Personal Notes: Speed of Communication & Managing Copilot Growth

Hey. So today's episode is going to have two completely different parts.

I recorded one while I was driving to the gym, and then I record.

The second one in the gym to the office.

That's typically how my mornings roll.

So let's go ahead and play the first one. It's going to be about speed of communication and then I'm going to talk now about something else. So let's go ahead and play the first one and I'll come back to this. All right, so we're talking about speed of communication today, something I've been learning and that is if anything is important, it will still be important when you get to it. It's very, very basic concept. When you actually think about it, it's kind of mind blowing. And I think I was reading this from. Oh man, I forgot his name. Stillness is Key is the name of the book.

Kind of.

The guy talked about stoicism a bunch and stuff like that, which usually I'm not a big fan of. It usually kind of seems a little.

Woo woo to me.

But this is a really good concept and I'm starting to implement it. Basically, it's like, okay, if I get an email right now is like extremely important. What happens if I miss it? What happens if I don't look at my email every hour but I look at like once a day? Well, if it's very important, it'll probably still be important when I read it in six hours. If it is not important, what will happen is in the next six hours it will resolve itself and I will have saved the time I would have otherwise spent trying to fix a problem that was not actually important. This is the key because many of us, including myself, pride ourselves on speed of communication. And I have always been that way, mostly because I'm easily awake. And so my philosophy is if I can keep enough filters on things like email, text messages, WhatsApps, DMs, etc. And highlight the people that are most important to me that I do want to communicate fast with, that I can respond back within a matter of minutes to basically everything. And I've done a decent job of this. I feel like in the past, like if someone's an owner of Augusta Nation, if they are an employee of mine, and you know, these are, you know, important, very, very important. Whether the developers, contractors, vendors, people have done speaking, things with before, it's like they have my number somehow. These people are important. They are people that I want you to communicate with and I want them to honestly, most importantly, feel important by me. Communicating effectively and efficiently with them. However, that number of quote unquote important people, which I don't use that lightly, I actually do think they are very important. It's just a matter of as that number grows, it becomes unsustainable to actually be able to manage all their communication quickly. Because let's say you have 150 owners at Augusta, and then I probably have, I'd say 100 users of Copilot first ones.

And then I probably have 150 team members that I'm responsible for in terms of like employees, managers, etc. Probably a little more coming up this spring, but it's under 150 now. I know that. But you have all these people, and if everyone communicated with you once a day, once a day, you would basically only have a couple communications each day that were super important. Here's the funny thing. Whether it be employee just being disgruntled or some sort of drama, or whether it be an owner in Augusta having a problem, etc. I have found that if I just don't respond and I wait one day they figure it out. And as painful as for me not to respond because I like to be able to respond quickly, because I like when other people respond to me quickly. The thing is, I will not be able to respond quickly to the most important problems that if I allow the urgent problems to completely cloud my day. And so no one likes to be told they are not urgent and important. And that's the problem, the dilemma that we face, and it might be for you, family, like, if you have a big family, for example, I've seen people fall into strides like, man, they're family. How do I not respond back to them? They're in 15 WhatsApp groups of their family. Like, how do I not respond to these are important people? Here's the situation I feel like over the past few days of doing this. People can be very important, but the situation they bring up is not important enough to where only you can solve it. And I actually feel like the thought process that I need to respond immediately to someone is somewhat egotistical. And I say this because I have felt this way in the past and still struggle with this. And that is I must respond right away because I'm the only one that can solve this problem. It's if it was an important issue, but you knew there were other people, including the person that emailed, messaged you, etc. That could solve the problem, that, you know they could solve it, and there are other people that could solve this. Problem if you actually believe that, you wouldn't respond as quickly because you are not the bottleneck for the resolution of the problem and therefore you do not need to respond immediately for this problem to be solved. And so something I've been working on, I think it is.

Not fun to do this because you want to respond, you have the answer. But it is amazing to me that 80% of important emails, text messages, WhatsApp DMs that are 911 says get solved and are suddenly fixed within 6 to 18 hours.

It boggles my mind.

Not really. It's just a matter of math and it's a matter of changing my behavior and response to that.

Such is life. Thank you all and have a fantastic day. Okay, so that was the first part about speed of communication. Now we're going to talk about what's actually happening in the businesses Copilot, specifically on this one. It's a little bit of a business update. We have. Oh, it's raining. That was a windshield wipers.

We have double our projections.

For Copilot, which is. I am not complaining, but when you're growing this fast, you have people in the system that you have told not to be there. And so like I've, I kind of like. So a couple years ago when, when Tesla was taking off, I remember specifically when Elon would literally tweet out and he'd be like, do not buy the stock. It is overvalued.

And.

No one would listen. And people kept buying it up and he was never ever trying to hype up the stock. However, because he's supervisionary, he was looking for four, five, six years in the future and talking about the company and you know, those things have come to fruition. The Cybertruck, a cheaper Model 3, etc. Etc.

However, doesn't. It doesn't keep from the fact that when there's hype around something, people join that should not be. They aren't joining for the sake of the vision, they're joining for the sake of everyone else is doing this. I must do it too. And I'm not saying that everyone has joined. Copilot has done this. I'm not making that statement. I'm. I know that, you know, Copilot fills a need and a lot of people want a software that's owned by someone in the industry and is actually making changes, etc. So I'm not. Please do not take this as I am discounting the users and saying that everyone's like sheep, you know, following each other. That's not what my point is at all.

My point is, from my perspective, dealing with a lot of people in the system sooner than we had expected does create problems we did not expect to triple, let me think one second, more than triple in the past six days. There's a number of people in the system. The volume of transactions has more than 6x because mostly because Augusta has joined in their larger locations. So that's been big. This just creates stress in all the systems, right? So you have support, you have customer success, which is the onboarding, etc. This week, specifically the last week of the year is our busiest week we've ever had. Literally dozens of companies joining every single day. There's just no way you can effectively onboard dozens of people in one singular day without having literally dozens of customer success people to take their Zoom calls, etc. So right now, like we're a couple weeks behind on onboarding calls and then fortunately we're only a few days behind. Like if someone wants to book a zoom call or phone call for support, those are only a few days out. So I'm happy about that. But in general, when you have that many people, like, the.

Customer experience is not good. And I was tempted about a month ago to literally put out my social media saying, like, please don't join copilot. That was the week we switched from liquid web to AWS in our servers. And, and literally our liquid web liquid, they were melting. The servers were literally melting like every, like twice a day. We could tell when there's spikes of traffic, like 7:30am Pacific Standard. And then usually around 2:15, 2:30 Pacific Standard Time, we would see these massive spikes of people usually clocking in and clocking out, wrapping up their day, doing dispatching, et cetera, and just would melt the server. And at that same week, we had people just pouring into the system like it was insane. And I almost texted out like emailed every message. Everyone was like, please do not join copilot. Like, we were not ready for this. This is not the time to join. But I didn't.

And so now I'm very grateful that we have literally doubled our projections. The problem is that also means we are half as much in terms of hiring, customer success, customer support. The product team needs to be built out more. The engineering team is actually pretty solid, I would say needs to be still like leadership side probably needs to be built a little more.

So it's just like this all out, building the plane while it's flying, 110%. Now, it would be different if I said Tomorrow, hey, let's lock this system and for the next six months we're going to optimize the code base. That would be one way to operate here. And as I talked about a couple days ago, there is that tendency to do that. I know we would make more money if we did that, 100%. I know I would actually have a better life because bugs really, really frustrate me. I also know that if I spend the next six months doing that, that the whole promise of what we have talked about and that is adding more innovation to the space will have been like, lost. And most enhancements are not felt by.

The team, by the user base after the first month. So if I said, hey, six months.

We'Re locking the code base down, we're fixing the bugs, and then we are.

Going to optimize this bad boy the.

First month, everyone will be really happy.

Because we would fix the bugs. That's kind of what we're doing in January.

But then if I, I would need six months to optimize everything for those next five months, people would literally start to question what I've promised. And that is the fact that we need to add certain features. Like right now we're working on the wait list, we are working on the packages and programs, chemical applications, we're working.

On adding multiple sub items to estimates, estimate line items. All these things are in the works and they'll be coming out in Q1, but. Oh, wow. I just pulled in the office and they're taping off a part of the parking lot. What are they? Oh, they must be having to switch out the heaters and air conditioning on the roof. That's why. Okay.

So what were we talking about? Totally lost my train of thought.

Yeah, so like I, I, I, I always sleep better because bugs really keep me up and annoy me and it I'm 10,000 times more concerned about the current members inside of Copilot. Same thing with Augusta. I, I just don't care about new members in part because we've been spoiled to never actually have to do sales like go out and sell and market and advertise. It's always been the community supporting us, which we are very grateful for, but I just literally don't think about sales. So like right now our sales team is booked out six weeks and the only reason it's booked out six weeks instead of four weeks is because he increased the amount of space on his calendly because it was no availability. Because as soon as like one day would transpire and he had a Four week where you could book a window. It was like that next day would fill up immediately. So can't book a call all December, all January. It's into February now. And that's because he extended the amount of window time you can book a call, which is insane.

So. So, like, we eventually gotta find salespeople.

But right now that is not. That's the least of my concerns. We're focusing on building the internal teams to be able to take care of the existing members more. That's like far, far more important. Same thing with Augusta. Like, we've never advertised. I don't ever hardly talk about Augusta on my main channels and things like.

That because, like, if we take care.

Of the members and we create great tools for them and we create for members of Augusta Nation, they have, like, unique tools that connect to each other. In this year, it's going to be Max AI the speaking on the phone. It's going to be estimate request forms that are instant quotes with upsells, the QR code technology. Work on with that. And then having all of that connected via copilot and command center, that is really the thing I need to focus on because making it where they all make really good money. And there's a success rate of a franchisee at Augusta. Lawn care is 98% versus the industry average of like 60 or 50%, depending on how long term you're looking out. That would be a win. And that. That will get around. People will hear about that. And so that's really all I focus on. Same thing with copilot. Like, right now. I just. I have no concern about sales. And again, that is somewhat of a privileged thing to say when literally Yesterday we had 20 plus people sign up, like new companies. And then the day before, same thing. We had the two largest amounts of revenue days we'd ever had.

And so now it's a matter of how do we manage the blessings. That is literally what it is. We have a lot more money than I thought. We got past the point of burning tens of thousands of dollars a week. We were past that point.

And because I'm not trying to extrapolate pool cash out of this thing, it is. How do we deploy this effectively without being wasteful? I've always thought about that. It probably, like, honestly comes from. So I was raised. My dad was a minister, and all the money that we got as a family was tithes and offerings from the church, which basically means all your friends, you're basically living from them. Like, they supply for your food and everything.

Else.

And so I always felt like, even though this wasn't necessarily extricably said, that, like, we should be good stewards of what we spend, because we are literally spending our friends and family's money that they gave to us as a part of a community. And so I feel the same way when it comes to Augusta. How we spend that money, same thing with Copilot, how we spend that money. And the question is like, well, are you ever going to pay yourself? Like, yes, 100%. Because I do think, like, me having good clarity of thought, me being able to.

Not be stressed in my mind all of the time is super important for me. Good decisions for the community. But I'm not doing anything extravagant. I'm not definitely not pulling money out of Copilot. Like, I'm trying to figure out how do we deploy this rush of capital and a ton of users in a way that we don't actually create more pain for the team. Because the thing about code is adding more team members can actually sometimes be detrimental. And so there's this weird, like, speed thing you got to work with. It's not like per unit of time. So a good developer can do, let's just say, three lines of code just for the sake of using an example. Someone else that you pay maybe twice as much could literally do 10 times as much code. The same thing can be said that you can say, pay the same two people the same amount as developers. One produces two lines of code an hour and the other produces 20 lines of code. So in the tech world, they call it 10x developers. There are literally people that do 10 times as much work as somebody else, which is incredible. Like, when it comes to lawn care landscape, you might have a double, like, hey, this person literally produces twice as much work as someone else in coding. Because it's not about physical labor. It's about, like, skill when it comes to coding. And, like, there's things that can take a thousand times longer than another task, literally a thousand times longer. And there's like, shortcuts to use AI to be able to code things like that.

You can literally have that much more output from a great team member. So going on and hiring a bunch of people, you might actually slow everything down. And so we're trying to be strategic. We're bringing consultants in for the product side. In January, I have a head of operations joining to really be able to scale the team more effectively. We have a new head of customer success coming into the team. In addition to Parker, who owes customer support, we have a Whole bunch of people coming in, but we're staggering them. We're trying to make it in a way that's not gonna actually hurt the team. We have a restructuring of the code base because we've added so much in 2023. It needs to be organized for new team members. When they come in, they can actually pick up what we're laying down within a couple weeks, instead taking a month or two to get them onboarded. So these are the type of things.

We'Re working on right now.

And this is not a bad thing. I'm very grateful and thankful that we are twice our projections and it shows no sign of slowing down. And I'm just trying to do my best to manage. I know that we are wasting some money despite my best efforts because I am willing to overpay for someone to work certain hours. Like we have some people working 65 plus hours. I'm willing to pay them more than I would typically in order for that to happen because like, we need the help. And so same thing with the developers. The ones that are key, like the 10x ones that we have, is like, hey, I'm going to pay you whatever is necessary for you to feel valued and making sure that you do not leave because you are literally worth 10 times the value of someone else. So I'm not going to be like paying you $2 more an hour. And so anyways, these are the things we have been working on. I don't know if this is helpful or not or if it's just interesting to see someone else's business from afar or hear from a different industry that is software in this case. But so many of these principles I talk about on these little personal notes really do apply to pretty much any and every industry. It's just how you apply it. And you just gotta change the words, you know, instead of lines of code, you can say number of lawns for cutting. It's, it's all, it's a lot of the same stuff.

Okay, love you all.

I hope you have a fantastic day.