Marathon Q&A with Mike Andes!

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the live stream. We have not done a call in show for quite some time so welcome and I hope everyone had a very merry Christmas. I'm going to be sharing here on the screen the number to call in. So this is the number to call in today. If you call 361-733-3333, you'll be put on the call in show. You'll be getting priority and in terms of who comes on to ask questions, I can answer questions in the chat but I will give priority to everyone that is in the call queue. So today is December 26th. Today we have some very special announcements that I'll be going through and unwrapping these gifts throughout the livestream. But if you have a question, call this number right here just on your phone. Pick up 361-733-3333. Any questions about business, marketing, hiring, anything and everything to do with your home service company? I will be able to answer those. So I'm going to leave this up for a second. We're going to answer several calls and then I will open the first gift. There are three gifts that we are unwrapping today. Let's go ahead and get started. Make sure this thing is actually working. And we're going to start off with a local number, 360. Welcome to Show. Thank you for coming on.

Can you hear me? Do we have. Yeah, I can hear you. How you doing?

Hey Mike, I, I wanted to ask you. So you said that you did the.

You started like you're testing out the door hangers for the instant, like the instant quote winter service door hangers. What, what type of response have you seen so far? Like just from doing it like with the, the franchisees are location.

Is that for mowing or what services are you talking about.

For winter service? Like the instant coil door hangers.

Yeah. So like we haven't finished an entire season so I don't want to speak on it yet. We've seen much better results when we're able to do instant pricing drive traffic from online to the forms. So we've been testing a bunch with that and that's what we're going to be focusing on the actual door hangers. It's tough to in what a door hanger explain to someone that they actually can say like what you want to focus on is saving the money. Because if you just focus on the pain, the problem is during winter is like they don't think they have a pain.

Yeah.

Nothing's growing and so it's really a matter of like trying to get most of your mowing customers convert to winter services. And then if you're going to actually try to sell, you know, people who have never done service before, you really got to pitch the savings like hey, you will save $500, you will save $1,000 by simply using us bi weekly instead of twice a year.

Okay, I got that.

Cool. Yeah. So probably by like early next spring once we've actually seen an entire season. And we're also doing a whole bunch of testing around the, the actual online instant pricing form. And how do we get. Because bottom line if you're doing a door hanger, the the amount of people that need your services for winter services so much lower. And so how can we use online to kind of use as a filter to get as many people to the form as possible versus with door hangers like instant pricing for mowing, everyone needs their lawn mowed. So I can, it's way easier to instant pricing for that because everyone has an actual pain. And so when they see the solution, it's easy for them like yes, I will take it. Whereas with winter services I really need to convince them that is a cheaper option. It look makes their property look better year round, etc. So. All right, cool. We had some other callers in the queue. Again just as a reminder, welcome everyone to the Q and A call in show. If you've never been here before, I, I take these calls directly from your phone. This is 361-733-3333 is the call in number. I'll answer your questions and throughout today I'm gonna be having some gifts to unwrap and give all of you. So let's get started. Got one here from Wally. I'm old. Have two successful residential home service businesses debating whether to get into lawn care as our current client demographic seems to fit well tons of competition in here in, in central New Jersey. But that does not mean there's still not opportunity for a well oiled machine. Like if there is a lot of competition it says that there is a lot of demand for the service. And so what I'm usually looking for is a growing population. I don't really look at the amount of competitors because the vast majority of them, 90% plus of them will not have a good website. So I can kill them there and then like in terms of ranking and then there is the other, you know, small fraction of the, even the 10% that have a good website actually do professional service, show up on time, answer their phones 24, like answer their phones at all. And so it's really a matter of I look at the amount of competitors as like, oh, there's plenty of demand. I've just got to figure out how to carve a piece of that out. Bugout Termite. I'm not a long guy here, but learn more about marketing side of things. Very similar to pest control. Yes, absolutely. Okay, cool. Let's go ahead and go to the phone. Next caller is from nine eight, five. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Hey, this is Cody Graber with Trinity Tree llc.

Hey Cody, how you doing?

Good. So the question I have for Mike is when would renting a vehicle, not leasing when would renting a vehicle be better than purchasing a new vehicle? If it's short term, yeah.

How short term are we talking? Like a couple days or a week or two or a couple months?

What are you looking at, six months to a year?

Yeah. Like if, if for example, I had a contract that I knew was only going to last six to 12 months, I might consider renting a vehicle. I would bake it into the pricing of that contract knowing that at the end of that six to 12 months, I don't need the vehicle and I don't want it sitting on the books. The fixed expense for insurance I have to restore it for after that, et cetera, or have excess capacity in the business after that contract is completed. So the only time I would usually do it short term is if I know for a fact that I am not going to need that piece of equipment in the future. Otherwise, what I would recommend is grow to capacity, get enough money in the bank account so that you can expand once you get that piece of equipment using marketing to be able to fill it up and use it consistently. You could also look at it as like instead of renting a vehicle for 12 months, which is going to cost you an arm and a leg if you do that. If you're going to spend 12 months on renting a piece a truck, I would also set aside just some money. Hey, I know I'm going to need X amount in marketing to basically fill this truck up after this contract to ensure that I actually fully utilize this piece of equipment. But like right now, are you looking at a contract that's going to be like a 6 to 12 month stint, Cody.

So it's not a contract, it's month per month. Right now all my work vehicles are down and rather than spending 12,000 to fix old vehicles, just looking at something short term.

Yeah.

To get the work done because I have bigger financial purchases that want to finance to help production go up within the true service.

Yeah, like if you're, if you're looking at a condo that's month to month renting might actually make sense because what you don't want to do is go buy or lease or get into debt for a truck and then literally two months into the contract they just drop you. And so renting in this case actually might make sense, especially assuming that this contract is lucrative enough to actually make sense of spending the extra. Probably I would imagine 2,3500, $2000 a month for renting the vehicle. Also, keep in mind there is liability associated with the fact that you're renting a vehicle and if it gets damaged, you know there is liability and there's insurance issues that could potentially rise to this. And if you damage it, like your insurance alone on a rental vehicle, it's especially, they know you're using it for commercial, could get extremely expensive. Like you might be able to go get a truck or a, you know, some sort of a vehicle for rental. But if you tell them that you're using it for commercial and you're using it for tree service, immediately it's going to go up in terms of the liability insurance because they know what's going on. They know you're going to be around trees and heavy equipment, et cetera. And so I'd be careful about this because a lot of times if you don't disclose it and then you go, you, you rent the vehicle and then you go, it gets damaged. You know, a tree chipper rolls into it, a tree falls on top of, et cetera, you might actually be in a worse position then. So from a liability perspective, like I feel obligated to tell you to keep that in check. Next caller from 31 3. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Hi Mike, how are you? Thank you so much for the landscape business course coming out for free tomorrow. Can't wait to watch all those videos and everything. I've been watching every video you probably ever uploaded. I just had a few questions. So I got like a pretty expensive like marketing plan coming up for the spring I'm doing. I have like 10, 000 flyers I want to pass out and I was wondering, like, how long does it usually take to pass those out if I have like a electric scooter and everything? I know it sounds dumb, but I thought you were doing that too. Like how long can I estimate to pass all those out?

Yeah, it really Depends on the, the neighborhood. Because if you have a cookie cutter neighborhood, you could easily get a hundred plus out per hour. Now, if you're, if you're not doing the electric scooter, if you're walking slower, etcetera, you might be more on that 50 to 60 per hour, and they have longer driveways, et cetera, but easily you can do over a hundred per hour, especially if you're walking quickly, you're using an electric scooter. Like all those things add up. And ultimately, when it comes to door hangers, assuming you're not, assuming you're canvasing, just putting them out instead of knocking on the door and actually talking to people, you can dramatically increase your results by simply increasing the speed at which you put them out and so optimizing where you put them in your bag, how many you're holding. If you have like instant pricing ones, I'm gonna have like two different prices. I'm not gonna write a new one for every single job because I can just get so much more out if they're just two prices only, like small and large. And so I would say somewhere between the realm of 50 to 150, depending on the centrality, like how localized all of the, the properties are, and then also just your setup in terms of speed, how you have everything packaged, et cetera.

Okay, awesome. Thank you so much. And I, I had one more question. Like, I like two more questions. What? I feel like it'll be like about a 1 to 3% response rate. I know.

What, so 1 to 3%. Is that what you're kind of shooting for?

Yeah. For the response rate?

Yeah.

Like for mowing?

Yeah. Like the only time I've ever seen 1 to 3% and like, especially on the higher end of that is in the dead heat of spring rush, like the most high demand time. If you get 1%, I'd be pretty thrilled. That means basically every hour you're getting a new lead that's really, really, really good. So I would not expect 2 or 3%. Unless you are literally in the one to two weeks where the grass is just taking like an absolute tear every three to four days. It probably needs cut. That's the only time I've ever seen where, where a 2 or 3% response rate comes up. If you can do 1%, usually the math is so on your side. Cause if you pay someone, let's just cut 25, 30 bucks an hour. With commissions, et cetera, and taxes to put out door hangers, you're basically getting leads for 30 to 40 bucks. And I would do that all day long. I would keep pumping money into that if you're trying to grow. But yeah, hope that answers your question.

Nice, nice. And also just one more. How big of a service area, like, should I be shooting for? So, like, the city I'm in currently is like about 100,000 population, but the surrounding cities are probably like 60 to like 80. Like how big of a service area should I focus on? I'm just starting.

Yeah. Ultimately, when it comes to service area, the smaller the better. The fastest way to grow your business in terms of top line revenue is add more services and add more service area. And so because of that, we always go after adding more services and adding more service area, we keep expanding. Expanding how far we're willing to travel because it's the easiest and fastest way to grow revenue. It's also the least profitable because the further out you have to go, the more windshield time there is, the less your guys can make on pay for performance. The more gas and fuel you use, the more wear and tear in your vehicles. The list just keeps going on. Same thing with services. It's like, well, if I just add one more service, it's simple, it's easy. You know, we're already at the property. Yes, you're right. But again, that's another thing you need to train employees on. That's another sop you've got to create. That's another thing your office staff has got to be trained on and you create more and more bottlenecks by adding more service area and more services in the business. And so the thing I'm always thinking about is how do I take a one mile radius or a two mile radius and just boil the ocean? Because if I can take a one mile radius and I have 100,000 people, like you have plenty of opportunity to grow a big business. So the reason I say is because like we built to almost $1 million in annual revenue in Blaine, Washington. You can look it up. B l a I n e. It's like six or seven thousand people population, but I was able to hit every single house for like 1000 bucks. With every door, direct mail, I was able to get in the local newspaper, full page, like $800. And so everyone knew who I was. Even though I had 1, 2 and 3 trucks when I was first getting started. For a few thousand dollars, I was just pummeling like facebook ads all the time. And so you're able to get way better penetration. I would rather boil the puddle than trying to go after the ocean. And so even 100,000 people in my mind is too many to go after. I would be much more centralized and focus on, you know, 2,000, maybe 3,000 homes that you really want to go after. They're your ideal customer. Because if you get inside that market and you have door hangers and you have yard signs and you're knocking on the door and you're running Facebook ads in this small area, all of a sudden they start to see you everywhere. And you actually get the benefits of brand awareness instead of just direct response marketing. Brand awareness being that they think of you when they think of your service without you having. Having to see an ad. And it's only achieved by you constantly touching them. And the easiest way to touch someone more frequently is either A, spend more, way more in marketing or B, just go after a smaller market, a smaller area. And so this is why, like, in Blaine, everyone knew how I was. They thought I had like 10, 15 trucks. When reality, it was simply a function of like, I do not. I do not market outside of this small area. Let's go to the next caller. I might have accidentally set this up where only 10 people can get in here in the call queue. So be patient in the call queue. I will get to you. Next caller is from 9:5:1. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Hey, how's it going, brother? This is actually Joey with bug out, termite and pest control.

Hey, Joey, how you doing?

Pretty good.

Awesome.

Yeah, I've been following you for a little while and I really appreciate all the education and stuff you put out there, man. It really helps. Going into my second year and I am trying to three exit from what I did this year. And there's a couple things that I know would help me that I struggle with. And reviews is one thing. Like, I got 20 to 20 this year. I wanted to get 100 like everybody else, obviously. And it's funny, it's like you get people that are like amazing customers or even return customers. And, you know, it's just one of those things I'm horrible about it too, is actually leaving that person to review, you forget or whatever. And I'm like starting to wonder if I need to do an incentive thing for all of my reviews and how to go about doing that through Facebook, Google, that kind of thing.

Yeah. So there's a couple things you can do. One, you could do an incentive. I would be careful about saying, hey, if you give me a review, I will give you something. What I would probably recommend doing is like you just can't ask for a five star review. What you want to do is like if you give me a review there's a benefit and then their review could be a one star and I still give them the benefit. I would also say what you can do is for example tap into something other than just an incentive. Like if you're like hey I'll give you a gift card or whatever. It's like most people aren't going to go out of their way for that and usually their reviews aren't that great. What I would recommend doing for example is saying hey, for every review I get I'm going to be putting $50 towards a community outreach project. I'm going to put that money towards giving that away to the local area of overgrown lawns or a community project. Everyone that leaves a review, we're putting that money all towards that and I'm going to match it on top of that. So $50 from you, $50 from me. You don't have to put anything in. I just need to review and that money will go towards something good that might work. You can do where it is a function of really just making sure from an automations perspective you have this set up so when a customer gets.

They'Re happy with their service or even if they just pay like an automatic payment to an invoice should just trigger off to them an email saying hey are you happy with or satisfied with the service? And what we do is we just have a picture of yes and no. They click on yes it goes directly to Google Reviews. If they click no it goes directly to leaving us feedback on a form. Now all of that to say like we're actually doing this exact same thing. In Copilot we're in the rate us page. If they do four stars or less on their feedback it just opens up a text box where they fill that in. If they click 5 stars it immediately will just go to Google Reviews. So I would just automate it number one and then number two is anytime you're doing a walkthrough I would literally have like we have it on our business cards in the back, a QR code and I would have it on your iPad or on your phone just like hey I'm really thankful. I really appreciate usually this like highest point of activation for review is after you've completed the service and they're happy you just finished the walkthrough. They're super excited. Especially one time projects even you could do this on first time mows if that's what you're doing or you're in pest control, right Joey?

Yeah, yeah.

So anytime there's like a pretty good transformation or you're doing a walkthrough of a property, there's been a big change. I just literally make sure it's super like it's part of your process to ask for a review and you could even just tie in like hey, in order to get will you actually come back to your property in one month it's gonna be a free inspection. Assuming that you leave us a review and tell us how we did on your service. So something you could tie the incentive also just around a follow up service. A lot of times like we would look. You would look at that as probably like customer service is like, hey, if there's a problem a month later I'll come back. I would tie that into the estimate or even in the walkthrough process like hey, if you leave us a review, we actually come back one month no matter what just to do an inspection and ensure the quality is still high.

Yeah, that's a really good. I actually really like the idea you had about making a go towards something because one issue we have is bedbug treatments for people that are low income because it is expensive. I'm actually one of the cheaper people to do it, but it's still really expensive for people to afford. That actually like that idea. I can try to promote that. And yeah, a lot of my customers are, you know, return customers and even still they forget to get on Google or leave me the review. I'll text it to them. It's in their, their email receipts. But I do like that idea. Maybe I can start pitching that more that it's gonna actually it will help people because I've been trying to figure that out as far as like some people have like GoFundMe and stuff for that same thing other other pest control companies. So that's a great idea. I should definitely, definitely going to attack that. And the only other quick question I was going to ask you was what do you think about storefront locations? Like how much, you know, is that traffic going to really bring in if I get a storefront office? Because there's a few spots here in my small town where I'm like, man, if I was there with a sign, how much more is that going to bring me in? On top of, I've actually adopted your instant door hanger quote thing too. So I'm going to. This is going to be the first year I try those. But just wondering, you Know what a storefront really bring in as far as like extra traffic?

Yeah. Like storefront for a home service business usually doesn't bring a lot of traffic. And what will bring the traffic in is the sign. And so what you can usually do is just negotiate with a business owner that has the property or the location you want to get a sign on their property. For example, if you went to a strip mall or a multifamily like apartment complex and say, hey, I want to put a sign up next to the highway, I will do all of your pest control for free indefinitely. As long as that sign is there, you'll get just as much exposure from that sign as if you would go pay 1,500, 2,000, $3,000 a month for a retail space. And trust me, your walk in traffic from that, you would be lucky to get one or two a week. Like, there's just hardly any traffic for home services when you have a physical space for services. If you're selling other products. Like if you were like, hey, we're going to open up a lineup where we sell traps and bait and, and other pest control products, that becomes a conversation of probably getting several people in their day, and then you try to upsell them from the product into the service. That could make some sense. I could, I could, I could get on track with that one. But in terms of actually having a storefront just for the sake of marketing, I think if you spend that 2, 3 grand on rent, then you have triple net, then you have utilities, then you have Internet, then you have the fact that you're going to have it manned, like you're going to have someone there. If you don't, then it's useless. So by the time you add all this up, you're literally probably talking about five to $7,000 a month in fixed expenses. And that doesn't probably include labor. Like, if you have someone there all the time, you're looking at 10, $15,000. And so now all of a sudden it's like, well, if you spent 3, $400 a day on Facebook and Google leads or Google Ads, would you get more traffic and lead flow to your website? And the answer usually is yes. Next caller is 91 8. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Hey, how's it going, Mike? This is Walter from Walter's Lawn Service.

Hey, Walter, how you doing?

I had a question. I'm doing good. We went through the copilot where we kind of went through the whole year and one or three years. So I ended up Removing some of our services, like, like French drains and like fire pits and like we used to sub out sprinklers. But we do get a lot of. One of the things that we're not doing is fertilization weed control. We get a lot of phone calls. Even in December we had about a couple handfuls of just realization weed control. But we always pass those on. Do you think it'd be a good idea to offer that now that we got rid of some of the other things that were kind of taking up a lot of my time and it would be easier upsell to my current customers and future customers?

Yeah. The big question is, the issue I have with adding more services is if the demand for that service is the same as your core service. So if you're doing landscaping and lawn care, that's your core thing. By adding fertilization, weed control, which I'm a fan of. The problem with it is that the demand for that service is the exact same as when everyone else is calling for mowing and other landscaping services. The only time I personally want to add any service to my business is if I am filling in the off season. So if I am making sure that it's a demand curve that is outside of my core service. Because otherwise this is what's going to happen. You're just simply going to create more excess capacity throughout nine months out of the year because you're going to have to staff up for this extra boom of spring rush that happens already. And so you're already overstaffed, you're already over equipped in terms of trucks and equipment for the spring rush peak. By adding another service that has that exact same demand curve, you just make it, you just make it even that much more demand. And so I see most of the time when people do this, yes, it will increase revenue again, adding more services will always increase more revenue. And it's easier, easy to be like, well, people are asking for it, I should offer it. It's just like sitting there, free revenue. But by adding complexity to the business, you are going to have more trucks, more equipment, more insurance, higher levels of training required for your office staff, for your team out in the field, certifications, licensing, insurance, all this stuff starts to mount. And what you're doing is, all you're doing is compounding your spring rush to where you're going to have to buy one more truck, you're going to have to get one more employee and that's just going to add to the excess capacity for 8, 9 months of the year when you're not in spring rush. And so I would personally ask, like, do you think you can grow to your goal of 800,000 next year without fertilization, weed control? If the answer to that is yes, I would not add it. Now. What I would probably say is if down the road you're in profit mode and I know your situation more acutely, Walter, because of the onboarding copilot. So like I would say if you hit 800,000 without it now, it becomes a matter of, okay, I'm going to go into profit mode. I'm going to raise prices and all my mowing, all my recurring services, and then I'll add the fertilization, weed control and make it super profitable from day one. Cause I don't need it to grow. I'm just gonna add it as a supplementary service. Cause I enjoy it. Cause customers are asking for it. And more importantly, the reason I sometimes give a green flag to this one is customers require you to do that in order to get their mowing. But I genuinely believe, like you've grown the business so quickly, I would not. I don't think you're going to need this service to get to 800,000. And so adding, it's just gonna add more complexity and is ultimately a distraction from the core services.

Okay, perfect. Then I'm probably just going to try to hit my goal first and then see where I'm at and then see if that's a good option to add it in the future.

Awesome. You're the man. Take care, Walter. All right, next caller is coming in from 417. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Mike, can you hear me?

I can. How you doing?

Hey, good. This is Jesse Edwards from Springfield, Missouri.

Hey, Jesse, I saw you signed up for Bluetooth Summit. Let's go.

Yes. That's awesome. I, We've, we've really turned it around.

I saw that. Good job, man. You crushed it all so much.

Yes, I, my question is we have, you know, we bought a lot of, or all of our trucks have just been deals that I found over time. And I, I mean like, they're just getting up there in miles. And the truck market, as you know, is used truck market is terrible now, but it is what it is. And I want to look at introducing.

You know, debt, like as in truck payment. But it's like just like a scary thought and I don't want my profits to go down. We're 24 profitable at the moment and from doing like research and asking other guys, you know, once you start getting closer to 1 million. We're right around 750. It's harder to stay profitable. But I'm trying to just get it through my mind, like for one, I'm gonna have to have these payments, I'm gonna have to have trust. But I'm also looking at like doing the Isuzu route.

So I guess my question is, is like, how do I, how do I fit those payments into my, into my, like, you know, into my numbers and make it make sense and stay profitable?

So, so why not keep doing what you're doing? Cause 24% is good. It's just a matter of like, hey, you got older trucks, you now have the money. It's like, do I go upgrade the trucks or are you trying to get more trucks? Is it more trucks or upgrading the trucks? Kind of the main question, really.

Upgrading them. There, you know, we've been salting and plowing and then some of them are only two drives, two wheel drives. And it's like, it's really hard to. I mean, picking out your fleet can make a huge difference. I mean, I've thought about going your route, but it's like with where we live and the size of our account, it's really served us well to, you know, have a 20 foot trailer with two 60 inch mowers and a 36.

Totally.

So that our routes, we can always, you know, fit them in instead of driving to two sides of town twice.

Yep. Yeah. Like, ultimately what you're going to do the math on is like, okay, 20, 24. Looking at your P now, like, what, what? Like, I'm not asking the question, just like I'd be looking at how much did I spend on repairing the trucks. Right? Because I would imagine on your fleet of several trucks, you're probably spending 15,000 on like, okay, this motor went out, this, this, you know, whatever cylinder, it just goes on. Right? So if you're paying 15, $20,000 a month now it's a matter of, okay, a year. If you're paying that now all of a sudden becomes where you can spend two or three grand a month and basically break even. The thing is, you're taking on debt, so you're adding risk to the business. And so I think at 24% profit margin, at 750,000, how I'd be making sense of this is instead of trying to get to a million, I would personally be like, okay, I'm gonna raise prices. And by raising the price, I'm going to pay for these trucks. Because if you raise prices on all of your mowing accounts by just even 15%, you'd immediately be able to afford brand new trucks for the entire fleet on the payments. And so the leverage at 750,000 that you have with a price increase is so substantial. And so I think you're in a really good spot to raise prices. Like I saw you send the financials over. The media team, they sent it over to me and like, like my first inclination. Yeah, now it's time to raise prices. And I, my immediate thought was like, I knew the trucks were older and like you will be able to afford for literally probably what, 30, probably 4 grand a month in payments. You'd have a brand new fleet of exactly what you want. If you raise prices by 15, a lot of. If you raise prices by 15%. This is how you make sense of this. If I do this price increase, I get new trucks. All of a sudden people want to raise price. Like I would do that. And then it also adds a lot of value to your brand. It add value to your existing customers. And you would you pitch the price increase based upon like all these additional things you're doing for the customer. And I genuinely believe less than 10% of people would leave.

Yeah. And that's why you market, to fill in who leads because you raise prices. And most of the time those people come back and for the listeners, like, who is listening, like I went from 480 to 750.

Yeah.

And I'm doing the same amount of customers. But it's. I raised, let's see, I mean, probably 20% of my customers.

Yep.

And that's really the big change. But I have one other question, if it's allowed.

Go ahead.

It's about. Basically I've got two and we're just starting out and it's kind of you. You knew I had Holly, I had my brother trying to do it. I realized over time that I probably hired the. I could have hired the wrong people, but I didn't have the systems in place.

I guess my question is like, what I'm scared of is.

Like being the. The face. And you talked about that and it's like I've been really good about, you know, being the one on the. I did everything this year. But it's like how did that transition go for you? Whenever you were the one on the phone, the face, you were answering everything.

I guess it's creating the system. Right. And then the VA runs the system.

Yeah. Like anything you can do to simplify the business is going to allow a virtual assistant or an office person to operate much easier. And so I've always thought about in terms of creating systems. It's like I just. Before I even think about creating a system, I wanna simplify it and standardize it. If I don't do that, I can't expect anyone to do the same job or even 80% of the job that I did. And so if it's like, oh man, this is gonna take forever to create a system around it, then just cut it out. Especially when you're at 7:50. If you watch my recent content, I want to be growing around that 7, 750 marker. And then just raising prices and optimizing. I don't want to buy more trucks, I don't want to hire more people. And so I can make a lot of sense over the next 24 months in this business by getting new trucks and hiring an office person and paying them well. By simplifying the business and raising prices. So if I simplify the business, I.e. cut services out that are requiring me to be there, they're requiring a lot of hand holding by an admin person. And you're always on the phone with these type of contracts or customers. I'm getting rid of them. I'm going to raise prices to my existing customers so I can upgrade the trucks. Which also reduces the amount of admin. Because it's very difficult for an admin and office person to schedule and route when the trucks are constantly breaking down, they're inconsistent or they're not the same. Like by having five different types of trucks, which I'm a fan of, to get started and grow the business, like just get what you can, get them used, you get out there and hustle. But as the business gets to profitability, if you can standardize the trucks and standardize the equipment and it makes it much easier to hand off to a va. And so in my opinion, this is a matter of, okay, let's raise prices immediately, get more steady trucks. Cause the ones that currently are falling apart, let's get that squared away. We could easily pay for it with just a price increase. I also think that price increase would be enough also to pay for this admin person and paying them well, like we have at our command center over the past few years, increased pay base pay by more than 50%, added medical benefits, added 401k, added PTO in this the past four to five years. And the quality of your candidate does go up and how long they stay with you goes up. And so like this year will be our first year going to spring rush where like 90 plus percent of our team in the office has been here for more than a year. They're not new employees. Like I don't even think we're going to be doing new training because everyone stayed. And so there's definitely benefits of paying people more and giving them the incentives and giving them the bonuses. And so especially when it comes to office and admin, if you have one or two people that, especially if you have one, they have so much inherent locked up knowledge of your business, it's scary. And so the only reason I would ever want to give someone the keys to my business, if I know those keys don't leave with them when they walk away. That's why I want standards, systems, procedures and simplification because I know if they walk out the door, I can quickly give those keys to someone else and they can pick up where they left off. And that is the I see over and over again at that $800,000 to $2 million marker, you have one All Star in the office that juggles all the balls of admin. And as soon as they leave, no systems were created. And therefore when they leave, the business will literally cut in half because now everything just falls back on the owner and they can't, they don't have the systems to give it off to someone else. It's a very dangerous thing. So there are three gifts up here on the screen. Number one, number two and number three. And in the spirit of the holiday season here at Christmas, we're going to be opening these up over the next little bit. But first let's get to the callers. We will come back to these questions or these presents and we'll open up them one at a time and they will cost you nothing. But let's go ahead and go to the next caller which is from 8, 4, 7. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Hey, this is Pete. I have a landscaping business in Northern Illinois and we do about five, we did about 550 this last year. This is my fourth year taking it like seriously. And basically I'm at the point where I'm trying to figure out like the, I guess GM role or somebody to take off like my, some of, some of the tasks off my plate. I do have like a full time admin person dealing with all like the paperwork and calls and invoices, but I'm kind of trying to figure out a, how to pay them and like what some of their tasks should be like the GM person. So, so I can just Kind of focus on selling and growing the business.

All right, so next year, like 20, 25, what's your revenue target?

See, I think if we don't get this person, we'll be capped out at the same amount, like 550, 600,000. Because I was working all spring rush for seven days a week for like three months.

Right.

But if we do get the, if we do get the first, and I think we could get maybe 800,000, I think.

So this is, this is the part I want you to think about. And I'm not dissing this idea. Well, I'll come back to it. But this is what I want you to think about is at 550 going to 800,000, that's $250,000 in additional revenue. Now if you said basically that's going to be unlocked by having this gm, keep in mind that GM is going to cost you. By the time you pay them like a base salary even and little of incentive and taxes, et cetera, you're looking at $75,000. And so what you want to be careful of here is you're going to pay $75,000 to unlock $250,000 worth worth of revenue. And so the profit of that $250,000 in revenue will likely be completely absorbed by the extra overhead of having this general manager. And so I would first off, just make sure that you're aware of that. Like it's not going to be a, this is not going to be a cash flowing year if you do this strategy. Because literally if you're, let's just say you're 20% profitable or 15% profitable even all of the profit of 250 is the 75,000 you're paying this general manager. And so the reason that is is because usually from 500,000 to 700,000, a business, unless it has been in profit mode and been raising prices consistently, cannot afford two overhead people. Because by the time you include your salary and his salary, all of a sudden we're at $150,000 in just overhead costs. And on a $600,000 business that is 25%. And so I would be very careful with adding this person if unless you have the cash reserves required to grow to the 750, but then you got to throw it into profit mode or grow to $1 Million, like I can just keep growing with this person. And so as long as that's like established, then I can answer the question more about like what's their role. But like based on what I said, there Is any response or like any follow up on that.

So I'm kind of confused on like. So if I understand like they're going to cost like roughly 75 grand. My kind of like main question about it would be like what task would I have them take over for me?

Yeah.

If I was going to focus mainly on the sales aspect of it and then like if we could like if, if I could just focus on sales. I don't know if I could grow that fast, you know, to a million five, you know. Yeah, but I mean we do have the capacity for, for it. I think this year we were like, so we did like 550 and we're, we took, took home about 100 profit after paying being the admin person. So.

We have that as like cash reserves. So I, I don't know if that would be enough to get it to go to you know, 1.5. We do have like four trucks and trailers and basically we, our main services are landscaping and then lawn maintenance. So I don't know.

Yeah, like a good strategy like assuming you have that much cash on hand. That's great. I think I would probably give it the green light to stay in growth mode. I would probably say go get that person and then I would grow that 750 this year. But then I would probably the next year throw it into profit mode, raise my prices the next year, maybe do 800 or 850 but be very profitable on it and then be in a good cash position to make that next big jump which is probably going to be hiring a full time office person. Now in terms of what they do, this is what I would personally do. This is what I did seven, eight years ago is like I wrote down every single thing I do in the business. Scheduling, answering the phone, answering the email, unlocking the gate in the morning, every little thing. And then I just literally put them in three buckets. Sales, operations, admin. And so the eventual $1.5 million version of this business looks like you probably is doing sales, having an operations manager and then having someone in the office that is admin. And so I'm going to build around that. So right now what's going, what's going to look like if you're going to focus on sales is everything operationally. And admin is going to be handed off this general manager, operations manager, whatever you want to call it. I'd probably call them a general manager if they're doing admin and operations and you're doing sales. And so I would be basically everything that I put into those two buckets of operations admin would be their job description. These are the tasks you do every day, These are the tasks you do every week. These are the tasks you do every month. And you would already know what those are based upon. What do you currently do now for the business? And what I'd probably do is literally just have a good on your notes app as you're going throughout your day. Like oh, I just opened up the gate, bup bup bup bup. That's probably going to be for the admin or operations person depending on when they start in the morning. Okay. I locked up at the end of the day I. Okay, who's the last person now? Is that the gm? Is that the admin person? Like I would just start creating the buckets of everything you do and then putting them into those three different buckets and then you realizing that the only things you're gonna do as a salesperson are the things in the sales bucket. So follow up calls, going out and visiting customers, all of those aspects of sales. Even if you wanted to throw marketing in there, you could. That's how I would kind of delineate between the roles and then when I hire them I would have an exact checklist of everything they're responsible for. And it wouldn't be a guessing game of like am I, should I be doing this? Should I not be doing this? It's like these are the three distinctions and categories of the business. Sales, operations, admin, I. E. Getting the work, doing the work and greasing the wheels for the work to get done. Next caller is coming in from nine eight four. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Hey Mike, I hope you had a fantastic Christmas with the family yesterday.

Absolutely.

Okay, so I have a question for you.

I am looking at potentially my long term goal is I would like to get into the pest control industry. I have a couple of years experience with it but you know, the licensing and stuff will definitely take some time and it's going to take a while to build up a customer base for it. But I currently have a, a lawn care business. It's just a solo operator truck. Me and a couple of helpers doing about 150 or so mowing and weed control. Fertilization is super profitable now when going into the winter I've been trying the winter services and the leaf cleanups. However I'm still losing money on that and I was thinking about completely cutting out like the wintertime work and dropping all my expenses down to practically Nothing. And just focusing on working on doing like the pest control licensing stuff in the wintertime and the weed control stuff, you can do that still through the wintertime here. So I was wondering if that's a viable plan or if I should strictly charge anything that's not mowing and we control fertilization an hourly rate.

I was just wondering what your thoughts on that would be.

Yeah, so I'm always very careful about thinking that another service is going to solve the business problems because yes, chemical application has a higher gross profit margin. There are also, there's more liability, there is a lot of competition and there are really good marketers in that as well. And so like, I just want to, like, I'm not downing that. I like the pivot, you know, if that's something you're more passionate about, if you, if you want to be doing that more long term. But I would just put as a massive asterisk that thinking that you're going to switch services and going to fix all the problems, I would just be cautious over that. Even the fact that you have 150,000 in revenue, have a couple of helpers, like if they're part time, you're probably making decent. If you're, if they're basically working full time, you have three people out in the field, that's going to be a very low margin service. You, you probably have a lot of room to raise prices. And so I would personally not get into the weed control fertilization game unless you have a dialed in website. You have great marketing. Cause there are great marketing companies in the fertilization weed control because of the high margins and because they can afford a much higher customer acquisition cost. And so I think it's more a matter of like, what do you want from the business? If you're like, I'm just more passionate about the pest control, I'm more passionate about that sort of thing. And I want long term that to be the business. Cool, go for it. But I'd be careful about thinking that it's going to solve all the problems of the business because there are issues, not issues, but there are challenges with that industry as well. There's challenges with that competition base and the people that are playing in that game are going to be much more sophisticated than Billy Bob and one helper that's doing lawns because he doesn't even have a website. And so I would just add caution around it. But is your question mostly like should you pivot to fertilization or what's your kind of question? If you could summarize.

Oh, so my question is, I'm. I'm licensed in the weed control and fertilization already. Okay. I've been having a lot of customers requesting that work from me, and so I got licensed and I'm offering that now. It's really profitable and working out very well. But in the long term, I would like to bring back my structural pest control knowledge and get back into that as a completely different business. So I was thinking about using my lawn business as a bridge into the pest control industry, since I understand it's going to take a while to build up.

Yeah.

And stuff.

My question, My question on this is. Yeah, like, my question. This is always the same. That is, if you're at $150,000 in annual revenue and you're starting to add other services that are profitable and you're going to switch to another, like structural pest control and think about doing a different, essentially a different business or different brand or like a branch of your current company. If you deployed that energy, time and money that you're going to spend on this new venture and you just put it into what you're currently doing, usually the returns are actually better if you just focused on the current thing, like doing more and better instead of new usually pays off in Spades. And so 150,000 annual revenue, I don't think you've addressed your total addressable market. I don't think you've tapped out your market for those services. And if you're adding services to them that are more profitable, like the spraying or the weed control or the pest control for them, instead of going to structural weed, structural pest control, I'd probably just keep doing what you're currently doing because there's way more total addressable market than $150,000 in your market. And so this is a slippery slope because what you can easily do, like, I bet if you add structural pest control, you'd probably next year do 300 grand, right. You do 150. You probably 220,000 in your current business and like 80,000 in the new thing, because as you say, like, it's going to take a little bit of time to grow. I also believe you could do 300,000 if you put all of that time and energy in the first one. And I think it'd be easy to find people, employees. Your marketing would be all on one thing. Your website would be on one thing. And so you can make it where you make the same amount of revenue, but simplified services and less services is going to eventually lead to much more scalable business. Because I'm mostly thinking about, as you grow this business, how do you pass it along to an employee? Not pass it along in terms of ownership, but how do you train an employee? Is it easy to get a third, fourth, fifth person once they go full time? And so instead of you creating this Frankenstein of $100,000 business here and $100,000 business here and$100,000 business here, just focus on one that does 300,000 and. And has employees and you can train them up easier. And so I'm not against the idea of doing structural pest control. Like, I think it's a great business. There's a lot of really good businesses. You could do concrete, you could do building decks, you could do fence staining, you could do Christmas lights, you could. There's so many services, and almost always the grass will look greener on the other side. It's simpler, it's easier. It has better demand year round. And when you get into those markets, you start realizing, oh, look, there's different margins. The customer acquisition cost is very different. And so I like the idea of a supplementary service before you do a new one. And so if you're already doing mowing, etcetera, I like the idea of doing like the lawn weed control or fertilizer or pest control because it's serving your existing market. If you go to structural pest control, you have no crossover. And you do create basically two different businesses. And so that's what I would be careful of. I'm not. Hopefully I didn't come across too negative, but that is the reason I almost always am pushing in that direction. Next call is coming in from four. Whoa. We got a lot of feedback. I don't know if I'm. Oh, there we go. Can you hear me? Okay? We got too much noise.

Can you get somewhere quieter?

Hey, Mike. Adam Mitchell, Mitchell Lawn Landscape down here in Joplin, Missouri.

I have a couple questions.

In regards to.

Growing a location to the point of handing it off to a gm.

Okay.

And then. And then starting a new location. We are, we.

Are at 37 profit right now. Let's go about 430,000 gross. I'm about.

Okay.

And.

We. I'm like an virtually like the octopus you talked about, except maybe a little more tangled up than that and everything.

Okay.

And I think that's how we were able to get to where we are now.

Right.

We. We have about probably $250,000 of mowing. And then we did landscaping, mostly upsell for those customers. I have two employees currently working full time.

We're still doing leaves. And then we were. We were between two and five employees for the year. But I don't have a lot of. Don't have a lot of systems in place.

And I have a key employee who's moving on this next year who was like my second, a second me who was helping things run. And I just don't know.

At this stage. How do you get over the bridge from being mixed up in everything to having someone who can run at least the mowing side?

How do you get. Get out of the field? Is mostly my.

Question. And then when, from that point, do you have the ability to start another location?

Yes. Like a general manager is going to be what everything hinges on in terms of the profitability and success of a location. So finding them, that's a different topic in terms of how do we actually build the business in a way where we can actually hand it off to a general manager. That's what we want to address here. Because everyone wants to work on their business instead of in their business. They don't wanna work in the field. And I agree. This is how you grow the business is how you are able to expand. This is how you're able to think of more of it as an investor in the business instead of that of an operator. I agree. That's what we should be doing. E myth says it all. The thing is most businesses don't have enough systems to allow anyone else to be successful doing what you do. And so again, going back to like, what do you do every day? What makes the business 37% profitable is your juggling. And so either A, we need to reduce the number of balls, we need to reduce the number of things that we have to juggle every single day, simplify the business, etc. Or we need to make sure that the next octopus that comes along, I. E. The general manager, has extremely detailed SOP standard operating procedures on how to juggle all the balls. There's only two ways to make this easier. Improve the, improve the, the effectiveness of training the next octopus or B reducing the number of balls the octopus has to balance. And so I always go to the easiest one first, which is going to be reduce the number of balls. And that's going to be simplify and standardize the business. So I'm going to look at when I get contacted from my crew throughout the day and they're in a panic and I need to jump into the business. What are those things? I guarantee you 20% of the services you offer are creating 80% of the amount of times you get dragged back into the field. And so if you're gonna hand off something like mowing, usually on more simplified, I'd do the same thing. Okay. On these mowing jobs, which customers do I need to get rid of? Is it the ones that are way outside my service area? Is it the ones that have a certain size property? Is it a certain one on a certain side of town? Is it the people that don't have full service? Is it the ones that don't do the weed control? They're always complaining. I'd be always thinking about, what are the customers? What are the services that, if I cut out that 20%, would make the job way easier for someone to come in and become the. The octopus. And so, again, if you think about yourself as the octopus, you just reduce balls or you figure out how to train an octopus better. I can do both of those by removing balls. So I do that first. Then once I say, okay, I've reduced my service count, I've reduced the amount of issues that happen throughout the day. I've reduced the number of employees that I need. I've reduced the amount of services that I offer and therefore the amount of training required to get an employee to being profitable. Once you've done that, now I start figuring out how do I standardize everything inside the business and. And make an SOP for a general manager. So how does an estimate get responded to? How do you answer the phone? How does an email go out? What does an estimate look like? What's the template for it? Like, you just start thinking about all the things you do throughout the day. It would be super helpful for almost every one of us. Every single day that you operate as an owner, just keep track of all the things you're doing. Because the question is, how do I focus on the growing the business is. You usually let go of many of those things. Now, I don't think everyone should do that. From day one, if you're doing 150, 200,000 in revenue, you. You are not gonna start being on this delegation quest of, like, all the 30, 40 things you do in the business. Like, oh, I should. Like, I should have someone else do my marketing. I should have someone else answer the phone. I should have someone else do my email. I should have someone else open up the gate in the morning. No, you're in grind Mode. You're at 150,000. It's you and one other employee stay there. You've gotta be in the business. Right now at that stage of business. But if you're at that 700,000, 800,000, you're starting to go from manager to architect. We have to step away from the building and actually start to analyze it. And if you're at that stage, it's now a function of what are all the things I'm doing in the business and how do I hand those things off. So if we look at 0 to 200,000 as this is labor mode, laborer, like your job as owner is labor, then as we go from 200,000, 800,000, that's the role of a manager. Now as you get up against the 800,000, that's when I generally believe you're ready for a second location. And I generally want to make sure you're very profitable at that stage because the big overhead expense of a general manager stepping in is going to cost the business. And they're not going to be as good at balancing all the balls as you as the owner are. And so that's where the 800,000 steps into. Then as the role of the owner being architect, you're doing multiple locations, you're potentially scaling up a different service, you're doing other things that are not in the business, operations every single day. And so I always think about those three different characters, a laborer, a manager and an architect. And the architect, the main job of the architect is to hand off things to a manager. And that manager will only be successful if, if you have simplified the business and standardize it. And the effectiveness of the labor hinges on the manager. And so it's a trickle down effect that if you don't get that jump correct, you'll just constantly be burning through GMs over and over and over again. And it is absolutely a skill to be able to become the architect and hand things off to a general manager. Next caller is coming in from three three zero. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Hey Mike, this is Kaden. I spoke with you through Instagram about Blue Collar Summit.

Let's go. How's it going?

Good. I had a question mostly about Blue Collar Summit. I know that you wanted us to print out our profit and loss statement.

Yes.

I was just wondering what else we should bring with us to Summit.

Yeah, so this is a great segue. Let's go. So by the way, if anyone signs up today and everyone has signed up in the past, you're going to get one of these jerseys that are custom that you're going to be aware at Blue Collar Summit and you're going to take it home with you. So you're going to get one of these. We got to have them sign up though, because we got to make the order here. So you got to sign up today. It's kind of like the last notice. But in terms of what to bring, we do need a printed off version of your pnl. And so there's nothing really else you need if you wanted to. Is it Kayden? Right?

Yeah. Cool. Kayden. So if you wanted to bring your balance sheet, you can. But in terms of the workshop on Friday, we just need to print it off P and L. The reason is because there's not going to be any phones or laptops on the workshop for Friday. And you'll see why there. Don't stress. Everyone that says like, oh no, don't stress. I'm going to make sure you're taken care of. But like, we're not going to allow it. It's going to be very focused. There's going to be a lot of engagement during the workshop. And I need a print off copy of a P and L. Now. If you have a general manager, I'd make a couple copies so they can stay engaged. Because the whole workshop will actually be built on top of certain elements of your P and L. So. So just your P and L. To answer your question, really it's just your profit and loss statement for 2024. If you can bring that. I would say if you want to be an overachiever, probably bring like 2023 so that you could kind of compare and contrast if you wanted to and then you could bring a balance sheet. But do print those things off and that should be all you need. Anything else on that note?

Okay, that sounds good. Also right now we run all of our management basically through QuickBooks. Looking to fully switch into Copilot. Would that probably be the best time to do it right now?

Yeah, like in terms of, you know, if you're in QuickBooks now, I think QuickBooks and copilots are very different functions. QuickBooks is gonna be fantastic for running payroll, for doing your bookkeeping, making sure you have your profit and loss. I mean your financial statements, your balance sheet, all of that for taxes. Copilot is much more of a field management service and marketing engine. So like, you can't send out bulk tech to all of your customers from QuickBooks. You can't route and dispatch your jobs from QuickBooks. And so Copilot is usually in addition to QuickBooks and we actually, it's coming out here pretty soon. We're doing a one way sync now with QuickBooks. I think it's as of next week, which is much better than the two way sync. And so it reduces any sort of error coming back from QuickBooks. All of that to say.

I would highly recommend getting both I field management software of any sort and then QuickBooks in addition for the bookkeeping, payroll and your taxes, making sure your balance sheet, your profit loss statement is in order. I think I do look at them as separate. So now Kaden brought up a very good point. That is. It is time to sign up for Blue Collar Summit, folks. Now can you see this? One second, Let me be sure. All right, this is the jersey. It's super cool. Everyone that signs up today and backwards, if you've already signed up, you're getting one of these bad boys. But you got to sign up today because we got to make the order for the rest of them. We're getting hundreds of these. But if you are coming to Blue Collar Summit, you're going to get one of these jerseys for every ticket. So go to bluecollarsummit.com and get your tickets today. That's actually one of the gifts today. So let me go ahead. Oh, I can't. We're gonna open up the first two gifts below. So this gift right here and this gift right here, we're gonna open up right now. So let's go ahead and open up the first gift. And the first gift is landscape business courses now free. All right, so landscapebusinesscourse.com is something I've been working on for seven, eight years and it's usually $600. It's now 100% free. So if you're looking to start your lawn care business, you're looking to grow it past a million. It is like the full recipe I looked Yesterday. There's like 50 plus hours of content. And you actually get to see me kind of like morph in the way I think about business because I have the original videos still on there and then I added to them. And so there's a bunch of recordings from Landscape Summit from previous years. Tommy Mello, Corey Ballard, a whole bunch of really great speakers that have been on the stage. I have those recordings in there as well. It's completely free. So that was yesterday. That was my first Christmas present that I wanted to share with everyone. It's completely free and I hope it'll serve you well. Now, the only thing I ask, the only thing I ask is you do one of two things. One, I would love to be able to see you actually taking the course. So if you could take a picture, tag me on Instagram, I would love that. And I'll probably give more things away if I can get some feedback. So on Instagram if you tag me, I will probably just share your post. But it helps me know that people are actually watching it. Thousands of people yesterday signed up for landscape business course once it became free. Let's go. Our goal of changing level professionalism in the industry hinges on the education of the industry. And so in the past I needed to charge for it because we have now a full out media team. I think there's like 7, 8, 8 plus people full time bringing another person here in February. So like it's become a huge operation. Like the cost of the media team is over a million dollars a year and so well over that mercy, it's like 1.5. And so by the time we have equipment and gear and we travel to the turnarounds, like it's expensive. And so I needed to have the course revenue in the past to essentially make sure we can break even. And you can talk to the media team like they know our financials. We break even every year. We just keep investing every dollar back into making better content for everyone. And so now though, between Augusta and Copilot and lawn care web design and home service web design, I can pay for that separately and so we don't need the revenue. And yeah, like there's a significant like hundreds of thousands of dollars that like I'm not going to get now. I'm okay with that because there's other areas everyone supported me so much in and, and like this is my way of giving back a little bit. So the content's there for free. That's landscape business. Whoop. Landscape businesscourse.com. all right, go check it out. It lays out all the different modules. There's a ton of stuff in there. It's completely free. All right, let's go on to the very next gift. And that is. We've already mentioned it. I just didn't have. I couldn't share this one without sharing the first one. So we got.

Blue collar summit. So this is not just for green, green industry because I believe there's a lot of really good crossover between industries and home services and you can learn a lot from them. So for example, I got a roofer coming out that does like a 10 million dollar business. He's going to talk about yard signs and how they use it in roofing, but we can use it in lawn care, landscaping, and so John Taffer is going to be there from bar rescue. He's going to start off the conference with a keynote. But if you want one of these bad boy jerseys, you just got to sign up to blue Collar summit today. All right. We gotta make a big order for the rest of everyone coming in and so you gotta sign up today. So. Blue collarsummit.com the hotel is almost full. So like if you're watching this in a few days it might actually be full. But there is a discounted, I think $70, $80 off per night if you book it through blue collarsummit.com so I know like we filled our room block already and I don't know how many more rooms there are in that room block that they give us the discount. So highly recommend you get it now. We got like three more weeks until conference. It will be the best conference we have ever had and it won't even be close. I'm really looking forward to it. All right, now we got a third. A third gift right here. Third gift. I don't even remember what it is. Let me think. Oh yeah, the software demo. Okay, real quick. So coming out early 2025, we got a bunch of stuff coming to Copilot and I wanted to show you one part of it which is the estimates on the customer portal. So let me actually share my screen and I'll show you what, show what we have had in the past with Copilot and then I will show you what it's now going to look like early in 2025. Let me just remove this real quick. So this is a quick demo. I wanted to show of some of the work we've been doing at copilot CRM. Now 2024 was a, was not fun. It was a bug. We went into bug hell. We, we spent the entire year rebuilding the infrastructure in the backend of Copilot. As we head into January, you're gonna start seeing some really cool stuff come out. I cannot wait. The team has been completely overhauled. There's just a phenomenal group of engineers now. And all the time and energy we spent on the backend to stabilize things will now be deployed to more front end things that people are gonna see. Now the very first thing you're going to see is this change to the customer portal. Cause it actually touches your customer. And when we're going through and making changes throughout the software, we aren't just thinking about like how do we make it look nice. We were thinking about how do we fundamentally rethink the way that this works and this one page, like, I know it's coming so like it's a little difficult to just share this one part, but there's so much more that's just around the corner in Q1 of 2025. And so here we go. This is coming out first thing throughout January, February in 2025. I want to show this is the old way that an estimate would look inside of Copilot CRM. This is way it currently looks. If you send this to a customer, it looks fine. You can request changes, accept or decline, et cetera. But this right here, boom. Is what the new version and the completely redesigned version of the customer portal is going to look like. Just for estimates. That's all I'm showing right now. So if I go back to all estimates, you can see it's like a nice little rollover. I click view, there's my estimate. This is now from the customer's perspective inside of the customer portal. Now the thing that I always wanted is that when a customer declines an estimate, I want to know why. And so in the past you click decline, like, oh, you declined. Well, now when you click decline, it's going to ask you for the reason for declining either pricing, scheduling or frequency, service or other. Now down the road there will likely be offers tied to this to where if they do pricing, you can immediately offer them a discount, et cetera. But for now at least you're going to get an email notifying why they declined the estimate. And that's super important for you to be able to, especially if you're trying to optimize for growth, reach out for a discount or be like, oh, you just have a problem with our scheduling on Tuesdays, great, we'll put you on Wednesdays, like that's not a big deal, or we don't want to wait five weeks. Great, maybe actually charge you 10% more, but we'll rush the order and we'll get through next week. These are the type of things you many times if you get declined, you don't even follow up. Like I bet less than 3 or 4% of people when a customer declines an estimate, follows up and asks why. And so this will do that for you. Another thing is like really focusing on the request changes part right here where they can give details as to, hey, can we change this, can we bring the budget down, etc. Just a much cleaner interface, the ability to be able to see this. And on the right hand side, we'll tell them right up front that their credit card is required. So when they click here to pay the deposit, because in this part the deposit is 50% down on a $500 job, they click this. Now it's a completely redesigned payment module that's going to allow them to pay with obviously credit card and US bank account, but also Cash App, Google Pay, WeChat as well as we're going to be getting in Apple pay here as well. And so just a much more streamlined, smooth, redesigned, well thought out system for collecting payment and getting that information on file to be able to charge them automatically in the future. So just it looks better. And all I can say is this is the tip of the iceberg. I know it's kind of coming down the pipe. I've seen a lot of the designs and it's not just redesigned. This is the first step of what you're going to see in the front end. But what we're doing as we go through each page of Copilot is rethinking what should this actually be doing? How does make you more money? Ultimately, what makes you more money is getting deposits, it is getting credit cards on file, it is making sure that when someone declines an option, you know why, so you can follow up with them. If you're in growth mode and you have enough, if you have fewer estimates, you want to be following up on every single one of those and making sure that we, we really emphasize request changes. So these are just very small. I know you see minor. There's so much more coming under the pipe. But this is the first thing that's going to be coming out and I wanted to share that with all of you today. All right, let's go ahead. We're going to jump back into some calls, but those are the three gifts I wanted to hand out today. This is the call in show number right here. If you have any questions, let's go ahead and jump right into it. Next caller. It looks like they're a local to me. Three, six. Oh, welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on. Oh, it looks like you called already today. How's it going?

Hey, my name is Fernando. I appreciate you taking my call. I work as a mobile mechanic, so I. May I. I just have a few questions. Sorry, go ahead. My first question is I currently make about 7,000 to 10,000 in revenue as a single operator and my two questions are I want to grow my business as close as I can to 100,000. So I'm thinking about renting out an office space so I can have a Google location address. So when Customers are job a mechanic. I can show up on Google Maps if that makes sense. And my second question would be how can I.

Increase my prices to be competitive but not as expensive as shops.

Yeah, totally. So first question, in terms of getting an address on Google, I do recommend doing whatever you can to get an actual address so that on the maps it shows you in your local area. Highly recommend. So I would not go spend $1,500 or $2,000 a month on rent just to get that. But if you can sublease from someone, if you can split a shop space or an office with someone to get a physical address, it does pay dividends in terms of how do you separate yourself and a bit more price competitive. I just make it like your marketing message needs to be. I would suggest focusing on the difference between you and a shop because like you know the benefits from a cost perspective as well as from a.

Customer service perspective why they would choose you over a shop. And I would just emphasize everything on that and I would address the pain point of like are you tired of getting two to three times like two 300% markup on your your parts? Are you tired of waiting a week or two weeks? Are you tired of having to tow your vehicles to the shop like address? Those pain points is really what I would be focused on like on your website because that's really why someone would choose you over a local shop. Does that make sense?

Yeah. Yeah.

Very cool.

Okay, that makes sense. And one last question, if you don't mind.

Go ahead.

So when it comes to the office space, I was kind of debating on getting something right like a those virtual offices, I'm not sure if you heard of them where you just pay like $99 a month, something like that. Would that be more beneficial than having to spend like you mentioned, go on 5050 at an actual shop location?

Yeah, it's definitely not a bad thing. Most of the time you can get into a Regis or other co working space, get a real address and that make that your office. I've seen sometimes they get declined on Google and it takes a little more re verification. So I've seen it work and seen it not. But it's definitely a better bet spending a hundred bucks a month than going out and spending 1500 to get an address. Be very careful I would say about one thing and that is making sure that that address is in your service area because from a Google Maps perspective you just won't show up if you're literally 30, 40, 50 minutes drive outside. Or worse yet A different city name or zip code. So whatever your city name or zip code is, I want that to match my address with my actual service area. Next caller is coming from 805. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Hey, Mike, how are you?

Good, how you doing?

Good. Also. So I actually run a pool service company in California, and I watch your turnaround that you did with the COCRU pools over here, and I was seeing that a major problem that we have is that our prices are way too low for what we offer as far as chemicals and that stuff goes. I'm thinking about raising my prices 30 to $35, which I think is a big jump. But.

Pretty much my question is I'm stuck in the owner operator mode right now where I'm making 25% profit, but that's with me doing a lot of the work, a lot of the repairs. Do you think that price increase would allow me to hire an admin route manager? Or is 30, $35 too much of an increase and I'll end up losing way too many customers? I just kind of want to know since you've done worked with a lot of companies before and doing all those kinds of things.

Yeah. So first question is, what was your rev. What's Your revenue in 2024?

Revenue is 300. About 300,000.

Cool. Yes. You're in a tough spot. It's one of those spots where it's like you kind of need an admin, but you can't really afford it yet. Okay. And then my next question is, you say you're going to raise it by $35. What's the current price for that? Same treatment.

Right now we're around 170 average.

Is that per hour or per customer? Per month?

That's per customer per month.

Got it. So you're basically going to try to.

I mean, after. After our chemical costs, we're probably at like 20. No, we're probably like 40 an hour once we account for all our customers.

Yeah, okay.

Which I think is low.

You're very low. So basically we're trying to go from 170 to 210 or so to 205. Okay. Right now it's like 2024 was 300,000. What was 2023?

2023 was about the same. So we've been condensing our service route. We've just been focusing on more local customers. So we didn't do much of growth in revenue. We just kind of streamlined and got closer to where we have all our customers. Very Close to us.

Got it, yeah. So the challenging part is when you're not growing revenue, what that usually means is assuming you weren't cutting out customers like that is you have less, you don't have enough lead flow to replace customers if you lost them. That's a bit of a concern because usually if you grew last year by like 20, 30, 40%, now all of a sudden I know even if we raise prices and lost 10, 15% of customers, we will replace them within a matter of several months. And so what I would be thinking about first and foremost is if you just raised your prices the way you want on a portion of customers, you'll get confidence before you raise it on everyone. So like, because like right now you don't have a huge amount of leads pouring in that will replace these bad, the customers that will leave the lowest paying ones. And so my concern is that we raise the price on everyone, we lose 30% of our customers, which I actually don't think would be a bad deal because you're going to raise prices enough, you'd make more profit if that happened. However.

Cutting revenue by 30% would definitely set you back right now because you have no leads to replace the ones that are leaving. So right now I would actually focus first on how do I get the lead flow higher. And so like your website, I'd be dialing all that in. So that way instead of getting, let's call it 15 leads a month, I'm getting 30, I'm getting 40. Then I have way more confidence knowing that If I lose 20 or 30 customers during the price increase, I'll be able to get them all back within a matter of like a couple weeks. And so right now, do you have a great website? Has that really been dialed in in terms like the online side?

Yep, yep, I followed all your tips. So as soon as people go to the website, they have a contact request form where they can put their number address.

And which way they want us to contact us, whether it's email, text or a phone call. So I've done all that part and I don't think I'm too afraid of not getting enough leads because we actually have the problem of when peak season comes for us, we're not even able to get our phone calls because we're too busy taking care of the customers which.

Aren'T even paying enough to begin with.

Yeah, I would raise prices. Yeah, I would raise prices. And right as you're going in the busy season and you could even stagger it so your number of Customers don't change. Because if you know, okay, like as soon as we hit, let's just say March, April, May, we know we're getting all these leads that we usually don't service, well then what I'm going to do is I'm going to say, okay, I'm going to raise 20% of my customers prices every single week for five weeks. And by the end of those five weeks we'll have a higher margin. And you have lost your lowest margin customers, but they've been replaced as those five weeks went on with those incoming leads that in the past you never even could get to. And so you now take the business from 300,000 to 380,000 next year, but 80,000 of that straight product profit because like unserviceable leads, they don't cost you anything, except especially if you're not like marketing. But what they do cost you is the extra demand that would otherwise be able to replace your lowest paying customers. And so that's why when people say like, I don't, I have so much work coming in, I just don't answer the phone, I don't get back to them. I think it's insanity because what we should be doing is raising our prices and getting rid of customers enough to be able to take the incoming leads that are willing to pay the higher prices. So I think it's crazy when someone turns off their leads. If you turn off your leads, the business has structural problems, it has lack of systems. Because ultimately if you're raising prices and you're at capacity, sorry, if you're at capacity and you can't do any more work, you should raise prices immediately to cut customers out that are your lowest paying. Massively improve your margins, like by raising your prices. What you said by, let's call it, it's about 22, when you won 22%. By raising your price by 22%, you're going to double your profits. Double. And so literally, if 30% of your customers left and you didn't replace them, you'd still be better off from a profit perspective. And so I am a huge proponent of as you ramp up with leads because you're at capacity, when you're at capacity, you raise prices or you grow and expand and get more trucks and equipment. You're not growing trucks and equipment. And I know that because you're turning away the leads. And so you got to raise prices. You, you gotta get rid of your lowest paying customers and then replace them with people who are willing to pay the price. And if you do that for one year, if you do that for one, even one season to where now you're making 380 on the exact same customers that you had last year, same number of customers. Now you have the profit margins to grow and expand. Next caller is coming in from 770. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

770. Welcome to the show.

Hello?

Hey, how's it going?

Hey, man. Can you hear me?

I can. What's up?

How's it going, man?

Good.

Hey, Zeus, we're over here from Atlanta, Georgia, man. I wanted to ask you a question, Mike. So practically I wanted to talk about lead flow. I honestly don't have a lot of leads coming in for my, my business. And I wanted to ask you if we are under, if we are under 200, how much would you recommend to put into marketing or. You know, I know, I know right now I don't have a website. I know I brought a priority top on the list. But what do you recommend besides door hangers and just recommending, I guess, more word of mouth from my clients that I have right now.

Yes. There's two things I'll be doing here. Number one is I don't spend any money on marketing until I have a great website. The reason is because it's compounding effect. My customer acquisition costs can be halved or even more just by having a great website that when customers hear about me, there's something that actually will pull in the lead because like if I, if I went into the market and was like, Coca Cola is the best. Coca Cola is the best. And I was like, okay, cool, we now believe Coca Cola is the best. And then I didn't tell them where to go buy Coca Cola. And there was no store for them to go buy Coca Cola from. It would be a useless marketing campaign. And so what I recommend is focus on the store first. Like build the distribution. That is the website that will then take in the incoming leads. Because if you do them, give them a door hanger, you. Yes, they might call you. But I know that more than half of our leads come directly from our website. And they never touch our phone, they never touch other mechanism, Facebook or. They come right from the website. And also know that if you have a website and you do the door hangers, they might call you. But before they do, they'll go check out your website. And so this is why a store. Go ahead.

I'm sorry, sir. Barry Kachak, do you recommend using your. Like if I'm under 200k do you recommend for sure. Going with the. Well, honestly, I think I might be. Yeah. Okay. Do you recommend going to your, your website like doing your. Because I know you make, I mean you have a company where you guys make websites for, for 500 bucks a month.

Yeah, yeah. Like longer web design and home service web design are awesome. Like I just see consistently the amount of leads that someone gets before and after. So like I don't want to downplay that. I would also say the only people we recommend get use it is if they're trying to expand past 200,000. It's literally the number I'm not making up because of you. That is the number I tell people and the team will tell you if you talk to them is like if you're not, if you're doing under 200,000 and that's where you want to stay, I would just recommend doing optimizing your Google listing upselling your customers. So I would rather you be sending out text blasts and emails to your customers and upselling them. You. You're gonna get better return than spending $500 a month. That being said, if you're gonna spend a single dollar on marketing, I'd rather the website be done first. Cause it'll double or triple the impact of your marketing spend. And so unless you're trying to get over 200,000, like at least 350, 400 next year. And I think that happens by having the website. Cause you just get way more leads. And so I don't wanna sell you on it. Like look at what you got there. Like on our site, our work page. But I just know when we on average Almost double within 12 months the amount of leads a company will get. And so if you doubled the amount of leads and you just took that cost of let's call it $500 a month and you were getting an extra 15, 20 leads, all of a sudden it becomes like if you were getting leads for 15 or 20 bucks, you just do it. But we don't because it's easier to be able to go to Google or Facebook and like, I'll give you 100, I'll give you 150. And it's insane how much we're spending on leads. But then we won't spend the money on the website. And so I would only do it if you're gonna grow and expand. So like next year, what's your kind of target? Or like are you trying to grow the business? Or like is 200,000 kind of where you want to stay?

1, 100 man, next year, like I want to go all in. Like I'm definitely want to go at least, you know, my goal is to, if I can, and this is probably me limiting my beliefs, but like I want to go, I want to go to the million dollar at least, you know, eventually down the line.

Yeah, you know, five. Yes. Like I would say. Sorry, I did catch up. I apologize. Sorry, I gotta keep the queue open though. What I would say is.

If you did door hangers and you were spend 500 on door hangers. Sorry, here we go, I've got you back on. Sorry for cutting you off. What I was going to say though is if you're going to spend 500 on door hangers and that's probably going to cover, let's just call it three to four days worth of labor plus, plus the printing of the door hangers. And so if you did that, you would probably get, if you did really good, you'd probably get 10 to 15 leads. I happen to believe if you spent that money on a website, you would get more than 10 to 15 leads a month. And it is now passive. The part about doing door hangers, you do need to still manage that person out doing door hangers or you're doing it yourself.

Okay, okay. I mean honestly man, if I'm making more than 500amonth just with. And I'm using you guys, like I don't mind it. I, I just definitely, I wanted, I want to, I'm thinking more for further down the line because I definitely want to get past the this year, you know, it's impossible. I want to get past the 250 or the 300 and right now, yeah, I just want to. I thought I'm progressive to get better, man. I don't want to. I'm sick. I'm tired of staying so low, I guess I would say.

Yeah. So yeah, I just say your best marketing dollars is going to be that website. There's a reason why people, you know, retail stores have a front showcase of their products. And that's what your website is. It's a place for people to validate everything that you've told them on that, that door hanger, everything you've told them on your truck, on your marketing everywhere else. And so I highly recommend it. Obviously I'm talking in my own book here. We have long care web design, we have home service web design. Go on to the site. You can go under our work and see the type of stuff we build. But I just know what the businesses do and no one like the churn on long career web design, home service Web design is so low because the amount of leads that they actually generate and I can retract that all the time, but I am talking my own book. Next caller is coming from 41 7. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

This. Shannon.

Hey, how's it going?

Hey, Great. Wow. I watch a lot of your stuff. All right, got a question for you. I know you use gas mowers. Have you thought about using the Greenworks commercial series?

Yeah, like the bottom line is, you know, switching from gas to electric is simply a fuel source. There are some benefits in terms of, like in terms of the efficiency, you save money on fuel, etc. Right now I don't see a lot of sense for it in terms of making me more money. I can't charge the customer. Most customers are not willing to pay more for it unless they're municipal or commercial. And we don't service a lot of those customers or if they have restrictions around that, then they require it. But I do not yet see the benefit of switching enough for me to be able to the pain of the initial cost. I also, I talked to a company recently that does the batteries and I said, look, the way you guys market this, the positioning of the battery space is really brutal. The reason is because as an operator, the only thing I care about is making more money and saving more money. And if you don't answer that question very simply for me as to whether or not I save money or make more money, then I'm not going to buy. And so battery is, in my opinion, will not make you more money. It does save you money though. And so one thing I recommend, like any battery manufacturers, every time you pitch the fact that your trimmer costs $600 versus the similar thing for $250 or $300 that's gas powered, you should just put right next to it how many hours of operation it requires for you to break even on this investment because it costs more for the batteries. But it also, you save money every single moment that you're driving the thing instead of paying for fuel and using it. So like if I know that after 300 hours I break even on the initial investment expense and additional cost incurred by buying batteries, I might start making a decision. But a lot of these, these manufacturers are still hung up in my opinion, on like, our performance is like this much better and we get so much more volume per.

I just want to know how, how long do I need to use this thing before actually save more money than what I spend on the initial upfront cost. But what was your kind of question behind the question?

Are you thinking about doing so he's mowers. So we, we invested into this company just as an electric mowing company. And so specifically what we're looking to do and we're trying to figure out a couple things here is that these mowers are not, not the Walmart ones you go buy. You don't go buy an 80 volt battery and pop it in. No, these mowers are measured in kilowatts.

Right.

So they are, they're GPS driven. They're, they're Bluetooth and they have WI fi connection and lte. So they're connected sailor. They're the high end mowers. And for the guys who are listening who don't know, the cheapest mower is 13,000. It goes all the way up to $27,000. So for the big one it's like 60 inches. But the point of the story is in your opinion, does it obviously you measure cost dollars and there is maintenance issues that you have a gas that you don't have with electric. For example, when you run mowers on hill gas mowers, the oil runs off to the side of the mower and I mean in the platform you can actually blow the mower longer versus like electric where the power is always there so long as it doesn't run out. You could say that have that argument but, but there's no real maintenance on it. That's if a. So there's, you don't have to worry about the same stuff. You don't have belts, you don't have all that maintenance. All it is is the charge. And a lot of these come up to like the big windows. Up to 24 acres on a single charge. I don't know if you've seen these big, big ones. So the question comes in is, is there really a marketing advantage? I should say the motors run exactly the same and you kind of price out. Is there a marketing advantage to electric when it comes to like hoas and government work where you need to be more quiet like school systems. A lot of school systems can't mow during school time hours because of the fact that the kids are in school. So you have to mow them after hours. Is there an advantage and can you see an advantage into investing in just electric mowers for different types of applications?

Have you already purchased the electric mowers?

Yes.

Yeah. So like at this point we're confirming our Decision. Right. So I would say if you've already purchased them, I would lean into it. I would try to market this to hoa, commercial, municipal. I know from, you know, doing a lot of these bids, they are usually not willing to pay a dollar more. So unless you can make sense of it on an operational perspective from the savings, they don't care. Like, yes, there we one out of, you know, 10 that are like, we only allow electricity. As soon as they do that, they just became super price inelastic or price elastic because so many people don't have electric. So it's very, very uncommon for them to be like, we are willing to pay 25, 30, 40% more for these. For someone that only uses electric, I would also say that there is still significant amount of sound caused from these machines in terms of like the mowers because the blades are turning like blowers, for example. I see a lot of benefit in terms of sound. Like when we video around electric equipment, for example, versus gas powered equipment, we can have an interview and they're walking right next to us. Where's a gas, gas? It just blows everyone's eardrums out. And so I would lean this into marketing. You can definitely use this. Like basically, hey, zero emissions, et cetera, et cetera. The customer's not willing to pay anymore. And so you're basically making a value prop. You're not making a price competitive. And so there's a really good book called Simplify. And I forget the name of the author, but like this is, this would be a version of you are not simplifying from a price perspective. You are from a value perspective. So I think you could definitely market this. And you're going to create a differentiation between you and competitors. That's great. Customers aren't willing to pay for it, they just aren't. And so they want their grass shorter, they want their bushes trimmed. And when they get two estimates, they're going to compare based on price. Now are there going to be the municipalities or the hoa, et cetera, that might, might say, hey, we only allow electric. Yes, but they aren't willing to pay any more for it. So it still will come down to does it make sense financially? So if you've been able to make sense of it financially over pricing a period of time, then great. But I do think you can differentiate. Like I would if I, if I already had bought the equipment, I would definitely use it in my marketing. I would really make a big deal of it. I would show the benefits. I'd show how Much fuel is burnt on their lawn every week. When another contractor comes versus all ours. I would really lean into it because simply because it's a differentiator. You just want to know your usp, your unique selling proposition. For some people it's because they're young. For some people it's because they answer their phone 24 7. For some people it's because they have a great looking website. For some people it's because they showed up in a decal truck. For some people it's because they're all their employees. Speak English like figure out your usp. And if for you, that is, you have battery operated equipment only, that's definitely something I would lean into. Next caller is coming in from 405. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Hey Mike, it's Jake. My name's Jacob. I'm coming to the blue collar. Super excited to see you there.

Let's go.

My question for today is how to get that first employee. So I'm hitting that 10k a month mark in my auto detail, mobile auto detailing business.

Okay.

I'm just wondering what's the best way to get that first kind of first employee and then start like part time and then start moving in the full time and how to do that and get ready for the spring rush.

Yeah. So like if you can have a backlog of work ready to go and I would say for example, as you go into spring rush, like okay, March 1st, I'm going to hire someone. They're going to probably start like March 15th. I'm going to have to train them for a week or two. But starting April 1, I'm going to schedule my jobs as if I have that full time person. Now there's a little bit risky in case they don't work out. But this is also a matter of like how you make sure you're actually profitable very quickly once you get a new employee because you're basically almost doubling your production. So if you don't have enough lead flow, that's like the first thing you're looking at. It sounds like to me you have that lead flow. Especially during spring rush, you can step into that full time employee. And so is your question more revolving on when to do it or is it more about how to find like from a, you know, ad perspective getting employees?

It's a little bit of both. Since this is my first employee, I don't know where to find this person ad and what to do there and when to get them.

Yeah. So a good hack on this one. That you obviously can use. Indeed. It's gonna be a little more pricey, but it's definitely like the go to right now. You can also just do a Facebook post on your Facebook page and basically make it a job post, right? So back in the day Facebook actually had job postings. Now they don't, but turn just make the post into a job listing your description, your compensation, blah blah. And you have a link to your website for them to fill out a form. Or you could do a Google form for all I care for them to sign to for them to apply. And so this works great because then what you can do is boost the post and do it to the like 4, 5, 10 mile radius around your shop and do it to only your demographic you want, for example 20 to 40 year old males. You can just target only those people around your shop. This works really good. Like if you boost that post. I'm not a huge fan of boosting posts in general, but this works. I would do that and then I would do indeed in terms of finding them and then in terms of making sure that once they come on I'd be like, how do I create systems to be able to take the four or five services that are most common, simplify them, standardize them. They have a system for training and then I'd be hiring someone, two weeks later they start and two weeks after that I have a full time schedule booked out as if they're going to be working with me full time. And I would assume they're only about 75% efficient because they're not going to be you. And I would assume that in terms of how many hours you put on their schedule.

Amazing. Thank you so much.

Merry Christmas. You go have a good one. Next one is coming in from 207 and I can't wait to see it. Blue Collar Summit by the way, again, mobile detailers, everyone in home services and blue collar services are welcome. Next 207, go ahead.

Hey, I got a question.

Is there. Are you guys working on.

Intake form?

Okay, you're kind of breaking up. I'm guessing you said about the intake form. So right now we have a work request form that you can customize and if you have your designer from your website, they could customize it and make it their own based on HTML. This is what I recommend is use of actual form builder like Jotform or paper form and then just use Zapier. So that way you can completely do anything you want. Like from those forms you can do everything like your design, match your Website style, et cetera. The current work request form inside Copilot is not out of the box, super customizable. It's like here's the forms and you put it on your website and it's immediately working. And we'll bring those into Copilot, but with Zapier you can just integrate a Jotform paper form, any other form, Google forms, you could just do any of those, but make it very customized in terms of design inside and embedded into your website and it'll bring that lead over in through Copilot. I will also say that the 10 seconds you save in terms of transferring information into Copilot is not worth having a bad looking form. And so I see a lot of people using like the out of the box stuff from CRMs for their forms and I'm like, look, it does take you 10 seconds to copy and paste their info, make the website like optimize for the mobileness of the website, for the design of the website, and then if you have to copy and paste it, it literally takes you 10 seconds. It slows on your site sometimes if you have a plugin from like a different CRM, it has a big field, a bunch of fields, it's hard, doesn't look good on mobile, et cetera. So that being said, this is definitely something on our roadmap and our VP of product actually spent a lot of time at ActiveCampaign working on forms specifically. So they are customizable. You can make multiple work order forms, not just one that'll be coming down the road, but for now you do. We do have a request form. It's not super customizable out of the box and that's why I recommend you use any other form builder you want, even the free ones, and integrated over using Zapier. Next caller is coming in from 91 8. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Call has been forwarded to voicemail. The person you're trying to reach is not available.

All right, next caller is coming. Oh, I. What? Did I like the wrong one? Oh, I. Click call back. Oops, sorry, my bad. That was my bad. Okay, cool. All right, well, if you have a question, feel free to bring in 361-733-3333. I might just accidentally cleared out the queue by doing that. I apologize. But I appreciate you all for being here today. If there's any more calls, this is the number to call. While we're doing that, let's go ahead and quickly review the gifts that we gave out because if you missed it yesterday, landscape business course is now free. Alright, so go to landscapebusinesscourse.com it's completely free. I built this after getting stuck underneath a dump truck in the PTO and for two weeks had to be on the mend after going to the hospital and realizing my business was built on nothing more than me working 80 to 90 hours a week. And in those two weeks I used what I learned, my masters in business administration to restructure the business and create systems. All of that is shared in landscapebusinesscourse.com and now it's completely free. So go check it out. Next caller is coming in from 31 6. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Oh, I can't hear you. Oh, go ahead. Oh, drop the call. Oh no. Try again if you want. All right, next caller I think is already called in for the day but might have another question. Four one seven, welcome the show. Thank you for coming on.

Hey Shannon, got one more question for you.

Go ahead.

Have you got on a quarter four? When their sales drop, we had an idea to come up with picking up poop. Dog poop.

Okay.

So to be specific, I wonder what you think about this. This is funny. So when the quarter sales go down on the mowing because the mowing, the grass is going dormant coming back up. The peak season for picking up dog poop is in the winter because no one wants qualifying, pick it up because it's cold, wet and rainy. The thing is it's only a little bit of branding and no really heavy equipment. So the guys, you could transition in that fourth quarter to where they're instead of picking up, you know, instead of mowing, you can have them start picking up the dog poop. It's really not that much extra. And now you can do a dual marketing concept where you're picking up poop on one end and then mowing, you know, and then cross sell them into the mowing in the next season. What do you think about that idea?

Yeah, so like I'm a fan of it. There's definitely owners inside of Augusta Nation that are doing this and adding pump poop scooping into their, their, their current brand. Here's my concerns again. I'm not saying we shouldn't do this. I'm a fan of it. I like it because simple services. I will say this, the person that was going to do landscaping or mowing usually is not the same employee that wants to also pick up poop. So what it becomes is a separate business. And I've seen This when people have added the service in the past. The reason I say that is because now I have created two different businesses and that is a level of complexity I usually don't want to do. I usually want to add upsells to my existing crew. And the only reason I want to add services to your point is I have a different demand curve for that service now. Poop scoop, et cetera does tend to kind of travel tend up, go up a little bit earlier of a spring rush because the snow melts. People don't want to do stuff, especially in those markets, they don't want to be picking up the poop. So great. Cool. I just generally believe that if you focused on the core product and core services as much as you would making the new wraps, making a new website, making new brand new entity, new insurance, hiring more people that are not in that. In the lawn care landscaping side, if you just focus it on the main business, you'd probably actually make more money. So I'm not opposed to it, but I just generally know that like this market is about 1 25th, about 4% the size of lawn care and landscaping. Even if it doubles, it's going to be less than 10% in terms of the overall size. I also think it's getting very popular right now on social media. It will continue to be that way. It's like if you think low barrier entry for mowing is there, it's just even lower when it comes to poop scoop. So I do think there's gonna be price, a lot of price competition come into the market, but I'm not opposed to it because like lawn care landscaping has a lot of price competition too. But I do believe it's such a simple service. A lot of good marketers will get into it and it'll drive the cost down, it'll drive the customer acquisition cost up. So I'm a big fan of like as an upsell to existing customers. But when you start making it two different businesses, two different phone numbers, two different websites, you just start like, what if I just deployed all that energy and time into the main business and I took my main business from 600,000 to 1 million instead of just focusing on $200,000 extra service over here. I'm not opposed to it. I like it a lot. It's simple services. I'd rather have you do that than some complex other additional service. But I do think there's me price competition. I do think that it is a. The TAM is increasing, but still small. But I am a fan of it over a lot of other services. I just traditionally look for a demand curve that's completely inverse of my main services. So I'm going to talk a ton about this at blue Collar Summit. So again, back to blue Collar Summit, which by the way is our second gift of the day, is this beautiful jersey. So if you sign up to go to blue Collar Summit today, you're going to get one of these bad boys. Everyone that signed up in the past will also get one of these bad boys. But we do need to make the order. So sign up today for Blue Collar Summit and you'll get one of those free jerseys is part when you sign up for registration at Blue Collar Summit. I'm going to break this down tremendously a ton. All the pros, all the cons, you're literally going to have all the different options of what services to add in the winter. And like the pros and the cons of each, there's pros and cons for every single one. And the one I see for the poop removal is the size of the market is increasing. I agree, but it's still very small. The, the barrier to entry to start is even like significantly lower than even mowing and landscaping. And then the demand curve, although it is a little bit better in the winter, which I really, really, really, really like. And this is why I'm a fan of it. It's also not directly inverse. It's not. It doesn't stop during the spring rush. It still is going to add to my spring rush demand. And for that reason we chose Christmas lights. But I do like the service, so please don't take the negative part. But I said it and twist that as a negative thing. Next caller is coming in from 7, 8, 1. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Hey, Mike, I'm a big fan of yours. I've been listening to you since. Oh, God, since you started.

Just, I've been having some problems on the part of dealing with employees.

Okay.

We're just about to. We're just about to close the deal the season at around 700. And just my problem now is just how to understand employees and how to deal with them because I'm very target focused and that causes a lot of rift between me and the employees because I'm the bottleneck of the company, you know, so you have so many employees, I'm sure. How do you deal with so many people and how do you go about that?

Yeah. So first off, I would ask is, do you have pay for performance for your Crew on the field yet or not?

No, we don't use pay for performance. We do everything by the hour. But this season, I'm looking to integrate the paper performance, since we use copilot with you.

So, like, I would like. I know everyone thinks I have, like this one track minor on pay for performance, but I know it did for my business because I was in your exact shoes seven, eight years ago, running an unprofitable business, but more importantly, working 80 hours a week, because I was constantly running after my crew, and I was tired of tracking their trucks, them showing up late, them doing a poor job on customers property, and I had no money. And so P4P was born out of complete frustration around what you're feeling right now. And I just know that if this one thing was changed in your business in the next 12 months, it would completely change the way you feel about your team. Because what you said in terms of how do I manage them, and you feel like you have your target focus and they're not. It's because they're incentivized to work longer. You're incentivized that they work shorter on the jobs cause you make more money per job. And so by aligning the incentive of the crew, they become target focused. Like, if you want to see them also get that same hunger of making more money, give them the incentive, which is the harder you work, the more money you make, instead of the longer you work, the more money you make.

And so, like, as much, go ahead, go ahead.

This year in payroll, I did just. Just under 300,000, you know, and I believe that everybody's getting a pretty good chunk of change. There's five. There's four of us, you know, five with me. So 300,000 between four guys in my. I think, in my opinion, is a good chunk of change, you know, and. But I feel like that's like. I'm just having problems. Like, they're like, oh, you're just. You're pretty much riding us through it. You know, you just. And I've been. Just. That's where I'm stuck in it. And like, I'm trying to. Maybe I was gonna go through that, the paper performance and see where we can do better. And. Yeah, I just. I'm at my west end right now, you know, I get it.

No, man, I. I have been exactly where you're at. I know exactly the pain. And so, like, the only thing I can say is if you're at the point of. At your. At your wit's end, you just have to determine that changing to P4P will be extremely painful. It's gonna require you to change the way you estimate. It's gonna change the have to change the way you communicate with your team, et cetera. But it is so worth it. You will no longer have to micromanage people. And the reason that they feel like you're riding on them is because your incentives are not aligned. You want them to work faster so you make more money. They want the job to take longer so that they make more money. So like they, even if you pay them enough, let's just say right now you're paying them great, great wages, they're still gonna always feel that way. And it'll always require you to be on their tail, be tracking their trucks, be checking on their jobs all the time because their incentives are not aligned. Even if you make the same amount of money on P4P versus hourly, if their incentives are not aligned with getting the job done faster and doing it at a high quality standard, that will not happen. Because we are, we are incentivizing them right to work longer on the jobs. So you telling the do otherwise, that is work faster. You're just constant collision. And so like it will be painful to make sure everything's on budget hours. It will be painful to train your team on what P4P is. This is what will happen in my opinion. You will probably launch this to the team. You will lose one to two employees. The amount of efficiencies gained from the other crew members will be able to get all of the work done. And you'll still pay out that $300,000 in wages, but you'll do it with one or two less employees out in the field. And that money that they otherwise would have made will go to the team members that are now working harder. And they will be able to make even more money by working faster and harder. But more importantly, it'll unlock you and your time to be able to focus on growing the business, on the sales, on the strategy, et cetera. At your size, that's what you should be starting to focus on. You'll only be able to do that though now they're gonna be self regul regulated out in the field. They will want the customer to be happy before they leave because if they don't, they get a yellow slip. They will want to get out of the shop within five or ten minutes because they want to make more money. They will tell you when someone's sleeping for two hours in the truck because it impacts their paycheck. And so as, as much as I've been screaming in the wilderness about P4P for years now, it's very difficult to implement for most people. But if you can get through that pain, the promised land is like 100 worth it. And people always wonder like how you do multiple locations. And like I've no, I don't show it to my locations. I haven't been to my locations for months. One of my locations, I've never even showed up to the shop. But the reason I know that it works is because the crew, when they show up every morning, makes more money if they act in the best interest of the business. And so by doing, by them doing that, I can pay them substantially more. When you can give someone a thousand dollar bonus on a paycheck above what their base pay is, they're gonna, they're gonna operate within that system. And so I would do whatever it takes. Like this is the slow season. Like I would be watching P4P University and like watching the videos, like figure out how you can switch because it's painful. I know that you got to structurally change the way the business operated, but it will completely revolutionize like your relationship with them and the business.

Okay, I gotcha. Yeah, that's, that's where I've been. I'm gonna start looking into your paper performance and start going in there, you know, and start listening to all of that.

Yeah. Wow. I appreciate it, Mike. Thank you very much.

You got it.

Thank you for everything.

Absolutely. Hey, mikeandys.com P4P everyone. It's a free course. You can also get a free month of the software. But like, even though you don't use the software, it's completely free for the, the training. And then if you go on to p4psoftware.com you can book a call with, with Lael and the support team. And like as you're setting up your system and like you're gonna hit bumps like what about the budget hours for this? What happens if, you know, there's a crew leader? What happens if someone doesn't have a driver's license? How do I adjust their base pay? All these little things is why we don't switch to P4P? I know, because I didn't do it for years. Cause of all the little reasons as to why I couldn't do it. What about blade sharpening? What about shop maintenance? What about if there's a really experienced person with someone that's not experienced? These things have been figured out and it will be difficult for you to change, I can promise you that. But it'll also unlock like this, man. It just. If I could just. I do anything to be able to convince people that it will change your business. And so, yeah, please check it out, and I think it'll help. Next question is coming from 9, 7, 8. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Hey, Mike. How you doing, buddy?

Good. How you doing?

I'm doing good. So my name is Hector. I own a company in Massachusetts, Alvarez Landscaping.

And I have a couple questions. Last year we made 550. And. And. And me and my wife were going over. I was telling her because I've been listening to you, watching you, and I was telling her it's time for us to up on the price, you know, and my wife is scared that we're gonna lose so much clients over that, you know, and so I was. We're afraid, we're both afraid that we're gonna lose clients over upping the price. And I was telling her because I've been watching your videos and doing all that. 20, 23, we. We made about 400. 20, 24, we're 550, you know, so I'm assuming 2025, we should be in the 6 to 700 range. So my question to you is when should I know? Or.

You know, I don't even know how to ask the question. Should. When should I not be scared to up the price on my. On my customers?

Yeah. So there's two things I'm looking for. Number one, if you watch the content, you know when to raise prices. And that's when you hit capacity. So when, like right now, could you do $700,000 without buying more trucks and equipment?

Yes. Yes, we have enough room. We have. We have four trucks, brand new trucks, 2023 and up. We got trailers. We got over nine pieces of machines. We have more than enough guys and new equipment to take care on the rush.

Okay, next question is from a cash perspective. Is, are things tight right now or is it decent enough?

It's. It's good. Last year we made 180 profit out of the 550. So you tell me, is that good or not?

Like cash on hand. Like, is there enough in the bank right now where, like, you're just fine getting through the off season. Your wife is comfortable with that amount in the money in the bank. Like, it's from a cash on hand perspective, not profit. Cash on hand.

Okay. Cash on hand. No, because we put everything back in the business. So I told my wife, we're Reback investing. So all the money we got, we bought new trucks, new trailers, new everything. That because I find the old trucks when I first started off and it started breaking down and, and I wasn't being able to service my customers. And like in snow contract we have like commercial buildings right now for snow that we did pay monthly for our services that we need to be there no matter what. And I couldn't afford having trucks breaking down.

Yeah. So there's two ways to tackle cash in hand. That one's tough. Okay, so there's two ways to do this. One is extremely conservative and you're going to make a bunch of money. The second one is going to be aggressive. You're not going to make as much profit, but you're going to grow the business. So here, start with the aggressive one. The aggressive one is that you're going to grow to 700 plus in revenue. You're going to get to capacity because you always raise prices at capacity when you have so many leads coming in, your trucks are full, you have all your equipment's being used five days a week like we're hustling. At that point you raise prices because if you actually need customers to leave in order for you to replace them with new customers that are coming in from new leads. So the ultra growth fast like let's go to the moon situation is next year you're all gas, no brakes, keep growing this thing. The reason I give you license to do that is because you already have the fixed expenses, you already have the trucks, you already have the equipment and you just need the work to get to 700,000, 750,000, etc. The more conservative route here from a cash flow perspective and from a profitability perspective is that you actually sell one or two of the trucks, you get down to capacity so that your three trucks now are being used all of the time and you can only grow to about 600,000 in revenue. Now you're going to hit capacity sooner and by hitting capacity sooner you can raise prices then. Now that will make you much more money profit wise. So if you're really, really cash strapped, I would actually recommend that. And especially if your wife is very, very concerned about this, this is actually the move. Right now you have probably 300,000 plus in excess capacity, meaning you could probably do $800,000 in revenue without buying more trucks and and equipment. Now that makes me scared because it does tell me that if you raise prices and you lose customers, we even have more excess capacity. And so I always am trying to Hit capacity and then raise prices. And so these are the two routes. I go ultra fast. I grow as much as possible because I need to grow to capacity. I'm not going to have a lot of profit next year because you're in growth mode still. And then the other option is you literally let go of one of your trucks, you get to where your capacities around 600,000. You raise prices in next spring rush because you have so many leads coming in and you only have the three trucks and that's going to be much more profitable route because you'll raise Your prices by 15% immediately draw $80,000 to the bottom line.

Amazing. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that. Hope that helped me a lot. I really appreciate you. You do. You're great. You're amazing. All helping us out. I'm signing up for the summit right now.

Hey yo, we'll see you there, brother. Best of luck to you. I can't wait to see you and your wife. You have a good one. All right. Next caller is coming in from 31 6. I think we've already had this person on the show today. Welcome to the show. Thanks for coming in.

Hello, my name is Johnny. How you doing Mike?

Good. How you doing Johnny?

I'm all right. I'm right. I'm actually owner of Outdoor Services here in Colleen, Texas. I know 316 is a in the Kansas area code, but I'm actually here in a military town and I guess my main problem is that I'm not having a lot of customers stick around due to being deployment and.

The market that I'm in right now, I mean you have a couple of big companies that are here, that's been here, that's been established for a good little while. I don't want to quote, unquote, use the term, you know, step on toes as far as, you know, pricing goes and, and you know, I mean taking or stealing as far as, you know, customers from other people. You know, what's the best way to go about strategizing to bring new customers in while adding more services? Because as you stated before, Mercer, more services don't equal profit. So. And I'm actually taking away a lot of services this year including like fence repair, you know, just big time jobs where I'm only a one time guy as far as, you know, a one man band per se. My goal this year is to go 100 to 100k. So I guess my main question is what's the best strategy? And I just posted your I just bought your door hangers your instant quote, door hangers. So what's the best way for me to apply a good business strategy to bring in new leads while taking out the middleman? Because I also use thumbtack as well.

Got it. So first off, you'd mentioned like being concerned about taking customers away from other competitors or is that a big concern for you? Is like because attracting new customers, you're going to get them mostly from other competitors or brand new. They've never used your service before. And so the likelihood is that 89% of your customers are going to come from other competitors. So is that a big concern for you though, like because of the local. Local market?

Yes. Yes. Because, you know, not really anybody here wants to pay more than 55, $65 at a max, you know, per, per mo. And I just don't know prices like that. Being a one, being a one man band, is that not only scalable, but is it profitable to keep, let's say 30 to 60 clients, try to build them up in this coming year while trying to.

Stay profitable by not adding as many services? If I'm acting that correctly.

Yeah. Are you, are you, are you wanting to scale it up, Johnny, or you just want to stay mostly by yourself solo, like in like a year or two?

Man brother, my main thing is it's trying to grow to at least maybe a two or three truck type of crew.

Okay. Yeah, like, you know, because ultimately you could just focus on simple service, simple couple services you want to offer. You've cut out a lot of the other ones. And yes, you might think right now you, the market doesn't sustain 55 or $60 or more than that per cut, for example. And I would agree with you, unless you have so many customers that you need to actually get rid of some of them because more of them are coming on. And so you can fix this problem by getting more leads than you can handle. And so this is where it becomes a matter of like, if you're trying to scale two, three trucks, do you have a website? Do you have a Google listing with a bunch of reviews on it? Do you rank well on Google? Because if you doubled the amount of leads you had, you'd hit capacity so fast you'd either a, have to raise prices above $60 a cut or you would have to go buy another truck and hire an employee and start scaling the business. There's only two ways about it.

Okay? Because my base minimum now is like 55 for you know, for me to, you know, doing any type of mowing, not to Mention I'm a type of company that charges for overgrowth properties that are drastically overgrown. Now initially that's where I see most of my profit margins taking on these big overgrown properties because of the one time initial fee. So that gives me a lot of revenue there. But yeah, my main thing also is just it's the thumbtack guy, you know, the middleman. I know you're big on the middleman at what stage? Because I'm not a software guy, I really don't know how to build, you know, websites and stuff like that. But thumbtack has somewhat quote unquote been okay to me, you know, as when I door hangers flyers haven't really gotten a call back. My revenue was probably lower than a couple grand a month last April or. Yeah, yeah, this, this past April I reached just under $7,000 in a month but my payout to thumbtack was probably maybe under just over a thousand dollars of that. So I mean, I don't know if those are good numbers to keep investing in or should I go ahead and pull off from that and stick with the door hangers the instant.

Yeah, like ultimately these services like thumbtack, these lead services are blood sucking. I won't say what. Like these guys, they kill our industry. They take all the profit out. If you just take what you just said in terms of the amount that you spent to thumbtack versus your revenue, you're spending all of your profit, you will never be able to scale the business. And this is why solo operators get on this drug of thumbtack and these other lead services because they're paying 20, 25% of their revenue is going to thumb. That's all of your profit if you were to scale the business. And the only reason that solo operators and smaller businesses have to use thumbtack is because they can afford it, because they have 50 to 60% margins. But you'll never be able to scale a business where 25% of your revenue is going out the door to acquisition. And so the reason the thumbtacks of the world suck all the profit out is because when you do the door hangers you don't have a website that people go to and actually see validation. And so what thumbtack basically does is create a pseudo website for you and then they suck all the profit out of the leads that they hand to you. And this is why like if you're going to do marketing, $1,000, you're spending every single month on ads just on thumbtack. If you spent half of that like on a long career web design or any other website that looks really good is search engine optimized, mobile friendly. You're gonna get way more leads and better yet in 612 months you'll get more and more leads as you go higher inside the Google rankings. But because we don't have the skill in our industry to market this makes me super mad. Sorry. Because we do not have the skill of marketing in lawn care, landscaping and home services. This is why these blood sucking lead generation companies are able to come extrapolate all the profits out of our industry. The two major profiteers off of our industry is equipment manufacturers and it is lead gen services. Because we cannot a know our numbers and actually be able to talk to account accountant to know whether or not we should take section 179s, whether or not we should actually buy more equipment, whether or not we should actually grow the business. And two, from a manufacturing perspective we have been sold or sorry, that was a manufacturing one because we've been sold on this idea of section 179 and writing things off. Absolute fallacy for most home service business owners. And then the second thing we've been sold on is the idea that you can get leads if you just put money into the machine. And so what we do is we constantly are on this rent, this drip from a lead gen services where we're paying 50, 100, 200, I've seen on thumbtack, hundreds of dollars per lead. They're getting 25% of your revenue, 20% of your revenue. You'll never be able to scale that business. And so what I want to tap into is that as I scale I have a flat fixed expense like a website that is constantly generating me leads. As I rank well in Google it's going to get more and more leads. The thing about thumbtack is they're going to go run ads on your behalf and they're the middleman to drive traffic to you and they're not going to send it to your website. You spending money on them is not going to get you any search engine optimization or clicks to your website. They're going to keep that customer for themselves. They're then going to market to that customer in the future and promote them to your competitors so they can sell that lead again and again and again. This is where the money from home services gets sucked into. I generally believe if you have a website that generates leads then you go out and spend money on marketing. And if you spent 500 on marketing and 500 on a website, you. You get way more leads. And in the long term, you start getting all this organic traffic to your website. Cause you just rank well on Google for when people search in your local area. But because we give this money to Angie's, because we give this money to Facebook, because we give this money to Thumbtack and all these different services, guess what? When you search for your service in your area, they show up first. They show up high on Google cause they're driving all the traffic to themselves. And then we wonder why we can't beat out Yelp and all these other different services when it comes to your search engine optimization is because we're all paying them. We're all paying them to rank well. We're all paying them to get a bunch of clicks to their site, which dries up their domain authority. The reason Augusta Lawn Care gets a location to on the top part of Google within two or three weeks is because we have domain authority. Thousands of clicks every single day. Just think about Yelp, just think about Andy's. Just think about Thumbtack that we are paying to go run ads for you to drive traffic to their website. That's why you can't beat them in ranking.

Get fired up. All right. Four one seven. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Hey, Mike, Jesse here again.

Hey, how's it going, Jesse?

Hey, good. I hope it's okay. I'm calling in again.

Go ahead.

My question, my big question right now, like something I've always wanted to do is turn Tracy, the guy that's been with me for seven years, into a gm.

Okay.

You know, like year after year, we keep talking about it and it's like, what does that look like? And you know, from what I, what I've heard is like they go from kind of a working GM to, and then to a full time gm, probably with like three to five crews. We've got three crews.

Maybe I'm too early on this and I need to be patient with it.

But what's your, what's your role look like once you get a gm? Like, are you going to go to another location? Are you going to focus on sales? What's your role after?

I, I would love to get one location to 1.2 to 1.5, but that would take two or three more crews. But that would take Tracy getting out of the truck.

Right.

From my understanding. But it's, it's like, I just don't know what. I don't know yet. I know I'm going to get there.

Yeah. I would push, I would push your revenue higher until you like you literally can't do all the stuff you need to get done. Because right now you're going to get an admin person. Then you got yourself as an overhead person. If you add him in, you do really need to get to 1.55 million to make sense of that structure of three full time overhead people. And so I would personally say I'd probably go into profit mode for one year, then take that money and you're kind of, you've been profitable this past year. So like you might be able to do it now, but like it's a matter of. Then you need to make that big step. You basically need to get the trucks, you need to get the crews, the extra crews so you can produce 1.2 to 1.5 million in revenue. And so either a, I would next year do like admin person and you be very profitable. 800,000, 850. Then I would then take that, all that cash and know I can go buy the trucks and equipment required to get to 1.5 and immediately get Tracy in as a GM and make a big jump. That's probably I would do because I.

Want the cash totally out of the truck.

Well, at 1.5 you're gonna need. Yeah. At 1.5 you're gonna have an operations person that's probably him. And then you are gonna be your likely the salesperson and then your admin person is gonna be full time. And so that. To make that more.

That was my next question.

Yeah, like that's how it's usually gonna look at 1.5. And I would just say like from a conservative perspective, I'd probably spend one year in profit mode at your current size with just you and an admin person. Because as soon as you add him in, you're taking one of your best people out of the field and you're making them overhead. And as soon as you do that, you basically gotta go from 800,000 to 1.5 to make any more money. Like profit wise.

Yeah. And then it's like location. So it's like next year what I'm looking at is just stacking up cash, figuring out all the changes that I currently have made and letting that run smooth for a year.

Yep. And then jumping, cutting out anything that as from an operations perspective is going to be difficult for him. So anytime the guys are calling you about a truck or a cool equipment or this customer, like I'm just trying to remove all of those variables that when he Gets in that position, he can just know he's the go to person for all operation stuff. He's a guy at the shop in the morning making sure all the trucks are good to go. He's making sure the equipment's ready to roll. He's doing customer callbacks. He's like the operations person. But to make that easier for him, a have plenty of cash on hand so you can grow quickly because your full time job will now be sales. And then secondly, I would be simplifying that role as much as possible and reducing any of the potential landmines he might run into.

Yeah, that makes sense. And then I just focus on sales and.

Architect.

Exactly. You got it.

Yeah. And P4P, that's the other thing. It's like I've been talking about it for two or three years now and.

It'S like the, the one thing I realized I couldn't set it up last year. I mean I had enough going on. But it was, we weren't tracking our hours, our man hours and we've done that very consistently all year. And it's really changed everything. And.

You know, we can, we can see what's going on that way and be able to raise prices and know how to raise prices. What other things like that could you would you say is super important before you just, you know, totally switch over to P4P? Like you have to track your man hours on every job.

But I guess like another question is like, does P4P work for like no removal and you know, leaf removal? Like it's totally different. Can you do P4P for just part of the year?

Yeah, you can definitely take a piece of certain services and not do P4P. Like we usually wouldn't do it for snow removal, but in my market again, we would only plow two or three times a year. I didn't want P4P. I didn't want the guys moving fast. I just paid them exorbitant amounts of money on base pay if they didn't and with bonuses if they didn't get damaged cases. So you can take bits and pieces of it. I would say this. There are going to be a hundred reasons as to why you can't do B for P. Oh, like what about leaf removal? What about this? What about like there's always going to be a reason that's why people don't pull the trigger on it. But like just do it. Like it is so true. Like just do it and then deal with the consequences of like, yes, an employee will be unhappy because you bid 20 budget hours and it took them 30 and they're like, there's no way I could have done that faster. And you're like, you're right. And the next job you're going to do it in 10 hours. And I budgeted it for 30 and you're going to make a killing. And so the next thing that I would say to answer your question would be like accurate estimating in terms of budget hours is the thing that's going to help integrate P4P better. If you're inaccurate on your budget hours, it messes up the guy's pay. And if you mess up the guy's pay, they don't trust the system. Next caller is coming in from 205. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Hello Mike, how you doing? This is Jose from Champions Landscaping out of Alabama here in Birmingham. I just had a question on. Well, how. A couple questions. We did 700k this year and we're shooting for profit mode. 2025 at 750 and I want to get a GM in place. Would you recommend.

Just one GM? Do you think it's something that one GM can handle.

And go to 20? Well, 2026, get a GM in place. Would YOU recommend. Do you think 1 million is something that a GM can handle? Or do you think I need to be looking at office person and the gm?

Yeah. So if you look at sales, operations, admin is a three function of the business. If you're going to hand this business off and you're not going to be involved, you're going to need an admin person and a GM person role at that 750,000 level. I really like that level because the GM can handle operations and sales. Typically as soon as you start pushing that million marker, I consistently see you needing another person for just sales and an operation role has to be split. So I'm a big fan of taking what you currently have, staying in profit mode, hiring one full time office person and then a general manager. That general manager is responsible for everything that doesn't have to do with administration. So all operations, all sales. Now the question I always lead to though is like what's your role going to be in the business?

So I wanted to just keep as a passive sort of income and just, yeah dude, just keep us passive sort of income and want to get into real estate and other business ventures.

So you throw this thing into profit just like you have like throw this thing into profit mode, raise your prices, do not buy more trucks, do not buy more Equipment keep your crew size under 8 so that general manager can actually effectively manage them. If you start needing 10, 12 people to make that 800,000, it's going to drive that GM. Like the level of competency for that GM has to go dramatically up because difficult to manage that number of people. And if someone's listening to this right now, like, well, I'm an owner and I have 15 employees. Yeah, you're the owner. Once you hand this off to a general manager, I consistently see if they have more than eight people in the field. And there's plenty of studies to say that six to eight people is how much someone can effectively manage. If you start having the 10, 12, 15 people out in the field, the one general manager alone usually cannot handle it. And so if you're going to, you know, try to make this passive, my current situation would be like admin person, full time general manager over everything. I'm trying to get where no more than eight people are needed in the field, which usually means you're going to have to raise prices or to hit that marker. And that's usually our 7 to $800,000 business is perfect in my opinion to make that model work. Next caller is coming in from nine eight four. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Hey Mike. So I called in earlier but I have a new question that I just thought of.

Go ahead.

So piggyback off a previous call about somebody that was having a hard time with the phone calls and such because they're busy doing the work. Somebody in this situation because I know you're running the MAX AI, can you like give any statistics on what your experience with the MAX AI is and how customers are reacting to it?

Yep. By the way, I'm going to drop people out of the call once they answer a question because there's, they're piling up. So feel free to keep calling in but I don't want people have to wait 30 minutes plus in these call queues. So yes, in terms of if you do this, you will have.

10 to 15% of people will be unhappy about it. They don't want to talk to a robot. That number will continue to go down the same way that when you required credit cards on file. There's people that used to give, have a problem with it and now it's basically standard. So that will continue to go down if you are using something out of the box. Typically it's extremely robotized. It's a long delay like you're, it's very, it's very Painful to sometimes talk to them. And so I would be careful about using something out of the box right now. I'm always monitoring what they're doing. We have full customization of the code, so, like, we have a big leg up. But as an independent operator, you're not going to have that leverage to spend on getting your own, you know, setup. So I would just keep watching it. I would say for now, I would really prioritize just answering the phone. And you could have it where even if you had a call service that only if you missed a call, they would pick it up. Super valuable. Even if you're paying 2, 3, 4 dollars a minute, like it's worth it. Because only 37% of people that when they hit voicemail are going to leave a message. That means 63% of your leads that call you after hours or when you're busy, you're missing that, that customer. And yes, you can call them back, but the likelihood of them picking up is low. And so I would say before you start doing the AI stuff, I would currently it's going to be cheaper and it's going to be a better customer experience. If you're getting a few calls a day that are missed, have it forwarded to some sort of remote call service. There's Call Boss, there's Jill's office. Are they the best? No, but they're going to answer the phone 100% of the time instead of 37% of the time you getting the actual information from that customer. And so I would just say that would be my general kind of overview of AI. I think it's going to take over the next five years until 30, 20, 30. This will eventually become commonplace unless you have the money to spend a lot on customization of the model. I would just wait for the technology to get to you and in the meantime, pay for missed calls to just be forwarded to a call service. That would be my recommendation, like bluntly. And I'll tell you when that changes. And when I think some of these out of the box stuff is good enough. But if the 37% is not, at least 70%, by having a robot answer the phone instead of the voicemail, it doesn't go from like 37% to say 70%. You just, it's not worth it. And a lot of times I see out of these box services, the, the, the amount of people that leave a information with the robot is like 40 or 45%. So it's like, yes, you're going to get leads. They would have Just left a voicemail otherwise. So that's where, like what we're always measuring. And until we got above 70%, we never rolled out Max AI because like, there's not enough benefit to actually implementing AI in if they're getting the same amount of people leaving information as they would otherwise with just a voicemail. Next call is coming from three six zero. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Oh, oh, sorry. You've been waiting a long time. 360, you might need to know. There you go. What's up? How's it going?

Good. Mike. Hey, Mike. So this year my name is Hector, and this year we doubled our profits or we made double than we made last year, but I just feel like it didn't. I don't see much profit.

Yep.

So I just, I'm struggling with that. And the.

So you doubled your revenue, but there's not a lot of cash in the bank.

Yeah, not that I, that I would like to see. Like this year we're 420 and last year we made 220.

So I'm just trying to figure out where I am lacking. Where, like where. How can I figure out, like, why there's not enough profit.

Yeah.

So I know for sure I'm gonna raise profits for next year, but.

I just don't know if you could help me out with that.

Totally. So, like, first off, I would say don't beat yourself too much. You basically doubled the size of the business. Your growth rate's like over 90%. So growth sucks cash. Anytime you're growing by more than 50% year over year, I consider you in a high growth stage. So you probably have to buy another truck. You have to buy more equipment. If you just took that cash alone out of your bank or put it back in your bank account, you'd probably be feeling okay. That's an extra 30, 40, 50 grand that's in your bank account. The thing that's really deceiving is you look at your P and L like, man, I should be profitable. Your profit and loss statement does not show asset purchases. So if you bought a truck, it doesn't go in your P and L, it goes in your balance sheet. And so you look like, man, I see all this profit, I'm supposed to be profitable on my profit and loss statement. Well, your truck was purchased on your balance sheet. And if you pay it with cash, there's not even interest expense coming out of your P and L. So like, growth sucks cash in so many different ways. That'd be my first Thing. The next thing I would say is, like, what you're determining now is like, what is your pain threshold for growth versus profit? Because if you're going to keep growing super fast, next year you're going to do 800,000 revenue. You're probably not going to have a lot of cash in the bank. But if that's so painful, like not having that cash and it stresses you out, then we spend a year, we raise prices, we don't buy more trucks, and we stay in profit mode. And so it's really. This is not a matter of, like, why is this happening? Is a matter of you're growing, therefore you have less cash. If we stop growing, we hit capacity and raise prices, this pain will go away. But is that pain of not growing greater than the pain of not having money in the bank? That's really only a question you can decide on. Does that make sense?

Yeah. Okay. Okay.

I guess a lot of people have asked. It is like, when they figure out if you buy another truck.

Yep. So when you're at capacity. So when you're using that truck every single day when you got. It's filled with employees, and the only way to get more out of that truck is working on the weekend. Once you have so many customers that's happening, then you're at capacity, at capacity. You now have the determination, do I stay in growth mode and get another truck and keep getting more customers, or do I stay in profit mode? And that's going to be determined by answering the previous question, which is what's your pain tolerance and your threshold that you're willing to have in terms of risk when it comes to growing the business? Next callers from 401. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Hey, how's it going, Mike? Thank you so much. So I was giving a call. I know you did a whole video on this before, but. So I'm going from one location where we're doing $3 million, but we. We do a residential fencing.

Okay.

And I'm opening up two new locations, so I'm going to Connecticut and Massachusetts. So. And I really couldn't grasp the concept of, like, the accounting. Like, how should I set up the accounting? Am I overthinking it or what would be the best bet? Because I do want the ability in the future to sell off, like, an individual location.

Got it. Yeah. So you're probably overthinking it. Almost everyone does. I did when I first started multiple locations. Generally, what's going to be the. The way I recommend is An S corp on the top or your holding company underneath that, you're gonna have three different LLCs. So that way down the road, if you wanted to sell one of them off, you could sell one of the LLCs. So, you know, from a financing perspective, you're still just gonna file one tax return with the S Corp, but you could break those LLCs off because they have different EIN numbers down the road if you want to sell them off.

Okay. And not. Not dba. So open up complete businesses. So the feedback I'm getting from people is, well, that llc, you won't be able to get your own credit for each llc. Or will I be able to?

So, two things. First off, the reason I stated to do the separate LLC instead of a DBA is twofold. One, you said it could be out of state. Second is because you stated that you wanted to potentially sell them off. It's going to be easier to sell them off if they're separate entities than if they're just DBAs under one entity. The second thing is, in terms of. What was that last question you said? I was going to address that last part.

Yeah, like, like, like getting their own credit card that way.

Yeah.

So, yeah, like you can.

Yeah. Like, are you worried about building their credit, like the business credit score, or you worry about getting actual credit cards and opening accounts?

Yeah. So opening credit cards because we're able to like get back 5% cash back on things like that and do things like that.

You know, if you have a different LLC with different EIN numbers, you'll be able to open up credit cards underneath each one, have different bank accounts under each one. I would recommend keeping them all under like one bank so you can easily transfer money between the two. Do journal entries of say, your general liability, which might be over the S Corp or admin costs that are split between the entities, but you can absolutely open up credit different credit cards underneath each of the LLCs. And that's why also having the different LLCs allows you to have a different EIN number and be able to open up separate, you know, checking accounts, credit cards, etc. For each location.

And you would say brand new Google my business account. And how about. Should I do brand new a Facebook page or just based that off of the one that we have network?

Are you. How far away are these locations? Like from a driving perspective?

Yes. 50 miles.

Okay, that's not too bad. I'd probably keep it under one. Do like a different, like branch locations. So like home service, web design, we do this quite often. And that Is like have different branches underneath in different locations. For a website you could do that. And then just be cognizant of the fact that I'd probably be doing different Google listings for each. Cause 50 miles I wanted to be showing up in those markets separately. But I'd probably do different Google listings each for one quote location on my main website, but it'd be tied to one. So the domain authority within that triangulation of the those three locations would be improved.

That makes sense. Okay, awesome. Thank you so much, Mike. Thanks for everything you do.

You got it? Absolutely. All right, everyone give me 10 seconds. I've got to grab my charger because we're about to die and I'm at 2% on my laptop. So hold the phone. We're coming back. We're coming back. All right.

We're almost back.

Okay. All right, all right, all right. We're back in business. Gotta get the old charger situation.

We're all going on almost three hours here. So this is by the way, the jersey that you can get if you sign up for blue collar summit today. If you've already signed up, you're gonna get one of these. But.

We need to get how many we need to order total. This is a large, I'm like an extra small. Alright, so no judging. Here, put this thing on. You're gonna get this jersey. Come on over to blue collarsummit.com. sign up today. Let me get my charger set up here. Give me one moment. And if you haven't already heard, landscapebusinesscourse.com is 100% free.

I got something cool coming for non green industry folks. Looks like I'm going to copy up here. I think my camera is getting overheated. One second here. We're going to switch to.

Boom.

No, not.