This $800K Call Center Fights to STAY ALIVE!

Why do I have to give you the respect of a reply?

You don't have to.

Just like real life. Just like real life.

You're wrong in the first second.

I want to be in my own box. There's so many red flags.

I'm the boss.

Felt like we were just treading water.

She gets mad at me when I'm picking up my phone, but I'm like, that's my business. I got to.

I know you think you have good ideas of sales. You are banned from sales.

But, Mike, it was like, also her fault.

It was really challenging in business, but.

Also it's a little bit scary.

And we typically go on and we fight a lot. Just listen to me.

Can I have your full attention?

Yes. Can I have your full attention? Yeah. I gotta call my wife and ask if I can role play with another woman, though.

Hold on one second. Let them go because we don't need them. How are you keeping track of your transactions for expenses?

I don't.

Okay.

We're in Calgary, Alberta. It's very cold. We're going to a company called Jump Contact where they take incoming leads. And they're kind of like a call center, but they have less than $5,000 in the bank, and the owner just spent $20,000, the last of his nest egg, on a 10x growth con ticket with Grant Cardone. What?

The first time we've ever gone to someone's house for a turnaround. Jose, how's it going, brother?

Hello. Hello. Hello, my friends. It's me, Canadian Jose.

Hi, Rebecca. Good to meet you.

Let's reintroduce my amazing guest, Jose Sainz, aka Canadian Jose, CEO of JumpContact. Jose, can you explain what you do and why it's so important for small businesses?

We help businesses of all sizes answer all their missed calls, all their overflow calls. So what that basically means is we'll interact and engage with your customers as an extension of your business, and we'll keep that lead alive. Right. Book it in your. In your calendar or hopefully maybe even close the sale for you.

Is it tough to kind of work together sometimes?

Big time.

Okay, I get it.

We're both very much wanting to say the last word. Say the first word.

Yeah, yeah. The middle word. Yeah, yeah.

It's. She's incredibly great at selling. So when we're in atmospheres, like when we go to networking events and that sort of stuff, she doesn't let me sell, sit beside her or anything.

Right.

So we both venture off and go do that. She's extremely great at that.

And what happens is that people get to see me as an expert. The more that you appear as though you're an expert, the more likely people will be to trust you. And the more more people trust you, the more likely they'll lie.

You were more like operationals hiring. Like, that side of the business.

I do everything.

Okay, cool.

I do everything. She primarily just does the selling.

80% of all sales happen between the 8th and 12th contact. Don't just wait for the leads to come in. It's your responsibility to grow your business.

She still does selling. Like, when we go to events, she. When she comes.

She.

She wears her. Her Jump Contact app.

Cool.

And she's there with us. It's just she loves to sell. Yep. And I mean, we'll get into it, I'm sure, but, like, I want our product to be better and better and better. I think the main issue that. That I was seeing was sales. Right. There's a lot of that we need to fix. But the biggest thing was there was something that was broken within the company that wasn't allowing us to sell.

You're talking about telling people about the services that you provide, but really, people care about the problem that you solve. Because if all you're saying is, I can answer your phone, well, I don't even think that I need my phone answered. I can just call people back.

Right.

So I put the brakes on selling and.

Oh, interesting. I thought it'd be the opposite way around. So you are more growth. Like the selling side.

Like, you're gonna figure out what you need to fix if you are falling on your face. So the best way to fall on your face is to get more deals when people that you know go with someone else. Like, really?

That's why I got out of the marketing game, because I didn't like the ego aspect of it. Friends, family, they would go with stranger over me.

But they would, like, ask you for advice.

Well, for sure, they'd ask me for advice pre and post. What's good? Can you correct it? It's like, why didn't you just hire me then if you're making me do all the work?

And what's the like. If you don't mind asking, like, what. What's the biggest point of frustration on your end? Is it like he doesn't want to keep growing and selling and you feel like you can probably.

That I would sell and then we would lose the clients that I was selling. And so it was instead of us selling and learning and continuing to sell and improve, we would Sell and lose clients. Are you, are you, is this a volunteer position that you, that you're in? I don't think so. I don't think so. We're all doing this. We're all doing this for the same reason. We want to help others and we also want to pay our bills and spend time with our family and provide for our family. So we need to get those conversions. It felt like we were just treading water or doing the same thing, like making the same mistakes and then selling again and then making the same mistakes, not actually improving and learning from those. I don't know, something going on that, that we lose.

But Mike, it was like also her fault because she wanted to put other people in our team to like close the deal to be the follow up. And, and they weren't. That's not their strength, you know. And I told her no. And she wanted to like, scale, like proper scaling means we have to, we have to remove ourselves from certain roles. And I didn't agree with that. There was, I don't know if it was a lack of confidence or just maybe a lack of clarity within our process, but it wasn't giving us the assurance to go out and get more business because we felt that something was broken within our company. I don't know. Do you agree? Well, both. Like, I didn't feel the confidence of going to sell more, knowing that there were still some issues and I didn't quite know at what price to sell and how to sell and, and all these things. I don't know. Like sales, of course, is the bloodline of any, of any business. The lifeline of any business. Yeah, but she wasn't technically strong, so she didn't even understand like the tech behind our business. So like that always bothered me. It's like, okay, you can sell, great. Relate to customers. You understand, you're amazing. But if you can't help the client understand their underlying issue.

Everything that you're saying, I have been through. Yeah, I know. It's like to scale what we call command center, an office like this where you're taking calls. We also do payroll for them. We do a whole lot of other back end stuff. You know, I didn't understand all of the software and all the rest of it. She doesn't need to. These are two different roles. Operations and sales are different.

But I wanted her to know, like, how could you not know? Like, you know what I mean? If you're selling cars, you at least got to know how to put the gas in.

Do you know what I mean, no, you don't. There's someone in the back that can put the gas in the tank. All right. There seems to be a huge disconnect between sales, Rebecca, and operations. Jose. We got to figure out a way to get both of them going in the same direction. So it's been the past year that you haven't been working together as full time on jumpcart?

Probably since November.

Since November.

Okay. So just a couple months.

Yeah, just a couple of months.

Okay. And has it been better since then? A little bit.

Well, I'm still procrastinating in perfection.

You know what I mean? Okay.

Whereas when she was there, she was just forcing through the sales.

Got it.

Right. Which helps. Right. And in my chase of perfection, my revenue is now starting to.

But it sounds like you're cognizant of that, so, like, I am cognizant. Why would you not accept someone that comes in and, like, wants to sell? Just knowing that things are never going to be perfect.

It's just, to be honest, for, like, the health of our relationship.

Totally, 100%.

She doesn't like me telling her what to do.

Yeah.

And I hate it two times more. Sorry. You're multitasking, but let me explain to you. Okay? Just listen. Yes. Can I have your full attention? Let me have your full attention.

I'm listening.

Let me have your full attention for one second. Just put that down and you can go back to it.

Then forget it. I'll wait.

Okay, Sounds good.

And she wants to also build her own thing because it's always, like, gonna be my baby. And at times, if there's squabbles or fights, I'll be like, you know, I'm the boss type of thing.

I don't like that. Yeah, I don't like that. I feel like I. Yeah.

She still wants to opinionate on my stuff, too. But when it comes to operations, hiring, you know, anything, how I run a meeting, what I say, how I say it, I'm talking too long. Like, that's a big, like. I get that a lot. You're worried too much.

Yeah. Yeah.

Long winded.

But see, this is the thing.

And she'll do it in front of the team. She'll like, like, like, you know.

Yeah.

And it. And it bothers me.

Right.

Discreetly. No.

Yeah.

When you, like, turn your camera off in a meeting or you just say, I gotta go.

Keep in mind, we walked in their personal house and we met them five minutes ago. So how long ago did you start Jumpcontact then?

Right around the Pandemic.

Okay.

So we both had our own marketing offices, our own marketing gigs that we did because of the pandemic. Basically, government shut everything down.

Yep.

Our businesses shut down. So we had to pivot. And then I found Grant. Like Grant Cardone, I've been threatened, I've been sued, I've been betrayed by friends, I've been ripped off and I've been copied. I realized the biggest thing about marketing is the amount of. Not the amount of leads that come in, but the amount of leads that get answered by business owners. It's kind of like if I'm calling people, I don't put the prep into phone calls because 90% of the calls go to voicemail anyway. So why am I going to put the prep into you and your business if you won't even respond?

And so if we look at 2021, 2022, 2023, what's revenue been those three years?

2021, we did about 100,000. 2022, we did almost 400,000. And last year we doubled. Yeah. But we started having a massive drop off in the last year, so we lost about half our clients.

Is that kind of what led to then her needing to kind of move on?

Yeah. We bought this new house.

Yeah.

So there was just a lot of stress going on. And that compounded with her wanting to sell and me wanting to make things work and me wanting to retool. You know, it caused a lot of friction. Something about it.

Oh, goodness, you're ridiculous.

You're back to.

Okay, actually, I'll wait. I'll go back to narrating what she's saying, and I'll forget my point, which was brilliantly situated for this, but we'll wait.

And how many right now, or let's say even six months ago, were we serving in terms of business owners?

At our peak, we had 100, 110 business owners.

Yeah, got it. And what's that at now?

Like under 50.

To your opinion, what's the reason for that turn?

Well, my prices were low. Very, very low.

Way too low.

Way too low. Way too low. Like, I get it. I said jump. I said, how high?

Call your cell phone. Like everybody had.

Well, I'm a call answering service. I gotta be available 24 7. So she gets mad at me when I pick it up my phone, but I'm like, that's my business. I got to.

Okay, maybe their love language is arguing with each other. I get it. Partnerships are hard. Marriages are hard. And partnerships plus marriage is very hard.

Like, why couldn't I just call someone back if I missed a call.

If you think about it, even just yourself, as a consumer, we live in an on demand world, Right. It's an Amazon world. You order something, you, you want it delivered next day or preferably same day, you don't want to wait. Right. That's where we're at right now as a society. Right. People want stuff immediately. So when they call you, if you don't answer, it's an easy, it's an easy solution for them. They just go ahead and call the next person. By the time you call them back, most likely what will happen is they won't even answer the phone. If you do get a hold of you, they might even forget what it was about or tell you that they've already moved ahead and gone forward with somebody else.

So what was the pricing before?

This is where. Okay, this is where. Her contribution to the company has been immense. Started at 90 cents a minute. And then I thought.

What was the setup fee?

Zero. Yeah. And then I thought it was a ballroom. I took it up to 110aminute.

Yeah.

She came in, she said, this is, this is broken.

When was that? 2021.

2022.

Okay.

She came in 2020.

So first year is like $100,000. Kind of just getting started. No money because you're so low on prices. She comes in is like, let's crack the whip.

22. Actually, she forces us. Forces. Because I didn't want to do it to go to a, to go to a trade show. I didn't want to do it. I was scared. $20,000 US flying, traveling. While we were there, she like, not me, she. Because I was quiet and scared. She sold about 30 people in two days. 33 people in two days.

Yes.

So basically took up our, our sign up fee, like our setup fee from $0 to $1,500 and our per minute from a $10 to $2.97aminute. Definitely that was a game changer for us when she did that. Now that she's gone, I've noticed that I'm kind of regressing back.

Yeah.

Well, what will it take to close?

Yeah.

You know what they're talking about right now, like buying in as a couple.

Yeah.

It's tough, right, to get people like.

Yeah.

I don't know about you guys, but when you're with your couple, sometimes it's hard when your couple's trying to introduce you to something and it's not coming from you. Right.

Yeah.

Initially, when I told you about Grant, you weren't all too into it, right?

I didn't know about. I didn't know about him.

Kind of funny. So my.

Head of operations at command center is very much the dynamic of the two of you. I'm more like you. She's more like you. I know, like, the clashing of heads that happens as. As you scale up a call center. And like, all the things you're telling me, I know exactly what to do. I promise you. It's just a matter of, like, I had this relationship with Liz in terms of, like, us beating heads this entire time. I know that dynamic. The bottom line is you guys can both get on the same page. It is transformative because by yourself, you will not make the business successful. By herself, she wouldn't make the business successful. It will take some people pulling in opposite direction. That tension is what makes you great. The pool of, like, we must be operationally perfect and we must continue to sell is what makes a great business.

We're both bossy. We're both bossy. So very challenging to communicate, to work together when we both. We both have had the same vision, but maybe we weren't aligned with the same process. To get to that vision on both.

Sides, it has to be that this other individual is different than me. They have strengths that I don't have, and I will have to at times relinquish my opinion because I have them, the partnership in mind. And obviously, when you have a marriage, it's more difficult because you can't have, like, time away from each other to be like, okay, like, I'm going to decompress, because they made me really mad during that meeting. For Liz and I, we could do that. Like, especially when we were growing a few years ago, it was like, all right, just get out of my face. Like, that's even more difficult when you have the marriage, right? Because then you leave the office and you walk into the kitchen and, like, we have to have dinner together. And that's tough, but it is respecting the other person for what they bring to the table and realizing they can't be everything to the business.

Somebody I love a lot and I care for, I respect a lot, too, more than just as my wife, you know, as. As a business person, you know, she's remarkable. So to work with her is awesome, and I love it.

I paid him to say that.

To the team.

The executive team must be aligned, right? Must be aligned in front of the team. They can go. We would. Liz and I would go argue, and we would do all sorts of, like, madness to, like, figure things out and hash things out and get mad at each other about what the other person was doing. But in front of the team, you have to be united, right? So that's an area of improvement. However, I think right now, both of you are trying to the other person's job when trying to, like, boss the other person. Yeah, yeah.

I think we're both trying to be, like, the tip of the sphere.

Well, because if she could able to sell 33 people in two days, that is a skill set.

Yeah.

No great salesperson likes operations.

She hates it. I don't know, maybe. Can you drop. Can she drop off?

Oh, yeah. Go for it. You go for it.

And then you'll be back. Come back. Because I really wanted her here. So this is my office.

Oh, that's cool.

So Obviously, we're big 10ers, right? As you can see, I don't care who you are, what you doing, what level you playing at when you're the boss. You the boss.

Miss me?

You.

Grant, I actually have two parts of my script that I would love to role play with you.

Yeah, I gotta call my wife and ask if I can role play with another woman, though.

Hold on one second. Is that the event you went to and got all the customers? The original.

Yeah, yeah. And then we went to. And then we went to Go High Level.

Okay, yeah, so.

So Go High level is actually where we signed, like, 33 customers.

Okay, so that's where you got the customers at their, like, trade show event.

Yes, correct. So it was like a. Like a $20,000 booth. Us. So for us, that's like $26,000, right? A lot of money, you know? And then we just went there, and Rebecca just killed it. She was just amazing. Right. So she would sell in, like, left, right, and center. You need to come to our sales school. Have you been in our sales school?

I want to. We're just restricted to stay home.

Stop it, Stop it. Come get you some closing skills and some Covid.

Agreed.

Yeah. Okay, great. I'll see you here.

Thank you so much. Absolutely. I'll be there.

Okay. But now they're. They're doing it again this year. Yeah, last year we didn't go again. I don't know what's wrong, man. It's like I'm like chicken. You know what I mean? Like, it was already proven that it worked, and then it was happening. And then I used kind of the excuse of our house and everything else, and it was stressful, right? With the house and closing, and she.

Was not working Full time anymore.

Well, she wanted to go, and I was like, we can't. The house, we got to be here. The lawyer signing all that stuff. She's like, we should just go. And I just didn't want to, you know, But I regret it. Right? I wish we would have.

I wish I could have. I wish we could have been there.

That would have been fun.

But here we are doing this. Yeah. Yeah.

So much fun.

But now we know, right?

Yeah.

Like, our numbers are dropping. Of course. Uncle G being our, our main, you know, North Star or whatever, right? These guys pay $12,000 each to sit in that chair three days. I got to look at their ugly faces. If you're down to your last thousand dollars. I got my last grand, dude. And I got Christmas coming. Should he spend it on this?

Absolutely.

Are you going bankrupt? If you're gonna go bankrupt, you want debt, you want obligations, and you want contracts. If you ain't gonna make it, you ain't gonna pay for it, dude. If we put it on a credit card and you fail, the bankruptcy court picks up the Visa, MasterCard, the American Express training contract you did with us lives on for your next company. 100% of those people will continue on. Like, we're sales, sales, sales driven. Right? So again, like, you know, but I haven't successfully been able to really do well in that market. Right. Like, I. I've had a lot of service based guys, and then, then they drop off. So got a lot of churn. Like something's wrong with, with the way I'm doing things that I'm not able to connect with them. I don't know what it is. Right. Obviously, you know, I take responsibility for it. Right. It's broken. The issue is that again, it's my reluctancy to want to invest the money into the business. We got a lot of overhead personally. Right. So we can get into that, like, you know, $10,000 mortgage payment.

$10,000 per month for a mortgage? Where's the money coming from? And honestly, even if you're making good money, you can still be dirt poor if you spend every single dollar. And the more money you make, the, the more money you spend. Guess what? You're still dirt poor.

You know, so, like, if you look at our expenses for us just to like, pay our stuff on a monthly basis is almost $20,000.

$20,000 for personal expenses every single month. What are we eating? Lobster and caviar for every single meal. All right. I'm trying to keep my composure in the video, but inside I'M screaming right now.

So this is how our system is, right? So this is like our, our, our team is here and they're taking calls. So like if a call comes in, for instance. Here, I'll show you right here.

What can I give you information on? Hey, Ariel, it's, it's Jose. I'm actually here with, with Mike and as we're actually doing some, some testing, I wanted to show them the system. You answered too quick, buddy. So, so don't pick up. Right, I'm gonna call back.

All right then. All right, buddy, we'll see you in a bit. Okay, bye. Yeah, so right now we have them all on P4P. That's why they're, they're picking up the phone so quick. Right? Okay.

So this is the way our system works, right? So as you see, the script pops up. Thank you for calling Jump Contact. This is Jose. What can I get your information on? Right, what's going on, gc, how are you? All good? All good. Good, good. We have Mike here. He's the, the turnaround king. Okay, we got Bruna. Bruna, Good morning. Hey, Chris. What's going on, buddy?

Good morning.

Good morning, Good morning. All right, we'll wait for the rest of the team to come in. So we have like our little Cardone University there and we have our meeting room. So clients come in here and they.

And this is through meta.

Yeah. Yep. So, yeah, so what happens is, for instance, we bring in a customer and then we'll walk in and then we'll go to one of our reps and then their video bubble pops up and then we'll start talking to them and then we can do a bunch of things in here. Right? So this is how we, this is how we bring the virtual world to life. All right, guys, I'm gonna do a team meeting like we do every day, guys. So let's start off. Let's get that blood flowing, team. Let's get, let's get some jumping jacks in. Alright, let's go. Come on, guys, let's go. 10 jumping jacks. Let's do it.

Ready? Let's go, guys. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. All right, team, good to see everybody. We got a special guest here. We got Mike. He, he came all the way from America. Where in the States are you?

Seattle.

From Seattle, Washington. So, guys, he's here. We're lucky enough to have to have Mike look at our, at our operations and see what we can do to, to make our service better so that our customers Win. We win. Win, win, win all around. Alright team, so put some wins in the chat, alright? I want to see some wins. All right team. So yesterday guys, we had a total of 944 billable minutes. Let's go. Good job team. Well done, well done. Average wait time 8 seconds team. So that's awesome. Good job. Really quick. So yesterday guys we had our leaderboard. This is our own version of P4P, just so you know. So yesterday guys we had Richard who was leading with 234 minutes, Ed in second place with 113, Ariel one minute back behind Ed at 112. Bruna 64, Chris 49, Ed, Georgina 34, Michelle 23, Lucy 22. So good job guys. Give yourselves a hand. Excellent job.

Look at my average wait time.

Let's look at your average wait time, Ariel. Okay, let's. Oh my God.

What is it?

Two seconds? Ariel. I have never ever, ever before seen it that low. How did you do that? Basically what was messing me up before is when I was doing stuff on my computer, I would stop doing the stuff on my computer and then try and answer and my lovely team members beat me to it. So now I'm just reading books on my tablet and keeping my cam on my mouse always. Well done, well done my friend. We'll have to, we'll have to look at, you know, some sort of bonus for that. I've honestly never ever ever seen it that low before. So that's, that's incredible. Congratulations. Great job. All right guys, so, so that's awesome as always, Ed. What are you smiling at? Do you want to say something to our friend here? Mike? Oh, oh, he's there. Yeah, he's here. I thought he was like with us right here, like in his computer? No, no, he's here in person. He flew all the way to Calgary. Other than that, guys, as always, like we say each and every single day, guys, right, the world class junk contact conversion experts team. We over promise and we.

Over deliver.

All right guys, have a great day. Okay, we'll see you guys. Thank you team. So the last 30 days our average wait time is, is nine seconds, right? So we're taking like 8200 phone calls, right? Like 19,000 billable minutes.

So billable minutes, is that accurate?

Yeah.

Okay, so we basically make about $3 per minute, right?

Correct.

So is this in the past month?

Yes, right here.

Oh that one there. So are we really billing out this month? Like 50?

No, because we still have staggered customers who are paying us 90 cents a minute. That's why it's different. Yeah. Yeah, I wish.

Nice. You have customers paying 90 cents a minute, and they have all up to $3. Minute.

Up to $4.

$4. And right now that's just based on when they joined.

When they joined, and also whether Rebecca signed them or I signed them. If she signs them, she's getting the 297 full amount. If I sign them, I'm doing, like, deals.

And what percentage of that is at the $3 per minute, approximately, versus a dollar.

So like around 25% of the business is at that elevated amount.

Okay. So the vast majority is still at the lower price. Okay, that makes way more sense. Yeah. Look, I know what it costs to run this type of business at command center, kind of like a call center for all of Augusta Nation, all 150 locations. We take their calls, we do their estimates, their invoices, and all their admin work. I know that we charge about $1 per minute, and I know just how close that is to being at zero. Very thin margins. And so if they're not charging three or four dollars per minute, they probably aren't making any money. Why do people leave right now?

It's just like when, when they get that initial. I think what it is, it's the initial big bill scare. And then they're just not happy. From that moment on, we're like on the chopping block.

Yeah.

And then they're pulling apart every single thing. They're trying to pull out a thread until the whole thing kind of goes apart. So we've lost them. So I think the problem is, is the onboarding.

Do you charge by the second, like accumulated?

That's an issue that we had. We were rounding up.

Okay.

And I think that's where also customers got a little ticked off. So we were rounding up to the nearest 30 minute.

Got it.

Yeah. But still, that's like a lot. You know, it adds up if there's. Especially if there's like a 15 second call.

Yeah, we. We were doing that in the past. We had to call two minute minimum. And then we. And now it's like five a second cumulative.

Yeah. So what I'm thinking of doing is, is doing anything under 45 seconds, we won't charge for, you know, and then. And then over and above, we're just going to do.

That could be. That could be potentially 20 to 5 to 30% of your calls.

Yeah, it's going to. We're going to lose money, but I believe it'll help us retain and grow more.

But, like, if you're charging a dollar. Let's call it a dollar per minute. And you're not charging for 30% of your calls because that's approximately what percentage of them are under 45 seconds. You're really now starting to charge like 70 cents per minute. Okay, so now we're just giving away things for free. Most calls are only a couple minutes long. So he's giving half of his calls away for free. We're going to lose our shirt. How do we get pay for the lobster and the caviar?

But a majority of our calls are actually sales opportunities.

Right.

They're actually new. They're new leads.

How, like, how do you go from 150 last year to like nine months later? We're at 50. Why are people leaving? When they leave is because it's one off thing that they're mad because I get that we have owners in Augusta. It's like they have one bad experience with a call agent, or we drop a ball on one thing and just blows up. Is it that or is it like, cost? What? Why are they. Because, like, calls. Call center should be so sticky because in order for them to take their calls back, they. You have to hire somebody or get an office. Like, what? You're saved. The reason we're able to charge a premium because, like, charging $3aminute is $180 an hour.

Yeah.

The reason we're able to do that is because we save them from buying an office, getting $3,000 worth of a lease per month and equipment, and hiring someone full time when they don't need it, et cetera. Like, why are they leaving? So yesterday, for example, how many people were working yesterday?

Everybody.

And were they were. Do they work full time shifts? Like, how many clocked hours were yesterday? Do you know that?

Yeah, everybody works a full eight hours. Full eight hours. It's just different people work at different times a day. So for instance, Lucy, who get the 24 7. Yeah, she's 24 7. So she only gets a handful of calls. She's there as insurance.

Got it. Like, last line of defense. Okay. But in terms of like clocked hours that we paid for, are they on contracts? Like, how are. How are you paying?

So what we do is we pay everybody a fixed salary. So we give them a yearly salary of $12,000. For Latin America, that's well above the norm. And then from there we do our P4P, which is we give bonuses from every pay period. The top rep gets. Gets an additional bonus. It goes from. From 1000 all the way down to 500 based on, on the, on the placement that they have. So Richard, who's just been over and above our best agent, he. He always finishes number one.

Yeah.

So he gets the, the thousand dollar bonus every month. Thousand, 9008-007006-00500.

So yesterday there was eight people working, or seven.

Seven, eight, nine. Nine case and nine.

So this is, this is the thing that I would be tracking a lot. So if we take all of their time that yesterday was billable hours, we had 13.55. That was the number of minutes yesterday that were billable. And then the thing that I'm looking at is if we got nine people, we multiply that by. It's called eight hours a day. There's 72 hours of clock time. So if I take 13.55, divide that by the amount of clocked hours. Right now, 18% of their day is being set spent on the call.

Yeah, very little.

Very little. Look, I understand the need to be able to go overseas to get really reliable labor and be able to make the cost work. However, if 80% of their day is spent doing absolutely nothing, you might as well hire someone in person and pay them two or three times as much. But as long as they're efficient, they'll make more money than the person that's overseas. There's times that probably for 20, 30 minutes, the phone doesn't ring, or if.

It rings, like someone's already answered. Like if Ariel's answered in two seconds, that means you, Rebecca, myself, are just not there.

Oh, I saw the numbers. Because, like, if they actually run the math on this, some of them worked Yesterday less than 6% of their day right there. So six calls. Talk time was 11 minutes. Let's assume that we charge a dollar per. It's $11. So there's a good chance that she.

Made more than we did. Oh, she collected a whole amount. It went straight from the client to her pocket.

Yeah, well, you're paying, you're paying 8 to $10 per minute and you're making a dollar. That sounds like great math. And so the question is two. One, can we tighten up their shifts? Or B, can we. Like, this number needs to be above 40% for us to make money. Like, I have no doubt that means like 40% of their day is actually on the phone making money. The reason I know they're not making any money is because at Command center for Augusta Lawn Care, we shoot between 50 and 60% efficiency. For our team that's on the phones, they're at like 10 to 20% efficiency. And so I know there's no money being made when you're charging someone a dollar per minute.

So these two are evenings, like in the middle of the night. And these two are new.

Yeah. So you could.

Anything.

Well, you could take two of them out, Right? We could probably take both to me, to two new people out, and you could take one of the evening people out because I can guarantee you they're not answering calls all the time. And I know that because they are. They're on average taking 12 calls. They're taking less than. Oh, my word. They're taking less than 20 minutes of calls per day.

Yeah, yeah. She just started and she's a rock star, actually. She's trained. She's got all the. All the skill set to be our top person.

The bottom line is you have two people at the top that make. That do more in revenue than the entire rest of the team.

It's necessary for us to get more.

Phone calls, but it's not because I can just know that only 18% of the day on average is being used.

Yeah, but what I meant to say is it's also because there's no more phone calls. Like, there should be more calls coming in too.

Right, Right, right. That's why I think we increase capacity.

That's what I'm saying.

Then you address the team.

Yeah. We don't need to hire a single person.

No, no, you could. You could double your revenue and not.

Have any more, which is amazing. We're in a great position in that regard. Like trained reps. And then at that point, if this number is still low, then they got to get fired. Right.

Look, I understand that laying off team members is not fun or exciting. I hate doing it. However, if it's going to cause the business to go out of business because there's no money being made and we're losing cash, then everyone's going to lose their job anyways. So why not cut the lowest performers and increase the amount of work that's being done by your high performers and then actually make a profit? The challenging part is you have spikes in call volume that you got to deal with.

Exactly. That's the problem.

So how can we fill in those gaps instead of incentivizing them based upon each other? So, like, you're ranking them right now and giving the top performer 1000 bucks. The lowest performer gets 500 bucks instead. What we could do is because, for example, that thousand dollars, they just have to be everyone else. They don't have to be exceptional. They Just need to be everyone else. What you could do is rank it based upon simply how many clocked hours you have in the month versus how many billable hours you have in the month. And then it's like, okay, if you get above 20%, you get 200 bucks. If you get above 50%, for example, you get like, $1200. Have tiers of that percentage. Because, like, right now at 18%, if we multiply that, that means that 1.5 hours a day out of their full day is actually on the phone. That means that, like, 80% of their day, they're not doing anything. Because now our goal is to try to keep everyone that's on staff as busy as possible, because it aligns with their incentives. They don't want to be sitting there for 80% of their day doing absolutely nothing. They want to be trying to get 50%. They will tell you, we don't have enough work. So then you can literally let less people in because they're getting compensated based upon the way you're getting compensated. But what we need to do is not allow 80% of their day not to be profitable for the business. Yeah, like, that will crush you.

How do I balance that, then, as we bring back in clients? Because now my goal is to. That's why I wanted to do this, because I want to get back to that hundred. Right. And when that happens, the phone's going to ring a lot more.

But this is the thing. Now you have a way to track when you need to hire more people, right? Like, out of the seven or eight people working, nine people working right now, there's probably three. Right off the bat, you know, your lowest performers. I could see them in the reports. We could immediately cut them loose, knowing that we have 80% of everyone else's day that's not being used right now. This is where. This is where I think this might work. So something we considered doing, and Jim's mowing over in Australia does this with their call center. And I think it could work well for you. And that is because they. In their market and you and your market, you don't really handle customer service very well. You're not set up for that. Instead, what we could do is simply charge for the lead, because as a business owner, I'd be thrilled out of my mind if you gave me a lead.

I love that.

And I have to give you 50 bucks or 20 bucks. It's easier to make sense to the business owner because they want leads. That's why they're coming to you like what problem are we solving? They want leads when they can't answer their phone. So instead of charging them by the minute, just charge them per lead. That way, they'll actually want their invoice to be higher every month. Why? Because it means they would get more of what they wanted in the first place. Which is what? More leads. Well, and what you could do. This is easy to see what that number should be. You'd simply take the number of minutes you currently have. You see how many forms, leads you gave to customers, customers last month. Do that over six months. You have an average of how many minutes per lead is on average. And then like, okay, great. Right now, we are approximately charging our customers $25 for every single lead that we actually give them. Great. Let's charge $35 per confirmed appointment or confirmed lead to our customers.

So. So my problem is me. I'll be like, well, Mike, let me run it for you for free for the first month so we can figure out that number.

This is why I think Rebecca should be doing sales. I know you think you have good ideas of sales, but the fact of the matter, she is bringing all the profitable customers. You are banned from sales. Because if I have that dollar amount, then when I get my bill every month, you're going to say, you got 60 leads. Here are all the forms. $60 times $40 a piece, $2,400 bill. And then it makes way more sense to me because I'm, as a business owner, I just care about customer acquisition costs, and I can just roll that $40 into whatever I'm spending on the front end for ads. So I'm going to do is like, okay, it took me $20 to get the click from Facebook or YouTube or whatever. It went to jump contact. I paid them $40 to answer the call and get the lead. Customer acquisition cost 60 bucks. And now when we give a customer a bill, they're happy because they got a lead with it instead of just as weird call with minutes. The reason we can't do that is because we do customer service calls when, like, they don't want us to be trying to go through something quickly. They want us. Take your time. We want you to go through this customer's bill and dig in.

I love that. I think that's amazing. It's just that initial speed bump, like, it took me a while to go from that dollar to $3. It's just. That's a massive jump. But she did it overnight, you know, and she had no problem doing it. So that's Where I just got to, you know, I believe this actually, believe it or not, will give me more comfort because it's, it's a pricing model that's a win win.

Well, all your customer service problems just went away on the sales side. It's a way easier offer. Right? Your job is figuring out all these numbers, giving her exactly what that cost per lead is going to be. She's going to go sell it out to wazoo and book calls into your appointments. You have two calendar leads. You're going to be funneling ads towards her calendly to book a sales appointment. She's going to literally on that call transact $1500 and book an onboarding call with you. You're going to figure out all the numbers and how everything gets routed and ivr stuff in the form stuff and she's not gonna have anything to do with it. But I just truly believe having more money will fix the whole issue with you guys working together.

No, I agree. I think so. She'll like me a little more.

The level of commitment to this needs to be like with violence. Right? We are either going to do this over or not. Right now the pricing stinks. The fact that we have between $1 and $4 is absolutely ludicrous. We could literally cut 80% of our customers right now and make the same amount of profit. Because you're only making profit right now that people make paying 3 to $4 minute guarantee it. And so it's either that we just completely downsize and have one or two people working for us and service these customers are paying a premium. Or we switch the whole business model towards leads. We pay our team members based upon leads. And then as a way to have a collective team measurement, kind of like profit sharing, we're tracking their efficiency score every day. Just keep tracking that over the course of a couple months and then you'll start being okay. We're usually around 45%. Let's give them compensation. Around 40, 40, 50, 60, 70, etc. I don't believe that you're going to tear off the band aid and actually switch the whole business model. I don't believe it. What I think you should do is have Rebecca reach out to the other 150 people that have used your service and left and try to pitch them on this new service. And by doing that, you will sell yourself on the idea that this is something you should now have spread across the entire org. First, I would contact all customers that have left you and sell them on this new model. That's the whole hardest sell. But I do believe you'll get people from it. We are now giving you an offer. You will be charged $0 for all customer service. Anything spam related, whatever. We still are going to guarantee at least under 15 second hold time and we're only going to charge you per lead. That's the first step. Second step, all incoming new customers from things like conferences, etc. You're going to go to one conference and instead of selling 20, you'll sell 50. Like it'll be, it'll be hotcakes with that offer. Then you're gonna have the confidence because you have all this new customer to go, right? Raise prices, quote, unquote. Really make customers currently more happy by raising their prices and aligning with leads. Again, if you were doing customer service and you actually went into their account, you would not want to do this. This is the worst thing you could do. But you guys don't do well at customer service. You do well at lead collection. I believe in roles and delegation and there is clear defined roles of what so and so is responsible for and the other person. As soon as we start helping each other, we will have friction. Yeah, it is who is doing sales, who is doing operations. That's the only question. I personally believe you're a better operational person. I personally believe she's a better salesperson. But you will both have to delegate and let the other person mess up on their own.

And in terms of the investment that we do in training, do you think we should bring it back a little?

You got it. You got to have a direct roi. If you are spending a dollar on training, coaching, masterminds, conferences, it needs to be how many customers that I get from that affiliate appointment. And what did that translate into?

What's a good, like, what's a good metric to kind of go by? For?

Just at least track it for now. Right now I have this $25,000 this conference. I got 33 customers over here. I spent $25,000 for these tickets and I got three paying customers which were lower value. Like These ones are 8,000amonth. These ones were $1,000 a month. This makes a lot of sense. Let's go figure out this one. Then what I'm gonna do is I take this one, I'm gonna focus on it, and I'm gonna also do split testing with something else like Facebook ads. And we're going to see which one do I convert more on. I think for 30 to 50 bucks, you're going to get a sales call. And she's going to close a third of them. And so for a couple hundred bucks, you're now getting a paying customer. That means within one month, we can pay off the customer acquisition cost. We need to. We need to pay off the customer acquisition cost as quickly as possible to actually make profit. Instead of spending $20,000 on a conference ticket and plus all the other travel fees that are associated with that conference, just spend some money on direct marketing, Facebook ads, YouTube ads, basically anything. Because right now you're spending $30,000, all said and done, for three customers. That's a $10,000 customer acquisition cost. At our current profit margins, we could have this customer for 50 years and never make a single dollar.

Or don't call it training. Call it fun.

Exactly, Exactly. Which, hey, I understand Growthcon has fun things about it, but is it worth 20 grand? Right. We don't have the money right now. I think we'd have more fun at GrowthCon if we waited three years and I had 150 grand in the bank.

Yeah, that's true.

Honestly, watching GrowthCon and other conferences like that when you're listening to people like billionaires, is all good, but it can be deceptive. Because what it takes to go from zero to $1 million, which is where jump contact is right now, is not exactly what is required to go from $10 million to $1 billion. That advice is different. And right now they need to focus on going from zero to a million.

And what about for, like, training? Training, Right, So like, for the team. No, no, no. For us individually, like, training programs, because there's not always a direct ROI there. Right?

Get more training. When you have implemented everything that you know how to do, then you need more training. You do not need more training right now. The training is not. Is the last thing you need. I only got a coach when I was like, I have done everything I know to do in this business, and I am tapped out.

Yeah, man. No, it's brilliant. Like, I think what you, what you've shared with us is something that we go to training for. You know what I mean? But it's. The problem with the training is that it's, it's not dialed in. You know, I mean, whereas this is very dialed in, very specific. Honestly, it's, it's, it's amazing. It's a gift for our business. You know, we value the expertise that he brings, and it's remarkable. And not just that he's, he's so knowledgeable in the space, and lucky for us, in the call center space, but he, he does it with kindness. And sometimes business gets done by shrewd people. And it's okay to be shrewd, but it's always nice when somebody has a heart behind the shrewdness. Right. So I. I enjoyed it. I loved it. I'm thankful. Very, very thankful. And, you know, this is something that, that will be priceless and something we'll remember for a long time, for sure.

I love everything that you talked about today. It's the implementation and the taking actions and following through with things that is like the biggest challenge after learning something like this.

Yeah. So what we're going to do is we have eight steps.

Yeah. So first steps would be, first of all to go and look at the past data. Second steps will be to ensure that we can track conversion data, because without that, we're in trouble. We need to make sure that that's 100% transparent.

At the end of the month, they literally get how many leads we sent you, and here's your bill.

From there, we gotta have the team buy in. So tell the team, hey, we're doing this. We're switching to this model. Go over the bonus, the team bonus, everything else. From there, train the team. So that.

And that is going to look like in the form of a dollar per lead. Plus, at the end of each month, the efficiency score of the team. You're going to track that on a daily basis.

From there, ensure that our forms and our scripts.

Are geared more towards, like the appointment set, not towards the customer service side of things.

Again, all this will be done naturally just by correcting incentives. As soon as you do this to the incentive, the team is going to want the lead. You're not going to change a lot of the scripts. They will just drive for it.

Then from there, pitch the clients, old.

Clients, try to get them to come back. That's all straight revenue in the pocket.

Set this up for new clients. So seven is for new clients, and then from there, eight would be to convert existing.

And that's where you literally, in one day will make an extra 10 to 15 grand a month in profit. And so if we can both agree that these eight things are going to get our business closer and by getting this business more, having more money, it's going to help our family. We will hold each other accountable. These eight steps right now, we've been bickering and fighting about each other's roles in the business and what they should or should not be doing. Like, literally within two minutes of me being in your house, he said it's her fault about X, Y, and Z. And I said, that is strong words, but.

But, Mike, it was, like, also her fault.

Those are fighting words.

I didn't make a big deal.

I saw you in the corner of my eye, there was that twinge of anger. I get it. Right.

But I just. I just struck before she could. So you know what I mean?

Sometimes the best offense is a defense, right? To, like, you know, just.

But if we look at it from the perspective of, okay, we are on the same, same team here.

To be honest, I just wanted to be fully transparent, like, so how I felt like it's not often. It's not ever that we have somebody, like, fantastic.

I appreciate most people try to put a facade on. That's why we're able to get these eight steps. And I have absolutely no doubt that they'll work because you're showing me everything raw. And I know this will work. But I also know that, like, you will need. In order to stay accountable to the execution, you will need each other to hold each other accountable because she will need to make a calendar link. You will have to be able to do these numbers. You will have to hold each other accountable in each other's roles and then realize people are gonna disappoint you. There's gonna be times on a sales call, you're like, you could have said this. There's gonna be times you're like, in a meeting, you could have said this. And you shut up until there's a time when you openly have a dialogue of like, we're gonna make this a safe part where we can express areas where we think the other person can improve. And that's not when energy is high and we're mad. Cause there's room for that. Like, you need to be able to improve. And there are areas of a team meeting you can improve, and there's areas in a sales cool you can improve. But, like, bringing that up in the heat of a moment and when there's passions are running high is the wrong moment. And I'll just say as a side note, if drama on social media is something that you're known for, I would run 100 miles away from that.

Well, the bad thing is, it's not even an act. She's legitimately mad. You know what I mean? I wish it was an act.

And every relationship has that. Yeah, yeah, right. But, like, let's just say, for example, because I know you respect the cardone. They have disagreements, and I bet they're pretty heated the way that Alaina is they are very heated, but they do not show that they are a united front in front of everyone, publicly, because that's what their team needs to see and that's what their investors need to see. That's what their customers need to see. Your customers do not need to see that the two executives in this company are bickering and fighting on anything. Right. And like, yes, I appreciate you being open and vulnerable, but your wife, you do not say I disagree with her on something to someone that's 2 minutes, 3 minutes in. It creates ill will on her end.

Yeah, it's true. See, this is my problem.

I appreciate you being open and honest, but that's something that you just don't cross. Not only executive, but your wife. It is your fault. It's your fault.

It's your fault.

If you're the owner of the business and you want to be the quote, boss, everything's your fault, including what your executives do. Okay, we have two months to implement. And then you're gonna have a zoom call with Zach and he's gonna ask you, did you do these things? And so you will publicly be on blast if you don't. Is that what we need to, like, we will take action.

Public embarrassment.

I have no doubt whatsoever in what we're talking about. Like, there's no question marks around this stuff. I've had to figure this out, like, by trial and error and making losing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Don't go down that path. Like, this will work eight weeks, every single week, we're gonna knock off one of these things. That's the only thing we're focused on. And I happen to believe that within doing number, you know, two and three for the first couple weeks. By selling all those old customers, you'll immediately improve revenue by 20 to 50% overnight, without increasing any cost, by the way. And I also believe once you get to number eight, you will immediately again, overnight get five to ten grand of just extra profit by raising the prices without raising prices. And customers will be happier. And guess who's going to leave? The people who already we're not making money on.

Yeah. So there you go. Public embarrassment if we fail. What do you think?

The best.

It's the only way.

Yeah.

The wife's going to get mad at me.

When Mike Brook things, when he. When he looked at our stats and looked at our numbers, it was more of a. A rep versus rep type of mentality. And. And we were basing on a leaderboard based on. On who was better. Quote, unquote, better. Like 1 to whatever it was, 1 to 6, 1 to 10. What. What Mike had told us was rather than. Than bonusing people based on how they perform against each other, bonus them based on how they perform in general. And it was kind of interesting because I never looked at the business that way, which I should. It was just breaking down the numbers, like how, how efficient are our agents and in this case, in the call center world, meaning, you know, what percentage of time are they on the phone versus the percentage of time that they work? And what we found was we had some reps that were under 5%. So 95% of their day, they were doing anything but being on the phones. And that's what their job is, to be on the phones. Right? So we brought that up to the team. You know, some of the team was like, well, that's, that's, that's not our fault. That's your fault. Our job is to answer the phone. If the phones come in and Zach gets it quicker than me, then it's, it's, it's not my issue. It's, you know, it's a you problem, not a me problem type of thing thing. And, you know, we, we told them, well, then we're going to switch around schedules and adjust things so that everybody has ample opportunity to, to be able to get to the phones. And they didn't like that. And as a consequence, five people on the team left, right? You know, so it, it sucked, right? To lose five people that have been with us for so many years, so much time, effort, energy, money goes into training them. And it was a little hard, but understanding that it was for the best. We want people that are aligned with us and share the common vision and go goals that we have. You know, it also showed us that we were inefficiently spending on labor, and it allowed us the opportunity to hire locally. So, you know, the money that we were spending on more agents on the five agents allowed us to hire three agents locally.

So Mike, one of the things he brought up was that the pricing was, was kind of confusing, right? And us having.