Multi-Million Dollar Lawn Care Business OFFICE In Action!

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes, landscape businesscourse.com and today we are at Augusta's headquarters for command center is where we answer phone calls, send out estimates, do a lot of the office and admin work for our franchisees. Today I want to show you some of the things that they're doing here because regardless if you're a franchisee or not, you probably are doing some of these tasks. And so hopefully you can learn something over the next several weeks. We want to share individual cases as we answer specific phone calls, have certain scenarios in terms of unhappy customers trying to get collecting on an old invoice. We're gonna try to zero in on specific scenarios, but today we're live, they're all working and I want to hop in and in terms of some of the stuff that we're doing before, during and after the client relationship.

Obviously the client relationship is usually gonna start with someone asking for an estimate. So that's gonna usually come in the form of a phone call, an estimate request form, possibly someone filling out a form on the landing page of one of the franchisees website. So behind me here you can see that they're working and doing a lot of the things in terms of getting those leads, setting up those estimates for the franchisee. What's really, really cool is from here we can actually go into the. Let me show you here as April is working on this client, specifically calling back a customer, setting up someone for an estimate at a location on the other side of the country. So again, when you have the systems in place, regardless if they're in New York, Texas, Oregon, Washington and or just a few miles away, we can set it up the same way every time. So right now she is calling someone, it looks like over in Tennessee, five, four, Medfors. This is actually in Oregon. She's giving one of the clients a call back and then we're setting up an estimate. Over here we have Rachel, who's working on more the latter part of the client lifecycle, which is collections. So one of our franchisees over in Massachusetts had an invoice from last April that is overdue. And so Rachel's actually working on trying to do the collection collection side. So when we look at what we can do here at command center, we look at before the relationship with the customer taking that phone call, getting an estimate set up on their schedule for the franchisee and then also during the job. So during the job we're gonna be doing work change orders, we're going to be talking with the franchisee and Seeing if there's changes to the job that need to be done, if materials were added, if budgeted hours were added. And so this is gonna be important because the communication between the franchisee or the owner is not going to be directly with the customer. We want that to be our job. Our job here at Command center is to make the franchisees less reactive. When you're trying to grow your business, the things that interrupt you and make you reactive are the things that are keeping you from growing your company. If your phone rings right now, you jump for it. If you're mowing and then you're doing an estimate, all of a sudden you get a bad email from a customer, it interrupts you and it keeps you from doing the things that are actually going to move your business forward. So our goal here at Command center is to be able to take those reactive tasks off the plate of the franchisee so they can focus on marketing and growing their team. Those are the two things that actually lead them to building and growing their business. So when a lead form comes in, what they're going to be doing here is they're going to be going in and seeing the schedule for the franchisee, putting on their schedule for the next day. And we give one hour windows. So we don't recommend giving someone a specific down to the minute time that we're going to be at their property. It's very difficult for an estimator who's trying to get 10, 15 appointments in a day or someone who's just getting started. They're trying to work, you know, maybe five or six hours a day and then doing estimates. It's very difficult for them to have a schedule where it's like you have to, they're at 10 o'. Clock. Instead, what we do is we're going to give them an hour's window of time. We're going to tell the customer, hey, we'll be there between 10 and 11am and they know that between 10 and 11, at some point during that time we're going to show up and give them an estimate. You got Michelle here, who is now in that process after the estimate has been completed by the franchisee at the property. She's now taking the job notes inside of service autopilot that has been given by the franchisee from their mobile device during that 10 to 11 o' clock appointment. So now the franchisee has gone there, they made shorthand notes. They didn't have to do any pricing formatting. They simply put shorthand notes into the mobile app. So that way. Now Michelle goes in there, and now she is doing a trimming job, it looks like hauling the debris to the dump, pruning hydrangeas, clarifying about the rhododendrons and which lilacs they're going to be pruning and what's happening. She's going to take all that information, format it really nice, make sure it's spelled, checked, capitalize all the rest of it, format it into the estimate so it looks really nice, and then attach a video to the client that basically makes it very, very personalized to that customer, saying, we look forward to serving them at their property. So this is kind of that phase between the lead and then the estimates now being sent out. So that's going to go out to the customer and we're going to get them on the schedule. That estimate is going to have a button that says accept proposal. That button then triggers an automation back to the command center, says, hey, this person's ready to be on the schedule. And we can put them on the calendar, make sure that they're scheduled up. Move over here to Elodia. She's also working on another way that leads can come in, and that is the chatbot. So right from the website, potential lead, a customer can interact with the command center here and ask for an estimate, ask if they want a landscaping job done or a mowing job. And from that angle, we can also bring in leads. So there's several ways we're bringing in leads. Like I said, a phone call, a web lead form, a landing page form. They can do direct chat, might be an email. So taking all of those inputs, then creating the estimate and then having the automations to get them on the schedule. And again, that's going to lead us right back to the collections part. And that's all the stuff that command center can do right from the beginning initial to all the way to the end, when we're collecting on the invoice to make sure that the franchisee can spend their time focusing on marketing and hiring their team and, and training them and developing. That's what's gonna grow the business. Back here we got Lonnie, who's also working with the franchisees on more of an operational standpoint to make sure their automations are set up correctly, their pricing is set up correctly. Cause one thing you notice is that our franchisees don't have to worry about using dollars and cents on an estimate. They simply have to figure out supplies and budgeted hours. That simplification of that process allows us at Command center to use what we call an estimate calculator to do all the numbers for them. This is great because when they are ready to hand off estimating to one of their staff members, that staff member does not need to have years and years of experience. They just need enough field experience to be able to tell us how many budgeted hours and what's the supplies using the template. And if you're doing estimates yourself out in the field, whether or not you're a franchisee, you need to have a template that you have specific types of services and kind of a standard estimate verbiage for each of those. Again, make sure you have as much verbiage on those estimates as possible. By the end of the day, you need to make sure you have enough verbiage on those estimates. And you can save yourself a lot of time as an estimator by having those on your notes app or a Word document, copying and pasting that into your estimate and save yourself a lot of time. So over here, Lonnie's working with the franchisees to make sure that their automations are set up correctly, that everything's set up correctly in terms of their pricing, so that when they give us shorthand information upon an estimate, everyone here is able to quickly create those estimates and be very efficient. When the customer calls back, is asking for a work change order. Those work change orders, by the way, we communicate directly with the franchisee through texting. Another thing that we can do here at Command center is in order to eliminate the franchisee from having to be the communication bridge for the franchisee to always have to talk to the customer, always have to be the one who answers work change order questions, or if there's a question that the customer has about the job, they can simply, instead of having to talk to the crew or anything like that, they can simply be in communication directly with the command center here via text, so the franchisees can text us directly here. So we actually have quite a few calls coming in here all the time. And again, all these processes, whether you are a franchisee or not, have Command center or not, you need to make sure that your admin and your office work is very, very efficient. I see so many landscaping companies that have way too much overhead and a lot of it comes down to waste. In this world, the admin world, the office side, getting things set up. Liz is over here. She is able to help with the franchisees. Right now we're working on something to do with the collection side of things. We're trying to get this set up so that again, trying to create a system where once they've come through all of these processes, a lead, an estimate, they've created a job, we've invoiced them and then they don't, they don't ever pay and now they go to collections and we're trying to get money from them. If that does not work, we need to have a system in place where we actually send them to collections agency and that's going to take 30, 40% of our invoice. We don't want it to get there. We want the automations, we want our processes to catch that invoice and catch that money far before that, hopefully. But at the very worst you need to have a system in place that when someone is not paying and they are way overdue, that you actually do collect on that invoice. So hopefully that was helpful. Some of the things that we do here at Command center, just a little bit of a, kind of a taste of some of the stuff that we do down the road. We are going to show you specific scenarios, how to deal with a customer when they're freaking out on the phone, what to do if someone doesn't want to pay their invoice and they're unhappy. How do you negotiate? How do you make sure you actually get paid the work you do? Thanks so much everyone. I'm Mike Andes from Command center here at Augusta Lawn Care. We'll see you next.