Mike Minutes Mastermind 04/14/22

This recorded mastermind session (Mike Andes, 04/14/22) is a practical Q&A covering short-term operational fixes and longer-term product/tech goals. Key points: batch estimates within a workday (not necessarily one day/week) to preserve close rates; franchisees currently lack a granular invoice breakdown because multiple disparate platforms (payroll, QuickBooks, Service Autopilot, Super/Zooper) are not integrated—software integration is the long-term fix; card-on-file policies can be enforced but current systems (Service Autopilot) allow a hole where customers accept estimates without a card on file; to address Command Center service failures Mike outlines a three-step recovery: 1) stop employee turnover (plug holes), 2) eliminate backlog (reduce stress), 3) fix systems and training (longer-term changes). He describes the current training ramp (~3 weeks for virtuals + 3–6 weeks to proficiency locally), specific Service Autopilot gotchas (call notes vs calendar events affecting dispatch), and many examples of unclear estimate note formatting (use titles, double-parens for pricing-only, specify supplies/hours) to reduce variability and Command Center workload.
Chapters
Good morning. Destination. It's rock and roll here. I got some several questions that came in and then I actually have some stuff I want to go over I think can be really beneficial. So let me pan through some of these questions. I haven't looked at any of these yet, but let's go ahead and check them out. Share my screen. Right.
Let me zoom in a bit so you guys can see better. All right. This is from Max Harwood. Cool. I try to batch tasks whenever possible. Would you recommend just having scheduled estimates on one day per week and leaving the rest of the week for drive bys? It's kind of a pain to have scheduled estimates with an hour or so of dead time in between. So I'm guess I'm trying to figure out ways to avoid that and group them together. Yeah. So obviously again it just ties back to close ratio. Your close ratio is going to be lower if someone has to wait a week to get their estimate. Because by the time you get there, say they call on a Saturday, they get set up for an estimate and you only take estimates on Fridays, for example. Literally by the time you show up, they could have had someone show up, give an estimate, estimate scheduled, they're on the job. Like literally the job could be done within a week. Right. So you know, it's really just a matter of sacrificing the speed for what is more efficient, honestly. And that's why growth sucks cash. Because if you're trying to grow more, you're going to be inefficient in the fact that you're probably going to do what you just talked about and have an estimate in a couple hours of dead space. Another estimate, what I would recommend is try to batch in terms of on a day. Right. So if you're going to work from, you know, seven till three, then do your estimates from three to six, for example. That might make a little more sense. This all ties back into two having a smaller area and more dense route. So that way when estimates are a certain area you're servicing, they're relatively close all the time. So it's also important there. But I wouldn't do a whole just one day a week, honestly. Unless you are so booked out with work you just struggling to get the work done. That's when like last spring, several owners either turned estimates off or they just put all of them on one day. And that's fine, but you're going to have a lower close ratio because people will finish the job basically before you even get there. I would batch in, turn Inside of a day. First for sure.
How can we get more detailed breakdown for invoices from the franchise? There are a lot of ambiguity how things are tracked for us to be charged. And when asking for clarity, there's no record of how it's calculated. Last month I did more tasks and service offer than ever and was charged the most. I've been charged by command. This is before the price increase was in effect as well. I have no idea what costs so much money if payroll, invoicing, scheduling, P4P et cetera. Yeah, so this is something that is a manual process right now and only software can fix this. And the reason that it isn't detailed right now is matter because all of these different things happen, different software platforms. So payroll, QuickBooks, P4P 4P software estimates being sent out from service, all power zooper. There is nothing that ties them all together. And so to track every single task and some of these tasks take one to two minutes. Like yesterday I was doing training and we created an estimate in a minute and 40 seconds. Like if it was then I had to then make sure I kept track of which task and what I was doing and screenshots or whatever. Like you would double the time it takes for every single small task. So the friction and the time spent recording has to be lower than the time it that it. You know, it has to make sense financially because I don't want to be taking that one minute and 40 second estimate that's created and sent out and making a three minute estimate because we are trying to record and keep track and stuff. It doubled the cost of everything. So that's defined balance that we're trying to walk down the road. The software is the only way to fix this and that is a matter of having everything integrated. And this is the steps we're trying to make with super because with super, every time someone is in an account is tracking who it is, what they're doing, etc. So this is obviously a long term goal and be able to see live time what you're spending. But it is going to be a tough one from a software standpoint because there's so many things then they go into email and they're doing your automations and when they're doing all those different things for you, it's very tough to track without being extremely inefficient. And so that's why most like call bosses, et cetera, they'll do blocks, you pay for blocks of time, like an hour at a time instead of by the minute. Because they would do a better job of tracking but they're going to spend a good chunk of that time just recording what they're doing. And so there's, there's that balance and, and I and long term goal is for you to be able to see a live dashboard of what's happening, what your bill is costing you. Oh wow, this is long. What is CC procedure? Procedure for asking card on file. Does it come across as this is mandatory or is it more just a recommendation? Had initial mode a day and took eight hours. And a client called freaking out says she cannot pay. This is bound to happen more. So a over the phone estimate can only get on the schedule if they.
Have a car on file. Now how this person could have got through is if this is sent to them and they click accept.
And so if they would have got the estimate and it was, you know, you drove by, you gave them estimate or even if it was a matter of done over the phone, they sent the email they didn't accept. This is the one hole right now is someone can get over the phone estimate and say great, thank you. Can you send that in my inbox? And they send it to them and then they click accept there. That is the one hole with service autopilot that someone could still get in potentially without having a car on file. But if they're going to accept on the phone, we can make sure that card is on file. It's over there. I have no agent flying. Yes. So this is where if you want to Nick, you can absolutely make it where someone's card has to be on file in service all pot before you go to their house. And this is potentially something you would want to check. But right now the process of requiring someone to set up an account inside service autopilot with the security questions and everything prior to service being set up if we're not on the phone is brutal. It's a huge friction in Zooper. This is not a big issue. But to expect someone to get server set up to answer five security questions, set up their account, username and password with a very, very complicated password structure and then add their card, toggle it to being on all of that is friction. And that's yeah, obviously we can't fix that. So that's why we're switching to Zooper. But I would say double check that they have a card on file prior to doing a in first time mo simply because they can get the phone on the over the phone, get the estimate over the phone and then say great, send that to My inbox or if we try to sell and they're like no, just send it to me. I'm going to make a decision tomorrow. Well then they can go in the estimate, click accept. And so that's when I would double check your initial mos and just make sure they have a card and file or get that from them. That's the one time.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. But yeah, it's exactly what we just talked about, I think. Yep. Just like fish put in there. Yes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I 100% agree with all of this. And so it's just a matter of this is the one hole for the video get through and what I would recommend. If you're going to do this, you could make your several. Several owners have already done this and that is make your email more poignant when they accept the job that says credit card is required and to be on on the schedule and or just double check, you know, prior to the day starting, making sure that any first time mo's have a card on file. But again this is the one, the one hole with service autopilot. Someone can accept a job over the phone or not on the phone but get the estimate sent to them except. And then there's no card requirement. Whereas in super you can just require cards to be on file.
Again, a lot of requests for treatment, some for mowing and hardly any for cleanups. Any suggestion on what I can do to get more cleanups to fill the schedule while the recurring work trickles in?
I know Max, on your site specifically we change the verbiage a little on landscaping, but we change it to landscape maintenance. So I don't think that would be a big issue.
I would definitely say try to do one click estimate emails to the mowing customers. A lot of people will contact a lawn care company and not realize that we do all these other services. So definitely use one click estimate emails as a way to pitch those to mowing customers and treatment customers and make sure that they know that you do the property cleanups.
I have a difficult question for you. Okay, here we go. From my analysis it appears that at the root of the issues we are having is the fact that you that that you thought that you were going to sidestep the employment crisis by over hiring. This did not work. And then was just exasperated by the quick adding of so many more franchisees to serve. This culminated with the service at CC suffering and ultimately ended with an abrupt stop to certain CC services. How should we look at this as a franchisee that was sold Something that is now, now not being offered. Why should this not hurt our trust in you and the franchise that we bought into? What are you going to do to repair the trust? Telling us that we don't trust you. Telling us that if we don't trust you that we should leave. Seems like a response from someone that doesn't know how to repair the trust. Okay, cool. So whoever you are, specifically, I know this is anonymous. Feel free if you want to text me directly or email me directly, I'd be fine. So, yeah, let me go through this. So I actually had some notes I already had on this. I didn't see this question before. So.
We talked a little bit of the roundtable. So first, I hope that you, you are able to watch this. And the recording was just made available this morning because the YouTube issues. But yeah, so let me kind of go through this one. So the first thing is what was happening at Command center is no different than most of our locations are going to, especially the larger ones that have a lot of employees, and that is turnover, people leaving, etc. And so when that's happening, it's not an immediate fix. And so we had a three prong like my, my process for switching things around. And as I said, that's all I've been focusing on. But my, my three step process is somewhat counterintuitive because you can't just fix something like this on a dime. And so.
The first step was stopping the holes and that is basically stopping people from leaving. Right. And so we truly had enough people, enough experienced people. And one of the biggest struggles right now that we're going through is the fact that all the virtuals are just a couple months into things. They do not know very complicated structures of how things happen and when customers call it very complicated. Especially in service autopilot, where there's just so many ways to do things. And I'll explain one of those in just a second. But the first step was stopping the whole stop people from leaving. And that was when we took the abrupt action three or four weeks ago and made that decision. Because the first thing that has to be done is stop people from leaving. And so this is, this goes for any, any of us that are struggling with people leaving right now. The first thing you have to ask is why is people, why are people leaving? Why are they leaving? And you got to stop that first. You can do all, you know, keep filling the bowl with water all day long, but if there's a hole at the bottom, you know you're going to Wear yourself out trying to hire more people and they're just going to keep leaving. So the first question you have to ask yourself, like, why are people leaving? And then just be brutally honest with yourself. And I knew several weeks ago that was because the amount of stress that people were under and the compounding effect of people leaving, the most experienced, putting more and more pressure on the people that were training the people that were experienced, and then putting people that were new into places where they were inexperienced for and not confident in their abilities. So the first step is plug those holes. And so that's why we have to take really, really fast action a few weeks ago to stop that from happening. The second step that I've done here is eliminate the backlog. And that's what we've done over the past three weeks. And, you know, now we are sending estimates within 24 hours and by next week we have more training that's being done and we're going to be work. We've worked the backlog. We caught up. And that's important because what was causing all the stress was the backlog. Like when you come into a Monday morning and have thousands and thousands and thousands of emails to go through and, and at the same time, you can't even get to them because the phone's ringing too, too much and then people are leaving, that compounds that problem. That just makes people want to leave. And I can't blame them. So the first issue was fixing that issue of people leaving, like just capping that by making really fast action I did not want to make. And then second it was eliminate the backlog so there's not as much stress. And that's what we've been working on the past few weeks and we've been able to do. And by next week it's going to be. We're going to be right where we want to be at. And the third one, that's when. That is when you fix the system and actually make changes. If I would have done some of the things that we're going to be starting next week and next few weeks, if I would have tried to, like, fix things, Liz would have tried to fix things at command center, we would have lost more people because change on top of the compounding pressure of more and more backlog, it will crush people. And so I know it's been like, you know, four weeks since I really jumped in on this problem and we've all been talking about it, but really you can't just switch something like that so quickly. Like you're not going to change the culture and you're not going to be able to change the dynamics of what's happening that quick. And so whether you have five employees and you're burning through them constantly, a lot of times the reason is because everyone jumps to step three first it's like let's make changes. Like no changes aren't required. We need to figure out how to stop people leaving. Then when you work through the backlog so there's not much stress which is causing people to leave, then we focus on changing stuff. And so.
What we're currently in is step two and we're almost complete that to work into the backlog. And then step three, fixing the system is when we start really digging in on a lot of stuff and we know what those things are and we will be working through them. I mentioned a couple of them last week in terms of being able to track who does what. Estimates insert service autopilot, which is a breeze in super, but has been very difficult inside service autopilot. So we are making those changes. But those changes cannot be made until first and foremost we stop people leaving and secondarily we reduce backlog dramatically. So I hope that made a little bit of sense. But I think that three step would work for any. I don't care if you have three employees and you just cannot get them to stay or if you have, you know, a command, 30, 40 people.
It's a matter of first you have to stop people from leaving and that might mean cutting out services in your business. It might mean firing some really tough fires. I know that a couple of people in popular mind, they fired some people recently that very difficult to do in this time of year and they knew it was going to be issues. But you have to do that first and then that will usually create more backlog that'll even put you behind more. But then you got to work through that, then you can start. Okay, we're going to change this, we're going to change that. Like let's introduce all these changes because the changes will create even more stress. And so that's kind of. I hope that answered the question a little bit better. But whoever that was, feel free to direct message me as well.
And we can definitely go through that stuff. And then in terms of this is probably the same person here. One question. Hiring at cc, how are they trained?
Cool. Yeah. So this is, this is in relation to the training command too. And so right now there is a three week process for virtual to get up and running and then locally it takes Usually three weeks and then another three to six weeks to get them really proficient at full service things. And so right now what's been happening is people have been get three weeks of training, are on the phone and they have to take the questions and go for it because everyone is sewing. So it was so behind and the backlog was so thick that there was no matter of like, okay, let's stop here and let's break down this thing and like, let's go through this call. There was no follow up because the backlog was so big. So again, that step two is what we're working through now and step three, which I believe will start next week is going to be the first. Okay, let's actually break down what's happening. Let's break calls apart, let's do more internal training. But there's no point in doing internal training when the people that you're taking out of to do internal training is creating such an amount of stress on the people that are working that they start leaving. It's just a vicious cycle. And so none of these decisions are hard or easy. Um, and regardless of whether it's myself at command or you and your business with three or four or five and 10 or 15 employees, all of this is what works.
And that is you have to plug the holes first, work through the backlog, then change, make changes. And so we're almost there to make the changes and we know what those things need to be and I'll convey those as we do them. But the big part of it is once someone's trained up, it's not like within a matter of a month even they're going to know every single scenario. And especially in service autopilot service all part is amazed. For example, Liz mentioned this morning on the Facebook group about people getting calls but then not showing on the dispatch board. The reason for that is because inside service autopilot, when you create a ticket, it asks a call, an event, sorry, a call, a note or a.
A calendar event. And the problem is when you get a call in, if you do a phone call, that's great just to track that something happened. But if you don't do an event, it's not going to go on your dispatch board. And so you don't get notified either. So what was happening is people were making call notes or call tickets instead of tickets that had a calendar attached to them. And what's tricky is inside of the call note, it still has a date. And so that seems like, oh, there's a right, I'm assigning it to somebody, everything looks good. But if it's not a calendar event versus a ticket that has a call note, like, so, for example, in Zooper, inside of someone's profile, they have what's called call notes. They type in there, and when they click save, you get an email with those notes inside. So you don't need to go to your dispatch board. You don't need to go. And, you know, it doesn't even be dispatched. There's like one click. Like, type notes, click, and then you immediately get an email versus in service autopilot, which is right now. Take notes, create a calendar event, dispatch that calendar event, assign it. Like, there's too many steps for you just to get what's happening. And so.
You know, obviously, internal training is what's going to fix this stuff, and that's what we have to start working on. But I also cannot have it where we are three, four days behind on estimates like we were several weeks ago, whereas now we're sending them out within 24 hours. So we're working through that backlog we're getting. We're almost there. And then we can start honing in on internal training and keying out people that we see specific issues with and getting up even higher standards of training. So hope that made sense. All right, couple things. Let's go through these questions that are coming in and then. Yeah, Evansville. Wait, let me just make sure I answer this question. Well.
I felt like there's one part here I didn't answer.
What? Okay, so let me just bring this one up. I didn't feel like I answered this fully. I don't want to feel like I'm skirting the issue.
Yeah. Okay. Why is this turn? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So.
I feel like we kind of talked a lot about this at the roundtable.
Yeah, I feel like we talked about this. So what. What did you. Yeah, so I'm gonna talk about the roundtable. Like, I'm not really gonna go into why. Why someone should trust me or anything like that. It's a matter of, like, I hope my actions over the next few weeks and months kind of prove that. And ultimately it comes to Command Center. It's not regulated. It is not. You don't have to do it. It's a matter of a value proposition. And that value proposition has been hurt in the past few weeks and months. And I'm working on changing that. And it's not an immediate fix. And I think that anyone with a good number of employees knows right now how difficult it is just to keep and retain and really a command center. Until someone's been here three to four months, they are still learning because there's so many systems they have to learn and we're trying to obviously the long term fixes be able to have control of our software. It's to be able to integrate and those are things we're working on. At the same time we have to plug the holes, we have to work through the backlog and then we have to create better internal training. So whoever that was, feel free to contact me directly. I have no problem. I just felt like we contact went over quite a bit at the offset. All right, let me go through these questions here. Just wanted to share when talked to all my crew about the delayed spring rush. Said it may take three weeks or three months to have a big influx come address the emotions first and then came in with logic. I had another company willing to hire them if they didn't like our current position being slow. At the moment everyone was okay with 25 to 30 hours and want to stay because they see Gus as a future other than permanent grunt labor. Great. I know you guys have a ton of rain there, so I'm hoping that is able to change there. Facebook user was a hard pill swallow. Had to backtrack on some promises but I feel so much better and the culture is already better now. The expectations were reset and completely straightforward. Okay, I have to check Facebook to see who wrote this. Just I have context. Give me one second. Boom.
Let's see here. Oh, Connor. Got it. Okay, same person. Okay.
What'S the goal after 100 franchises? Honestly, the metrics of number of locations is very unimportant to me. We just have to focus on making it very, very good and that will take care of itself.
What should the goal for solo operation area revenue wide? What should the goal for a solo operation revenue wide? The goal for solo operators just to get in the door and I scale up.
Very quickly and there's already a couple of the solo operators that are going to be scaling past 20,000amonth in revenue and they just started.
And so the goal is to get in the door with solo operator but ultimately still scale up your business and.
Make a larger company. Okay, cool. I had a couple things I want to share and then we'll call it a day. Give me one second here.
That'll be it for today for questions because I know we're running out of time but let me go through a couple things here because I know I'm getting a lot of Text people asking, hey, what can we do? Make it. What can we do to, like, save money at command or make it faster for them or make it better for them? So let me go over a couple things real quick of stuff that I saw yesterday. Stop this one and share this one. So this is going to take me a little bit of time here to share this screen, but hopefully it makes sense. Can you just see this? Okay, so this is not to pick on anyone. So if you see like, hey, this is my account. Don't worry about that. Oh, sick. I'm showing someone's name. Give me one second here. I didn't want to do that. Give me one second. No one here needs public humiliation.
Give me one second here. I don't mean this to embarrass anyone. This is a matter of us all just learning. Let me just show this.
Screen here. Okay, great. So this is, for example, yesterday or day before. This is a few of these that popped up. I'm just. I'm just taking a picture with my phone of a screen. So this is an estimate. Notes for crew. Hit fenced in area with weed killer hard. Client needs to be notified day prior to coming. So this is the type of thing that is very difficult for entry level or someone who's been here for a month or two or three months, Command center, to understand what you're trying to tell them. So there's multiple things that could be here. Like, so making these notes clear is important. Am I showing this? Good. All right, so notes for crew. I'm assuming this is, like, supposed to be on a job for the crew. Hit fenced in area with wheat tiller hard. Okay, so I'm assuming this means, like, spray. Okay, great. So I'm gonna probably be looking for a job, see if there's one where I can add a note for the crew for weed killer. Okay, great. Client needs to be notified day prior to coming before moving animals from era. So, for example, this one is tough. What do you want command center to do here? There's several things that they can do. They can create a tag on your account that is going to notify the customer every time we come, which is when I was doing this one, that's what I went to. Because the next one is really tough. And that is. Do you want us to create a ticket that reminds you to call them the day before? Do you want us to call them the day before? Because we don't have a calendar where we're going to mark things down and say, okay, we need to call Them back and stuff like that. So this is the type of notes that are very difficult to put in front of anybody, let alone someone's been here for two or three months that has not seen many, many work change orders, many, many things to be able to understand what this means. When this is coming from an estimate notes, for example, it doesn't tell us like, you know, go to existing job and put this note on the crew spray fenced area with we killer second thing, please put on the tag for reminding them of the service dispatch or just add service dispatch reminder. So for example, this one, that's what I did. I want to make it as automated as possible. I went into an existing job, made sure that this note was a little bit more refined in terms of verbiage and added it. And then I made sure that there's a tag on this person account that would remind them every time we come. Okay, let me show you a couple others. And again, this is not about, you know, this is wrong. This is a matter of us just being better. Because every single time these are confusing. It requires multiple people at command center to jump in and the most experienced people. And that's costing you money. It's slowing them down. And I neither of those things is in any of our best interest. Let me show you this one real quick.
Okay, so the first one was easy fertilizer per application. Okay. This next one, first of all, double brackets means do not show this on an estimate. Okay? That means this is pricing information only. It means that there should be title and notes above it. So when I see, when I saw this yesterday, this is just me working yesterday. Aeration and overseeding. 25 pounds. Done. I fall like this, coming to command center, you're going to get five different estimates, right? So for example, do you want us to send an aeration out? Do you want us to have a separate line item than overseeding? Now the overseeding in your estimate calculator has an associated cost. Do you want us to add 25 pounds of seed to that or do you want us just to go with the cost of what's in your estimate calculator for overseeding. Okay, done in full is great, that's easy. But do you want us to put that in the estimate notes? Do you want us to schedule this? The double brackets throw everyone off. And furthermore, like if I gave this to five people at command center, you'd get at least two variations. Some people would break these up, do an aeration, then do an overseeding treatment. Some people would do the same Thing. But then they would also add 25 pounds of seed to the overseeding cost that is already in your estimate calculator, which is based upon your weekly mo and then done in fall. Like, I'm assuming that we need to put that in the notes. But again, this should read like this. Core aeration number one, get service to be performed in fall. Quotation marks, Use weekly mowing price. Or you don't even have to put that because we're using estimate calculator overseeding number one, install seed in front and backyard beds using 25 pounds of rye grass seed. Parentheses. Use weekly milling price. Or if you want us to use £25 supplies, £25 of seed period hours, whatever those are. That's the only logic they know how to use double parentheses to service to command center is do not show this to the to the client. All right, so I made this estimate. I had to guess what my title was going to be. Core aeration. I had to guess with overseeding. I had to guess that they wanted this included inside of the estimate notes. And I. This was easy. It needs to be done in fall. But I had to create this whole estimate the title, what notes were like. I had to say number one, 25 pounds. Number two, include in the fall or to be scheduled during the fall. So these are things that if you are in your template, just copy and paste. It won't take a lot more time. And you're getting massive variation at command center because of this. And I can't expect them on some of these things to not make mistakes, because I make mistakes, I'm sure, just doing this. So for example, this one, double parentheses again means do not show this to the customer. Seven plant removals around house, seven BD hours, truck debris. Again, I know what you're trying to say. You know what you're trying to say. But if you give this to 10 people at command, you'll make at least one error guaranteed. Okay? There's no. There's no title, there's no job notes. There is. The parentheses should have pricing only. There's no supply in hours. Like that is extremely important if you want to have consistency. Half the yellow slips that I see are because of this sort of issue. Things that are just not clear and they're not inside the systems. So let me do a couple more. I just want to kind of give examples here. This is again, not to like, embarrass anyone or anything like that. This is just a matter of us all learning together. So, for example, oh, that was just what I ended up doing on this one. Yeah. Okay, let me show this one here. Just for treatments.
Okay, so treatments. Okay, Great.
So.
Treatments. March 1 fertilizer with treatment spray, May 1 fertilizer, treatment and etc. Etc. Great. Okay, so I look at this, I'm like, okay, this is a package. Let's go treatments. We're going to do one in March and it's going to be this one in May. It's going to be that. Great. And then these, these are prices below. Well, this was considered a yellow slip, but that's because the, the owner wanted this to be separate line items for every single one of these. That is just not conveyed here. Right. If you want that, you're going to have to do a title and then you have to do double parentheses. Title, double parentheses. If you want a different line item for every single one. This is just like when someone looks at it, they're going to think treatment package, because the way it's set up and then the ones is like, we'll do a different line item. Is it one as in like, there's going to be one service? So it's just. It's just not clear.
So again, double parentheses really is the way to delineate between different line items. So if you want multiple line. Multiple line items, you need to put double prints. That's how they know. Okay, this is the end of a line item. Here's the price for it. End of a line item, here's the price for it. And it shouldn't take a long time if you're copying and pasting from a template. Right? So, okay, I think I have one more. This is an example. Let me see what I got. This is just unclear notes, I think. Let me just share this real quick and we'll call it day.
Boom. Boom. Okay, what was this one? Okay, this is estimate scheduled. See here? Blacked out the name. Good job. I believe backyard was quoted at $650. Check with client to confirm writing note for tomorrow to schedule work $25 off front yard with no debris, haul off, install mulch up to new cedar fence, weed, whack and spray weeds before installing black bark three yards, no weed fabric. So if I gave this to you, I gave this to everyone on this call. I can guarantee you. Guarantee you we have. Okay, there's, let's say 10 people listening to this call. We'd have at least five different ways of how this was to be interpreted. Okay, so first of all, first here, about $650. So are we supposed to call the customer and ask them what they were quoted because that's kind of embarrassing. I'm going to second guess that. I'm going to go through all your notes, I'm going to go through past estimates, etc. But again, you're leaving yourself up to up to air. And when I went back, there was nothing for the backyard. There was no ever ethnic nothing there. And so 650. What's that for? I don't even know what the estimate was for in the second part here. Writing note for tomorrow to schedule work. Okay, so does this mean one, that this is just a note for the estimator to keep track of things? Or is this like we need to schedule the work tomorrow and we're going to take $25 off the front yard? But not like I need to work change order here. So these are the type of things that just throw Command center honestly through a loop. So for those of you who have asked about, you know, how do we make it better? How do I reduce my cost at Command center by making it more efficient? This is it. Like that sort of note that I shared there takes two to three people. It is. Everyone collaborates. Looking back through estimates, looking past service, going to people's email, when literally it could be a very simple fix. But you're just opening yourself with massive amounts of variability and issues. So if you want to eliminate estimate issues, watch Marcus training academy. If you follow exactly it as you will have no issues on estimates. Yeah, so I, I know and I know this is not everyone by the way. I'm just trying to help those of you who are having these problems because there are absolutely locations that there's never a question of what an estimate is because they're copying and pasting a template. We see supplies, we see hours, we see double parentheses, we see title 1, 2, 3, 4. We see exactly what's going on. And even if there's something that is a different type of job, we can follow along with what their thought process is because they're following the system.
So anyways, hope that was helpful and I appreciate all being on here. We'll see you tomorrow.










