What If Contractors Could Review Customers Back?

Like, as soon as, as soon as the customer that gave me money, I'm reviewing them immediately. Like, everyone's on the side of the customer. That's why everyone just assumes these reviews are correct and they're not. They're scams.

It's the guy or gal that posts a 1-star review and then basically they're like, hey, give me what I want, I'll take it down. So they post a 1-star review and they use you as— they use this on you all the time. You're a hostage.

Because if you want to go buy $350,000, now you're negative in terms of cash flow for 2 months. Can you actually even sustain that kind of growth for this upcoming year? Or do you run out of cash and have a profitable, fast-growing business that runs out of money? Goes bankrupt.

100 clients will drive $300,000 in revenue, but you're not selling them all on January 1st. You're selling a lot of them in May. So that means you're only going to get like just over half the revenue for the year, theoretically. So you need way more than 100 clients. It's all the things that could break in a process. What if we lost a person? What if we have crew issues? What if we don't have enough people for the phones? What if we lose our one Only sales guy have you basically one day say, hey, we're 6 weeks booked out on whatever irrigation or 3 months booked out on landscape. Just stop taking sales. Stop taking it or turn off the marketing. That stuff kills.

Welcome back everyone to the podcast. Jonathan Potocnik, Mike Andes here. Today we're gonna be talking about 2 different topics. We're gonna first talk about customers that are bad and how we want to rate them. And show the world why they're bad. And then, then we're gonna pivot to something more in your business, what you can do this off-season to prepare for next spring rush. A lot of times you have so many things that are going on throughout your busy season, like, I will get to that one day. But what are the actual things you can do this off-season to prepare for next year and make sure that 2027 is a landmark year for you and your business? But first, 'cause Jonathan hijacked the docket, he's like, I gotta talk about this. I've been venting. I've been thinking about this for years. I just, I want a place to vent.

He's been talking to Philip about it.

So the basic concept is this: we have Yelp, we have Angie, we have all these services, Google Reviews, that rate us as contractors. But when you look at Uber, Airbnb, VRBO, they all allow you to rate the host and the person that shows up, is the person driving, etc. So there's no two-way action in the home service industry. Jonathan. He's, you know, he's been looking through bad reviews recently. He's been talking to Philip. Philip's jaded. They've been thinking—

Oh, I'm back involved in the business. So yeah, yeah.

And now he's considering taking all the chops of software and just hijacking every homeowner possible to be able to make sure that we keep them accountable. These Karens and Kens around the world that are going to write bad reviews, try to get us out of our deposits, not pay their bills. So Jonathan, take it away. I set the platform. Tell us about this. Huge problem in your life and what you're doing to fix it.

Well, I mean, I gotta say, like, since I've been back involved in the business, I'm hyper-aware of all this stuff because I watch it. So then it leads to me, you know, and Phillip chatting about this same conversation over and over again and moaning and groaning to each other. And so last night I dropped in the docket this idea to talk about in the future. And then like 5 minutes later, I don't know if you would have noticed, I dropped it up top and then I moved it to the very bottom as I thought about it. It's like, we don't really need to talk about this right now. And then Mike texts me today. It's like, hey, let's let's talk about this. So here's the basic problem, and I I have an idea for it, but I just don't know how it would go, and I really shouldn't do this. I keep getting myself distracted with things that really I shouldn't spend a minute of time on. But it's for the people.

This one's for the people. That's right. This is me.

This is me giving back.

That's right. Exactly.

So it's like I I gotta imagine that anybody that's been in business for a while has felt this. It's the it's the guy or gal that posts a 1-star review and then basically like, hey, give me what I want. I'll take it down. They take it down and then they stay your client. And then 5 months from now, they want something else. So they post a 1-star review and they use you as— they use this on you all the time. You're a hostage. Or the number of issues we deal with where people are flat out lying, like it's a full-on scam.

Yeah.

And it's— we've got several going right now that are full-on scams.

Really? Oh man.

Oh, big ones.

What happens, I guess, is because once they find out, after like you get a Karen that's calling all the time, they figure out, okay, this is a call center. Like, they pit them, like us, against the owners. Or like, they'll tell the owner someone said this on the phone. And like, look, we can go back and see the recording. We never said that. Or you never said that. Anyways, go ahead.

Yeah, oh, Phillips mentioned that because there are some things that they'll— that people will do where you don't have a picture or a video, so you can't prove, right? It's not timestamped. But there are things like if it's said on the phone, there's a variety of things you can catch people on. And one thing that Philip said to me, because I'm not out in the field dealing with this, but Philip has made the point that sometimes what happens is when we catch people, they're like, yeah, well, I tried. And it's like, no, they don't. No remorse for the scam that they were just trying to pull on us. It was like, yeah, why not? I tried. You got it. Didn't work, but we'll just continue on. Then they want to stay clients.

Like, I saw it anyway. I saw it in a Reddit forum. I was just going to give it a shot.

I thought, I thought maybe I could get a free, you know, like landscape in my backyard, but Anyway, I try anyway. So it just, it just keeps happening. Now, to be fair on this particular issue, it's like all issues in the business. When you actually look at the data and say, how often does it happen as compared to how big my business is or how fast we're growing? It's like, okay, we should just ignore this. But it's such a frustrating personal thing. This one really rises to the top when Phillip and I are talking, because it's because you're getting scammed.

Yeah.

Like, we do mess up. We do deserve some not great reviews sometimes. That's— we readily admit that. I'm talking about the stuff where you feel like you're being scammed. So anyway, uh, we just talked over the years, it's like, or probably for 2 years now, off and on about this, but really this year quite a bit. It's like, there needs to be a system that you can— like, in, in our system, we can flag people that we will never take back as a client. But I've got so many friends that are all my competitors in the local market. Like, we need a shared list. So, if my friend, like, at their company fires this client, I'd love to know because they're going to call my company next and try to sign up with us. And so, I want to not take them. And so, that's one idea. And the other one is like, why in the world is there not— it's probably because it would never work with the public, wouldn't go for this, but why in the world is there not a product Where we can review the customer, like, to your opening. Like that, it just, this whole review thing just feels, anyway, I'm rambling, but this whole review thing feels so scammy sometimes and so frustrating and there's no way to really fight these things.

Right. You're gonna get a lot of support for this. I have seen multiple people try to build this.

Um, have you? Okay. See that? I've looked, I've wondered if anybody has ever tried it.

Nothing's gone—

Everybody's got a feeling.

Oh yeah. I guarantee you in the comments, there's gonna be 5 examples of people like, I built this, here it is.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

The other thing is, I think we need to expand the aperture. All right. I don't think this is just a home service issue.

I think this is true. Absolutely.

Restaurants, hotels like this. We can expand this. You know, we can become the Angie's List for the, the customer. But now you get to see what their laundry, laundry person says, what their cleaning company says, what the local bakery says about them. You know, it's the people when you see they leave a 1-star review, click on their profile and all they leave is 1-star reviews. You're like, I think this person deserves a 1-star.

Exactly. Yeah. I just, there's gotta be some way to fight back on this stuff. Like it's just, and so yeah, that the real reason this started was I, I think I want to take this a step further here in a second and just talk about a little bit of advice and brainstorm for just a moment before we jump into the real topic today. But I was curious if you'd ever seen a product out there. I do remember that when I started CityTurf, there was a company in my market there. They were, their name was Just Mowing. And I believe they had a list of people that they, uh, that was public that, uh, they considered bad clients. I'm almost sure that's correct.

It's like the barber. It's like, at my barber, they have this, like, if you show up late, you put your name up on the board. If you don't, if you no-show, it goes in this different box and you gotta pay $20 to get it erased off the board. So you just have this list of bad customers on the board. But okay, so here's, here's the problem. As I'm thinking through it, you're only helping your competition. And unfortunately, in home services, or a lot of the— you're only helping the people in your local market if you tell them don't use this, don't do business with this customer. Most people are very happy that their competitor gets their worst client. They just make sure they internally document it. So the problem I see is this, right?

Right.

Like, why does this not spread? Because I've seen these built before. They don't spread because the only reason you would tell— put that in a database is to prevent your local competitors from using that, having that customer. And most people don't want their competitors to win.

I'll have a City Turf, we'll put 11,822 people in the list. No, but we'll put all our good customers on there. So every time somebody, one of our competitors goes, that's smart.

You see, reverse psychology. Now we're talking. Oh, that's awesome. Well, that's a problem with any sort of marketplace. Is you have to have the 2 sides. Like you could immediately have thousands of people on the contractor side, but there's no database. There's not any value to sign up. That's the, that's the, yeah, you would need the, the, the funding of Uber to make this work.

Yeah. Yeah. I had, I had thought, well, maybe just something with my local, you know, competitors that would be a little bit—

That's how Facebook started. Just Harvard. Just saying.

Oh yeah, true. Just college. Yeah. Just my local competitors. And I can picture a couple of my friends right now. They'd be like, oh yeah, I'd be all in on that. We do this.

Yeah.

But you're right. As soon as you broaden that out, it would start getting gamed. And then also you can imagine like the same people that are crazy on Google. Well, some of the contractors are crazy too. So they'd be, they'd be blaming consumers for stuff that's not even there. It'd go both ways. It's a mess that maybe there's no resolution to, but it sure feels one-sided.

Customers should have to respond back to the reviews. You know, you go back there as a homeowner, like, no, that didn't happen. That's awesome. All right, well, are we— let's move on to something more valuable, um, for everyone that wanted to humor us. Um, but we do believe that given the success of JP in software, I think this is a give-back moment. It's one of those moments where we extract as much as possible from the people that have succeeded. And in this case, I think that, uh, time well spent if you built this. So.

That's the other part. If you built this, see, I feel like you could get publicity for this. Like you could get free PR because You could get the— you could get people— what I've wondered is, would people get upset about this? Like, would people feel like it's wrong for them to get reviewed? Like, it's okay for you, us to review your business. But the idea that you would review me back, would you get people up in arms about a service like this?

So here's my philosophy on this. You can always give your opinion on the person that you're giving money to. But very rarely does this work logically, like in our psychology, if I'm giving you money that you can review me.

Ah, yeah. If— wait, if I'm giving you money, yep, then you can review the person.

Yeah, but like, as soon as, as soon as the customer that gave me money, I'm reviewing them immediately, like everyone's on the side of the customer. That's why everyone just assumes these reviews are correct. And they're not. They're scams. Yeah.

So the other thing I always have to remind myself of is people don't live in our businesses. So they don't understand Yeah, the problem. They just like— it's kind of like talking to people about how challenging it is to find labor. In my argument, I don't want to go down this road, just how hard it is to find labor. And so people don't understand how hard it is to find labor when you talk— or team members— when you talk to somebody that's not in these businesses.

Right.

And, or the parent that wants the friend, it's like, hey, can my kid work at your company for the summer? No, we're not going to train your kid to work hard and not play video games all day and not be lazy. Like, that's not going to be—

Now you can review parents. There you go. Yeah, that's another part of the application. Let's go.

All right, that's enough of my tangent.

Okay, cool. Let's move on to the second topic. Um, I want to go over the real topic. Yeah, the what we can do in the offseason as home service business owners, and ideally come up with some real tangible solutions that for most of us during November to February, approximately, especially in North America, Um, that allows us to be able to improve the business. And so my goal here is that both of us offer 2 strategies. We'll go back and forth of real things that you could do now in preparation of the offseason or during the offseason to make sure that 2027 is a great year for your business. So Jonathan, go ahead and tee it up with one of, maybe one of your, uh, first ideas.

Okay, so I'm bringing 2 to the conversation and the 2 are directly related to each other.

Oh man, I have a bad feeling we're gonna overlap a bunch. I was like, maybe on this one I should let him know what I'm going to talk about, but let's see.

Go ahead. We'll see where it goes. All right. So, uh, the, uh, the best way I know to kind of start this and tell me if I'm going to step on whatever you're going to say, but it's this, it's, it's initially, I'll call it the plan. This, is this going anywhere in the direction of what you're going to talk about? Go ahead. Okay. All right. So I think what we do. What I've done, I suspect a lot of us do this, is we sort of have a plan for the next year. And my, my belief is most of us, our plan is based around revenue. Like you'll of course say, hey, I want to fix this, or I want to get a new truck, or I want to replace this person. Like there's, I need to hire another person. Like that's part of it. But if you think about the way most people think about what would make a better next year, it's usually, I want to grow my business by X. I want to make more money. It's something revenue related. Okay. And so most of us technically have a plan. I want to grow my revenue by $100 grand. I want to grow it by a million. I want to grow it by 20%. That's sort of our plan. And then we think about the next step and the next step is that, okay, for me to do that, I need to start, I need to write some emails and sell some more stuff to my clients. And this is what I think I'll sell. And I need to have You know, heard Mike talking about Facebook. I need to do Facebook. And I was listening to this other podcast and, you know, I really should start doing LSA or spending more on LSA. We that's kind of the plan. We go a little further than that. Also, you know, we'll pull into the plan. Hey, I need to recreate some SOPs and some processes. We'll pull that in there. And that's kind of you go a little more than that, but sort of the plan. And so where I want to take this is that. The plan actually takes quite a bit of work, and it's not how I lived for a good part of my career. Like, we would plan, but the way I'm about to talk about is not how I did it for many, many, many, many years. And the way I'm going to talk about is what I think actually works. Okay. And so the gist of the idea is that In your off-season here, when you can get a clear mind, you dedicate some very focused time and to trying to figure out what is it that I want. Okay. And you've— I'm taking this a different direction than what you've probably normally heard. And what I mean by that is we'll go back to the revenue example. So the revenue example is I want to grow my business by $400,000 in revenue this year. Okay, great. That's a great starting place. We'll just start with that. That's the revenue number. All right. So, and you kind of want to— where I'm going with the starting point is you kind of want to do a brain dump and just think about all the things I want to improve. But I know that one of your things is going to be the revenue. So I'm just going to use revenue as my example here. I understand there will be other things. Okay. So then the next thing that comes from that, which will kind of get into my second point a little bit later, but I'm not going to go too deep with this here. Is okay. The next thing that needs to be on my list is what broke this year. So what what in it's like revenue I know is going to be on your list. The next thing is what broke this year. So what were the things we were frustrated about? You know, think about spring. Think about through the year. Just think about all the things that sort of went wrong, and I would suggest you get those down. You you could talk to Claude or ChatGPT and just have it make a list for you. You could write it in a document. Doesn't matter. But I want you to do a brain dump of the things I want to accomplish, my goals, revenue being one. And then next, what broke? What went wrong? What were we frustrated about? Okay. So if one of the goals is revenue, then one thing that's absolutely imperative is that you then think about, okay, knowing what broke last year. No, well, let's put some numbers to it. Let's say we are $1 million this year and our goal is we want to do $1.35 million next year. Okay. If I were to add another $350,000 revenue to the business and let's think specifically about spring, or maybe another way to just like, think about your worst week last year, and now you're layering in, taking on all those new clients, getting them up and running and serve them. What would break? So you kind of think about what broke last year, but now if we pile on more revenue, Just trying to imagine this. What's going to break? Okay, so we think through that. So that starts to form what I'm going to call your plan. And the plan is we want to get this amount of revenue, so we got to get this growth. And the plan is also these are the things that could go wrong. They went wrong last year, and they could go wrong again this year, and they could go wrong in an even bigger way as we add more revenue to this business. And that starts to kind of block out the plan of. We need to do this. We need to do that. It starts to make that list. Okay? And then, so you're you sort of have on your plan your biggest offenders and your your big opportunity, which is the revenue. And then that needs to get broken down into steps. And the steps are what, in my opinion, makes the plan reality, and it exposes the weakness in the plan. Case in point, I'm sure. Everybody's done this. I sure have. It's like it's easy to say, well, next year I'm going to do this thing and this thing and this. I'm going to get all these things done over the winter, and we're going to grow this much next year. We're basically just making stuff up, and it feels good, and we're way overly optimistic because we're exhausted coming out of the year. So we want to take a little bit of a break. Like there's just a lot of stuff that happens, and we don't get even half of our list done. I suspect that happens to a lot of people. And so this is why I think this. Brain dump, this plan, breaking the plan into steps is really, really important. And I feel that as I've moved this direction over the years, we have more often than not lived in reality. And so, and that's really, really important to getting the outcome that you want. So if you've listened to many of our episodes, if you think about This conversation or this thing you've heard about from me for a while, which is the marketing calendar and my task list. We've talked about it several times. That's exactly what I'm doing. So whenever we say marketing calendar, you might hear it as it's just a calendar saying this thing needs to get emailed, this thing needs to get printed and mailed, this thing need you know they need to change the. They need to look at analytics in Google and maybe change some of the copy in the ads. Like, that's— those are the kinds of things that you might picture go on a marketing calendar. And that is all true, but the marketing calendar does way more than that. The marketing calendar says on February 15th, this thing has to go out the door and drop. So that means 60 days in advance, or whatever the— whatever, uh, period is required, We have to have done the work to be ready to ship that thing on February 15th. It's the thing that says, hey, we need to do an audit of our marketing at the end of the first quarter and an audit again at the second. It, it defines the things we do as a business and it defines when they have to get done, both when they deliver and when we need to start working on them. That's a plan. And it's not just a plan for me. It's not just a plan for the business. It's a plan for the people inside the organization. That I need to, I need to give them enough information so they can just run and perform without constantly asking me what to do or what's next. And then you also heard me talk about this task list. So if I say we wanna drive X amount of additional revenue next year, it's all the things we need to do. Um, there's a lot to say here. Like, are we gonna grow the business through acquisition? Meaning, are we gonna get new clients? Are we going to grow the business through expansion? Mean we sell more to our existing clients? Are we going to grow the business through reactivating old clients? Like, meet people that canceled, maybe we're going to try to bring them back. Are we going to reactivate old leads we never closed? Are we going to try to get them to buy? Like, that's 4 different ways right there I can grow revenue. And a 5th is, are we going to focus on things that drive down churn? All 5 of those things grow revenue in the business. So part of the plan is where are we going to get our growth from? If I want $400,000 in growth this year, I could get maybe $150,000 from acquisition, new clients. I could get $100,000 from expansion, selling more to existing clients. I could get $50,000 by losing fewer clients. Like, where am I going to get this growth? That's the plan. And then once I know that, it's like, okay, well, if we need $100,000 from acquisition and I know that I convert 50% of all my leads, and I know that a client is worth $2,000 a year, I can back in and say, I need whatever, 200 leads. Or I, you know, I can back into that math. Well, if I need 200 leads, then that's like, I need this many door hangers going out. I need to be spending this much on LSA, or you're possibly guessing, you don't, you know, we don't always know, but it starts to inform an actual plan. That's a plan. A plan is, this is the goal. I'm going to break it into steps. I'm going to back into what I need. So like, like how, how are we going to attract people to the business? What are the different marketing channels we're going to use? How many leads do we need to get? Qualified leads. Uh, we're looking at in the past, as I said, how many people are generally converting. We're thinking about deadlines. We're thinking about the best time of year to do this marketing. We're thinking about who on the team is going to do what we're thinking about. Well, now that I've made my plan, I've broken into tasks. This is insane. I can only do, I got 90 things. I could probably do 9. So I'm going to have to figure out how to get my $100,000 in revenue from a few things. So what is the real priority? Because I can't do all these different ideas. I can only do a few. Can I get my $100,000? If I can't and I can't do all these things, then my $350,000 or $400,000 I want to grow the business by, it's not even realistic. So that should modify the plan. So that's the gist here of, of being, of really dedicating some time and not I feel like what we often do— again, I always point at myself when I say this kind of stuff— is it feels good to be busy because it feels proactive. And sometimes I think as leaders and owners, we can feel guilty doing this kind of work, or we— and, and we— because we don't feel like we're doing anything. But this is the most important work in the business. It's— so that's why you have to do it.

Okay.

And also, this is what If you set this up right, this is how you delegate, and this is how you get the team clear on where we're going. And you again get people marching in the right direction and you give them absolute clarity on what they need to be working on. And so I think I'll pause there. That's a lot, but, and we can kind of volley back and forth, but this plan I think is your starting point and it doesn't feel as big and as exciting. as training and creating processes. And I'm not raising prices. I'm not saying you shouldn't do any of these things, but I'm telling you, based on my experience, this is the top-level thing. And once that plan's nailed down, then there's a simplicity to know that now we just go into execution mode for the year and we're just gonna execute the plan.

Yeah, that's great.

I'll pause there.

No, that's excellent. This past year we saw a huge gap for our owners of the planning aspect, and so we actually We have a whole day. It's, it's our national holiday in Augusta Nation, and it's called Projection Day. It's in February.

Oh, okay.

We take the entire day and everyone goes live and creates their projections. And one thing, if someone's struggling with the breakdown, that really helped with our owners and that we do is we take a P&L, uh, and if you export it from QuickBooks as an Excel document, you have every single item or expense item of— and revenue item of the P&L, and then you have every single month. So you show all 12 months. And then as you say, okay, well, I want to grow revenue by $350,000. Okay, great. You have identified one Excel, you know, square over here, one cell of how much revenue you want to grow by. Okay, well, where, which months is that revenue growth going to come in? Because if you're doing expansion, it's going to look very different than acquisition. So like, then I work backwards from the end of the year, backwards throughout each month. Where is that revenue actually coming up? And then how does that impact every line below it? Most of us are pretty decent, like, I want to grow by $350,000. Most of us are not great at figuring out, okay, where that revenue is going to come in the year. And then even fewer of us are good at expecting where is that going to impact my P&L and my cash flow throughout the entire year. Because if you want to grow by $350,000 and that's all going to land in 2 months, and you're also going to have to go buy a truck, equipment, trailers, etc., now you're negative in terms of cash flow for 2 months. Can you actually even sustain that kind of growth for this upcoming year, or do you run out of cash and have a profitable, fast-growing business that runs out of money, goes bankrupt?

Yeah.

And so, yeah, this, this was really helpful for us to come up with the task list because the task list for us a lot of times is like, well, I know the revenue and I generally know what I need to work on. And what helped really pump through like, what is the things I need to go do is, oh, like that month I'm going to be doubling my marketing budget. Oh, I haven't created that upsell email or text message yet. So the task was a great, like kind of almost a byproduct or a result of going through the P&L for every single month and asking, if I grew revenue from $50,000 to $80,000 in March, what happens? Oh, I've gotta hire someone. Okay. In order to hire that person, when do I need to put the ad up? Oh, then, then, then my task list starts getting built out. So, um, that's been really helpful for us.

I think that's an incredibly good addition to what I just said. And I've talked about this very same thing before, and I'm so glad you added that because I think you said this, but I just want to add a little more color to it. In a lot of our businesses, if we look, if we do exactly what you said, then we'll notice that like 60 or 70% of our year is made in 90 days.

Yep.

Like there's a big— in a lot of these businesses, recurring revenue business, because so much work sold in a moment of time. And so everything you just said. Having enough money for the growth, being able to get the trucks, being able to get the people. All that stuff has to happen way earlier in the year than you think because the growth happens to happen then. That's one thing you see when you do it your way. The other thing you see when you do it that way is if you plot your revenue, there's two kinds of revenue. There's realized revenue. So I say I want three hundred fifty at least. This I think this is the right terminology. It's terminology I use. Realized revenue is I say I want to grow three hundred fifty thousand this year, and so I actually collect. All $350,000 in 2027. And then there's run rate revenue, which is I want to grow by $350,000, but I don't actually collect all that revenue in that year. Like I've sold $350,000 in revenue, but I will collect $200,000 in '27 and the other $150,000 in '28. I, those are the, I don't know if those are the exactly right terms. Those are the terms I use realized and run rate. And so that's another awakening you have when you look at it the way you're talking about, Mike, because you could see on the. On the calendar, it's like, gee whiz, like to get the $350,000 and actually collect it all this year is even harder than we thought because a lot of those, a lot of our clients aren't going to get sold till like May. So we need to sell even more clients. Like if you were to do the simple math that, uh, 100 clients will drive $300,000 in revenue, but you're not selling them all on January 1st. And there's churn. And there's churn. You're selling a lot of them in May. So that means you're only going to get like just over half the revenue for the year, theoretically. So you need way more than 100 clients.

I've been doing this math a lot because I have like literally a couple months of spring rush to hit. Yeah, right.

You're about to.

So I'm like, where are we going here? But like, uh, when it comes to the projections, another thing that does, when you break it down, is I think to your point, when it comes to a seasonal business of any sort, you have to almost anticipate what the next constraint of the business will be. Because in winter, yes, your constraint will be leads. You don't have any, like, No one's showing up asking for your services, but you will have to anticipate that once this problem is no longer a problem because of my task list, I will complete these things. I will have tons of leads. I need to anticipate the next constraint. Otherwise it'll bottleneck my growth when all of a sudden I'm in spring rush. I don't have enough workers and it's because I failed to realize that the next constraint after solving the current constraint. And so it only emphasizes the importance of planning. Because otherwise you, you turn your leads off, you turn your ads off, you turn away customers in the middle of your rush because you didn't anticipate that that would be the next constraint to the business.

Yep. That could be my second.

Oh, well then we've got it. Okay, we'll move on.

All right.

So I wanted to go, I actually had something very similar to yours and Jace will attest. I think I sent him like 3 different dockets today in preparation. Because I wanted to take it to very specific to this offseason, meaning 2026 going into 2027, because this advice I would not have given a year ago. And that is centered around what I believe is the first offseason that this is a real tool for us to use. And it is around AI, but it's building an AI operating rhythm.

Okay.

And that is a, A monthly, quarterly, and daily rhythm so that when you hit the spring rush, you can take advantage of it instead of waiting for next spring rush. And again, you might have heard us talk about AI, but like during the offseason is the time to actually sit down and really clean the data, make sure it's useful, and then look for areas where there's lost profit and that gives you time back as a manager or your manager's time if you have a larger organization. And so the task that I would say for this offseason specifically is connecting— I just have 3 tools. You could obviously connect a whole lot more. And whether you want to use, you know, connectors or the terminology, but essentially connect your email, your CRM, and QuickBooks. And if you connect those 3 to your AI agent, the amount of data that it has, assuming your data is clean inside of those systems, is tremendous. And so the 3 applications I would want someone to build is first around quarterly pricing reviews. And so combining the customer revenue with actual labor hours, looking at your labor costs, so your direct cost of the labor, that's going to come from typically QuickBooks or your payroll provider, looking at cost of materials, all your overhead, that's going to come from QuickBooks, but be informed by the data that's inside of your CRM. And then flag the accounts that need to be repriced, potentially got to reroute certain people if you have a recurring-based business. changing certain scopes or even potentially cutting customers out. Determining how you're going to set up that data infrastructure during the offseason is what makes it useful when spring rush hits and you get 300 or 400 or 500 new customers. If you haven't set it up to actually have that auditing and you haven't tested to make sure it's, it's clean, that's what causes doubt around whether or not I take action on July 1st when I know that there's 20 customers I need to cut or a service that's unprofitable, or I know I need to do this, but— I don't really have the data to back it up. It's kind of murky. These guys aren't really clocking in and out. And so setting that up now on the quarterly basis, on the monthly side, these would be like management scorecards. And so whether you are the owner-operator or you have managers inside the organization, having a monthly scorecard that they see based upon their specific department. So a couple of the ones that I, I use is like a sales tax audit. What are the things that I do that suck my time or suck my energy that myself or my managers are doing that if I could just spend a little bit of time during the offseason setting this up with AI, it can do a lot of it for me? Sales tax audit is one of the things. Catching trends on the P&L. So especially if you are removed from daily operations, how can I set up a system that I'm not micromanaging, but rather I have a system in place that is, okay, we went from 10% to 15%. On that, uh, of revenue going to this thing. Labor went from 45% to 49%, and that's not statistically consistent with last year. Little things that I can set up now to prevent me micromanaging and ticking off all my mid-level managers or my technicians simply because I don't have a system to give me that data. And I think the overarching theme that as we go into this offseason, I think is different than every other year, is we have always talked about knowing our numbers, and this is in my opinion, the first time that anyone, regardless if you're running a $100,000 or a $10 million organization, we have the ability to do it. And it's not a function no longer of having the data. It's no longer the function of having the time to parse the data or put it through some sort of algorithm or get an analyst or get a consultant. This is a function of, do you want to do this?

Mm-hmm.

And do you actually just want to take a few moments to connect it and ask it questions in English? And no longer, I don't, I believe this is this turn of like, it's no longer about knowing your numbers, it's about knowing what questions to ask.

Mm-hmm.

And getting the data is no longer the bottleneck. It is what questions do I need to ask? And this goes back to your point, like knowing the plan informs which questions to ask. But now the knowing of your numbers is, it's a commodity. And, and for what used to be, I believe for a $5 or $10 million company to have an analyst or have someone that's just looking at the data or pulling reports, that's for all of us now. And I don't think it's an excuse. There's no excuse to not know our numbers now. And if that means you need to clean up the data so that these things I'm talking about are actually possible, we got to do it. Whether it be like on a monthly basis comparing efficiency against like quality, how many callbacks did we have? Well, that might mean that I have to create an event type in my CRM that's for callbacks so that the, the AI is able to see that, oh, this is a callback and that's how much time was tracked against it. And now I can actually see what percentage of my crew's time is spent to callbacks and have a real dollar amount of what that's costing. A lot of this just though has to do with setting it up and taking a little bit of time. And during the offseason is the time to do it. So we don't have the excuse in the middle of spring rush or next year that I just don't know, the guys aren't clocking in and out. I don't really know how long, how much it's costing us for callbacks. I don't really know how efficient the crew is. And I think this is a golden opportunity as we head into this offseason. Because like even last year, I would say it was like October, November 2025. that these started to become very powerful. But for a lot of us, it became more mainstream. A lot of people even listening to this probably just got into Claude and ChatGPT in the past 6 months.

Right.

And so utilizing this to its fullest degree, I talked about quarterly, monthly, and then like daily end-of-day reports. So in the past, you might have had your admin person kind of scrub the dispatch board. Hey, I want you to look for jobs that were not complete. I want you to look for jobs that are skipped.

I want—

I need you to reconcile a specific payment. Because it's by the minute, it's a first service. I want you to go through the dispatcher notes or look at the media that was attached to the job. These are things that now can absolutely be automated. And I would be looking at sales, operations, and admin as a way— how can I get the most relevant information to my manager at the end of the day to ensure that, one, I don't have to micromanage them, and two, nothing falls through the cracks? And I consistently see people failing to be a great leader or grow their business past $1 or $2 million because they do micromanage. They do get in everyone's business. But I believe that AI is a huge opportunity to be able to have the KPIs, know the numbers, but not have to be stepping on people's toes, looking over their shoulder, asking for the login to their email, like things that consistently undermine your mid-level managers. And so some examples of this that even we're using is like Google Business Profile reviews. You can absolutely set up a very simple automation using— go check the reviews. If there's any, any unresponded, go ahead and respond to them. Here's the criteria for how you're going to respond to them. If it's 0 to 4 stars, don't, just surface it because I want to respond myself. Back to our scam artist customers. If it's 5 stars though, here's what I want you to say. Here's, here's the kind of framing I want you to use. Another thing is like following up on sent estimates. If you have a salesperson, one of the biggest things I see an owner failing to delegate or trust their manager with is like, hey, I need you to follow up on estimates. And so what do they do? They bother them every week of like, hey, how many? What's our close rate? This is all just an automation that keeps you informed and allows the manager to remember, oh, I forgot to call Miss Susie again. She said to call back tomorrow. These are the type of things that could be done in a daily report to my sales, my operations, my admin. For operations, like, where's the labor efficiencies? Which of my crew members should I potentially offer some more training? For admin, it's even like payment discrepancies. Like if you connect Stripe, like your payment processor, And you say, hey, I just want you to reconcile at the end of each day, make sure nothing got bounced. Was there any discrepancies with a missed payment or a bounced check or anything like this so that I'm not concerned as the owner when I walk by the admin's office and I see a stack of checks or I see, you know, why is, why is it not reconciled correctly at the end of the month? These are things that I think we can just set automations and use AI, but it will simply take the humility to realize this is a new method. This is a new way of doing things, but knowing your numbers now is a commodity. It's a matter of what questions are we asking it and how are we getting creative with taking all the data that is now at everyone's fingertips and utilizing it in the business. So I would just really encourage like this cadence of what are the tasks I do quarterly, what are the tasks I do monthly, what are the tasks do I do daily. And those are the things that even your managers are thinking like, what do you do as an operations manager? What are you doing every day? What are you doing every month? What are you looking at every single quarter? And then creating automations to ensure that they get their job done and then you're informed As the operator owner without micromanagement.

So to get in the weeds a little bit on that, that's interesting. Where do you stand on, well, let's start with, is there for people, and I know this could change, is there a specific system, Claude, ChatGPT that you recommend people use to do this?

I think the challenge right now is it's so new, it kind of depends on which of your CRM, like what your CRM will connect to.

And oh, true.

If you don't have a system that connects, what reports can you extract from it? And so even if you, if you have a system that doesn't have MCP access or API, okay, which reports do I need to download? And, and sometimes this is a matter of like screenshot the page where it has all the reports listed and ask your AI, which of these reports do I need to give you to be able to complete these tasks in my business?

Yep.

And, and just again, it's like which questions it's, and this is why I believe like It always comes back to humility because I see the people that are the least humble are the ones incapable of coming up with what questions should I ask this AI agent? Um, because it'll tell you, it'll tell you like download the, the, the revenue by service summary.

Yeah.

There. Yeah. Is it ideal if it's connected to MCP-RPA? Yes. But like you can download a lot of these things and do it more manually as well. Hey, so the team was editing the podcast and something I realized was we didn't give you the actual tools to do what I'm talking about.

And I know I'm talking a lot about AI and MCP and API.

And so what we decided is I just want you to actually go do it yourself and see the power of what I'm talking about. And so we're doing something we've never done before, and that's giving 2 months free at HomeWorks. So over the next couple months, as we head into the offseason, you can actually put your data in. We will help you do that for free. We'll do all the implementation calls for free. And even if you just stay the 2 months, but you see the power of what AI can do once it's connected with your CRM, It's such a game changer. And so everything I'm talking about today, when it comes to connecting your MCP, you can do in those first 2 free months. We will get you all set up, all of your contacts in. Just use this coupon code, Mike, when you check out, when you're setting up your account inside HomeWorks, you'll get your first month free. And then after you complete your implementation calls and we get all your data in, you'll get your second month free as well. So I hope it's helpful so you can actually get a taste of what I'm talking about in the podcast.

Are you talking— are you imagining For most people, like, let's just say you use Claude. Okay. And so in Claude, you can set up a project, you can set a folder up on a computer, or you could connect it to Google Drive and you could just drop files in a folder. Or you can do the MCP approach, which you've talked to, which it just connects directly to the other product, the software. So let's just say somebody, um, so if they're working with HomeWorks as an— or QuickBooks, they connect direct. If they're not, they're working with another system, they can do the export. They can dump the files into a folder on a computer. And ChatGPT or Claude, they're both capable of reading that folder and doing this processing. Um, do you— is this— when you think about this, is this generally set up on one team member's account, or are you telling people to set up like team accounts and share this? Like, how do you teach people to interact with this? Does that make sense?

Yeah, because we have some where we have team accounts and they, they can share different projects. So you can invite people Yeah. And I get confused sometimes 'cause I use Manus, Claude, ChatGPT, I kind of use all of them.

Yeah.

But like, I know for the media team, they do a lot of sharing. So like, that's a team account. But then a lot of the, the reports that I build, I just do it from my own account. But then, okay, 'cause I can connect my— 'cause that's why I said connect email. 'Cause if you connect your email, you can send out emails to your operations manager and your sales manager, and then I get control of it. And this is what, again, like it's the ability to delegate and keep people accountable. Now, like, there's no reason to micromanage or get in someone's business because you can keep them accountable with just the numbers. You can see it all happening in your account. You determine what they see. So I can be like, hey, if everything's good, don't remind my operations manager that there was zero callbacks today. Only bring up and surface the actual issues that you see inside of the system. Um, so I generally actually just stay inside my account. Uh, most of the time.

And that's a little bit of where I was going. Like, let's say we want you— it surfaces something like, hey, this thing's not happening, or this number's out of whack. I was curious how you get that to the operations manager for people. Is that generally you're like seeing it and then you're telling them, or do you have it set up in some way where it's telling them?

Yeah, I'm having it send usually like that daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly report. Uh, and so for, for example, my general manager in Texas, it's like at the end of the day he's gonna see several things. First off, are there any initial mows, the first service that he needs to go in and adjust the pricing? It also gives them exactly what the pricing should be based upon how they long they were clocked into the job. It also checks if— was there any dispatcher notes from the crew? He technically doesn't even have to go inside of HomeWorks. You could just look at that. The other thing that he's getting is quality. Like, were there any customer complaints? Who were they? What action should he be taking? Because he's operations, that's what he's focused on. It's like getting the work done, making sure the crew's happy, and doing a good job. Uh, whereas for like admin side, they're doing— I have one set up for Claude to check Stripe and Homeworks and make sure every single day auto-charge is working. Because like, I just don't know if what happens if someone has ACH set up and 3 days later it bounces. Like, I don't— I hope everything's working on the backend, but I want to make sure every single day I'm making my money. So in 3 months and I'm like, oh, they haven't been paid, charged at all, but it looks like it's getting paid, for example. So I do it where it sends it out because you can do it as long as you connect your Gmail. It sends out reports to everyone. Yeah.

That's what I wanted to get to. I just wanted to make sure everybody is understanding. So you're connecting your email and it's going out through email. Exactly. And I assume you're using like a work account email here, not a personal.

Correct.

How do you— this is a sidestep here. How do you think about connecting email to these tools? Do you— would you ever connect your personal account?

I would. I haven't found a huge need to connect my email.

Yeah.

Um, I keep my, my personal email is like this reserved sacred thing that—

Yeah.

Because it's on my cell phone. But, uh, in terms of the business ones, uh, I just have other domains specific for the businesses that like I'm very much okay with setting up automations, firing off the reports from Claude or ChatGPT. Um, and then I just, in my one-on-ones with the managers, like, hey, what do you wanna see? What's useful in this report? And what do you just glaze over every day as like, That's noise. Because that's, that's also the challenge. You can ask it for an end-of-day report, and it will just create this ginormous of like, yeah, everything that happened inside of your CRM. And it's like, that's useless. It's like, very much you have to intentionally tell it, this is signal, this is noise, this is what I need them to know. Here's what I would do based if these things pop up, here's what I want them to do. And then it's just feeding them from a report perspective instead of me looking over their shoulder telling them what to do.

Yeah. Makes sense. I hope, hopefully everybody understands. Uh, do you have any concerns about running this? This is kind of a question for everybody to hear. Um, do you have any concerns about the data not being sandboxed? So in other words, you're essentially sharing your company data with Claude, Anthropic, uh, or OpenAI. You know, what do you think on that topic?

If they want to get into lawn care and take my customers, I will refer them to your new platform. I will give them a 1 star.

Yeah.

And, um, that's about all. I don't know, it's just, I think that absolutely there are use cases, there are cases where the data security is important. I think that if we were doing something that is so unique and so proprietary, I would be worried. When I am simply sharing customer ID numbers, when I am sharing, because again, if you're connecting your CRM, it can use customer IDs, it can use a lot of backend stuff. I'm not personally super concerned about it though, to be perfectly honest. I am much more in the camp of like, give it full access, let it know everything about me because I want the context to be as good as possible so the answers are as complete as possible.

Yeah.

And so usually what I do instead of even dropping files in, I will just give it access to a Google folder and then everything just goes into that folder and any— that way I have the record. Like if something happens to Claude, I could immediately cancel it. I'd still have all my data. Um, I'm not usually the type that stores stuff in a project and then deletes it. I'm going to usually have Google Drive or something that I control a little bit more, have the keys to.

Yeah, I fall in the same category. I've decided that because there's a lot of conversation around this and that's why I wanted to ask. Um, I've come to the conclusion that I am fully comfortable trading all my privacy away for the advantages that I gain. And I feel like we traded all our privacy away as soon as we got this thing.

Yeah, totally.

As soon as we, like everything we did, we have no privacy, everything. crosses an ISP, everything sits on a server, like there's data copies of everything everywhere. It's like, it kind of doesn't matter. But to your point, if I was trying, working on researching the next big drug that we were going to release, I wouldn't be running it across these AI models. Like I'd be sandboxing it. So the one thing I will say, and I haven't done this yet, I have not connected my personal account because I, I am a little paranoid about this one thing. And that is, I will eventually move all my financial stuff to a completely new email, and that email will never be checked on my computer that I run AI. And that may be a little paranoid, but man, if— because your email is the unlock to everything you have. And so I don't want my financial accounts being, uh, I don't want my email account that has the email address used in my, my financial accounts anywhere near anything. That's the only thing that I think I'm still like a hard line on that I won't do. But otherwise, um, I'm just like, whatever. Yeah, a lot of times the tools are so good.

I find some of the— there are some— this could be like a dated thing now. I do find some— I did find some limitations around personal Gmail accounts of what you could do in terms of like automations. But I've always— I've never connected it like I've always just used the Augusta or like my homework email or something like that. Uh, I don't know if that's a matter of like our level of Workspace, Google Workspace, but anyways.

The last I remember testing it was a— you still had to approve things. I don't— I haven't tested that late. I don't know if that's still the case.

Yeah, I'm this— anyway, even when it comes to approvals, I'm like, just let it fire off. Let's go. I'm pretty hands-off when it comes to— it's like, as long as I protect my customers' data, that's— I'm actually much more concerned about that. So like, we have a lot of strict internal policies about like not dumping clients' data into AI because like they haven't signed off on that. And if they— if we're going to use a model with their data, they've got to sign off on us using models to do things. So for example, importing clients into, into the database, for example, there's a lot of really cool stuff we can automate, but we need to make sure that if we're going to use a model, we let someone know or we say, here's the manual way of doing it in case you want to just export, import on a more manual process.

Yeah. Yep.

Okay. What's your second one? We're, we're, we're moving along.

Yeah. So my second one was very, very much a build on the first one and I sort of alluded to it. And it's this idea of how do you preempt, or better said, what will preempt your growth plan? You've made this plan, what could go wrong? So how do you think about what you— is exactly what you started to think, talk about. It's like, how do you think through what the bottlenecks are? And then preempt them, meaning preempt means solve them in advance.

Yep.

And so as you're making this plan, I alluded to this already. We're very much thinking about what, what went wrong last year. We're very much thinking about, uh, in spring, like really, because spring is the make or break a year time. So what can go wrong in spring? Like, uh, another example would be, I have all these grand plans for the marketing that we could do. This is another example where the marketing calendar comes in. I have all these things we could be talking to the client about to sell them stuff. So I'm going to promote this service and this service and this service, and that's how we're going to achieve our revenue growth. Well, the problem is we can't talk to them about all those things in the same 30-day period or 60-day period. So as soon as you put this on paper and you put it to a calendar and you see exactly all the things we're going to have to do during that period, you quickly realize like, wait a second. My plan is based on selling this amount of revenue and there's no way I could ever even get their attention, or I couldn't talk to them about all these services. This is impossible. And so you're, you're wanting to think about what broke last year, what could go wrong this year. That example I just gave where you're like, well, I have these plans to sell this service, but people don't even worry about this service. They don't have pain around it or concern around the service till later in the year. So this is a pipe dream that we're going to get much conversion trying to sell this service this early in the year. You want to really think through that. And then you, you, again, we really kind of touched on this, but I'm going to say it again. So if the plan says that I need to onboard 200 clients in spring, or in City Turf's case, 1,000, or whatever that number is going to be, it's a big number. Then you start to back into who, who is going to touch, who and what is going to touch this process. So In my mind, the first place this stuff breaks is generally the phone. It's generally the office, because if 60% of your sales are going to happen in 90 days for the year, then the turning the estimates, the talking to people on the phone, the answering the questions, all that— the office is what'll generally break it, because you've probably built a staff that'll work for a 12-month period and not a staff that will will hit work for a 90-day period. It's always the problem, like, how do you afford to pay for all the people you need for only 90 days? And then what the heck are they going to do for the other, you know, 9 months?

No time off. That's the solve. That is the solve. Yeah, overtime and no time off.

Yeah. And so that's an example of the stuff you have to think about. And so to rattle off a few other things, like, Matt, think of all the crew issues you had. So people that get sick, people that got hurt, people that called in for whatever reason didn't show up, people that like you gave them no time off, but it's like, but my family member is getting married. I have to go. I think about all those things. Well, how do you staff up enough to cover that? Because there's always going to be things that happen. So have you staffed up to cover the things that are going to happen? Because all of this will blow up your plan. And then another way to think about it is, do you have a, do you have what we'll call a dependency or no, we'll, we'll go with the capacity scenario. Capacity is I could sell all this work, but right now I have one person that does all the dispatching, all the scheduling in the business. Well, that's a capacity risk. So another way you might think about this is who within my company owns certain things or If somebody owns dispatch and you've got just one person trained to do this and we give them even more work, or if they're out, what do we do? Does that mean I have to pull my estimator or me over to do this? And then I'm not selling. And when I'm not selling and estimating, that means we're not growing. Like some of these things you can't solve yet because you're not big enough. You don't have enough money. But unless you think about them and try to solve as many of them as you can or come up with backup plans, This is why most comp— the majority of companies do not hit their goals. I think if you were to look and survey most people, they do not hit their goals. The vast, vast majority, if they have them. And that's one way to hit your goals is just not have them. Yeah. My analogy over the years is the way that most goals are set is it's 2 guys sitting outside in 68-degree, wonderful sunny weather, having a beer. And they're talking a big game like, ah, this year, We're going to fix all this, like, because they're feeling good. You know, it's like the weather's good, they're having a cocktail and they're like, that's their dreaming moment. And they're talking all the big game. We're growing revenue by this much. We're going to do all this stuff. None of that stuff ever happens.

Yeah.

The reason it doesn't happen is, well, that's not a plan. And then the other reason it doesn't happen is because of this, what I'm talking about now. It's like, it kind of goes back to last week we were talking about, I think it was last week we, I, we brought up the book, The Theory of Constraints. It's all the things that could break in a process. And so that's essentially what I'm talking about here. It's like, what if we lost a person? Uh, what if we have crew issues? What if we don't have enough people for the phones? What if we lose our one and only sales guy? What if I have to get back out in the field? What if we have too much work and we have to shut off marketing? Or like, or what are we— have too much work and we're not answering the phone? Like, what if the estimates— like, there's all these scenarios. That can break things, and so it's really important to think through those. And the reason for that is because when we find the biggest offenders, like the biggest thing that could go wrong, is all this landscape project work that we're selling means I'm back out in the field, and that means I'm not selling the maintenance work. And every if I just look at what's happened in the last few years, every year the same thing happens. So why is that not going to happen this year? So that like right there is the clue. Okay, that is one of the single most important things that has to go on the plan. That's what I'm wanting to kind of bring up here and have you think through as you're doing your plan. It's not just about breaking down how we get the revenue and are we going to get through acquisition or expansion? Are we going to get it from Facebook? Are we going to get it from LSAs? That's part of it. This is the other side. If all of that works perfectly, like you assume that all that's going to work perfectly, as in Facebook could drive enough revenue. An LSA could drive enough revenue, I mean, get you enough revenue or sell you enough clients to get the revenue. What will keep you from actually making those sales or keep you from actually delivering the work? Or, or what we— I've seen so much over the years is have you basically one day say, hey, we're 6 weeks booked out on whatever, irrigation, or 6 weeks— we're 3 months booked out on landscape, just stop taking sales. Stop taking it or turn off the marketing. That stuff kills. You know, you don't hit goals over that. So that's this last part. It's like, it's again, we're gonna break down the revenue strategy and then we're gonna break down the bottleneck side, everything that could keep us from getting that. And it's based on everything we've experienced before. And then imagining if I pile on more revenue, more clients, more phone calls, more trucks, more, more everything, what, what becomes the new problem that might happen? And that too goes onto our task list, which is our plan. And then as we've talked about weeks previous, you're, you've got a task list that's too big. You'll never be able to get it all done. So now we have to stack rank it. And part of stack ranking it is what we talked about. It's like return on what's gonna drive the most revenue if I do this thing, what's gonna give me the most benefit. But the other part of stack ranking it is what in my to-do list that if I don't do it will hold up thing above it. And so that's the ordering and the ranking. And that's the— if you'll go through that exercise in the early part of your offseason, and it takes some real frustrating work, um, it's tight. It can be actually tiring work to really truly do this and think through it. And it can be frustrating to see, I have to do all this stuff and there's no way we can do it. It's just like, that's usually the outcome of projects like this. But that's exactly the point. And then once you have that, it's about just getting to work and delivering on it. And then the other thing I would add is that if you're a bigger company and you've ever wondered, well, what are, what kinds of, what does a big company talk about or meet about? Like, if I could go be in a $10 million or $20 or $30 million company, like what would I see? I can tell you what you would see is they would have this plan and If they're having weekly meetings or issue meetings or any kind of meeting, this plan is being discussed every week, every two weeks. Are we on track? What's off? How do we need to course correct? Because you're you're looking at this every single week as a team and saying, "Are we going to hit the deadline so we can start delivering March one or whatever that month is?" So that's it's not just about identifying what to do. It's not just about identifying when you need to do it. It's about having a guide that you can constantly look back at and say. Are we on track? Are we going to hit goal or not hit goal? If we're not hitting goal, what do we need to do?

Yeah, this is one thing we're trying to build with that projection day is once they fill it out is then every single month they can see, okay, I'm ahead on this, I'm behind on this. Because like once I even built that for myself, it was like, okay, I'm 3% behind. All right, where can we find the revenue? Okay, we're 5% above and let's focus a little more on defense or like some other measures. So, um, I think another Issue for a lot of owners is they're so eternally optimistic this time of year because cash is in the bank. We made it through the spring rush by the seat of our pants, and it's hard to envision the problems that are going to arise because I've never experienced them before. I don't know what it's like to have that many leads. I just know I need to advertise to get more leads. But we don't— we never identify the next problem that will inevitably occur when demand for most of us doubles, triples, or quadruples. And that's always been the hardest thing for me is like we have kind of 2 seasons. One is spring and summer. Command center goes 3 to 4 times medicals. Augusta owners are all under stress, like way more problems. And then that one kind of dies. And then very quickly, software and franchise, that's, that's like where we make all of our growth.

Right.

Is the other 6 months. And so it's very much this weird, I'm always offense on one while the other one's in defense and vice versa. But it's interesting to watch sometimes the, the ability to be able to say, okay, like, what's the problem going to be next year if we are going to grow this much? And then the challenging part for, for any business is forecasting demand and then being able to then, okay, based upon that forecasted demand, I need to go higher, I need to create the supply end of this and be able to project that is the challenging part.

Very. And we don't know what the economy would be like. We don't know. I mean, there's a million factors. Economy's just one. That go into trying to forecast. So it's complicated, but, and you won't nail it, it won't be perfect. You'll, uh, but if you don't do it, you're, in my opinion, pretty much guaranteed not to get it.

And I like, I like the point too of like consistently tracking against where you're at because I kind of look at like, uh, a compass. So it's like, okay, that's north. Great. That's your one day at the beginning of the year. You got your goals. Great. If you put that down and you start walking in that direction, there's a very good chance that in 365 days you'll be off someplace Very different versus you gotta keep looking at the compass to actually ensure you stay on course. And that's why it's so important in my opinion, not just to have like a goal day and it's like, I'm trying to do this much in revenue and here's all my numbers and I did a great job for talking to AI. It's like, great, month 2, where are you at according to that compass that you set out now to go?

So, yep, good analogy. What's your next one?

Okay, so this one is building an AI brand library. Um, and so you've talked about this a little bit in the past when we did our examples of how to use AI. You talked specifically about one of these. I break into 3 categories, and that is a voice OS, a brand OS, and a creative OS. So I'll go through each of these to hopefully give everyone an idea. And again, the reason I use this one is because 12 months ago I could not have said this because the models were not good enough to generate a lot of these creative elements, specifically when it comes to your working out in the field, vehicles, logos, text, all of that is better now. And so for anyone that's like, AI's slup, you have not given it enough inputs to make the output good. So during the offseason, I want you to take the time to build these 3 assets. And if you do that, it'll be a whole lot easier to create the marketing material, create the emails, create the marketing calendar if you do the work on this backend. So 3 elements. First, first is VoiceOS. So operating system, voice OS. Inside of that, you want to ask the AI, Jonathan went very deep on this one, and that is, what's my ideal customer? What are their buying motivations? What are some of the objections that I have? What tone do I want to have when I talk to them? What are phrases I never want to say? Like, for example, cheap, right? Maybe I talk about high value. What are the things that I do not want to say to a customer? And then give examples of really good emails or ads that you like that maybe you've written or you even like out in the wild. And then you can take those examples, make the edits, and then tell the AI why you did. So for example, I will screenshot a competitor's ad. I will say, here's what I like about it and here's what I don't like about it. You do that several times and it really guides AI on how you want to communicate with your customers in your local market. So that's the first part is the voice OS. Again, this is probably a 20 to 30 minute conversation if you're just getting started and just say it. This is— these are the things that I want to build for my business. I want to create a voice OS document that I can inject as a prompt into my AI to get the copy of my business nailed down. And again, a really good example. Jonathan went really deep on this, showing it in real life. The second one is I call Brand OS. So each of each department I have has these 3 folders. inside of the brand library. VoiceOS. Second is BrandOS. So this is going to be logos, colors, fonts. Don't just tell it I use Times New Roman. Give it the font file. Put it in there because then it'll be able to take the file and use the actual font in your marketing creative, etc. If you have mascot, if you tell it to make a— if you show one image of your mascot, It'll do a horrible job of putting that on marketing creative, on trucks, et cetera. Give it everything you have. Give it the different versions of the file, large, small, PNG, JPEG, PDFs, et cetera. And then give examples of when it's correctly used. So what I will sometimes do to refine my BrandOS is I will throw it all that I have. I will ask it to create 10 different images on, for example, a truck, my crew and their uniform, and then I will tell it, nope, that's wrong. You messed up the font. Nope, that's wrong because the dog, his ears do not look like that. And you just constantly are trying to shape it so that way you have this folder, the Brand OS, that you know you can immediately get creative or you can immediately have these elements of font colors being consistent across the board. The last one's Creative OS. This is the one that is really powerful when it comes to marketing, and that is Go out and get real pictures of your crews, your vehicles, your equipment. Have them do the services that you offer. Like if you offer 5 services, I want pictures of all 5 of those services. If you have before and afters, if you have local landmarks. So for example, if you live in a city, get all the images of those local landmarks and inject them into this document. So that way, when your truck is driving down the street on an AI-generated image, it's showing a landmark in your local town. In your local area. This is actually, okay, spoiler alert. Um, when we're going to Texas is I have 5 or 6 different cities that we kind of go into, and each of those I now have pictures and, uh, creative OS for each one. So when I go into the city, here's all the landmarks and here's everything else we've talked about, my trucks, my uniform, et cetera. But now my billboard or my truck is going to be in front of that city's landmark. More importantly, even if you go more specifically, put it in front of like there's a school, put it in front of a water tower, things that are identifiable to their area that is going to help them stop on an ad. And even your social media creative, like the ability to be able to have it customized to your local area. But you have to give it this information, like you have to show it. These are the 4 landmarks that everyone knows in my area. It's a local business. And so another— the last part that I do on the Creative OS is different angles.

So, mm-hmm.

When you take— this is— Jonathan just did this with his thumbnails. Let's go. You, you can't just take one image of Jonathan's face and tell it to make an AI-generated thumbnail. He took all angles of his face doing different impressions and different, um, uh, facial expressions. And so the same thing is true when it comes to like your trucks. Don't just take a picture of your truck and expect it to do a good job generating an image. Take 20 images from every angle of the truck, and now inside of your Creative OS, You have a folder called truck and it'll do a really good job of making sure that when it uses that information on a generated AI image, it's super good. So anyways, that was my, my little rant on, uh, that's awesome. An AI brand library.

I'm, I'm a, I have all of that except the landmarks. That is a great idea.

I know I might have to cut this outta the podcast.

I like that idea. So, um, yeah, I mean, I just second all of that. One of the things I thought about when you were talking, and you may have a better idea to do this, I built all this stuff. Uh, voice and brand has been, all of it was built last year, uh, early, early last year for me. And then, or brand was actually, brand was built in 2024 and it doesn't matter. Creative has been a this year product project where you have a person that's Working about 70 hours a month just taking images and video in the field. And so the, the local landmarks is really good. But here's, here's why I said all that. I wonder in terms of creating it, as you were talking, it's almost picturing like on— let's just use Claude, for example. You have a thread that would be voice, a thread that would be brand, a thread that would be creative, and those threads persist forever. So as I have new Great examples of marketing or reasons why we do something, reasons why we don't do something. We're constantly just adding it to that thread and then periodically we're having it generate us a new creative guide or voice guide or whatever the case might be. Uh, I don't do it that way. I've, I've sort of created all this stuff and then I moved on, but you got me thinking I should have a live thread where I'm just constantly dumping more and more. We're doing that with the creative thread, but not with the voice thread. I periodically update that. How do you guys build yours?

I have it where it's just a Google Drive folder, so that way any output will go in there. And yeah, I've just trained it that if it's in there, it's good.

Um, okay.

So that way—

So you just have to read the Google Drive.

It keeps refining. Yes. Like, for example, it'll gimme an output for an email. A lot of times people will copy that, go edit it, and send it out to a customer. The one part that I'd encourage everyone to do is like, make the edits, Then you gotta give it back to the AI. I'm like, oh, I made these 5 changes and it starts to get better. Oh, it, the, he doesn't like this, doesn't like that word. They always take out this sort of phraseology and it'll refine itself and make the, the voice OS even better.

But in that example right there, are you dumping it back into the thread or are you just putting the document back in there and then telling the model to look at the updated document?

I only, this is like my one data thing is like, I want that file. Somewhere I can always access it. So I've always just made it where I have a kind of like my source of truth is my Google Drive. That's just me.

Yeah.

You could dump, definitely dump it back into the chat, but I've always just said like, hey, reference the Google Drive. I just put back the final product and make sure you see the differences. Tell me what they are. I wanna make sure it understands why I did certain things. 'Cause then over time you just get, it gets better and better and better.

Yeah.

Uh, and you don't have to keep making little tweaks.

I think I'm just wanting to be very clear for people 'cause like you, I actually use a Google Drive as well.

Oh, you do? Okay.

Yeah. Now there's— but I also have other projects that are just folders on my computer where Claude or ChatGPT are writing to and from a folder on my computer. But for City Turf, it's all Google. Yeah, you get the idea. My question, what I'm wanting to be very clear on people, for people, is you download an email, you rewrite it, you re-upload it to Drive, Google Drive. Is that— are you— I just want to be clear, you're You're still doing one more step, right? Aren't you going into Claude to the thread or to a thread and telling it to read that new document or just the act of uploading? Is that enough?

I've trained it pretty good. Like I, when I build the projects, I usually say, this is your source of truth. Any file in here is what I consider good so that I, I don't have to inject it back in. Like if I was trying to do an iterative process, I'd probably put it back in and like keep working with it. But I've made it where it's just like, always look at this for the source of good. And that's why, like, I'm like, the defensibility around, like, my private Gmail even is, that's my Google Drive. Like, everything in there, I consider it to be able to scan and use for the model.

Okay. Maybe I need to test again. The reason I'm bringing this up is historically that's not worked for me because the context window isn't big enough to scan all the documents. So I feel like I have to point it very specifically at these examples. And so that's, that's why I was asking. But maybe the context windows are better now and I'm, I'm not realizing that.

Do you open a new chat inside the project each time?

Uh, yes. Okay. I see what you're saying. And, but yes, if you're doing it that way, uh-huh. But even then there's a limitation to how much it can read in a folder.

True.

Only solely can ingest so many tokens. And that's why I was wondering if you were, telling it specifically, go look at this, go look at that.

Honestly, it's a lot of times when I'm talking to it, I'm usually saying like, hey, go reference the VoiceOS and look at previous emails. I do command it still. Yes, you're right.

Okay. Okay. That's what I was trying to get at. I wasn't trying to get too much in the weeds, but you said something that made me think, oh, oh, maybe I've, uh, I'm missing something and it can do something I'm not realizing it's capable of.

Great point. And like sometimes too, I'll get on this kick, especially around copywriting where like a specific type of copywriter. I've been reading their books. I really like to craft towards that. I'm just like, you know, a slippery slope, for example. Like, how do I create a slippery slope throughout an email? And if it's resonating with me, I'll be like, hey, reference that document about— and I want to tailor it towards that approach. So I do guide it, to your point.

Okay. All right. Very good. I thought all that's great. I would add one last thing. And that is, you might have heard, whomever's listening, you might've heard this and say, well, man, when I work with my model, it's really good. And it might be really good. And I don't need to create all this stuff because it's really good. And it might be because you've been doing this stuff inside your model and it has a memory and context and other threads it can reference. But none of this is scalable for team members. You'll never be able to hand this off unless you create these documents, because this is what educates their model. And this is why I do Google Drive.

Because then I can share that folder, make them a viewer only. They get all the context, not— can't edit it. And I don't have to share them in my, my AI accounts. They— it's always updated on their end. So anyways, very useful.

Cool. What else?

I think that's all we got. Um, yeah, I think what I want to know though, for everyone listening, we've been like super tactical today, so we'll see how this does in terms of the algorithm. But there's a bunch of stuff we mentioned specifically that you can change in your business this offseason. The tax on this, this episode is you gotta let us know down below which one are you going to do first, which one resonated the most with you. And you're like, I gotta at least do that one thing. I don't wanna list 5 cuz a lot of these things, if you just did one of these things this offseason, it would completely change your business. And instead of going into the offseason with 20 things you wanna do, I just wanna know one, uh, because it will absolutely set up 2027 to be a fantastic year.

So appreciate it. I 100% agree with that.

Appreciate you all watching. All right, we'll see you next week.

Likewise. See you later.