These Graphs TRIPLED My Business

Hey, everyone. My name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have over 150 locations around the world. We do over $50 million in annual revenue. Today, I'm sharing with you the secret that allowed us to be able to cut our churn in half in a matter of three weeks. And I'm going to be sharing actual examples of customer roadmaps that we've created recently and how you, in your home service business, can also make sure that you don't let customers leave. If you do a great job and you're responsive and customers know exactly what's happening at every single step of the journey and throughout their sales process, they won't want to leave. And so if you're in any sort of recurring business, that'd be like janitorial lawn care, pool cleaning, where you're going there every single week, or if you're in a reoccurring business like that needs to be done every four, five, or ten years where the customer can still come back to you. This is important, and that is like customers coming back to you over and over and over again. And never wanting to leave is a very good thing. And yes, we are talking about customer roadmaps, our customer journeys. Now, why should we have these? And I'm going to actually walk through mine in just a moment and explain exactly the steps that I've used. But what is a customer roadmap? What is a customer journey? Whatever you want to call this, first and foremost, it makes a visual representation of all the different touch points in the customer's life cycle, right from the time that they reach out to you to the time that they eventually leave and everything in between the good, the bad, and the ugly. And visualize the touch points. Is it weak? Is it daily? Is it monthly? Is it quarterly? Is it annually? When are those things happening? The major thing, though, that a customer roadmap is built for is really making sure there's a process and a system to retain customers. Ultimately, if we can retain customers and they don't leave, we can increase the lifetime value of that customer. If I'm able to increase the lifetime value of the customer, it means that I can also afford to spend more to acquire said customer. For example, if I am able to make $1,000 per year from a customer and I keep them for an average three years, I would have a lifetime value. Just use this example of $3,000. Now, if someone else does a better job of customer service, a better job in terms of quality and communications, customer and they keep them for five years at the exact same price. Their lifetime value for that customer would be $5,000. Now, who do you think is able to spend more on customer acquisition? The person has the higher lifetime value. And that's where the old saying that says, you show me your margin, I'll show you my opportunity, is if there is a lot of profit being had, you can outspend other people on buying more customers. And this is why bigger companies get bigger, is because they have more margin, they have more profit. And because of that, they're able to go buy out other people and in the form of outspending them on marketing. So if another company is only willing to spend $100 per customer that they acquire, and you're willing to spend $200, you're gonna be able to outspend them and get all the customers. Another reason why having a customer roadmap and a customer journey is so important is it tells the customer what to expect next. So when a customer accepts an estimate from you, they should know what the next step of the roadmap is. Are they supposed to put a card on file? What's the date of service? What are the payment terms? These are the type of questions that customers have. And if you don't walk them through these, they will eventually get derailed. And when you're talking about a roadmap, you don't want them getting derailed. You want them to go through the entire process. It's gonna increase the value to you as the business in terms of making sure they stay on. And ultimately, the customer doesn't want to leave. They want to have a good service. They want to be able to give you more money to in order for you to solve more of their problems. So let's go actually through a couple of these in just a moment. But another thing that you want to address in a customer roadmap is what happens when things go wrong? What happens when customers are unhappy? How do they get support? How do they get back on track? What is the protocol? Do they phone you? Do they email you? Do they text you? Do they use your web chat on your website to reach out? I've seen people do that too. But being clear with how to support work when things don't go as they should is very important. All right, let's jump into this. This is the copilot roadmap. This is the roadmap we use for all the members inside of Copilot CRM software business, basically for home service business owners to make more money now, day one is orientation, all right? That is when we are literally just going to tell users all the different resources they have at their disposal in terms of instant chat, zoom calls, phone calls, Facebook groups, et cetera. That's where we're going to talk all about that. Office hours with myself as the founder on the weekend. This is orientation. This would be in your business, like getting an estimate that's been accepted. Now, once an estimate has been accepted, the job is not done. The problem has not been solved for the customer. And so we need to make sure there's a roadmap for the customer to know exactly what the next step of the process is. At Augusta Lawn Care, we make sure we send out what's called a three thank you and welcome email after a job has been accepted. That thank you and welcome email is the bridge to the job getting done. And that is, when's the date of service? What are the payment terms? How do I communicate with you? Do I have to put a card on file? These are the type of things that need to be addressed in order for the job to actually be, in my opinion, on the schedule. It's not on the schedule once the customer clicks accept on the estimate, because they could go accept on other people's, you know, estimate proposals. They could also still be out looking for estimates and accept theirs and then get on the schedule with them and put a 50% down to down payment. I want to collect payment information, I want to deposit, and I want a date of service scheduled as soon as possible to lock in that job. But you won't be able to do that if you don't have a client journey or a customer roadmap. So at Copilot, day one is orientation. It's a live zoom call. Fourteen days later, we do another zoom call. This is the account checkup or the Q and A. Why do we do it 14 days later? Because that's when most people get frustrated. That's when most people are gonna have complaints with your service. It's not in six months or a year and two years. Those customers are important. But most of your churn happens within the matter of the first several visits, the first few months. So you wanna have as much interaction, as much touch points as possible at the very beginning. And yes, it's expensive, but to have these type of calls. At Copilot, it takes us a long time to break even on members because we have so much upfront support and getting people in the systems. But the ultimate thing is if you can keep a customer and you Do a great job in terms of home services. Whether you mow grass, clean windows, clean gutters, does not matter what you do for home services. If you just do a good job, people will stay with you for a long time. But those first few visits, it's those first several weeks of service that you've got to get things dialed in. That's when they're gonna have the most complaints, the most callbacks, the most yellow slips, the most adjustments to their work notes, their job notes needs to happen in those first few visits. So be proactive about those touch points. And that's what we do. At day 14, at copilot day 30, we now actually start to look into the future. We've been with them for now 30 days. We've had the relationship for 30 days. In your business, you've now done several services. They might have had a complaint or two. They might have adjusted their call notes. They might have adjusted their preferences on their account and how they pay or how they communicate. That's fantastic. Now I'm starting to look forward. In 30 days, I should be able to upsell them other services. So if you do mowing now, you should be able to have seen their property a few times and know that they also need weeding. They also could use a molten stall. They could also use fertilization. And so now I'm trying to solve more of their problems by giving them more value. All right? And ultimately, this entire client journey, customer journey, whatever you want to call it, this entire process adds value to the transaction. And in home services, the reason most the time we get in this race to the bottom is because of the equation that is simply this. A transaction will go through as long as price is lower than value. Now, if a customer's kind of trying to weigh things out, they're not really sure if they're gonna go forward. What it means is they're not sure if the value is higher than the price. And so when we're in that stage, the easy way to be able to make sure we consummate the sale and actually it goes through is to just lower price. Cause immediately the transaction will take place. And that's when you're like, well, I'll give you 20% off, and they take the deal. That's the easiest way to close the deal. What's harder is to increase value. When the customer's like, ah, I don't know. Increasing value is much more difficult. This is increasing value, creating touch points. Add after they've given you the initial purchase to be able to make sure that number one, they're onboarded correctly and number two, that then you have a recipe that you follow every time to make sure that you keep solving more of their problems. And you're like, well you're just interested in making more money. Cause you're trying to sell them weed and feed and you're trying to sell them gutter cleanouts when they just ask for mowing. You're right. I am trying to make more money. I'm trying to increase the lifetime value of the customer to me. I'm also trying to increase the value of my service to them so I can solve more of their problems. Getting the money is just a byproduct of solving their problem. And so they came to you to solve problems. And so if I can solve more of their problems. Day 30 for Copilot, we're thinking about their goals. We wanna know what is the goals of this business. Like, you didn't join Copilot to get fancy features and software. You joined to grow your business. And your customers did. Did not join your home service to get a fancy estimate or have a client portal or put their car on file. They came to your business in order to have a solution to their problem. And there are many problems that they encounter. So can we solve more of them? And so at Copilot on this goal session, we're trying to figure out what the business is trying to achieve over the next 12 months. What's their marketing budget, what's their hiring plan? Do they have cash on hand and is it going up or is it going down? And make sure they actually have a strategy to reach their goals. The same way that you can create a strategy for your customer to be successful in your business. That is solve more of their problems. Do a property inspection over the course of time. Look at what we do at copilot. 60 days later we talk about automations. We're doing a one on one with them. Automations Day 90 we talk about leads using mass marketing up sales features inside of Copilot. What are we trying? We're trying to add value to a service. They're already paying for this. But I'm trying to add value. You're like, I've already got them. I'm mowing their grass every week. Yeah, but there's other problems you can solve for them and it will unlock value for you and it'll unlock value for them. Day 180 six months in, we're gonna talk about their team, how they can their strategy for hiring and actually training and retaining their team. You're like, what's this gotta do with software? Not a whole lot. Ultimately I know that the customer didn't come to me to have software. They came to me cause they wanted to grow their business and make it more profitable. And so I know that in addition to the problem of software, they have other problems like how do I hire people, how do I make sure I automate that process, how do I retain great talent? These are problems I can help them solve in addition to the thing they're paying me for. And so maybe you send a newsletter giving education to your customers about your industry. Whether you're in heating and air conditioning, you talk about when you're going in the cold season, what you can do to increase efficiency of your home. Whether in lawn care, you talk about watering schedules. These are things you can do to add value to customers. And you're like, well, it's not actually making me money. Well, it's improving this journey for the customer and it's making sure they stay with you in the long term. At Copilot, every single year, every single year we have a business planning session where we're doing a one on one zoom call and actually go over with our users. What is the strategy for every quarter, what is going to be, what are you doing for marketing? Do you need to buy more trucks, do you need to buy more equipment? How many people you're hiring? That's what we do at Copilot. That's our customer success roadmap. Now I'm going to go over the one we use for Augusta Lawn Care. This is the one we use for all of our owners inside of Augusta Nation and their general managers when they come here for training and they join Augusta Nation. And I'm going to use this as an example for you and your business. So the very first thing is they come here for training. When I say here, they literally come to this room for four solid days and it's really concentrated and jam packed. It's a ton of training you in person. And they're gonna learn all the systems that we talk about and we use at Augusta. Now this is where for your business, the equivalent of the customer starts the journey with you. And this is when you send them an email saying welcome to the family and like got their card on file and like jobs on the schedule, let's go. That's not where the customer success journey ends. If we want them to actually succeed and solve more of their problems and offer more value to them and increase the lifetime value of that customer, we need to constantly stay in touch with them. We take for granted that recurring customers are gonna keep coming back to us instead of constantly providing more value, Whether it be copilot, where members could leave at any time, or even inside of the franchise. At Augusta Lawn Care, people can leave at any time. They're not tied to a 10 year contract that they can't leave. So they can leave. If I don't provide value, so what am I going to do? I'm gonna produce a value in the roadmap there ever so often and as frequently as possible in as many ways as possible. I'm going to meet the customer where they're at. And so after training, that's not it. They're gonna do onboarding for those next six weeks with their existing cohort. So the cohort of team that they come for training, all the owners and general managers that come for training over the next six weeks, they're gonna get on Zoom once a week with an owner success manager and actually make sure they go through the implementation of all the systems that they learned at training. Okay. This is the equivalent of you doing an account checkup as an account manager on your customers a month or two months into service. Like, what could we do better? Can you survey them? Where can you improve? If you survey your customers and ask for where you can improve, and then you fix every single problem that they come up with, you will come up with a much higher lifetime value of a customer because no one will want to leave a service that is constantly improving. If you look at all the callbacks and yellow slips that come into your business, if you just fix all of those, you'll keep customers longer.

So the first thing we do in the first six months, six weeks, is a weekly call. Why do we front load so much training in person On Zoom, we make sure that we keep all the same group that comes to training on these onboarding calls. Why do we do that? Because most of your customers are going to leave in the first few months. Most of your customers are going to have complaints, problems, obstacles, roadblocks in the first few weeks of implementation or in the first few weeks of becoming a customer inside of your business. And so I'm gonna need to increase the frequency and the velocity of contact with them at that period of time. Once you have a customer set up for like mowing, for example, and you know what height deck they want and that there's a little strip of grass back in the alleyway that sometimes we miss, and you put those in the Job notes and, and you've gotten all of the callbacks and you figured out that they have a card on file now and so they don't have to call in about their check that's overdue or whatever. Once you get all that out of the way, it's pretty smooth. But that's not the time to just step back and never address that account again. The account managers in any area of business that is constantly following up with existing customers will increase the retention, will also decrease the attrition people leaving, and they will increase the customer satisfaction by constantly offering value to the customer. So what we do at Augusta Lawn Care is we have daily, monthly, quarterly and annual support contact points. Again, the roadmap. We are simply mapping and visualizing how do we support the customer every single step of their journey. So daily we have what we call the 3M or the mic Minutes Mastermind, where there's gonna be a Q and A directly with myself. And I answer every question that's submitted by an owner or a general manager. And they can submit at any time. We send out text messages to make sure they can be on at any time. And a lot of them, like I think about 70, 80% of them every single day, watch the Mike Minutes Mastermind. But some people don't want to. They're either too busy or they don't like that form of communication being live. So what do they want to do? They want something more like the monthly coaching calls. One on one with a coach, whether that be a peer like an owner or someone from corporate as a coach to be able to do a one on one zoom call or phone call and make sure you know your metrics and actually make sure that you have a game plan for, for growing your business and you're gonna fill it out on. We have a separate dashboard online where we actually keep all your key performance metrics over the course of time so you can track it. And that's what a monthly coaching call is going to be for. Now, some people even that they might not enjoy as much. So we have a quarterly roundtable and that's on Zoom with all the other owners and we all turn our cameras on and we have a quarterly zoom call. And so I'm gonna update people daily, I'm gonna update people monthly, I'm gonna update people quarterly, and then we even have an annual conference just for Augusta Lawn Care. And you're like, what does this have to do with my business? Whether it be weekly newsletters, whether it be the ability to be able to keep in contact with your database and keep those leads warm. It's how frequently do you wanna be communicated with? I'm not gonna decide that for my customer. I'm going to provide all as many possible ways of support and customer success as possible. And then they get to choose what's the way that they prefer. Some people want to watch every single mike minutes mastermind every single day. The vast majority do. Others really value the coaching calls. And they'll prepare and they'll have metrics and numbers and questions ready to go. Other people will wait. They want to in person and seeing eyeball to eyeball on zoom. They want to ask me. Some people want to do it in person so they'll come to the annual conference. And then there's another aspect as we go through this customer roadmap and this journey for Augusta Lawn Care is community. I wasn't actually thinking about doing this, but let me show you these. This is an example of what having community as part of your roadmap for your customers, what it produces. All right, this is in the past, what, four days, these two documents have been created from the community of Augusta Lawn Care. One is the general manager meeting sheet, where weekly you fill out the metrics for your general manager and so they can stay on task with all the metrics they need to know. And that was sourced by an owner and then refined by corporate and the media team. All right. Another one was the Christmas lights terms of service, because we're going hardcore, augustalights.com, you can check it out, but this is the terms of service that now all of them can use as a PDF, edit it and attach it to their estimate emails. Fantastic. That's what a community can do, is it can offer all the solutions you need to make your service better. Now, a community in your home service business could be a Facebook group for your members. It could simply be making it easier for them to be able to give you feedback on your client portal from your website. Like a web chat, through text, through email. Like I'm not going to dictate. Everyone must call me between 12pm and 4pm every single day. Cause that's what I said. No, I'm gonna allow them to email me. I'm gonna allow them to text me. I'm web chat. I'm gonna have 247 where AI is gonna answer my phone to be able to collect their information and get their problem solved. These are the type of things I'm trying to do when it comes to community. I'm taking care of them. I'm gonna keep them notified of when they should be doing certain things surrounding my industry, like when to water their grass, when not to water their grass, what type of fertilizer helpful this type of year. These are the type of things you can do to offer value and create community around your business. Like there are Facebook groups I've seen for gyms, for example, that have hundreds of members, extremely, extremely valuable. And no one want to leave, not the gym, they don't want to leave the community you built. And so build community around your business as much as possible. Share things like new employees that have come onto the team. If you're doing a non profit or some sort of giveaway, share that show that you donated your time or you did something for the community. These are ways to be able to create community around your product and service that is very, very sticky. Now another thing that a roadmap should do for your customers is what happens when things go bad. How are customers supposed to respond to you when they have a complaint or when something is not going well, when they have non sufficient funds, when they went through a calamity. That's what we have at Augusta, what we call the state of emergency. It's a six week program where literally if someone's having like a brutal time financially or health, like they had a heart attack or their relationship went crazy and they just need help, like they can pull the rip cord, fill out the form and get state of emergency declared. That's where for six weeks command center is basically gonna remotely manage and, and operate their location so that they can like chill out and that usually we get in, we start raising prices, we reorganize their route, we optimize things, we get in touch with the team. But that is what happens if things go badly. And to date, anyone that's ever joined the state of emergency at Augusta, there's been several of them that have had to go through the. They've all come out the other end and have grown. Their businesses now are continuing to be successful. That point in time, most people would have closed their business down because of these catastrophic instances. And the same way that in your business, most people would have left your business because you made a mistake, because this one thing went wrong, because you didn't do this correctly on their job site. But if you have an actual mechanism and a system for taking an unhappy customer and solving their problem, and you actually have a way of like, okay, if you're on the phone, you have up to $50 to solve any problem and you don't need to get authorized. Just take care of the customer. That's your equivalent of your state of emergency. Save the customer from the sake of just being a franchisor. Outside of the fact that I love my franchisees and I love every single owner inside of Augusta Nation, this is a retention tool. I do not want them leaving augustination. I will never make a dollar from them again. Just strictly from a business perspective, I am incentivized to keep them. And so if you think, if you actually care about your customer and you actually want to see them succeed, whether it be in business, in personal life, or just overall, you wanna be a good member of the community, make sure that when things don't go well for them, you have a route to still retain them in the business. And everyone that's saying right now, like, well, that's greedy. You're just thinking about how to make as much money as possible from everyone else. You're right. I'm trying to increase the lifetime value of the customer. And I know that by having a customer roadmap, I will increase the value lifetime of that customer to my business because I will produce more value to the customer by solving more of their problems. I know that the real problem for someone at Copilot is not the fact that they want fancy software. It's that they want to grow a business and make it more profitable. And so I'm gonna create solutions around that problem. And if I can do that effectively, if I can do this effectively and have a roadmap that actually gets customers to success, I will never lose a customer again. If you wanna watch a video or right here about metrics and all the numbers you need to know along the journey, click this video right here. I think you'll like it.