Mike Andes (creator/leader) presents a short video laying out the pros and cons of Copilot CRM. Cons: Copilot is new—lacking long-term customer reviews, likely to have more bugs and operational hurdles as it iterates quickly, and it may be relatively expensive for very small operators who can’t amortize the cost. Pros: high transparency (open roadmap, active community engagement), autonomy from investors or debt (founders own the company), leadership with direct small-business/home-services experience, and a focus on using AI to produce practical, actionable business insights from CRM data (e.g., close ratios, pricing, hiring triggers). The mission is to build a CRM that tells owners what to do practically to run their businesses.
Chapters
Foreign.
Some of the pros and the cons of Copilot. Let's go over the cons first. The cons is first and foremost. We don't have years and years of reviews, customer feedback that you can look back and see we have a 5, 10 year record of creating software and having happy customers. Another con is that because we are new and because we are young, there are more hurdles and bugs that may potentially interfere with your workflow or your operations. That simply because we are new to the game and there's things that are changing and as we add new features, there's going to be bugs, there's going to be hurdles, there's going to be things that pop up much more frequently than someone that has software that's been in place for five, 10 years, hasn't changed a whole lot and they're incrementally tweaking it by 1% every single week instead of 1% a day. And that's the rate that we are trying to operate at. Another con potentially is that we aren't the cheapest software. There are other software packages out there. If you're a solo operator or with one or two employees, it might actually be a more cost effective alternative to Copilot because we are definitely not the cheapest software out there. But I do believe you get what you pay for. And when it comes to software, every dollar you spend should be returned back to you in efficiencies gained by 10x, which I do believe Copilot delivers on. However, if you're a smaller company, it's harder for that math to work simply because the law of large numbers and you don't have enough scale to make 100, 200, $300 a month payment on your software make sense financially. So what are some of the pros or positive things about joining Copilot? Number one is the transparency that I have for all of our users. I am in our Facebook group every single day, every other weekend. I have office hours, a mastermind, a live stream with all of our users. Talk about talking about what exactly is on our feature roadmap, exactly what we're working on. We show exactly the bugs and features we're working on live on our flight log. There's nothing behind closed doors, there's no surprises. We tell you what's coming and if you have a feature that we're working on, we will tell you approximately when it's on our feature roadmap. This level of transparency not only comes from myself, but I expect this of our entire team from our sales and support. We will tell you if we think there's a better CRM that will work better for you. If you get on a sales call we with one of our reps and we have a demo. We will tell you if Yard Book is a better option for you. If Service All Pilot is a better option for you. If LMN or another alternative CRM is going to be a better fit for your business. Because ultimately I only care about the small business owner. If I keep that as my North Star and if we keep that as the North Star of Copilot CRM, the business will be fine. I ultimately am trying to build the tool that I've always wanted in a CRM and failed to see it happen in the CRMs that have existed for so long. Another pro of Copilot is that we don't have any sort of outside pressure on what we should or should not do in the business. There's no debt and there's no investors. We don't have private or public investors. We are not bought out. There's no other stakeholder besides myself. I own 60% of the business and our CTO Patrick Cash, who owns 40% of the business. That's it. We don't have debt. We don't have loans that we could potentially go do in a recession. We don't have a board of advisors or a board of investors or angel investors or venture capital. We don't have to try to focus on raising the next funding round to be able to continue to burn cash. That's not how this business operates. And because of that we have full autonomy to move quickly, hire developers that are going to actually move the needle for innovation and be able to push the boundaries of what other legacy software providers will not do for the sake that they are not willing to potentially jeopardize losing 5 or 10% of their audience. They have to make a mass market vanilla product that will get a massive amount of users instead of doing what the users really need to take their business to the next level. And that is push the boundaries, make some mistakes and make some bugs by pushing the envelope of innovation and staying up with technology and HubSpot and Salesforce and these massive companies that are doing CRMs right and actually innovating when it comes to AI and current technologies. These are the type of technologies that we will take into Copilot and use because we have the autonomy to break things and move much faster than legacy CRMs. The last pro of Copilot is that there is someone at the helm and the leadership that has real business experience in the small business world and in home services. Always has been, always will be, and every single day I'm in the trenches with my franchisees at Augusta Lawn Care with thousands of other viewers from my channel in multiple different industries in the home services from plumbing to roofing, construction to cleaning. All these industries can use Copilot and know that the leadership actually understands what's going on in their businesses operations and what it takes to be successful. Not only do I have the understanding of what should go on inside of a business, we can then take and tailor the software using AI to be able to tell you exactly what you should be doing in your business based upon the metrics, based upon the objective data of close ratio, time to close, the percentage of revenue that's coming from each of the services you have and which customers you should raise prices on, when you should hire employees. All of this can be determined by AI and by the information that you're already inputting into your CRM. Your CRM has so much data it blows my mind that there's no CRM that's actually telling the business owner what they should be doing practically in their business. That's what CoPilot's mission is, to solve that problem. And that can only happen with the right leadership and the ability to be able to innovate very quickly.
