the BEST Software for Home Service Businesses

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My name is Mike Andes. I'm the co founder and CEO of copilotcrm.com I'm also the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have over 120 locations around North America. And today I'm going to be talking to you about the best CRM customer relationship management tool for your lawn care, landscaping and any home service based business. I'm going to go through the top five and explain the pros, the cons. I'm also going to talk about how much you're going to be paying for it. Also looking at the payment processing because that's actually the hidden cost of most of these softwares. It's not the monthly fee and then what the ideal user use case for every one of these software is going to be. And if you, if you're starting out, I am biased. I am 100% biased because I'm the co founder of Copilot, I'm the CEO. However, you might be shocked by the fact that I'm not going to recommend Copilot for everyone. I think that these other software software systems have a user that is better fit for their needs compared to Copilot. I'll explain which ones I think should and should not use Copilot and who should actually use these other softwares. Instead of Copilot, which I am affiliated with, I'm going to be comparing all of these and in terms of prices and features and things like that, I'm going to be comparing the top tier of their features and their top tier of what options they have. The reason for that is because when you start to grow a business, the the amount that you spend on CRM is so minuscule compared to what it can save you. If it has the right feature set, it has the right user interface. It's incredible. If you have a million dollar business you could easily save 50, 50,000 or $100,000 a year simply by having a couple of good features. So having an extra $50 or $60 per month is not going to be a deciding factor. I am going to go overprice. But just keep in mind I'm comparing the best features and the best tier you might say or package that these softwares offer. All right, I'm not going to compare every single tier because most of them have three to four different tiers. All right, I got some notes. I want to be prepared, make sure I got everything nailed down. Just keep in mind I have tried out dozens of software packages. These are the most popular ones. And down the road I'll be adding in more one off software system there might be a little more niche or a niche niche to the industries and specific types of use cases. But I'll compare and contrast those and the pros and cons of each of those as well. But these are some of the most popular in the lawn care, landscaping and home service industries. So just remember these are my opinions. I am biased. You definitely want to do more research and talk to other users. In my opinion the best feedback is from other users of this software, not the companies themselves. So just remember I am biased and I do own a piece of Copilot as I go through all of this. But I have tried out dozens of software including all of these and I know exactly what is the good, the bad and the ugly. And the whole reason I had to start start Copilot is because I do feel there was a need in the market that was not being filled by these other players. So let's go ahead and jump into it. What I'm going to do is you get the little button here, the little color circle as I move through the different features of the specific software. I will move this along until we finish over here where I am going to explain what user and what use case is best for the specific software. So let's start off with Jobber. All right, so some of the pros that I have with Job or some of the good things is very simple, great looking user interface or ui. Very, very clean. It's easy to learn and adapt. So if you have using another software and you're migrating in a Jobber, very simple. The user interface is very, very easy. They've some really good new integrations and with about 15 to 20 different companies that they're working with right now, direct integrations and Zapier integration. Zapier allows you to connect with like 4000 other apps using that, that specific Zapier integration. So that's fantastic. Very simple way of using SMS texting and I'm just really like the way that they do the text messaging to and from the customer, very simple. I've seen other software systems that their SMS texting extremely complicated, it's hard to track. Jobbers really nailed it and they have great chat support. When it comes to Jobber. Their chat support like in the bottom right hand corner of the software you can just like chat with someone. Very good live support. I also like their mobile app. It's very clean, very simple to use and their client poor portal layout is just stellar. Honestly the way that they have invoicing and estimates for the client to see in the client portal. In my mind, one of the most simple ones and the most user friendly ways of getting started when it comes to CRM is Jobber. All right, some of the cons is that they do lack some automation flexibility. When you start trying to create automations beyond just estimate follow up and invoice follow up, there's just not lot of customization there as well as their dispatch board is just not really built for large operations. So for example, my very first Augusta lawn care location, you know, there needs to be an ability to have 3, 4, 500 jobs on a dispatch board and you know, dozens of crews. And I feel like jobbers is not set up for that. Their dispatch board isn't really set up for that larger operations and some of their marketing functions are pretty limited unless you integrate also with mailchimp for email for example. And the problem with that is I want to have all of my marketing and my serum in one software package if possible instead of having to go get a mailchimp subscription which is going to cost you an additional hundred and fifty dollars depending on what type of number of clients you have. But for my business I'd have to pay an additional on top of what I'm paying to Jobber for just mailchimp so I can do my email marketing. There's obviously a lot of benefit to having open source where you have a lot of integrations. But also I want one software to a lot of the heavy lifting for me and that includes my marketing and Jobber does not have that right now. Now when it comes to pricing at Jobber, we're looking at $349 per month. That includes 15 users. So very nice. If you have like 10 users, it's an average like 35 bucks a user. Not bad. But in addition that $350 you're going to have to pay for upgrades such as company Cam Mailchimp and these integrations might cost 50, 100 plus dollars. So just keep in mind you're not getting really all the features that you would in some of these other packages at the 349 price point because there's integrations that are also need to be tacked on if you want to use their full benefits and their full feature set. So CompanyCam, great integration, love it. The ability to take photos and videos and attach those to pieces of the estimate, etc. But that's a paid additional feature. You'll have to get a subscription with the other company. All right. Payment processing 2.7 to 3.1%. Depending what type of credit card and depending on what type of layer and tier you're in of their customer base, you're going to get 1% a fee for ACH. Right. So you got credit card processing and then you have ach. It stands for Automated Clearinghouse. It's for basically when you get the routing number and the bank number, bank account number from the customer. A lot cheaper, only 1% achievement. However, they don't allow for auto payments. From what I've heard, because this is a recent thing, from what I've heard, they do not allow auto payments on ach. The reason companies do this is because they want you to use the credit card processing because they make more money. So I don't like the fact that they don't allow auto pay on ACH and they don't have a cap on that 1%. So if you have a $10,000 bill, you're going to pay 1% of that, which is $100. A lot of these other companies what comes to ACH, they have a cap on what ACH is per transaction. All right, ideal user, in my opinion is anyone that is from $100,000 in annual revenue to $500,000 in annual revenue. So again, they don't really have the flexibility for those massive companies, but they are going to be a little bit have some good features in here in terms of users that are still small and above 100,000 revenue. All right, I wouldn't recommend a job or if you're doing under 100,000, you don't need it. But if I would recommend it for people that have most of their revenue, that 100,000 to 500,000 is coming from recurring jobs as well as projects that are under $10,000. They don't have the most robust project management tools. They're really built for smaller jobs and recurring jobs. And so if you're doing 50, 100, $200,000 landscape installs and ponds and pools, probably not the best solution for you in my opinion. All right, let's move on to Service Autopilot. Now I've used Service Autopilot the most out of all these software systems because we have built Augusta nation to over 100 locations mostly on service output. We've used some other other softwares as well, but the vast majority of our locations in the past ran on Service Autopilot. So some of the pros, number one, very powerful enterprise level features for automations. Potentially some of their best work was done a few years ago when they instituted some very robust Features around automations great for the enterprise level larger companies doing 3, 4, 5, 10 million fantastic features for them. In addition to automations for those enterprise level users, they also have job costing and great price matrixes. Again something that's not visible in something like Jobber, but it is great for that enterprise level user that is doing hundreds of estimates a day, thousands of recurring jobs a day. Their dispatch board is fantastic and in my mind one of the best dispatch boards out there for recurring work and for large volumes of recurring work. All right, so this is again enterprise level users is where the game is at for service all because their automations, their price matrixes and their job costing. All right, now let's talk about some of the cons. So cons for service all very long learning curve. We had to train our franchisees for months many times to get them up to speed and learning how service all can be used. It's very complicated to learn and it's very hard to implement. In fact a lot of times they upsell you into a setup. So the thing I don't mention a lot here is the fact that they're actually trying to sell you on a package just to get your software set up for you and then on a recurring basis try to sell you on a monthly 50 or $100 extra just to get your email account set, your email document set up and your estimate formatting and your invoice formatting. It's so complicated to implement. Honestly, it's one of the worst things about it really. Honestly in my mind one of the cons of service Autopilot is that they have a slowing innovation ever since their co founders were bought out and they've been part of a larger company that has venture capital behind them. Innovation has slowed to a crawl. Also their client portal in my opinion, just very, very poor. Hopefully there's some updates down the road, but we've been hearing about those updates for four or five years now and haven't seen anything. They have very few integrations. They're much more of a closed system, kind of like Apple and compared to something like Java has an open source and allows people to integrate and connect with Zapier and other apps. Last thing that the cons is really bad customer service. A lot of their users, that's their biggest complaint is bad phone support and then the way they do their ticketing system that when you call in the person on the other line just makes a ticket for you and then says that they'll call you back. And sometimes you wait days waiting for them to call you back. So definitely a big con in terms of pricing you're looking at $279 per month for their Pro and Plus account plus $19 per user so keep that in mind. That's a big part of the cost is that per user pricing plus setup they're going to charge you for setting it up plus you're going to pay for upgrades such as Maps Pro which allows you to do measuring of properties via satellite etc. Plus you're going to have other upgrades for like client portal $50 a month if you want to do QuickBooks sync another $50 a month texting more like there's just a lot of Additional so the 279 per month is definitely just the tip of the iceberg similar to Jobber where other integration that you're going to need that are going to be on top of that monthly price. So it's a little bit deceiving there but 279 is the actual price plus $19 per user plus setup plus all those other you know pieces of fee.