent 10 more dollars in admin to have a human. Therefore that led to $60 worth of revenue. Hard to measure. Very hard to measure. Because a lot of times your upsell is simply them accepting the fact that you will give them a quote. So then tracking whether or not the estimate was accepted and then attributing it back to that upsell is very difficult at times. And our response rate dropped dramatically. We were able to get to estimates very quickly. And I started asking myself like, if it's true at command center where as we spent more on cost in this area of support, what if we did the same thing here? And so what we started doing is instead of just adding chat support, let's do phone support. There's about a 3A tripling of cost when I go from having someone do chat to someone doing a phone call. Why? Because now they've got to speak English. They've gotta be fluent at it, They've got to be on call, live interaction. They can't manage like five chats at the same time. So the cost to me is probably three times as much when I go from chat support to phone support. Now here's the thing. Video support is like 10 times the cost of chat support. Because now I've gotta skill this person up to the fact that they are gonna be live One on one with somebody, they've gotta be in an office, they've gotta, they've got to have the surroundings that enable us to do video support as well as just the fact that now they're showing up for scheduled appointments. So they got to have a buffer before, a buffer afterwards. This is literally a 10x cost to have video support versus chat support. But I started asking myself, like, when was the last time I used software? I was really frustrated. When was that? Usually when I reached out to support because I had to go through like 10 different AI things to get through to a human. And then when I left a chat, it would take a day or two for them to get back to me. And they weren't very, very helpful. Like, okay, what's one level better than that? Phone calls. And I don't want it to be where I have to call in and wait for five minutes on hold. I want it to be where I schedule a time and my support agent shows up when I said I have a scheduled time, that I don't have to waste my time as the user. So that's what we did and it tripled our cost at support because now I have to have someone that can speak English, they have one on one instead of one to five. Because if I'm doing chat support, I can do five chats at the same time, no problem. Now it's one on one and I have to have a much higher caliber of person doing the support. And then we went to video because like, when was the last time on software you had an issue and you're in the chat like, hey, why don't you just book a call with me later today? I have some time book. 15 minutes, we'll do a video call and I'll just show you exactly what we're talking about. I'll go open up your account and we can share a screen. Like that very rarely happens. And the reason is, is because it costs 10 times more than just having someone overseas answering chats or just having the AI bot do it for you. And we do have chat and we do have phone support, but we also have now added video and the ability to be able to hop on a call and just someone just do something for you really quickly in your account. And you see it a lot of times you're like missing a button. You just didn't notice one little thing inside. Your automation was done incorrectly. And so all of this stems down to, for you and your business. For home services, when we think about the word home services, we have to remember the most important part, and that is service. What I want to challenge you on is when we look at three different departments inside of a home service business, we have sales, getting the work, operations, doing the work, and we have admin, just getting paid for the work. My question is, how do I serve the customer better at every single one of those stages? How do I turn the cost center into a profit center for sales? In my opinion, the best way to serve a customer, save them time. And so if I can give a video to the customer instead of having to meet with them in person, that serves them well. This is why inside of homeworks, inside of our fieldforce mobile app, you can now attach video that has like over 10 minutes long because it allows me to be able to put that on the customer portal, give that to the customer, automatically compresses the file, and I don't have to waste their time visiting me, talking with me for 20 minutes about their project. A video for the customer. Instead of doing an in person estimate that is how do I serve the customer better? I save them time. When it comes to operations, one of the things I like most about software is you can create these systems to make cost centers, profit centers. And so in the past, a cost center was, well, I have to go pay my crew to go to the property and do the work. You say, well, I can't get around it. I have to do it. It's operations. I have to do the work itself. Well, we've made it. Now where inside of the field force mobile app, they can have a button, they upsell the customer immediately. And you can have it prescribed the three or four services that you know are seasonally specific to your area and be like, oh, they're on a mowing service. There's gonna be a dropdown for four options. Mulch installation, bush trimming and bed maintenance and winter services. And I'm going to have a dropdown and allow my crew to tap on one of those. And I can either automate a text or email going to the customer, or just have it notify my dispatcher and I can send that out manually myself. This upsell feature allows you to be able to dramatically increase your revenue from what used to be a cost center, which is I have to send people physically to the house. And so instead of thinking of this is a cost, how can I turn my operations people, my employees out in the field, my technicians, into salespeople actually generating revenue. Cause that's the thing that we all love to do. The sales side, getting more jobs Getting the work. But how can I turn the cost center, the technician, the actual delivery of my service, into the ability to generate more revenue? We talked about sales using video, we talked about operations and using upsells in admin. How do I show empathy and service for the customer and turn what used to be a cost into. Into a profit center? I'm going to use upsell phone scripts. Many times you call into any place they're using some sort of training or scripting. And home services are notorious for the fact that maybe it's your spouse or your friend, they just answer the phone. But if you don't have specific scripts of what to say when the customer is asking for this service to upsell them another service, don't wonder why you're not upselling more services. You, as a salesperson, as the entrepreneur, you, yes, you're in the field and a customer asks you for mowing, what do you do? You offer them treatments. You also see that they need the bushes trimmed. You do all of these things organically, but you'll need to create a system, a phone script for your admin staff that when someone asks for mowing, here's what you offer them and here's how you offer it to them. And here's the pricing required to be able to sell the job over the phone, if possible. And a lot of times you will get people that are doing instant quotes or over the phone pricing, and your upsell is actually just an appointment. And so all they're trying to do is sell the appointment for the estimator to show up. But if you can take what used to be a $40 weekly or $70 biweekly service, customer signs up, they go to your site, they give you a call, they get signed up over the phone, great. But if that phone agent is able to then sell a $700 service, or at least the appointment to meet the customer and have the opportunity to sell a $700 service, all of a sudden I can recoup the customer acquisition cost within a matter of a few days instead of a matter of a few months. And so if you're selling a recurring service, a lot of times it's very easy to be like, oh, I'll do instant quotes, I'll do pricing over the phone. I'll give customers my price immediately or over text, great. But if you have them on the phone and you've turned something that used to be a cost into a profit center, and now you have systems in place that is upselling phone scripts, I can make what used to be a cost and straight overhead into an offensive measure for the business. And so, based upon my estimation this year in 2025, at Command center, for example, we have upsold more revenue than the cost of all the wages that we pay the command center. That's pretty awesome, the fact that you're able to add more revenue to the business than all the wages that you pay your admin staff. And here's the thing. I have to do the admin stuff no matter what. I've got to send out the invoices, I've got to do the estimates, I've got to answer the phone, I've got to do the text message, I've got to do all of my payroll, I've got to do my QuickBooks transactions. I've got to do all of those things no matter what. But if I was able to do the work and create a system that would allow me to be able to turn a cost center into a profit center. Talk about the difference in profit margins between one business and another. And so don't make the mistake that I made, which is everything that is a cost should go down. And I want revenue to go up when reality, if I just took that cost and I actually spent more on it and made it premium compared to everyone else. And instead of phone voice messages, I had AI. And instead of AI at human agents, and instead of just human agents, I actually gave them upsell scripts to be able to make this defensive measure offense. Talk about the change your business will have in 2026. Because in home services, the word service gets glazed over and we think about sales and more customers and more revenue. But if you just serve the customer better in sales, operations and admin, 2026 will be a banner year.