Spending Time on Estimates That Never Close...

Jeremy from Klein Lawn Care and snow Plowing. Should a business send estimates to all previewish current and potential customers in their database before spending money on marketing? Is there a more efficient way in copilot than going through one by one creating estimates? Some of the people in our database have been there over five years. How long should you leave an estimate open before concreting it? Rejected. Sometimes saying it to someone who didn't ask for one and you haven't had contact for years. Some of the people in our database may not have the same email address and or phone number. Is there something in the works in copilot to notify the business when an email or text bounces back? Never gets received by the customers. Okay, so currently there's nothing that works around. If a text or email bounces back to notify you, you can see it individually on their account. But it's not in the works right now to do that. In terms of how long to leave an op an estimate open. In my opinion, I'm gonna keep harassing them until I get an answer and then maybe after like 30 days, potentially I mark it as lost or rejected.

So your basic premise here of sending people estimates in your database. I think there's a lot of juice to squeeze before you start sending estimates to people that have not asked for one that in your database and you haven't heard from them in years. So in my opinion, if you're going to do complimentary estimates, not a bad idea during your off season. But I'm going to be doing it for existing customers that are already on their property for recurring maintenance. I've served them definitely in the past like six to 12 months. I'm not going to go back five years in my database unless you have like 100 people in your whole system. If you have a more established business and you've been around for five plus years, you probably have thousands of people in your database. There's a lot of higher quality leads than people that you haven't talked to in five years and just randomly give them an estimate. I'd first start off with how do I qualify quant? Like qualify these folks. So I'd be sending out emails and text blasts from copilot to your entire database and then taking the 30 or 40 people ask for an estimate and I'd be giving them a quote. Taking the time to give them a detailed quote. Also I will say that those messages I watch what goes out from copilot and if you're sending a whole bunch of really fancy graphics and Videos. I know you can embed a video into an email. I know you can do that inside of Copilot and it's useful in some cases. But if you're sending out a marketing message and you're sending out embedded GIFs videos, attaching images, attaching files, I've seen some people, such like PDFs, you're going to, you're going to have a reduced open rate. My goal is to get a high open rate and a high response rate. And to do that it's going to look as much as a personal, personal email as possible. And so we are going to be working on some updated templates for everyone that you could use at least a guideline to be able to see what we recommend from Copilot. The ones that we have in there are very basic and they work fine. But I am seeing people customize them to the point of hurting them. That detriment, both from a marketing perspective and as an open or a email deliverability perspective. And so you want high deliverability. But more importantly, when they open up the email, I want them to respond. I want them to not think this is a marketing message. I want them to be able to like, oh, if it says, hey, Mike was at your property the day, thought you might need a mulch install, would it be fine if I drop by tomorrow and get that for you? That's a very personalized email that you can kind of automate. But the response rate and open rate on that will be much higher than having a whole bunch of graphics mulch and a big button and, and a video attachment and an embedded YouTube video like so I would just be careful with that when it comes to mass messaging and especially if you're doing what you're doing now, where you're going one by one by one. I would rather just send a mass message. It was text only and it said very similar to what I just said. Hey, it's a great time to get your mulch installed. I'm just using mulch as an example. If you'd like that, go ahead and let us know. And you don't have to say click this button. You don't have to say respond back. Just let us know. Like that's common language. People will respond back to it's high open rate because it's only, it's text only. I'm not gonna throw a whole bunch of graphics or anything like that in there. Luis from Turf Green Lawn Care Services. Hey brother. Hey, Mike. My brother and I are business partners focused on recurring work. I'M strong on the admin and client communication side and he's more hands on with operations and fixing things. Can you help us map out what our roles should look like at different revenue ranges? For for example, when, when one of us should get out of the field. What each of us should focus on as we grow? Just trying to get a better idea of how we divide responsibilities as the business scales. So one thing I wanted to actually show you all today, I didn't plan on doing this for this specific one is if you go to mikeandys.com AI feel free to ask these questions here as well especially cause I know sometimes waiting for the mastermind is not necessarily the best.

Thing if you're trying to get a more instant answer. So I just want to kind of demonstrate it real quick. If you go here, you just type in drop in that question. There's a whole bunch of other questions in here and you can search. A lot of times I see people in Copilot putting in screenshots of their.

Of their KPI cockpit or your actual QuickBooks profit and loss statement. If you can put it in here just by clicking this little button here. And you will immediately be able to get a whole bunch of analysis from myself. And it's all automatic based on AI, but it's all trained on all the data and all the content I've ever put out. So feel free to put that in. Let's see what the AI says. All right. So, all right, here's how I'd map it out for you and your brother. Based on revenue stages. 0 to 500,000 in revenue. Your brother stays in control in the field, focused on production and quality control. He's the one ensuring jobs get done right and efficiently. You handle admin, client communication and sales. Your focus is on keeping the pipeline full, managing customer relationships. You're also the one tracking numbers, revenue, profit margins and capacity. 800. 500,000 to 800,000. Your brother starts transitioning out of the field. You double down on sales and admin. Looks like 800,000amillion. Your brother's fully out of the field. You step into a leadership role. Focus on strategy, marketing and high level client relationships. At this stage you should also consider hiring a general manager, office manager. Handle day to day admin and free up your time for growth. So this is exactly what I would say, exactly how it breaks this down. 0 to 500,000. You do not both want to be out of the field and you want to be spending as much time as possible actually producing revenue as you've hit that 500 800,000. Now one of you start getting out of the field. Once you're over 800,000 then potentially you afford the both of you out. So again this is more, less to kind of exemplify the AI. So mikeandys.comai will take you there. But that's exactly what I would kind of break this down as. Until you hit 500,000, I am trying to optimize for time in the field and production hours. As you pass that 500 800,000, you start getting more space for a full time overhead position. Now if there's two of you again, it's going to be still kind of split. But what's nice is you can kind of split your roles and responsibilities between sales operations and admin. So you don't really need both of you full time. Until you start getting above a million dollars, you're going to need that sales operation admin roles filled with an office person, a general manager and or operations manager and then a salesperson or estimator. Cody McLeod from Proscape Lawn Care and Landscaping. We are booked out five weeks and have yet to hit spring rush or market the season. What do you tell the client when you're going to do an estimate? At what point do you break the bad news? And it's going to be weeks after you give them price, when your price when you're on site with them. So what we do at Lawn Care Web Design, Home Service web Design and Augusta Lawn Care is the same and that is once customers start saying no to me, which again keep in mind, one or two people saying no seems like a lot when in reality it might be 5 or 10%. So be careful with using verbiage. Like everyone's saying no because I'm booked out so far. Like are they or just one or two people that happen to land on one day. So I'd say that first as a warning because sometimes people say that and then actually look at the numbers and literally two or three out of five or ten are actually saying that. But let's just assume that 60, 70% of people when once they accept an estimate and you say hey, I'm booked out six weeks, they say no. Let's assume that for a moment. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to put a banner on my.

Website. And this is a reason why at longer web design and home service web design we allow for unlimited edits. Because if you are booked out five, six weeks and people are saying no, I want to put a banner. So they don't even submit an estimate request form because otherwise you're spending a whole bunch of time wasted on, on getting the estimate to the customer, meeting the customer, doing a design, all this other stuff when potentially they don't, they're just gonna decline you and it's a bad customer experience. So we usually like to put it as a banner on the estimate request form on my website right at the top to prevent the lead from coming in. And then if you get down to like three or four weeks booked out, then you can just take the banner off. It takes two seconds. So that's what we recommend. Cody has another question. Why can't I attach a video to estimates? It says a 50 second video is too long. So it's not to do with the time of the video, it's do the size of the video. So I believe it's 15 megabytes and I believe almost all the email providers will allow 15 megabytes. Once you start giving about 18, 20 megabytes, Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, some of them will start to block those from being attachments. So that's why it's 15 megabytes. I will say there is a free and paid apps on your phone that you can quickly compress these. You can also just do it on Google. Just type in Google and do like compress video or compress mp4, drag the file in and then compress the file down. So I've, I've had ten 15 minute long videos that I will compress down. It gets a little blurry down to like 360p or 480p instead of 720 like high def or 1080p but it still is, you know, viewable. And so it's more about the, it's a file size and if you have massive video files and like 20, 30 minutes long, you're probably going to want to upload that to like Google Drive and then do a link and they make a clickable button that says like click here for video. That's what I'd recommend. But if it's like a 50 second video, it's very likely that you're shooting in high definition or 4K and it needs compression and it's very, it's very likely it's on like your iPhone for example. A 50 second video will, will be 40, 50, 60 megs and that won't be able to go through the email providers. So we have to compress it down. Jonathan from Amory Lawn Care People often ask to do Spraying, but I don't have an applicator's license. I don't plan on getting one. I noticed in your videos you use organic spray. What brands do you recommend? So keep in mind most of the time, even with organic spray, you're still going to need an applicator's license. So just be wary of that. So keep that in mind. Don't just think that, oh, if I use organic, I don't need an applicator's license. In terms of what brands I recommend, there's a lot of good ones out there, there's a lot of bad ones out there. There's. We have a couple providers we use and they're very, very small farms that create them. So I actually don't talk about them a lot because they run out of product quite often. Kevin from Lawnmark Landscaping. How can I transition to only online estimates for spring cleanups and fall cleanups? A lot of clients have specific needs for a lot of cleanups. I. E. I need this plant removed and placed over here, et cetera. Should I have clients take a video of the work and upload it to our website? I want to completely get rid of drive by and in person estimates, but I'm having trouble creating a system around it. You're the goat. So yeah, if you're trying to do it for spring cleanups and fall cleanups, you're probably going to need a video.

And so as soon as you ask someone to do a video, the ad friction in there, it is going to drop off dramatically the amount of estimates you will get. You will probably see a 70 to 90% decline in the amount of estimate request forms that you get. If you ask for a video, even if you make it simple to drop the video. And it's, it's just people a lot of times aren't even home, it's dark outside, it's raining, et cetera. And they're not going to go walk around the property for a video especially because like you can you. We usually saw this work for customers that were existing because they know you're gonna, they know that you're, they're gonna have you do the work. So they would also rather not meet you at the, at your, at your property. But for customers that have not done service for you, they don't trust you enough to know that you're actually going to be the provider. And so they're sending five and request forms to five different companies and hoping that they get some responses. So we don't see this work a whole lot if you're trying to grow now, if you're like, I don't care about 90% drop off because I just have tons of work and I only want people that are going to submit a video, great. I agree with the premise of getting rid of overhead and a person driving around and an estimator and all the time spent on that. I'm a big fan. Just know that you're going to have a huge drop off in the number of new customers that will submit a video. So that is a possibility. The other way to do this is potentially have ranges. So you could say like, hey, there's a $400 cleanup, a $900 cleanup, and a $1,200 cleanup. And it's based upon the size of the property. So you could do it based on property size. I've seen some people do this and it works just fine. Just know there's gonna be times like when you walk into a property and it is a $3,000 cleanup because of the jungle and they put $600 for mowings. I'm okay with that because instant pricing, because I can charge a permanent rate and it's going to be usually within 50, maybe $100. If it's overgrown with a property, you could be thousands of dollars off. So I would just be careful around that. And you could also just say it's like, look, once you get to the property, you know, then we'll validate your quote or we'll, you know, make sure it's valid. Like if you show up to a property and someone puts $600 and you know it's gonna, it's a $3,000 cleanup. You could just decline service. It's just. Are people gonna put negative reviews about that online? Potentially, yes. So I would just keep that in mind. If you're trying to do cleanups, I'm not against this. This is something we test, we continue to test. Like, I would love to be able to do this. Just know that your accuracy on estimates just drops a lot because there's so much more variety when you're talking about square footage of a property and grass. Assuming it's not overgrown, you have like a very limited range of variability. And even if you it was completely overgrown, you're talking about like hundreds of dollars, not thousands of dollars. But if you were able to get a, you know, card on file required, you card, you show up to the property and it's overgrown. Like, I'm okay with it. And you could also just, you know, get to the property and be like hey, sorry, this is out of our scope. Like this is way bigger. Sorry we have to change the estimate. Or even just in your verbiage, in your estimate request form, you could say quote will be validated upon in person visit at the property or on the day of day of service. And so that way you just know like, hey, if it's way out of scope, we could go up to a customer and be like, hey, it's not $600, it's $3,000. So I'm not opposed to that. Just know you're going to have a lot less accuracy, which is anytime you're doing instant pricing, it's going to happen. It's like what level of inaccuracy are you comfortable with? I'm comfortable with a hundred, maybe $200 variability. I'm not super comfortable with thousands of dollars difference. So. Also, the parameters of a lawn being cut, for example, is pretty standard in the mind of a customer. Whereas, um, a property cleanup is very variable because how much are you taking off the bushes? Are you hauling the debris away? Are you taking the hedge down six feet? Because that could be a tree job versus trimming the tops of it off by a few inches and just leveling it off. So the definition of a property cleanup to everyone looks very different. And for that reason I that's why usually in person is is required. James from Momentum Lawn Care and Services. Hey Mike. I started my lawn care business in January 2024. The first six months were a learning curve, but your videos in the Copilot Facebook group helped me push through. Fast forward to this spring 2025. I've already made more revenue than I did in all of 2024. I now have two full time employees and we're just still operating out of a 12 by 30 storage unit. I haven't paid any paid marketing yet. Just a referral incentive. One free month for three recurring clients referrals. I recently came into a sizable amount of capital I'd like to reinvest in the business. If you were my position, what would you prioritize to scale quickly and sustainably? More equipment, a shop space, marketing or something else? 1. If I decide to invest in marketing, what channels would you recommend? Starting with door hangers, local SEO, Google Ads, or something else, considering I've never done any paid marketing before. Okay, so let's start here. I would first off say make sure you come up with a plan because you're actually growing very quickly already. Sometimes when people then all of a sudden have a capital, they get a loan and they're already growing quickly. They now go into hyper growth and they can actually mess themselves up. So I would really make sure that your pricing scales so that as you get more customers, employees, then you're needing more trucks, now you're going to need a bigger shop space, etc, make sure your pricing is set up correctly because what I don't want you to do is scale an unprofitable model that is currently profitable because you're out in the field and you have a, you know, limited overhead. Once you have to get a bigger shop space, once you have to get more employees, more trucks, et cetera. Will your current pricing model scale? So I'd be first making sure you have a plan around that, you know your numbers, make sure you have decent enough margins to be able to scale because you're going to have an increased amount of overhead as you begin to grow. In terms of what I'd be going for first in terms of paid and make sure first, I'm investing mostly in my website where I spend every dollar first. Before I go to something more like Google Ads or Google Local services, I would do those first. Those are intent based marketing. People are looking for my website, they're looking for my services, they're looking for my keywords and then I move to something like door hangers or Facebook ads, etc. But I think that given where you're currently at, if you have, if you don't already invest in SEO and a great website, that's where I would start. If you need some like inspiration, check out home service web design or home long care web design just for inspiration. Feel free to. You can book a call with them by the way for free for 15 minutes. They could point you in the right direction. Look at some of the stuff you're doing now. I would spend every dollar there first though. And I know I'm super biased when I say that because we do web design for hundreds and hundreds of companies. That being said, if you spend money on Google Ads, you can easily spend 500, 1000, $1500 on Google Ads, Facebook ads, door hangers, et cetera. But if you're driving it to a site that has a 1% conversion instead of a 3% conversion you're getting, you're paying three times as much for every single lead. So it just is a matter of focusing on is important in my opinion. Number two, what point would you recommend moving from a storage unit to a dedicated shop space? Is it worth the cost early on or should I wait until I max out My current setup. So if you're trying to maximize for profit and being lean, you're going to wait until you max out your current setup. There's no, you don't serve the customer any better. It doesn't improve the quality of your service. The customer doesn't even see your shop space. So until you need to expand overhead, I'm going to try to reduce it as much as possible. Now, that being said, I don't know how sizable this, this amount of capital is that you're investing, but if you know you're going to get two or three trucks, if you know that within the next 12 months, you're going to triple the business, maybe you go ahead and get ahead of it. If you have a really good deal that you found number three, would it be too soon to hire a third employer crew lead? If I'm not booked out yet. But I want to fast the season. The thing is this, unless you're scaling so fast that you're adding more than 30 budget hours to the schedule of new work every single week on top of all the existing work, you don't really need to be hiring someone ahead of schedule. What I mean by that is you can get someone in two weeks from today. And so I'm a big fan of booking out two or three weeks and then hiring someone to start in two or three weeks. There's is very rare that you need to hire ahead of your capacity. So I think you see people this all the time and usually it's just a function of they're in a rush. And you can get, you can get good employees, assuming your labor market's decent within the next two weeks. Now what you could do if you have excess time right now is you could hire three people, start one of them in two weeks, another one in four weeks, another one six weeks. You could also do that anticipating the scale and the ramp in the future. Just note, just realize that means doubling the amount of budget hours you're going to be doing in the matter of next month. So when people talk about I'm growing quickly and then they go from two employees and they hire two more, you're doubling the business. And if you're planning to do that in one month, that's fine. That's awesome. Great. Let's go. You're hitting the spring rush. Just keep in mind you are doubling the capacity of the business. And so you better make sure you have double amount of work and a double amount of budget hours. And that's why if you're not using Budget hours. And you're not tracking that, it's very scary to be hiring because you don't actually know if you need employees. So track budget hours in every single job. I'd be thinking about 30 budget hours of completed work per 40 clocked hours in a week. And then using that as a measurement of, okay, I'm booked out two weeks, three weeks. Okay, I hit two weeks, I'm immediately gonna go hire someone. Then knowing that in two weeks, I'm gonna start planning for an increase of 30 budget hours per week. So if right now your capacity is, let's call it 90 budget hours, so you and two employees, that's 30 for each of you. Um, I'm going to wait until I have 90 budget hours on schedule for the next two weeks. And then in two weeks, I'm gonna start planning for 110, 120 budget hours. That means I can hire someone today and have them start in two weeks. Alex from. From Marron Cleaning, how do you set up instant pricing on the website? I've tried using Jotform, but I'm able to look as easy as it used as Augusta's instant price form. Also, I've heard you talk about pros and cons of instant pricing. Before the lead submit details. How would you track conversion rate if the instant price is before the lead details? You can't. You really can't. You have to track the conversion on the website. So the form will not be. I'll give you this information. What you have to track is how many people get to your website and then bounce. That's really the main way to do it. I've heard you mentioned to track number of jobs instead of leads, but I don't understand what you mean. Would you use jobs accepted divided by website visits? Love your content. Thank you. Okay, so if you're trying to sell cleaning services from your website, there are two ways to do this. One is you ask for their information, they click submit, it goes to a different page and it shows them the pricing. If you do that, that's totally fine. You're going to get the most number of contacts or leads inside your database. But what's going to also happen is there are going to be people that if they saw your prices, would accept. But because they see submit information, they don't want to move forward and they don't want you to have their information. And there's about a 30% drop off there. Now, the alternative is you get their information, they see the pricing. Um, and. But you don't get their lead information because they there's no button that says submit information or continue et cetera. So double edged sword it's which, which one do you prefer? Do you rather get more leads and some of them not accepting or do all of them coming through being accepted? So we see about the same amount of drop off rate and in terms of using jotform on jotform you can see how many people have started a form and then drop off. So what you might want to do is have a, a multi page form where they submit their information, they click next and then you can see how many people drop off inside that form and the conversion through that. So if you're doing really good you'll usually get around 25 to 30%. If you're doing really bad, you usually get like I've seen people, some people as low as 3 to 5% that will start the website, start the form and actually complete it. If you're above 30% usually you're doing pretty good. Of people that start the form finishing the form as like a very general rule of thumb because just remember there's always competitors or like random people that just like test it out just to see how it works. So. Elijah Gray from ELG Lawn Care Services. Hello Mike. I've been studying all your classes and I'm wondering if EDDM is still the way to go in 25 when growing a business. If not, what would you recommend? Thank you. So door hangers over every door direct mail. Unless I cannot do door hangers due to local laws. So like if they don't allow canvassing, if it's gated neighborhoods for example, that's when I'll I usually use ever door direct mail in a more targeted fashion. But if I can do door hangers, I'm usually doing door hangers. Usually the cost of delivery and printing is about the same depending on where you're at. Um, I will also do every door direct mail if it's in an area where there is a huge dispersion of geography. So like I can't do a hundred, I can't do 50 plus doors per hour because the if they're really spread out long long driveways for example and you're only doing 2030 deliveries per hour of door hangers, then starting to the delivery cost of every door direct mail starts to make more sense. But if I can do 120, 130 doors an hour because they're really close the houses, the louver cost is substantially lower on door hangers. Even if I'm paying someone to do it. Adam from Pristine Green Lawn and Landscape if you are four to six weeks booked out for simple services landscaping cleanups, what's the best way to let customers know before providing them an estimate? If a customer needs to have it done in two weeks and it can't be done for five weeks, we wouldn't want to waste our time providing with an estimate when as we're so we already answered this one from someone else. But let's continue and see if there's something else that Adam brings up. When as a request comes in, would you have the office get in contact with the customer before scheduling a drive by in person estimate and let them know or just include something in the estimate notes when you send the quote? Obviously if a customer calls in the office could let them know over the phone or if it's an in person estimate, the estimate could discuss the timeline in person. But I am speaking more into the estimate requests from submissions for drive by estimates where we typically don't have direct contact with the customers until after the estimates are sent. Yeah, so again I'm trying to beat out all of this by putting it on my website. So again everyone, not everyone people come to question why we do the subscription for lawn care web design home service web design. It's because you're allowed to do as many edits as you want and that means changing banners like this when you're overbooked and putting that banner right at the top of your estimate request form prevents anyone from submitting that estimate request form if they don't want to deal with a five to six week delay and it prevents you from calling the admin time your estimator going to their property. All of those extra costs and time spent Last question for the day from Jeff Brand from Blue Sky Property Services did a one time cleanup for an elderly woman not very mobile so I had to lead her around her acre property to get specifics on the property. We I did the work as estimated and more and she removed one item, a large fruit tree, pruning much of the time she was hovering over the project and giving directions. I had also told her I would treat her lawn for weeds. Didn't have it on the estimate but did it anyway and the final bill was given. I had not updated the services on it, obvious problem and she paid it happily with my coworker witnessing. Oh man, this is tough. She wanted her lawn mowed again and I told her we couldn't do it that day but I would give her a Price. A day or two later, 24 some days after the bulk of the project was done, when I gave her the price, she began complaining that the job wasn't under specifications and I had not done enough extra to allow for the pruning job. Not done. Now she is bombarded with calls and texts claiming hide and taking advantage of an old lady. Suggestions, please. So, you know, there's a level of, you know, you can only do so much. You can, you know, it sounds like based upon everything you told me, you did everything possible, you gave extra services and now someone's being unreasonable. So I'm going to do everything I possibly can to talk to them, do what I can. If it's a small little thing, I just, please, like, let's just move forward and have a happy customer. But when they're being unreasonable, it's actually easy because the worst thing that they can do is make a big deal of it online with a bad review. And if someone is being unreasonable and I've done everything possible and I've gone back to the property and I've given them free services. Honestly, a response on a negative review is actually really easy because you can explain to anyone that comes and sees that negative review. Very easy that you tried, you remained professional, you offered other services, you did the walkthrough in person. It was three weeks later that you heard from them. So I actually don't get concerned about these when I've done everything I possibly can. That's what it comes down to, in my opinion is like, did you actually put in the effort to do the best job for the customer? If you did, I would not worry about this because the worst thing they can do is make a big deal of it online. And if they do, you have all the ammunition required to say, hey, we did a walkthrough. You were there the entire time, you said this three weeks after the job and after we did free services. And you can just apologize for the fact that like, hey, we didn't. You weren't happy with the job. But like, ultimately we did everything on the estimate and more for the cost that we had, you know, given prior. So I think that as long as you're at, you remain professional. Existing customers, like, or existing customers don't check your reviews. They keep coming back to you because they're happy. Negative reviews are read by people that are potentially going to use your services. So when I'm responding to reviews, the only thing I care about is the new customer that's reading that review and then reading my response to it. So remain professional. Don't get in a back and forth with the customer calling them names or calling them a liar. It does nothing. They're not coming back to you anyways. They don't like you. Just focus on the next customer that's gonna read that review and then see your response and just remain professional. Show that you did everything possible in your power to make them happy, did free services like you, did everything you needed. So that'll be my recommendation. All right. Hope you all have a fantastic day. Walter, please get in touch with ATC and do a zoom call. We'd love to go over the settings, make sure everything's set up correctly. And this coming week we do have a little surprise and delight along with fast follows on the estimate redesign that was done last month. Lots to come so looking forward to it. Love you all and hope you have a fantastic weekend. Take care.