Weekly VS Month Billing (Q&A with Mike Andes)

It's always a race at the end to pack in questions. So feel free to just hop in in this.

In the sense of upsells, I'm working towards building out like premium property protection maintenance packages and I'm trying to not overcomplicate or anything. So it's like when a new lead comes in, we're obviously just going to get the quote to them as fast as possible for what they're asking for. But then when you're trying to increase their annual value, um, is it better just to like present them with like a list? This is what we offer. What do you want to do? And then build out the package from there? I see billing obviously as being like one of the best options for that since my area is really used to subscriptions. Or do you just try to let it upsell, you know, step by step as you visit over the course of the property?

Right, yeah. So there's two ways of thought on this. One is they are in a buying window, they're buying from you already. We should be trying to sell them as much as possible and solving more of their problems. And then the second ideology is we need to solve their problem to gain their trust. And once we've done that, then they will buy more from us in the future. I think both are right. So for example, I would probably put in your estimates. If they ask for one service, I'm going to give them the package price as an optional thing. Yeah. So I would just have a second line item says optional and says like 12 months program or name it something fancy and then it's super simple and it'd be just below the item that you know, they've requested. And then on a recurring basis, maybe quarterly, if they don't accept the package or like the more recurring 12 month plan, I'm going to be trying to upsell them that using text or email. And then you just want to be strategic in terms of when you send that, for example, you're not going to want to upsell them a 12 month recurring package when there's nothing to do in their property because at that time a 12 month package doesn't make sense to them. What you want to do is when they just had a massive bill for, let's just call it, I'm going to make up a number, 400 bucks for that month. You want to say, hey, by the way, for 299amonth across the whole year, we'll take care of all these other things. Yeah. And so you just want to be strategic in Terms of when you pitch that.

Yeah. So spring definitely. Like in spring when everybody's getting the all the extras done, you just try to pitch those packages and then do you think it's a good idea to like set up a separate page on your website? Is like almost like a checklist form. So it's like here's from on your website they can say we want full maintenance and they go in and they just check off and then it comes to me as like a service request or whatever. Right. And then I have to go to the property and fill out the package and send it to them. Is that or is that just too complicated on your website and people won't do that?

Yeah, you want to be careful with complicating any sort of 12 month plan on your website because most people come to your site like they have a pain point and they're like looking for one thing. So that's what they're going for. If you're going to package and bundle a whole bunch of other stuff into it, you got to keep it like deathly simple. And so what I would do is like if they select for example, what service are you on in Keaton? Sorry?

Well, we're full service maintenance year round like but we get really heavy six months of snow where it's just like lawn and everything basically shuts down. Like it's hard to even offer winter services. But yeah, it's all about increasing that annual value and just trying to set it up so that we're allowed to go in and take advantage of those opportune moments throughout the winter. Right.

Yeah. So I would have, I would have like mo only and then I have another package like mo snow and all things property maintenance. Exactly. And then, and then just be like listing off the service that are included in that. But just don't get super technical. I see people way too often cuz we do W services. I see people start like explaining all this stuff to the customer and like okay, so if it snows we're going to pull the one visit forward and then if it doesn't snow we're going to put it's going be two weeks like, like hey chill out. At the end of the day we're going to make your property look good year round and we're going to come during the off season and spend the same amount of time as we would if we were mowing. That's it. And so just a basic simple as possible. If you can't say in two sentences, you got to consolidate it. Okay, gotcha same thing with your upsells. Same thing with your upsells, too. Like when you. When you're trying to get them from mowing to the other package. Like, trying to explain too much and like, listing off tons of services can get you in a bit of a pickle. And if you have savings in terms of price with the package, that's what you want to pitch as much as possible. Because that makes sense to everyone. If I can just say, hey, based upon last year, you spent $1500 with us, this package is going to cost you $1200 per year, and you're going to get all this other stuff that. That makes sense to everybody.

Yeah, exactly. And like, I was thinking more so because it's like our. Our full package essentially includes like, 14 points, 14 services. So it's like if you're booking at least eight, then we'll throw on the nine for free. Right. But we're also going to maintain, like, a minimum where if you're not going with, you know, either six months of snow or six months of lawn mowing, you have to be fulfilling four out of the 14 points or, you know, we're just essentially not a good fit for you.

Yeah, yeah. So as long as you can say that in a simplified as possible, because 14 points, 4, 8, 9, like, just these are the two options. And if I can't say in two sentences. Yeah. So you got it?

Yeah.

All right.

Hey.

Hey, Mike. This is Matt Hope, Mills, North Carolina.

Absolutely.

You got me there.

I got you. Go for it.

Oh, hey. So quick tax question. So I met with my tax guy today, and I'm probably going to end up owing around $15,000. And this leads into my question as far as I'm getting ready to hire additional person in the spring. And he's saying I should go ahead and buy my truck and my equipment to go along with it, and it'll save me around 6 to $7,000 on that tax bill. Am I jumping ahead, or should I just eat that $15,000 in taxes and not try and buy the truck.

Preemptively?

Yeah, great question. So in the short term, I think he's right. And that is like, buying the truck is probably going to, you know, give you basically a 20 coupon to whatever you buy. Now, what's cool is you could technically either get debt or lease this and take this deduction. Anyways, this is like the whole argument around leasing or getting debt is the fact that you can do a Section 179 on a $30,000 truck, put $5,000 down and save more in taxes in the next few weeks than, than what you're actually putting down on the truck. Now the other part to think about here is if you're going to next year, so if you're paying 15,000 in taxes, I'm going to go on a limb and say your net adjusted gross income something like 90, 70 to 90,000. And so the question is, if next year you're gonna do 200,000, well, that's gonna put you in a different tax bracket, like a very different tax bracket. You're gonna go from like 12% to 24%. And so if next year you're expecting that kind of profit, the $30,000 section 179 from this year will actually save you significantly more next year. And so this is the thing you want to be careful with section 179 once it's read off this year. Great. Yeah, you take the deduction, but if right now you're at a 12% bracket, you're saving 12%. If you next year you're going to be in a 24% bracket. Now that deduction is worth twice as much to you. So it's really a matter of like, when do you want to pay the taxes? Like, if you were hurting for cash, I'd probably take it now because you're going to need the truck in a matter of just two months. You're going to be buying it anyways. But if you know next year you're likely going to be more profitable, then I would probably wait till next year. And if you're like, well, it's going to be probably about the same, I'd probably just buy it whenever I need it. And I would probably just do a five year depreciation schedule and not do a section 179.

Got it.

Much appreciated. Thank you.

Yeah, you got it.

Hey, Mike, can you hear me?

Go ahead, Riley.

Hey, you may have said this to Keaton just a minute ago, but I, I think I might have missed it, but we're trying to switch a lot of our clients over to the subscription based services. You know, one price, spring cleanup, thatching, mowing, all, you know, the full services.

Being in Idaho, north Idaho, we have a lot of snow. I mean, we get a lot of snow, especially come the new year. Sometimes we get a lot, sometimes we get very little. I want to include that service in there somehow, but it's an unpredictable.

It'S not a predictable service. We didn't do a whole lot last year. We did a Ton the year before, and we haven't really hardly done any so far this year. Do I include that as a separate. Do I just have the subscription price for six months, maybe April through October, and then pause that and then just do as. As the snow comes, charge that whatever that price ends up being, or should I find an average and then include that into the price?

So from, from your perspective in terms of pricing, you're going to find an average. From what you tell the customer, what you want to protect is that 10% extraneous. Very, very like one out of 10 years, you get this crazy amount of snowfall. You need to protect yourself against that. So I would do is just say, hey, it includes snow. Snow removal up to X amount of services and put that on the higher end. Like, it's not going to be like a. Like you're just trying to protect yourself against the insanity of one year where it triples snow volume. You're not trying to protect against like a heavy season you're predicting against like edge case horribleness that could wipe you out and you're gonna make unhappy customers. And then usually they're going to read it like, oh, well, last year they only plowed me, you know, plowed the. The place like four or five times. They're doing up to 10. Great. Totally fine. So I would do that. Just have an upper edge limit. Some people do it based upon number of inches fallen, but then it's kind of difficult for them to keep track of. And then you've got to convince them that there was that many inches fallen. I would just do based on a number of services. It's like so up includes up to X amount of services.

Okay, cool. Thank you.

Yeah. It'll also protect you if you get dumped on in snow. You can kind of make the excuse to them like, hey, we haven't got your property yet because we don't want to come five times the next week. We're trying to get down to two or three to preserve and you don't. So you don't go over your budgeted number of services. It kind of protects you a little bit. And you can use it to. From a scheduling perspective.

Okay, cool.

Yeah.

I mean, last year at this time, we've made. We made three times as much as we made we've made so far this year from snow and ice.

Yeah. So the dependable kind of annuity of revenue, what you're giving up is the killer years. But then you're trying to get rid of the slim years, and I agree with that. If you can, if you can sell that. Right. If you can't sell that. You know, one thing I'll say is you want to sell this package when there's a ton of snow on the ground. Because what you're going to have is people that are paying three times as much for emergency snow service. And what you're trying to get is sell them on a lower price on a flat rate. Do not pitch this service. I would not be running ads if there's not a lot of snow around, because they're going to be like, why would I pay you? I don't need you. They don't need you until they want you. And so I would just be careful around that. Like you want to try sign up as many people as possible when they have really high bills.

Okay, cool. Yeah, I haven't pitched it yet. I've been trying to figure out what that even looks like, but I'll. Yeah, definitely wait till we get a little more smell on the ground. Cool.

And you can even create like three packages. If you're like really like, for example, both like, you could have three packages. Hey, we have a six month subscription for mowing, we have a six month subscription for, for snow. Or a third package is a snow and lawn 12 month package. And these are the monthly prices for all three. So you could kind of package it that way. The challenging part was packaging in general is budgeted hours. If you're doing like paid for performance, it starts to get a little more tricky. But in from a pricing perspective, it's very, very straightforward.

Yeah, we have a couple places, a couple commercial sites that are just one price, 12 months or really six months actually just for the landscape season. But I find it difficult and I'm sure there's probably a way. But inside Copilot figuring out then how to make my budgeted hours, how to actually translate that into my efficiency on there. So I just have it priced at zero, just so it can be on the schedule. But then I have to kind of track that on the back end of myself.

Yeah. So when you're coming with your pricing, every single service inside that contract, we want to have budgeted hours. So you're gonna have a level billing agreement inside of Copilot. And then inside of that, you should have visits for every single service, whether it be some of our weekly or bi weekly, some of our six months, et cetera. And each of those should have budgeted hours. And that's how you can still run pay for performance even inside of a level billing contract. Because Every visit needs to have budgeted hours, otherwise like you're kind of running blind on the contracts and you don't know if you're ahead of schedule or behind in terms of the pricing. So if you need help with that one, Riley, feel free to book a call with atc. But like switching from just like blanket pricing for contracts to actually like where you use the budget hours for every visit, your crew get way more efficient because when they show up to a job, they just see one visit with just the budget hours for that specific service instead of more of a blanket like hey, these are all the things we gotta get done and then they're figuring out when they gotta get them all done.

Okay. Okay, cool. That makes sense.

A question real quick about SO one our biggest goal right now we're moving one of our guys into estimator roll. That would be our first non revenue producing employee that we have fun. It's a little bit foreign to us as far as, you know, want to have something where it's still incentive based, pay a little bit. So we're thinking maybe do what our initial thought was is partial salary and partial profit sharing. But that by itself is pretty foreign to us as far as the big thing with profit sharing too is not only just what percentage but also because we're growing so much and that's our biggest thing, the profit is not as much as it would be, you know, if we were just standard operating, you know, staying the same size. So what percentage of the profit because it's reduced we give him. And where are we going from there?

Yeah, so the challenging part here is if you just did profit sharing, what you don't want to do is give them a higher percentage now and as we become more profitable because we'll stop growing or going to reduce the percentage we give you of profit sharing. Like it just is a bad look. So what I usually say here is you want to have two different metrics here. One would be your profit sharing which you know in time will become a bigger piece of compensation. But right now you're going to need some sort of revenue metric because you're growing fast. So like I'm assuming right now you're like 7, 800,000. Where you at in terms of revenue this year?

We're going to be right at 600.

Okay, cool. And so what do you think next year is going to look like? Is it going to be around the 800,000 level?

Probably between 8 is okay.

So. So you're going almost 50% a year. So yeah, you probably won't have a ton of profits. So then it's just a matter of, okay, I would probably do your profit sharing. You're probably not going to see a lot of it next year. We're probably going to be running a pretty low margin because growth sucks cash. We're going to be buying a couple more trucks, hiring more people, price to move the shop, whatever it might be. And so because of that we don't expect a lot of profits. So I would do some sort of other compensation mechanism based up year over year quarterly growth. So at Q1 2024 versus Q1 2025, based upon the revenue growth in that quarter, you'll get a bonus.

Okay, so keep. So the main week to week income would just be like a base salary and then instead of doing like, I mean because you know, we don't want to do like a commission, anything like that, it would be way too much to track anyways. So the main thing would be big portion of his income is just gonna be quarterly bonuses.

Yeah. And that would be bonuses based upon revenue growth. And you're gonna wanna make sure that when the business levels out and stops growing that most of the profits or most of the compensation is gonna come from profits. Because you do not want him just thinking about top line growth like these bonuses. Maybe a thousand to $3,000 a quarter for revenue targets is what I'm thinking. But I want it to be that if we get to say 900,000 and then we turn this thing into a profit gold mine and it's starting to do 150 to thousand dollars in profits, I want him thinking about a twenty to forty thousand dollar, you know, prize. Right. So make the profit sharing a high enough percentage that that is the goal. The revenue markers are simply an incentive for him to stay on. When the business doesn't have profit and you're in growth mode.

I got a couple more quick questions. One, when.

When it comes to winter employees and just trying to keep them around, you know, when, when there's not a lot we can do is, is a salary plus hours sort of pay, does, is that make sense at all? Like if they, if we're paying out like a, a base salary of 20 hours every two weeks or something just to say, you know, you got to be on call though when the snow comes. But then obviously when they work more than 20 hours then they start getting paid hourly. Is that, does that make sense? Do you think that would be attractive to anybody at all? Or is it just you're better off, Are you Trying to him off and offer them to come back.

Yeah, like if you're, it depends on what your goal is. If your goal is, I'm trying to get people that are willing to come do snow. Usually that's what you have to do. If that's not the candy cap, like that's not the constraint. And it's like, I need, I'm trying to do this so I, they just come back in the spring. I would, I would not be thinking in terms of like, just pay them something to stay on. Mostly due to the fact that you just added up how much you're giving them over the course of the next three, four months and you just said, could I get an employee if I gave them a bonus of $5,000 or if I spent $500 on marketing? On indeed. Like usually the answer is yes, unless you have a very high skilled position. And if someone's like, I do have that. Simplify your business. So usually like I went into this trap and was paying 70 to 100 grand a year just trying to keep my crew busy throughout the winter until finally I was like, okay, I'm just gonna lay them off and they're all gonna be allowed to come back March 1st full time. And every single person came back. I was like, this is. And for years I went through that. So yeah, yeah, I get that the.

Main battle is just the, the ups and downs with the snow around here. It's just that, like there's either just literally nothing to do or then the snow comes and we get 2ft overnight and you need 10 people out there dealing with it. Right.

So but by, but by removing that.

Base and on call list. But I'm also trying to think of, you know, keeping four people around year round even when necessarily there isn't a lot to do. Like I would like to say, okay, you can stay home for a week here because there's nothing to do. You're still going to get something.

Right? Yeah. If you had recurring revenue, if you had recurring revenue, like all of your contracts were on 12 months level billing, I'd be more inclined to do that.

Yeah.

But the thing is, the thing is I happen to believe that if you took that revenue that would otherwise be going to them when there's no snow, and you just said, okay, we're going to be able to now double our hourly rate when you are on call. I happen to believe people would show up for 50, 60, $70 an hour. And now you can afford it. Right. So I've always just ran the math on this and been like, okay, when I actually need them, if I paid them twice as much, would I be able to find people? Probably.

Yeah.

Okay, good, good point.

And then would you be comfortable with sharing like some of your best interview questions that, that you ask candidates these days or that you find are like the best insights into, you know, new people would be some of the first ones maybe that you lead with.

Yeah, there's so many of like interview questions and honestly I now I've done enough of them where I tailor my interviews pretty severely. The biggest one that helped me at the beginning though. What's that? Sorry?

For frontline team members, essentially.

Yeah. So like the one thing I'm always saying is like, you know, I'm going to talk about their last job, I'm going to talk about their last manager and obviously making sure there's no like spite towards their manager because if they're spite towards their previous employer, you're going to be. Get spite towards you. Right. But then also just being what I usually am looking for is I'm trying to find a reference that they do not have listed and I know they don't want to share with me. And so this could be someone that they worked with, their, their direct manager. So like they give me the owner's name, for example, as the reference. I was like, great. Was they, were they your direct manager? No, no, you know, the operations manager. Great. What's their name? Matt. Great. So when I call Matt, what will he say about your performance? And then usually you can get them to break and you get the real reason they left. And if they start getting skittish, I know something. Ideally though, I'm trying to call Matt. I'm not trying to call the owner who they gave as a reference. So I never call references on someone's resume. It doesn't matter if I'm digging to find who can I call actually was closer to them. And then I simply ask the question, when I call them, what will they say? And all of a sudden you say, well, we didn't really get along and like you get some other stuff. So that's like a layup one.

Do you have like a pre screening process where you ask them a few questions right away before you even get on the phone or bring them in or anything like that. Or you just do like one sit down.

It just depends. So like it depends how many candidates you have coming in. So for example, I'll use an example. It's fresh in my mind. So we, we have a for. For copilot we have several positions open. We have thousands and thousands of applications coming in, mostly because there's a lot of white collar jobs being laid off in tech and so thousands of applications. So what we're going to use is just AI to screen them out. Right? Very like just screen out. We need 90% of these gone just so we can look at something. The bottom line is the more screens you put in, the less people you're going to at the bottom. So it really comes down to how many applicants do you have. If you have 20 applicants, you can get pretty picky. You might. Okay, I'm just going to call them all and set up an appointment. Half of them won't show up. Right. So you can very easily start putting these filters.

Okay.

Now I want to, I want to improve to like, no one's a lot of smoke. Everyone is a clean driving record. Everyone needs a phone. Like, you start adding more filters in, so you get down to a manageable number of people to interview and actually, you know, give a job offer. And so, you know, if, if you have tons of candidates, doing a screening call is helpful because you'll screen half of them out. But a lot of times if you just schedule appointments, you'll screen those people out anyways. So I'm a big fan of just like every like 10 to 15 minutes, I'll schedule a whole bunch of people knowing half of them won't show up. Instead of going through the 10 or 15 minutes of just screening them on the phone, I'll just have them all show up and knowing that that's a mechanism in of itself to like screen them out. But we, we do, we do also do phone screening. If the general manager is like tapped out in terms of time, we're going to do screen them here at command center and then set up the appointment.

Yeah, okay, that works out.

I'm good now. Thank you.

Cool. Anyone else? Feel free to unmute yourself.

What we do with the pricing as far as snow and lawn is instead of labeling it as a package, we'll do it. We just call it a seasonal rate. And we explained to them, look, with this seasonal rate, it doesn't matter how many plows you get, especially in the wintertime, how many plows you get, how many, whether, you know, we get 10 inches of snow, we do 15 plows or we do five plows. This is what your rate's going to be. We do very successful with that. Just kind of a little insight for you guys might help you a little bit. My question, Mike, is with with some of your customers that are net 30 nat 40 nat 45. How would you, would there be another way to approach these, these companies or anything on trying to get your money a little sooner or more on time? Because right now that's something that we pull, we run into is they're running over that.

That 30 to 45 dates.

Yeah.

And these are big companies that we're working.

Got it. And so what percentage of your revenue right now, Shannon, is coming from? From commercial? Mostly that.

Mostly, yes.

Okay.

So like right now in this moment is a tight spot because we're waiting on that money to come in. And that's hurtful.

Totally. So two things. The first one's the biggest and that is I would have payment terms that incur fees if they do not pay on time. So inside of co pilot you can just have it where after 30 days it starts to accrue at either a percentage or a dollar amount as they continue to not pay. And then you can just set up an automation that tells them, hey, day 21, hey, FYI, in one week your balance is going to start accruing interest. And so as long as it's on the estimate that they accept or the contract they sign and they within state compliance. So you want to check what state are you in? Shannon.

Michigan.

Yep. So you always want to look up Michigan and see what percentage you're allowed to charge on overdue fees. Because you don't want to go over that because especially big companies, they'll be like, oh no, it's over. And then you're, you're kind of handicapped.

I want to say it's like 10 or something like that.

Yep. So you could, you could do like, hey, after X amount of days you're getting charged 1% a month. That's 12%. It's really not that bad. But any fee is usually enough for them to start thinking like we didn't pay this person. Especially because you have a signed contract with that and their company, the company does not want to get sued over this sort of thing because it'll affect, you know, the business owners, you know, because these are big companies. But so they don't want to be sued over this sort of thing. So I would put it in your contract, I would have a fee and just automate it. You got to automate this sort of thing. If you're trying to remind yourself to go in and add fees, it will never work. So having where hey, after 30 days this fee gets automatically added to the invoice and then there's an automation that after say 21 days, 25 days, 27 days, it's leading up to that 30 day marker. That would be my recommendation. I think you'd really quickly cut this down. It's just challenging because a lot of them do not want to put things on file. They want to don't want to put a card on file, they don't want to put ach. Another thing I would say, Shannon, is you could flip the script on them.

Most of the ones we do do work with ach, which is nice. A couple of them do offer early pay, which is nice. But some of the companies.

Are just kind of a headache. And even though we have not, as our current company have not been in business very long, it's only been since April.

We've actually been in business a lot longer. It was under a different company, different owner. We retain those customers, which is huge for us as a new company.

One thing I'll say, Shannon, that might be helpful. I've seen some commercial companies and I'm going to be testing this a bunch in 2025. So I don't have data on this firsthand. And that is why not, can we just flip the script on these guys? And that is when they sign up, they, they pay on the 1st for services that are coming up that month.

From a commercial perspective, they're going to pay the same amount for this 12 months no matter what. But you can pull this off with commercial a little easier. And that is like hey, you pay this first $1200 when we sign the contract and that pays for your first month. Now if they're late on payment, I'm, I'm still like in the middle of my month. So they're two month, two weeks behind. For example, I'm still like halfway through the services rendered. So this is something that we're gonna even start testing with residential because we're gonna start creating cards in our form on online and just like, hey, we're gonna charge your card for the first service right now. And then you will pay for the upcoming months of services at the, on the first of the month we're gonna start testing on residential. But I know commercial is easier because they're signing a contract for 12 payments of X. Just make it the first of the month, right? And then if they stop doing, if they don't pay you the very worst, you've done 30 days of service, you haven't gone 60 or 90 days without them. Like you just say, look, if you don't pay for the first, we are stopping services immediately and then those you don't, no skin off your back.

The very few ones that we do have as seasonal like that are pretty decent. It's the per pays or per pushes that are the headaches. The worst headaches.

Yeah. So you say, hey, look, we really encourage people to do ach on and put their, their stuff on file. If you don't, totally fine. Just realize that if you don't pay within 14 days, you going to start accruing fees at 1% a week or 1% a month or whatever, whatever you're allowed to in Michigan.

Because I know we did start to do that and then we had a lot of them kick back in emails. You charge us a late fee and we're going to stop services with you guys. These are companies that we've partnered with.

For a long time. Well, then we go find new customers. Right. And so like this comes down to what's the constraint? And it's like we need to go find more customers so that if they're not willing to abide by our billing terms, we tell them to go pound sandwich.

Okay.

Yep. And I, I really do believe if you in your onboarding process, if you just simply give them two options, one you can do, we can bill you at the end of the month and if as long as you pay within 30 days, you're good, anything after 30 days, you're getting late fees or put your ACH on file and never worry about this again.

Okay.

Yep.

Okay.

Well, I actually want.

Naomi, you're good.

Hi. Yeah, I actually wanted to piggyback on that a little bit. So we're launching Copilot with our existing customers in January. And so I've watched a lot of your videos and I just want to make sure that we're approaching this correctly. So that first invoice that they receive in January, after we complete their property, it's going to say update billing and then your invoice is ready. And then in that email template, I've used one that you guys have, but kind of tweaked it to where it has the client portal first to like pay here up, put your card on file. And at the very bottom it has like, here's your invoice, total due. Now, would that be the best approach to get because our goal is for everyone to have the card on file, which we've explained to our customers, and if they're not willing to do that, then kind of go elsewhere?

Um, yeah. Yeah. The big thing is you want to ask for that card Information like you mentioned when you're sending out the first invoice because until then you're just hoping they go in there for whatever reason until they actually have a payment outstanding, they're not going to do it. And so that's a, what you're doing is right. It's like, hey, here's the amount that's overdue. So you can use the merge tags pulling their overdue amount or their due amount, I wouldn't call it overdue because you will get some people freaking out. They just have this weird thing like you should have overdue, like this is due and it is required that you go in here and pay it. What's nice is that once they're inside the portal, it's pretty like they have to put the card on file just to pay it. And once the card's on file you can charge it. So like, it's not a complicated process for them to like approve the fact that you're going to charge it in the future. So the main objective is just get them to open the email and then open up the client portal. And so if in that title it says you have an outstanding balance of merge, tag, invoice amount, they will open it up. Once they click on that, I would say even if you wanted to Naomi on like a second follow up for people that don't go after it, then you explain here's. We did change billing providers and here's a few things that are going to make this better. Click here and please update your card information. It's a one time, you know, deal.

Okay.

We've gotten like 98% of people that comply within the first two emails and then anyone else, I'm usually going to contact them like hey, I sent you a couple of emails or I text them.

Okay. So my question is because we kind of did some test runs and I sent an invoice and on the, on their end when they paid for the invoice, it actually didn't save their card onto the profile. But you're saying that when you do pay for the invoice that we're still allowed to charge the card even though it's not on their client portal. I'm a little confused on that.

Yeah. So I was assuming you're doing this in January because the update that's going to be coming up basically once they pay it's in their client portal profile and they have to remove it in order to be able to not let you charge it. And so what happens is if they remove a credit card from the profile from their portal with and you cannot charge it, you'll get notified. So then you can do whatever you want whether it be contact them or remove them from recurring service. But for now you're right, they do have to check the box that says like allow them to charge. Okay. Exactly.

If not.

Yeah. So what I would do is in that email for now just address that like put a little check mark emoji and be like make sure to put this on file and you won't have to deal with this again. And then what you can do too Naomi, because you're sending is an invoice. Anyone that doesn't do it in say like three or seven days just have automations that kind of nicely remind them and then you can give them more information as time goes on because I don't want to bombard them on the first email. Like this is why we changed providers and here's all the good things about it. I would just be like hey, here's this overdue invoice. Please put your card information here, go. And then if they have an overdue invoice I would deal with it a little bit differently like a text message or explaining why we changed and like this is a one time thing etc.

Okay. Luckily we, we have sent two notices already that we are like moving to this new system. So they are aware of it. So I think we'll be good on that end. Awesome. And then just out of curiosity, on your opinion between weekly billing and monthly billing, like what do you prefer?

Yeah. So like what services are you doing, Naomi?

So maintenance reoccurring. We're transitioning from a monthly billing to a weekly billing. But we just kind of, that's what we're moving forward. But we obviously really hold your opinion highly. So I just kind of hear your thoughts on what your.

On that increasing payment frequency will always increase Churn. Okay. Mostly due to the fact that people see it more on their card card statement now it'll even increase it more if you send them an invoice or a receipt every single time you send you charge their card because they're being reminded of that service over and over and over again.

Okay.

Now so across the board you can always say that increasing billing frequency will increase Churn. That is a statement. That is, that is true. That being said, you have to balance out with the fact that cash flow is way better if I can get it weekly versus monthly. And so the kind of middle ground I see on this one Naomi, that works well is don't send them an invoice or receipt on every single charge. Send them access to their client portal, say we're going to charge you every single week. And if you want to see your charges or specific invoices, log in here. Okay, so the reason I say that too is because when I do send an email or a text message, I want them to always be sales driven because those I need to get opened up so I can upsell them. I don't want me sending four or five emails a week, four or five emails a month simply that are just receipts because they'll stop opening up my emails. They'll see, you know, they'll see your service name and like oh, just another invoice receipt.

Who cares? Okay.

I, I want that one email or one text a month that I'm sending out to customers to actually get responded to. And if you're sending them cluttering their inbox with just invoice receipts, you've lost them.

Okay, thank you, I appreciate it.

We got time for one more. Anyone else?

I can do one more for you.

The for auto pay for us as one of our biggest things, our biggest problems in cash flow, they have so many people go past due. But I didn't know because we kind of want to structure a little different for like a lot of our projects. Like if we do fifteen thousand dollar side installation, I don't want to automatically charge them as soon as we hit close on that one. I'm okay with giving them 30 day terms. I almost, I'd like to set it up where you know, everybody has caught on file and then if they hit past due then they could charge. But for our current, I think it'd be better especially like when you talk about not send a bunch of invoices. That way they're more active with marketing emails and things like that to just never send an invoice but just auto charge when they hit close and complete job. Auto charges for recurring but not for projects. I don't know. Is there a way to set that up or is that how we should do it? I don't know.

Yeah, so you could make this happen. What you would need to do is on the big projects just disable those individual customers for the auto charge. Right. So you can just turn those off. But then what you could do is have an automation that once they hit a certain number of days overdue, it fires an email to your staff or you saying hey, go charge this person. So you just want to customize that email that comes back to you and the trigger is after the invoice is 30 days overdue. Hey, this person's name, this is how much they owe. Go charge them on auto billing because they have 30 days overdue.

Good.

So that part would still be somewhat.

Manual. I don't think you'd want to automate that anyways because it sounds like sometimes you might mark a job completed and it becomes overdue, but you don't really want to send the invoice. You just marked it as complete. So like, I would probably like, based upon the bigger project size, guys, I'd probably do that more manually anyways.

Yeah.

Cool. Riley, you unmute yourself. Go ahead, you can wrap us up.

Hey, I just had one question. Just.

What is your thought on hiring friends?

Yeah, like I. Go ahead.

I was just gonna say we kind of consistently for the last few years had I had two employees, I happened to lose both of them this fall unintentionally at the exact same time. One went back to school, one decided he was done working in 100 degree days.

And so I'm currently solo, which I haven't been in about two years. I've got a friend who lives a few states away. He's moving back to this area and reached out to me about coming to work. I'm hesitant just because I want to keep that. I still want to keep that relationship, but I don't want to.

Yeah, I just don't want to ruin that relationship. And I'm curious what your thought is on that.

Yeah, it's like I, I honestly, what I'm thinking is you got to choose between which one's more valuable. Do you value your personal relationship with him or having a great employee? Because if you value having a great employee, you might be willing to let go of the relationship personally because it sounds like he's like from afar. But if you're like, I really like this guy and I want to make sure we're friends for a long time, I would probably not jeopard that for having a good employee because you can find other good employees. It's hard. It's harder to find a really good friend. And so generally I don't see it work out in the long term. But what's nice, the reason everyone does it is because this friend will immediately have trust with you and you'll immediately trust this employee. And so that's why it's so easy to get friends, because like you immediately have that trust and rapport built up both directions. And that's why it works out at the beginning. Very well, it just rarely works out in the long term because either a, you stay small and they start to get wore out and then things happen between their said or you scale up and your role changes in the business and they fell in love with the business at the size at which they, which they started with you. And so then they, they're like, oh, I really liked working with Riley and now I don't ever see him, he's just out working doing estimates all day long. And I'm working with all these other fools that are, you know, four or five other guys. So I never see it work out usually in the long term. So I would, if you can find someone else, that's probably what I would try to do.

Okay, cool. Yeah, he currently works at a very similar business as a foreman over there. And so I saw it making sense that he could move into that position as you grow. But that's more than just a labor level position. Yeah, I could see a lot of lines getting crossed.

Yeah. One thing that I've seen work sometimes is like you come into the, into it like, hey, you're going to work here for six months and like it's going to stop. Right. So you can kind of scratch the itch of getting some. An employee is really trusting and like you're able to scale up but knowing that you don't have to deal with the two year marker from now when now the business has changed, your role has changed everything. But, and then he has a finish line too. So it's like a little different. I've seen that work sometimes.

Okay, cool. Thank you. Awesome.

All right everyone, we'll have a fantastic rest of your weekend. Appreciate you being here on the goal session. I hope you have a very merry Christmas, a very happy new year and really do appreciate hopping on. So we'll see you probably in the mastermind. I just finished that one and I'll probably see in the next week 1. So anyways, thanks so much. Take care everyone. Bye.