The Ultimate Upsell Guide for Home Services

Failing to upsell your existing customers means that forever you'll be addicted to spending money on Facebook, Google and other ad platforms. If you want to get out of that, you're going to have to figure out how do I upsell a thousand dollar per year customer into a $5,000 per year customer? Because if you can do that, you could 5x the business without getting a single new customer. That's one of the topics we'll be covering today as I do a Q and A with new members from homeworks. You can go be part of this. Call yourself if you get a home works and become a new member today.

So I have a couple of questions there on two different ends of the spectrum. The first one is right now we're focusing on building extreme slides and water features into pools. We've exchanged some contact on Instagram once or twice. So it's mostly the luxury echelon of building. And I think that's where I need to be positioned right now because of some of the. My colleagues.

Right.

So one of the questions we have is we're always about bonuses and incentives. I think the problem we have with water features is that if something goes wrong real quickly, who goes back to make the fix and how are they get, who's paying them? Is that coming out of my pocket since I gave them like some incentives to maybe finish up more efficiently. But that sometimes could lead to, you know, not having all, everything done properly. So that's one of my questions.

So the defects that happen, are those usually happening within a week or two of installation?

That's a good question. I'd have to get some thought on that to know the percentages, but I would probably lean towards, let's say 50% of that's correct.

Correct. So the, the shorter that time frame, the better because like what really stinks? And this is why, even when it comes to big projects like irrigation, we had problems with this with P4P is they do a big installation job, they crush budget, get a thousand dollars bonus and then five months go by and it's like, oh, you installed the controller incorrectly. Very difficult and hard to explain to an employee where it's like, yeah, you're getting ding for something five months ago. So the nice thing is when, when they make it have to go back to a property, I'm assuming most of it's just time, like they have to go back and fix something. It's not like a lot of material costs. Am I correct in that?

That's correct, yeah. It's a, it's a time thing. But again, who pays for that? Who's liable so that I'm not paying a bonus and then I'm paying for extra time on the clock.

Yeah. So as long as your bonus is. Is a bonus meaning you have base pay, that is you make sure you honor, overtime, etc. On and then the bonus is based upon their performance. That is how quickly they get in these things installed. That's all money on the table that you can take off if they're making mistakes. The nice thing though is Jeff, if they're just going back to the property to fix something and it's just their time, you don't even have to make a manual adjustment because they're just now going to get less done this week on P4P I E production this week. And it's going to. It's going to vicariously hurt them. You don't have to make a deduction. So what's nice in your case is most of these repairs are time meaning hey guys, go back to the property. You're not producing any more revenue. It's going to slow you down today. It's going to hurt you on this month's paycheck. But you don't actually have to remove the money from them. The removal of the money, like the removal of the bonus happens when there's product cost, materials, equipment that's broken and you, you are actually no go buy something to replace something that was broken.

That makes a lot of sense now. I appreciate that even more. So could I switch gears to another question?

What?

Do you want to take someone else?

Okay, go for it.

So over the years I've done a lot for many customers, a lot of repeat customers. That's really a nice sweet spot for us. I was trying to think outside the box. We did a beautiful job. Totally finished the backyard. Another contractor came in, installed an audio system, really put everything over the top. I says there's no way that I can't do this myself. So my son in law who's an electrician, we put our minds together, we bought a brand new enclosed trailer. We made it a virtual. Not a virtual, but we made it a real showroom with lights, speakers inside and outside and it can run off the grid. It's fully shrink wrapped and branded.

Wow.

And it's focusing on just audio and video. I mean I'm sorry, lighting and audio. So it's really cool. We can actually drive down the road and have music playing outside of the trailer. So what, what my go. What my plan was is to Go back to all my existing customers.

Right.

Because they're not price shopping and set up demo setups for them for a week at a time and then take it off if they're not interested or leave it and install it. I was also going to put mails out to strategic demographics that could yield a little bit more disposable income. With that said, do you have any other insight you could give to us taking this into this new direction?

Yeah. So basically you've added an additional add on and I think the biggest bang for your buck is going to come from taking existing customers have already given you money, they're super happy and you're like, hey, there's an extra. I'll make up a number five to ten grand and you're going to take, you know, your seven out of ten to a ten out of ten. The mobile trailer is that built as a showroom, Jeff.

It's a little of both. You can actually store material on there. It's all shelves, cabinetry, you know, and it's user friendly to work out. There's a microwave, a refrigerator, and it could be ran off the grid with its own little power pack.

Yeah. Did you pull service or just the installs?

It's, it's not so much in the way of maintenance, but we do have maintenance agreements for those that have our extreme features. We'll go back, we'll wax the slide, check out the waterfall, flow rate, lights, fire, all of that. So I do have a nice little foot in the door with those, the clienteles. And then naturally there's this new stuff that generates.

Okay, how many contacts do you think you have in your database?

Several hundred. Over 30 plus years.

Yeah. And how much does it cost for you? That doesn't matter. I would be looking for three freebies that I can give to every one of those customers that'll hit all of them. So for example, waxing the slide, adjust whatever they need based upon what you installed for them. I'd be giving a freebie away. But as part of the freebie they have, you're going to set an appointment to be with them. And that what is going to turn from a freebie into a sales presentation and you're going to show up with that trailer. So hey, Mr. Jones, I'm going to be there at 3:00pm we're going to be doing your complimentary wax, your waxing of your slide. And while you're there, I have something really cool I want to show you. I think it worked great in the backyard and it's A great touch point for you just to connect with them and they got great service. At the very least you're getting a review. So when you leave that, you're at least getting a review for the fact that you just did something free for them. And that reciprocity, whatever the word is, reciprocity that comes with you doing the freebie though. You'll get the review and then while you're there you just so happen to have this awesome trailer. And have you seen the fact that we now do lighting, we do audio. So that's you get them in the trailer and you upsell them from there. So I think you can go from like let's just say you get 50 of these people to set up appointments, you're giving them something for free. I think 25 of those get inside that trailer, 10 of them sign up for service and then you've gotten. Then again you kick started that service arm. And I would just also in your sales process for your existing business, bake in when your going to do these upsells to that other feature. Right. So like it's like well they said no before. That's not the end of it. When you do the walkthrough of the final job, you're also with the trailer right there and you're going to do. Hey, by the way, we just went ahead and installed the lighting and the audio will come back in a couple weeks to take it away. But wanted to give you a shot at trying it out and see how you like it. So like you're going to bake that upsell in in the future to new sales.

Yeah, I like that. Sometimes if I build it in there's a lot of budget restraints. So sometimes I like those upsells towards the end.

Yep.

Because like you said, you're leaving it. They're seeing every day that the wife comes home to a beautiful lit house. Now it's like when can you do it as opposed to how much? If it's built in early sometimes there's a lot of push and pull and it. They may want a little bit more.

Yeah, they're happiest with that pool and the slide and the light, all that stuff right after you do it. So what you do is you just leave it with the, the lights or the audio equipment and say hey, I'll be back in two weeks to take this away. You know, in the next two weeks they have four parties lined up ready to rock and roll. They're going to love it and they're not going to want it gone and so you can pitch it up front and they're going to say no budgets. And then you just say, hey, by the way, as a thank you, we install it for free for the next two weeks and we'll come back and get. If you don't want it, totally fine. No pressure whatsoever.

I like that.

Beautiful. Thanks for insight, Mike.

You got it, brother. Jackson's up. Go for it, brother.

Hey. So I've got two questions. The first one is first a little background. I'm 17 years old. I'm graduating high school in the end of April, beginning of May, really trying to go full time. We just hit 115,000 in revenue last year and which was increased by 65% from 2024. So great growth there. But I'm really trying to grow to hopefully hit between 3 and 400,000 with growing full time. So huge go there. But I do think it's completely doable. However, the main question is I'm. I would love to. And I feel like I got. I have an opportunity to go on a missions trip all, all the next school year. So I would thinking kind of take it as a gap year. Nothing. I'm going full time in. I'd like to keep the business going. What are some steps that you would take before if I went on that leaving in say, August? So what would you do the first spring rush to prepare for that? Who would you hire? Or would you even try to get that growth? Or would you try to stay back at 115,000, you know, maybe try to grow a little bit, but nothing crazy and then really scale it up a year, a year from now?

Yeah, I would wait. I'm pretty, pretty firm on this one, Jackson, because mostly because if you're going to go on this trip, you don't want back home pulling you back every 10 seconds.

Right.

And the likelihood of pulling you back every 10 seconds increases dramatically when you go from a hundred thousand to four hundred thousand because you now have a group of employees instead of one really solid person that you fully trust to get the work done and you compensate them really well. So if I was you, I would go into profit mode, raise prices, get really solid, try to get as much off the plate this person as possible. For example, like, I wouldn't even. I would consider not having a phone number. Okay. This is like for everyone else, you can just turn me off in a second. I would not have a phone number. I'd probably have text only. I would probably have. The only way for them to sign up is from My website, instant quotes or some other form of like pricing is done for them. But ultimately you're hiring someone who's gonna have to be very self sufficient and they could, they have the capacity to go run a business themselves. So you're gonna have to compensate them heavily. But what I would recommend you optimizing for is the triple. Otherwise don't do it like you don't want to go away. And it'd be like all the time think about the business. You're firing people, the customers are complaining, you got bad reviews. Just get rid of as much as possible by simplifying and standardizing everything. Standardize your pricing simplifies the services. Like if right now you're like, I have to go tomorrow, what are the three things you know would fall through the cracks? Get rid of them. Like if it's like, well, whenever we turn on the irrigation stuff happen, great, we're not doing irrigation. I would go hardcore profit mode. Like if you've read the book, just do everything when I talk about profit mode. And then when you come back, you'll now have a little bit of a nest egg that you can deploy against growth mode. And you go, everyone's afraid of raising prices. What if I want to grow down the road? Great. You spend more money on marketing and at the very worst you lower prices.

Right.

So I, that would be my recommendation mostly because I want you to optimize for the trip your regret trying to grow in a year early and then bouncing on the trip and not enjoying it.

Right, right. Okay. And then another question that's not really related to that at all. But I knew, I know that you know, in the, I'm from the Charlotte, North Carolina area, South park area, senior trucks around. You know, when you started that location, and I believe it was 2022 or something, what did, what kind of marketing did you find was best during that? I know a lot of the door hangers, we did those last year, it was just slow to get them out. Properties are half acre. It's just, it's just hard to go house to house. So what kind of marketing would you focus on? And obviously if we're in profit and we're doing that, maybe we're not spending a whole lot on marketing to begin with. But when that time comes, what are some things that you found were good?

Yeah, like when I started location, it was later in the year. So that's why the door hangers worked because you don't have to rely on someone's searching us out. Otherwise Google is, is A winner in that market. There's a lot of demand for it during spring and then late summer. I was starting it in June, which is kind of between the two rushes that you see in South Park. So Google works good. Honestly, in that market. Facebook ads do well if you do them correctly. Two months ago, they were. They were getting leads for 10 bucks per on core aeration only for about two weeks. So what we've seen really work well there is where on leaves corporation and certain like very acute periods of time where people need a service, get them in the lead, get them in a copilot, and then upsell them other stuff later on. And so what's nice with the texting thing now that you can mass text is you just need people in your database, the type of person that doesn't want to do service on their property. And so what we do is we just adjust our offer and the service that we're pitching based upon the thing that we knowing at really low cost per lead on and hopefully just break even. So for example, coration, I get $10 per lead, let's say one out of five, because usually lower close rate on those 20%, $50 cost, customer acquisition cost on a $120 service. We're not making a bunch of money. But if I know they're in my system, I can sell half of those people mowing or winter services.

Right.

And so I would. That's what I would focus on. Like your offer is just basically a goal to. To qualify the person that is going to be inside your system that you'll upsell something else later down the road.

Okay.

Okay. So I have a secret. It's just for everyone watching this video, but on February 17th, we're officially changing the name of Copilot CRM to Homeworks. So get ready because something big is about to happen. Hannah and Nick, go ahead.

Hey, we have a couple questions. We're trying to push for a lot of growth this year. Last year we're at like 605. I think obviously we're just finishing up our taxes, so.

Well, most people don't say 605, so you're probably pretty accurate.

We're pretty close. So we're trying to. We're trying to push for growth because we wound up moving out. So we're on the border state. So there's Washington is right next to us. We're on. We're in Idaho and we moved out of Washington because we wound up losing a large customer there. We don't want to deal with taxes. And so I was just going to.

See if you were going to say the truth. Okay. All right, thank you.

Tax, taxes. And man, the customer. The customer was a huge pain. And then it just, they. They decided to go with the person they were with previously because they were way cheaper. So anyways, we're. We moved out of Washington. It's not worth it anymore. We're trying to push for growth to. To overcome that loss that we had. Because that was probably about a quarter of a million.

Yeah, about.

About half. Almost half of our revenue for the year was mostly because of snow because that. We lost money all summer on them, but we made it back on the snow season. It was very profitable in that way. So what, what recommendation? So we're trying to hit capacity as fast as possible. So what recommendations do you have in order to do that as far as like price point? Obviously we're going to be restructuring our website to have like 30 pages like you recommended. I looked at some of your marketing videos. So we're going to be doing a lot of that stuff. But like, if you were to say like the biggest, I don't know, one, two, three things, whatever it is, in order to hit capacity at. We're also in a slightly more expensive area than average. So.

Cool. What, what city are you in?

Coeur d'.

Alene.

We live in Hayden, but Falls. Yeah.

Cool.

And.

And how far away is that from where you were serving in Washington?

Like 45, 50 minutes. We had a big route.

It was about four hours on the route.

Are you abandoning all those customers in Washington or is it just the one? Okay, good. Okay, cool. All right. And then second thing is that was a commercial contract you lost. Is that correct?

Yeah.

And are you residential otherwise or you do commercial? Kind of.

Only we have commercial for snow, mostly residential for. For maintenance.

Got it. And okay. All right. Like I'd be first looking at website, first looking at like new reviews. I'd be setting up an automation to get reviews. Like by the way, like this time is the best time to ask all your customers for review. I would send for everyone listening. I would send a text message to every single customer from COBA asking for review from you personally. You will get like we. We've put in several something around like 5,000 Google reviews in the past few days across Augusta. Just saying like, hey, thank you so much for your support in 2025. It would love if you get a review. Like it's. It just crushes this time of year. I don't know why Christmas, New Year's, is a great time to ask for reviews. But doing that and then making sure your website is optimized for Coeur d', Alene, it would be the highest leverage. And, and like right now, how many Google reviews do you have, Hannah?

Like six?

Yeah. So that needs to be over 30 in that market specifically probably more like 50 because I know that area pretty well. To start showing up, you will double or triple the number of leads. If you can get to 30 plus leads, 30 plus reviews you'll get, you'll get double or triple amount of leads from Google. So I would focus 100% of my time and tension on website Google reviews. When I say website, I'm talking like headers and page like you were mentioning having service pages, etc. But make sure it's very, very customized to Coeur d' Alene and the reviews will probably be the biggest thing for you to be honest.

Okay, so just really focusing on reviews. We were potentially going to buy guys route that's retiring and then there's an Airbnb company that just acquired 180 Airbnbs and they don't as far as know they just have like a maintenance guy. So we're looking at hopefully picking those up. But then my next question was revenue goals per per employee. You have like 125 to 150, right? Was your revenue goal? Is that per like mo season? Is that for the whole year?

It's very dependent on your market as well as services you're offering. If you have snow and mixed in there, that number should be significantly higher. If you're just doing maintenance only, it's going to be significantly not but can be lower than 125. So I, I'm tracking that number mostly for the internal sake to be able to make sure like we're trending in the right direction. I'm not necessarily using it as a benchmark against anyone else because as soon as you add snow, you bump that by 30, 40%. As soon as you do commercial, reduce it by 20 or 30%. So I would just benchmark yourself year to year using that number and I would be much more inclined to be tracking your efficiency score in terms of labor because that actually is the determining factor of efficiency, not how much you make revenue because like you just throw material cost, you just throw a bunch of product on a job and all of a sudden you're making more revenue. So I would be much more looking at budget hours versus actual hours. And that's why like on the calendar, on the dispatch board Everything inside copilot is budget hours, like all over the place, create a new visit. There's efficiency score there. Like everything is there for budget hours because if you don't know your efficiency score, you don't know how efficient you are. And revenue per employee can mask massive problems in the business.

So then my next question is we have a lot of, like I said, it's more expensive than average because there's so many like really wealthy communities in our area. Would you be trying to get in? Because we have some customers that are down in some of those communities and they do, they do revenue really well, like per customer, because we, every time we send out a quote, we send out all the services that we provide for maintenance and they can select what they want and then we split that up between seven, eight or nine months, depending on what it is. And but we do like they're, they're picky, you know, so it is like a time issue. And then they also, obviously they're wealthy for a reason. So sometimes they can be very price sensitive. Surprisingly. So. Would you be trying to go after like one off just a bunch of mow trim blows, or would you be trying to get those full service customers that do aeration, do dethatch? We're doing their turn on, we're doing their blowout, we're doing their backflow.

Yeah. Like, so first off, people that are wealthy like to negotiate. I'm one of them. Am I price sensitive? No. But will I push back on price? Yes. What I mean by that is I am willing to pay two to three times more if someone just does not bother me and this gets the job done. And so when you're going after that mark, that target demographic, it's easy to say they're price sensitive because they will push back on price. They'll try to negotiate with you. But once you get them as a customer, they don't price shop you because they, their time is worth so much more than someone making 100 grand a year. Like their, like their time is if they have to meet with you one time a year, that's worth more than all the billing that you'll do for the whole year for them. And so I would really lean into saving the thing that's most valuable, which is time. If you do that, there's price sensitivity goes out the window because now they're not comparing your $45 versus someone else's $40. They're comparing spending three hours trying to get bids for someone else versus going to your website and signing up Today. And so I would be pushing 100% of your time on focusing on saving them time because that's the thing they value most and especially if they're an older audience, like time is really valuable to them because it's literally a shot, like a shot clock. And so I would lean heavily into saving them time. Whether it be instant quotes, whether it be speed to lead, whether it be answering the phone. These are all the little intangibles that if you do them all of a sudden they don't question price. And so we were able to track like what percentage of people negotiate price. And we have that down to less than 1% at Augusta. And it's mostly because like you can't compare me against someone else who doesn't answer the phone. You can't compare me against someone else where when I get your card information on my website like you don't like and people know. And so the type of customer showing up starts to self select themselves for a premium service.

So then since you're familiar with the area, are there any services that you'd recommend? Sorry, our kid just, we were out late working on snow stuff and since it's just the two of us, she was out with us too, so she's sleeping in. What services would you recommend to extend your maintenance season so that our employees can stay on? Because like with the snow, we, it's like feast or famine. So sometimes you're working like 40 hours straight and you wind up having a lot of fall off on your employees. Because even though we pay about 25 to 50% more per hour for snow, it's still just a lot. You know, you're like, you're. So what would you recommend to like try and extend our, our regular maintenance season to make their schedules a little bit more stable?

Yeah, three things. So first off, in fall I'm trying to push off demand. In spring, I'm trying to pull it forward and then I'm going to try to figure out something to do when I there's not snow on the ground and so when I'll break all three down. So for example, in the fall I am trying to make sure that all my existing customers, I serve them after all the people who are coming in because the leaves are on the ground I needed to properly clear. Like I'm trying to push my customers off after that. So I schedule them in advance for a few weeks later so I can push my demand out a little bit. Same thing is true. In the spring I'm going to try to get Them to all do it as soon as the snow is melted or ideally like even like before that, like as fast as possible so that when the rush comes, I can actually capitalize on the leads coming in and then the big. The big unlock. If you have you had a chance to read the off season book by chance?

I haven't yet. I will be. I have about six books that are on my list, so.

I know, I know. Don't worry about it. So two things. One, if you're more on the YouTube side, there is a free course on it. So it's just. Go to mikeyangs.com There's a free workshop if you just want to watch in the background if you can't read the book. But in there, Cure four of the five is for the off season. When it comes to winter services in your market, Winter services does pretty good if you pair it with snow. Now you guys don't do residential snow, I'm assuming, right?

No, we. We're thinking about it. I think we'll probably do a big push for it next year. It's just that the. For us. Because the snow is not. De ice is where you make money, in my opinion.

Yeah, that's what I think. If I was you out in winter services, I would bundle in de ice into your winter services. Don't do the plowing that way your plows guys can go out and do commercial and then your winter service crew stays on residential and they just do de icing and maybe shoveling off like the. The walkways, for example.

I mean, most people around here buy like one bag of de ice for the year. Like because people are very. The biggest thing I come up against is is it going to mess with the concrete?

Right.

And it's like, obviously we know that that's like it can. But it's also based on how the concrete was put in. If it was a crap install, it's going to flake off because you got that slurry on top. So I just. The D ice is kind of where we come up against an issue with the resident because that's what we were. We were calling around our friends and family and anybody that we knew and asking them like, hey, would you pay this much for de ice? You know, because we. We have an option for delivery, but.

We tried to roll out a de Ice delivery service. It's hitting pretty well with. With commercial but not residential.

So we have like a bin that just goes there with a shaker and we keep it full.

Residential people don't think about Snow until it's on the ground, they can't get out of their driveway. So what you want to sell is a thing that they do know. They have paint around, which is in the fall. I'm going to sell them a spring cleanup or a fall cleanup. Then I'm going to say, hey, by the way, would you like to come every two weeks, keep your property looking good all year round. And if there's snow on the ground, when we show up, we'll just give you de icer and we'll put next to your door. So that way if there's snow on the ground, you still have something to do. And then if there's not snow on the ground, you still have something to do, which is trim bushes. You're able to clean out the gutters, check the downspouts. Like there's a Look, look at the book. Like I give you like 50 things you can do still during the off season, provide a whole bunch of value. But what you're doing is taking every single fall cleanup and trying to convert that into winter services. And then you compare the price of what you. They just paid you. Hey, you just paid us 500 bucks. Why don't you just pay us 3, 350 over the next four months and we'll keep your property good so we don't have to do another $600 cleanup in the spring. So it becomes like a price savings game. It keeps your crew busy and you, you can build it in a way where if there's snow, you still have something to do and there's no snow, you have plenty to do as well.

Okay, sounds good.

So cure four in the book is. If you just want one chapter, read that one.

Okay. I mean, we'll read the whole book, I think. Did you already read it?

No, I'm in the middle.

He's not finished with it, but it's all good. Anyways.

Thanks.

Let's go. Good stuff. You got it. All right, last one. Brandon. Go for it. Actually, wait, John, Brandon. And then John and then we'll call it a day.

All right, thanks. I got a quick one in here. Just kind of following up from before. So pushing for the sales goals and growth goals for this year, trying to focus on more commercial properties, property managers, and continuing with our kind of success we've had with the residential property management groups. What's kind of your advice for reaching out and I guess attracting those customers outside of search, SEO searches and that sort of thing, how we spent a lot of money and time into that this last Year I'm kind of happy where, where that, where that's at. And then also with those customers, you know, how are you kind of seeing them? Like what, what value should we be selling them immediately on? You know, like cost savings, this sort of thing. I don't know.

Yeah, property managers, everyone thinks they're cost sensitive because they usually are handling commercial, but they don't get any more money if they save their owner money. So when it comes to a property manager, they're, they're looking at you as a time expense to them to manage the property. But they're usually getting a percentage of rents. And so either a percentage of rents or almost always percentage of rents as a property manager. So the thing that you can do to stand out, save them time. So what we would do in our property management accounts is we make a video after every property we put inside the customer portal, inside copilot. And now it's, now it's just do through the app. You can just do it. The reason is because now it saves them a trip to the property every week to do like a site walk. And so if there was trash lying around, if we saw a vehicle that was broken down and on blocks, if we saw any sort of activity of strange needles in the back force, we would always make a video attached to the profile and send a note to the property manager. Once you do that for them, they'll never leave because that's where the, you save them money. And they're the ones that hold the keys of the contract. But they ultimately don't care about the price. And so when it comes to property management, it's a relationships game. That's why a lot of times it takes a long time because if you do build that loyal relationship, they will not leave. And so we told property managers up front like, hey, we were not the cheapest. And so that would scare 90% of them away because they, they are supposed to be in the best interest of their owners, looking for cheapest price, best bid kind of thing. But once they got in with us and we save them 50% of their time because we make videos of overflowing cash, trash cans, they would never leave because they don't really actually care about the bottom line of that property.

Yeah, makes sense. They're often trying to deal with the least amount of complaints in time as possible. Thank you.

So it's a long term game. You know, a lot of it comes down to like account managers that your big game is like, you know, wheeling and dealing with the property managers. Many Times and just building that relationship. But what you can really do to cement them is save them time, prevent them having to go visit the property.

Okay. And I guess that first contact too, outside of SEO and searches and trying to call them directly, do you recommend maybe going to an office, that sort of thing? Or like how about, how about that first approach?

Yeah, we did gifts like during the holidays for their, their office. We just take them in. The bigger opportunity though is when you do that. Just saying, you know, if you ever have anything come up for bid, just let us know. You drop them a card. Again, it's a long term game and if you can get one, you can usually get like all their properties. If you just do it correctly and you do a great job, you take stuff off their plate. Another thing you can do is if you are ever, a lot of times they'll hire someone for like a one time project and then you can get the maintenance contract by just over delivering. And also if you just really contract. I did this a couple times, like I want that strip mall. Okay, great. Go to the strip mall, make a video of all the things that need to get done and just tell them and give them a quote. This is only when you're really slow, like during the off season. I would do this, but it basically does two things. One, without throwing anyone under the bus, you show that their property maintenance they're currently getting is subpar. And then two, without them having to get five quotes, you just said, hey, do you want to solve this problem? And so if you go and show that. Hey, broken sprinkler heads though, there's this leak here. Oh, by the way, the garbage is overflowing on the left side. Like you immediately show your value to them because that's saving them time and then they expect down the road. That's the type of thing you'll do.

Yeah, makes sense.

Thank you.

So I, I would over, I would use and abuse the Field Force mobile app with the video into the customer portal. I just make it part of the process for your crew to make a video at the end of every single thing, every single property visit, they just have to do a quick walk around. Video goes into the customer portal. Property managers love them because that means they don't have to go to the property. That was their eyes on the property for the week.

So.

Yep, makes sense.

You got it. All right, last one of the day. John, you're up.

I know your philosophy on messaging when it comes to billing. Right. So you don't want especially in the off Season. No more emails like. Or just don't do them from the beginning. Make them check the customer portal. Just because the, you know, increased risk of cancellations and things like that, the more they're reminded. I want to know what you think about visit notifications because what I've noticed like when they get a text for visits, dude, 20% of the customers like the. The 20% that cause all the problems, it's when those go out. So that's my first question. To post a report, not to do.

Sorry, are you talking about post job or prior to the job?

Prior to the job. So the weekly notifications are bi weekly. So do you. So to do the notifications or not to do the notifications is kind of what I'm asking you. Like.

Yeah, so we don't. If a customer specifically requests that we would. Because we can set that up. And very shortly here inside Fieldforce mobile app, you'll be able to tap a button and you'll send them a text that you're on your way. So that's coming. That being said, I will not use that feature because of what you just said. The more times you remind a customer about a service, the more often they are, the more, the higher likelihood they are to complain and the higher likelihood they are to change billing. And so I E cancel. So I would not do it unless they had a gate. I needed unlocked pets, I need put away or for some reason I needed them to know I was coming for me to do my job.

Deal. Okay. All right. You got it. That's the.

Okay.

Can I run the next one by you?

Yeah, go ahead.

I'll make it fast. Okay, so this one, I'll try to make it as simple as possible. So I do, I do flat rate billing and I do it on the first of the month. Helps with cash flow. Where it becomes a problem is with biweekly customers. So, you know, you have those months where you might have five Mondays now they either get a free cut or you have to remember to go in and charge a one off. So what I do now as a policy is two different routes. Either the first and third week of the month or the second and fourth week of the month. So far that's worked pretty well. But there aren't a lot of CRMs that have that capability for the scheduling. So what I'm doing, what I would like to ask you is should I even be thinking that should, should I ditch that as a policy and just go per cut billing just to avoid complexity, to avoid customer confusion and then Just automate it further.

Yeah, I. So let's assume for a moment that every CRM can do that and it's really easy to schedule like that. I would still not do it. The reason for that is not. It has everything. With admin you're gonna get calls. So many. You would. We would double our call volume if we did like second, fourth and first and third week. You, you just want to say bi weekly like every other week or every week and then look at the. Because you're charging the flat rate every month. Just take how many visits is that going to be in the, in the year. Divide that out and change your monthly rate because it's impossible to convince customers they do not remember. And if you don't show up for two, you know, three weeks instead of two, you're going to get a call every single time. It's going to happen twice a year, depending what's marketing. It's going to happen two times a year and they're going to call every single time. So if you have. As you begin to scale, this becomes an absolute scheduling nightmare and an admin nightmare also when you have a fifth week, it becomes empty. So like now you have to actually start looking out for fifth weeks of the month to fill up with projects because otherwise your crew won't have anything to do. And so I would stick to a weekly or bi weekly schedule and I would do the math on how many visits that's going to be in a year based upon your, your growing season and then split that out for your monthly to still stay the same on level billing.

Deal. Okay, thank you so much. I've been flipping through the book because I wanted to ask you about something in the book man. So there's one part on here, it's under the better tools or marketing part of the solo operator side you closed it with. If you want to be a solo operator for the long haul, invest in your professional appearance, better equipment, better apparel, strong branding.

Do you.

I was a little confused by that. Does that mean if you want to stay stuck, invest in like too much in tools instead of marketing or like where, where's the balance? Because the reason I ask is I've actually probably gone a little too minimal on appearance when it comes to branding. Mostly on marketing is what I spend on, but should probably, you know, get the trucks wrapped, get, you know, get uniforms and all that. But I just have been neglecting that where's, where's the balance? That, that just threw me off a little bit. I was just curious what, what that meant.

Yeah. So like when you're a solo operator, it's the one time where sometimes having redundancy and not increasing asset utilization is okay. Because if you only have, let's just call it a mower. If you have one mower and you're a sole operator, if that thing goes down, you're out of business essentially, like you can't get any work done. And so do I like the fact that you have two mowers and one person that is you? No, because that means that you at max, have 50% asset utilization. However, you'll need to do that somewhat inefficient decision in order to make sure you can stay doing the service. So sometimes having more equipment, also nicer equipment because you're utilizing it and it's a physical wear and tear on your body, not an employee that's going to work for you for six to 12 months as a frontline team member. If you're going to do this for the next 20 years, I want you to make sure you take care of your body. And so you might get the nicer equipment, you might get nicer, get nice springs on the stand on mower, you might increase the size of the truck a little bit just so you're comfortable, you enjoy being inside the cab and you get leather seats, so it's a little bit nicer for you. So when you're solo operator for a very long period of time, I'm optimizing for the fact that you're going to be a labor in the field for 10, 15, 20 years. And so I therefore know that the stress your body is going to encounter is physical stress. It's not financial stress, it's not going to be psychological stress that comes with a larger business. It's going to be physical stress. And so because of that, to keep you in the game, my objective is get the nicer stuff so that you don't wear out and you don't rust out or sorry if you don't, you don't like, your body doesn't physically break down. And that's why I'm okay with investing a little bit more in equipment, tools, redundant trucks and equipment, et cetera.

Roger that. Thank you. Okay, so stay the course, Juice the ads. If that's not going to be the, if that's not the long haul plan. Okay?

Absolutely.

Legend. Thank you.

I, I think the, the thing that I would say is wrapping the trucks is a, is a growth strategy. And so I assume when someone says I'm going to be solo forever, that they're going to fill their schedule pretty quickly and they're not going to need tons of leads. And so that's when I would say, okay, like the bottom line if you're staying solo forever, is get to capacity as fast as possible so you can start raising your prices every time you hit it. And then once you've done that and you have cash available, you're not going to go spend it on growth ads, etc. You're going to go buy better equipment and trucks to make sure that the longevity of your body sticks around for the 10 or 20 years you're trying to do it.

Roger that. Thank you, sir.

Appreciate all tremendously. Have a great weekend and we'll stay in touch.