SPRING RUSH MAYHEM: A Masterclass for Seasonal Businesses

If you're an entrepreneur and you have a home service business, here is how this presentation is going to make you more money. Number one, we're going to figure out how to schedule jobs during spring rush to avoid burnout and make sure you don't have to turn down leads. Number two, we're going to make sure that every single quarter out of the four quarters in the year are profitable, including what we consider the off season. If you don't know who I am, my name is Mike Andes and I'm the founder of Copilot CRM. We have over 700 companies that we do their software, make them more efficient and profitable, do over $1 million in daily transactions, and then Augusta Lawn Care, which is a franchise. I have a over 150 worldwide locations inside of Augusta Nation and we do over $50 million in annual revenue. All right, it stinks to stop taking new leads during the spring rush. Literally the time you've when waiting for all winter long, all off season long, and if it's not spring for you, it might be a different time of year. Just insert whatever timeframe, the go time, the time when you get tons of leads. And if you're in home services, most of us have a very seasonal lead flow and we know it's like to have a rush of customers, literally people pounding down the door, the door, the phone is ringing off the hook, leads are pouring in. And if you have to turn off your leads during that time, it's painful, it's the time you've been waiting for. But if you don't prepare correct, you have to turn off your leads now. It also stinks to lose money during the off season. And I know what it's like to burn tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars when I go from the end of my go time, my on season to switching to my off season and all the cash reserves that I've been saving up going out the window. Now, at the end of this presentation, I'm going to share with you my $50 million bet that I have in order to fix this problem and the massive bet that I'm placing in order to make sure that these two problems are solved for home service businesses. Now let's go back to the two big problems. Number one, stopping leads during spring rush stinks. Losing money during the off season also stinks. Why does this happen? This is the old way of running a home service business. And you could also, on the Y axis, the one that goes up and down there, I have money there. But you could also Say number of leads, you, you could also say demand, like the amount of people thinking about your service during that time. And you can see most of us have a massive spike in demand, a massive spike in leads, a massive spike in revenue during a period of time in the year called the spring rush. Now, this is inefficient. This is what causes many home service business owners to be unprofitable and eventually quit, which is the ultimate failure. Because many of us, if we just stayed in the game for three to five more years, would actually figure out this demand curve and what I'm talking about today, you'd actually come to this realization without having to watch this presentation. But my hope is that if you're in year one, two or three, that you're able to avoid the scars and the pain of this chart. Because this chart is the reason for many home service and seasonal businesses going out of business. Seasonality kills businesses. This way stinks. It's why it feels like a roller coaster, is you're literally riding the demand curve. You're riding the seasonality curve of your industry. And it is absolutely brutal for profitability and morale. This is the new way. And you can see that the spike in spring rush is not as crazy high, but also during the quote unquote off season, our revenue, our leads, our demand doesn't go as low. And if you watch my content for a very long time, you will remember a phrase I said years ago, and that is higher lows, lower highs. By doing that, you'll stay in the game. But today I want to make sure that you understand that by doing that and having higher lows and lower highs, you will actually make more money. So let's first talk about how to manage the spring rush, because we've established that it stinks to have to turn off leads during the spike in demand that comes in the spring and, and that it stinks to lose money during the off season. Let's first attack how to manage the spring rush effectively. The first thing I'm going to do is prioritize time sensitive jobs. I'm going to use lawn care and landscaping as an example, but insert whatever home service business that you run in any industry, and this applies during a rush of leads, whether it be in the spring or any other season, I'm going to focus on time sensitive jobs. These are jobs that must get done within a matter of days or a couple weeks and cannot be put off months down the road for lawn care and landscaping. If it's in the spring rush and someone asks For a mowing service, I can't push them off three or four weeks. If I do that, the lawn will go from two and a half inches to six and a half inches and all of a sudden the Lawn will take 10 times longer on the first cut. The customer will be unsatisfied, their HOA will write up, and they'll probably go to a different service. So I need to prioritize something like mowing in my industry because if I wait or push off the customer, I will lose the lead, make the customer unhappy, and tarnish my brand. So I need to focus on making sure there's room on my schedule and I budget accordingly in terms of the hours that I can have for my crew to make sure I can fit in. Time sensitive jobs. I'm also going to prioritize recurring jobs. Now, recurring jobs means it happens every single week, every other week, every single month, some sort of recurring basis. You're not just going to do it once a year. You're not just going to do it intermittently. You're not even just going to have a reoccurring, which means sometimes the customer comes back to you intermittently. We are going to have them on a schedule where, you know, you have predictable revenue. In the software world, they call this monthly recurring revenue. This is dependable revenue we know is going to come in every single month. The reason I'm going to prioritize this type of revenue is because it will help even out the curve of the entire season. It's going to allow me to make sure I can still make revenue even when the leads stop coming in. Because the problem with Spring Rush is that leads for all services come pouring in at the exact same time. It is up to us to filter out which ones are most important, and we've established that it's going to be time sensitive jobs and it's going to be recurring jobs that I can have recurring revenue for the rest of the year even after I've initially signed up the customer. So that way it doesn't stop my lead flow, my revenue doesn't immediately stop, and I don't have these massive peaks and valleys. Recently I was hearing from a landscape hardscaper that they went from $80,000 a month in revenue to over a million dollars in monthly revenue the next month. That's a lot of revenue and I'm super stoked for them. They have a great big business, but that kind of massive spike is very hard to sustain and plan for. And it's very hard from a cash flow perspective. To actually accurately predict what your lead flow and what your schedule is going to look like. I don't want that kind of business. I want something more stable. And recurring jobs is where that revenue comes from. So what I'm going to do during the spring rush is I'm going to move time insensitive jobs into the off season. These are going to be one time jobs, not recurring. These are projects that I can move off into the off season that are time insensitive. In the case of lawn care and landscaping, if I am prioritizing recurring and time sensitive jobs, that would be mowing, that would be a bush trimming. I can't push bush trimming off for four months. I might be able to push off for two or three weeks, but definitely not four or five months because the property will get overgrown for mowing. I have to prioritize it immediately like we've talked about already. But if I'm also offering a service like installing pavers or, or building a wall or installing a hedge, that is a time insensitive job, I can push that off two or three months past the spike in leads. That way, when all the leads come pouring in, I can filter out the ones that are time insensitive and one time jobs and move them at least a couple months off into the future. So I can focus on recurring and time sensitive jobs. So the question is, what happens if you're at capacity during the spring rush? We're talking about the spring rush and how to manage it. What happens if you're at capacity? There are three different types of capacity. Think of capacity as your limit, the max that you can do in these areas. And there's three different types of capacities that you can have. The first one is asset based capacity. Now when I think about assets, I think about your trucks and your equipment. If you have a certain amount of trucks, certain amount of equipment, there's only so much revenue you can do. There's a capacity that you'll hit before you say, hey, I have to buy more trucks, I have to buy more equipment in order to be able to continually grow revenue. So the very first capacity is how many trucks, how much equipment do you have, and what's the max or the capacity amount of revenue that you can produce without having to buy more trucks and equipment. And remember, this is at max capacity, which means you're using the truck all the time, you're using the equipment all of the time. And what kills me is when I go to home service businesses, they have five trucks and they only use One or two of them every day. They have five trucks, a whole bunch of equipment, and they have one or two employees. That is an inefficient use of your assets. And therefore you are. Your revenue is way lower than what your max capacity is for for assets. The second type of capacity, and something you're going to bump up against during spring rush is labor based capacity. Labor in this case is simply your employees. If you have a certain number of employees, what's the max amount of revenue that you can produce without overworking them? And overworking them means working tons of overtime, working so many hours that they want to quit, working so many hours that they walk off the job. This is your labor capacity. How many hours can they produce? How much revenue can they produce before they're maxed out? And if you go above capacity in the short term, you'll make more revenue and you can go above capacity in the short term. But if you continually are exceeding capacities of assets, all your trucks and equipment, your labor, all of your employees, if you're constantly going above max capacity, they'll eventually burn out and you'll collapse your capacity because trucks will break down, employees will leave. The third capacity, also something you don't want to go over, your max capacity, is personal capacity. This one's a little harder to calculate because it really comes down to what is your personal capacity. You have to judge this for assets. It's very easy to say, okay, I have X amount of trucks. This is how much revenue I can do based upon if the crew is filled inside the truck. For employees, it's very easy to say, okay, they work 40 hours a week. They're going to complete 30 budget hours per week of work. Multiply that by my hourly rate. Boom. There's my revenue capacity for labor and for personal capacity. It is very difficult to sometimes quantify because it really comes down to what is the amount of revenue that you can produce without losing your marbles, without having psychological, emotional, physical problems that occur in your life simply because you're overworking yourself. And this number can be improved the same way that you can buy more trucks, buy more equipment, and hire more employees to increase asset and labor capacity. You could also gain more skills. And hopefully this video helps do this to increase your personal capacity, which you can operate a larger business without losing your marbles. So what should be done if you're at capacity, in other words, all of your assets are being maxed out. You're using all of your trucks and equipment every single day. Those trucks are filled up with Labors, and those labors are being maxed out. They're working full time all the time, or you're starting to bump up against your personal capacity and you're starting to feel like you're gonna lose your marbles. What should be done? First off, if you're at capacity and if you're in profit mode. Profit mode is defined as you are maximizing for profit instead of growth, and you can switch between profit and growth mode in the year. So, for example, a lot of owners at Augusta Nation will take the first six months of the year to be in growth mode, and, and then they will switch to profit mode. If you're at capacity in any of these three areas, assets, labor, or personal, and you're in profit mode, you're going to raise prices. By raising prices, you're going to reduce your close ratio. You're going to reduce the number of leads that get converted into paying customers. By doing that, you're going to dampen how many budget hours are on your schedule. You're going to dampen how much more demand you can sustain. But in this case, we're not going to extend capacity. We're not going to buy more trucks, we're not going to hire more people. We are simply going to raise prices and be more profitable. That's why it's called profit mode. We're going to maximize for profit, not for growth. Now, if you're at capacity and you're in growth mode, which means you're trying to grow at all costs, and you're not as concerned about your profit margins and as much as simply generating more revenue, getting more customers, and having a high close ratio that converts more leads into customers, what are you going to do? We're going to buy trucks and hire employees. Because if we're in growth mode, assuming that your personal capacity can handle it, the only thing that limits you is assets and labor. And so in order to keep growing and you're bumping up against capacity, the only thing you'll need to do is buy more trucks and equipment, hire employees. By doing that, we increase our capacity and can continue to grow revenue, let me say very quickly, by having a strong brand and having a customer service quality measures in place and a great website and painted and decal trucks and uniformed employees. And you actually answer the phone when people call and you actually respond to them very quickly when they ask for an estimate. And if you do all those things, let me just say this. Being in profit mode and raising your prices usually will not hurt your close ratio as much as you think less customers will leave than you think when you raise prices to existing customers. We're doing this literally at my location right now. Over 300 customers we're raising prices on by 25 plus percent. A new video in the future will break down. What happened? When is the best time to increase capacity? So, okay, I am overwhelmed, overworked. I'm in the middle of spring rush. When should I increase my capacity, I. E. Buy more trucks, hire more employees? Well, it's actually not in spring rush. The goal is to get ahead of the demand. In other words, plan for the fact that during spring rush you're going to get a ton of leads.