What's Coming to CopilotCRM in 2025?

The elephant in the room. The thing I want to address today is, is Copilot CRM worth coming back to and what happened specifically? And I know everyone that's watching this has in some way, shape or form been disappointed in Copilot in the past year, in 2024. And so I wanted to give a bit of background. I want to talk about what happened. And then Josh is going to walk us through all the changes that have been made in 2024 to ensure that it is a platform that can be used and is helpful for your business. This is not a sales pitch. Let me be very clear. I know that everyone on this call, at some point in time, I let down, and I would say, you know, Christian's on this call. He's from the sales side. He's. He's probably talked to most members. I would say 95 to 98% of people joined, in part because my content and the stuff that I put up online to help small businesses. And so I know that you joining is a. Is a vote of trust and confidence in myself.

And.

And so this is not a sales pitch. This is not like, please come back. This is a matter of. At the very least, I want to say I apologize for what happened and give some clarity as to why that happened and then what we're doing to rectify that. Because at the very least, I want you to know that, like, I take it very seriously. And the things that were done this year, especially in the first half of 2024, I don't take lightly. So I wanted to kind of give explanation to that. And the people getting this, this recording and this video are really just the individuals that have experienced that over the past 12 months. So let's get started. So first off, why I started copilot.

Some of you see my content for a long time. I see so home. So many home service business owners working 80 hours a week, working crazy hard, insane hours, and they have no money in the bank, and they don't know why. And when I looked around at different softwares and different CRMs, it was a matter of there's a lot of good CRMs out there. There's a plethora of them. I could list off five or 10 of them that I think are pretty solid. They've been around for a long time. They do a great job of reporting. They're more stable than Copilot was earlier in 2024. And in our. In our great option, the thing that none of them were doing is actually telling business owners what to do next. In their business. And that's the part that I'm passionate about. And if you watch the YouTube videos, when I do the turnarounds, I go one by one and basically try to help someone turn around their business. Then when I did here is, I basically took the book and I tried to give a roadmap for someone that didn't want to be on the YouTube channel, didn't want to like publicly air all their dirty laundry. And I wanted to be like, here's the steps to turn around your business. There's 13 steps. If you do these, you'll turn around the company. And usually one or two of these are the main factors. I don't believe that a lot of people comparatively will read that book. What I do believe, even if they read that book is they will struggle to find which of those is most necessary to implement in their business. I believe software is the thing that when I get the KPIs, when I get the metrics, I'm able to actually diagnose what needs to be changed, what one or two numbers need to change in order to change the business and turn it around. And so that's what Copilot exists for and that's what we want to shoot for, especially towards the end of 2025 and going into 2026 as we start to implement not just seeing the numbers and the reporting, but actually giving suggestions as to what needs to change in the business.

So our long term vision is to make home service business owners rich by telling them what to do and why. There are very. Getting to know what your close ratio is is a great KPI. Getting to know how many budget hours you have on the schedule. Great KPI. It's very good to know that from a scheduling perspective. Unfortunately in home services I see time and time again people knowing their numbers because that is the new trendy thing that we are all pushing, which I'm happy about now knowing your numbers will not change anything in your business. It is how do I take those numbers and then actually make meaningful changes in the company, when to hire, when I should raise prices, which services I should be cutting out because they're too complex and I'm not profitable on them. That's what I actually want to be able to tell users and members of Copilot down the road. So I want to kind of recap a little bit here what happened in 2023. So 2023 we started, we launched co pilot, I believe it was middle of February 2023. And so technically 2024 is our first full year in operation. But in 2023 this is all the features that we that were added and most of these were added in the second half of 2023. The sequence automations before we only had the legacy Automations deposit thresholds. We launched this at Landscape Summit. 2023 was the deposit thresholds on stage, launched it live. We dropped it and from that moment October 2023 till January 2024 it took off like a rocket shop ship. Like there are so many people joining and in part because a lot of these features are listed here were dropping all at that same time. We had budget hour capacity charts so you're able to know whether or not you're overbooked. P4P software, the integration is super solid. Now when people go into the P4P app, they can actually see as they clock in and out of jobs in copilot how much money they're making as an employee. Multi location control, also known as command center. So if you have multiple locations, the ability for your office staff to be able to log into one account and access multiple accounts without logging in and out and they're able to see their time zone in each one, et cetera, job costing and price matrices. Call notes. So that way every single documented communication with a customer is in a searchable database. And then you have customer notes which are more sticky for things that you want to see every single time you go into someone's profile. We launched call notes with automated reminders on those. Did the ability to be able. Did I just freeze up?

Can everyone. Is it fine? I don't know why I freeze up, but you guys can see me. Okay. Lindsey, is that fine? You froze up on my side, Mike, you're froze up a little bit on my side.

Yeah.

I don't know why that happened. Okay, give me one second. I'm going to switch my video to an old fashioned one for a second. I'm going to go. Give me one second here. I'm going to go to here.

Boom. Now you can see me. Let's go. I'm going to try to switch back and see if that somehow randomly fix it. Look at that. Okay, great. We're back in business. Card on file. So one of the things that I was super frustrated with in the past was that when an estimate is sent out that I cannot get that customer actually on the schedule when they accept the estimate because I require card on file. I don't want to do service without that card on file in order to be able to get that in the past. I Had to email them, text them, call the customer, like, please get a card on file. Please log in. Hey, that message might have gone to your spam folder because literally in the email I'm asking you for your credit card information. I'm literally in the email asking for money that almost always goes to spam. And so that was super frustrating. And so we made it where when someone clicks accept estimate, they have to have a card on file before you even get notified. So when you get notified, you know, immediately you can go ahead and schedule the job. We upselling from the mobile app the ability for the crew to be able to from the mobile app be able to tap on a service that they see as a need for the customer and be able to immediately send them a text or email and upsell the customer to other services. The wiki page, the KPI Cockpit global search bar. Just so many things were done in 2023, a lot of which happened in the second half of 2023 and later that year is when we just grew exponentially. And that is where the skill gap was very evident. Myself not ever growing a technical company as well as at the time, my technical co founder, his abilities and his scope of experience know how to scale a company that was growing that fast. And that's what led to January 2024, when we had bugh, when all of a sudden we literally had over 250 documented bugs inside the system and probably more of them that we didn't document. And so I did not take this lightly. This was by far and away the most difficult period of time in my career. And the reason for that is not because we started to have to spend three to four times as much to be able to attract engineers. And we lost lots of money. And we continue to not because, you know, my businesses are dramatically impacted. And the owners inside of Augusta Nation, who I know personally very, very well, this was a matter of think about like this. Like I always like to think about like this. And this is what I told some of the franchisees. I said, think of it like all of your customers in one spot that you love a lot, that they've helped you for a long time. They supported you all being on a Facebook group. And then you disappoint them all at the same time. Like, you make a mistake, like you make a streak on their lawn or you mess up something on their. Their driveway, something is a mistake. And then all those people get to share what's happening. And that's very, very difficult. It was the hardest part of my career and I'm determined to make that right. And so I want to introduce Josh. Some of you may, may have heard of him if you are still in the Facebook group, if you have not heard of him. He has really, really helped us the past six to eight months, full time, the past few months to really retool the team and upgrade the engineering talent using people that have done this before. They have taken small companies and made them very, very big. Josh comes from ActiveCampaign that does over $200 million in AR, has over 150,000 active members. And so this is, this is not new to him. And so I really appreciate his contributions. I wanted him to walk us through the technical aspects of what's been done in 2024 to ensure this doesn't happen. And I really appreciate his contributions to the team and to Copilot over the past several months. Josh, take it away.

Cool, everybody. Nice to meet you. Yeah. My name is Josh Kahl. I'm the VP of Product here at Copilot. Really excited to be here with all of you also. I'm just really grateful, Mike, just for the opportunity just to lead this team and work in your organization. I've just been so warmly welcomed by you and your staff, all of Augusta Nation, and like I think many of you on the call. I knew pretty quickly that, you know, this team and vision was something I wanted to really be a part of. So just a little quick background on me. I'm a product person and an entrepreneur by trade. I ran a business in Chicago that was a creative agency that did some work with major brands like Sony and Ford and Heinz and Aflac and more. We also built custom software and we also had a multi room recording studio that recorded bands and we did some music for film and tv. We ultimately scaled that software division and it was acquired by careerbuilder.com and then worked in product management for a number of years, kind of really learning the craft of building software with high focused, high skilled engineering teams. Again, I think Mike already mentioned just at a company called ActiveCampaign, which is, yeah, 250 million revenue, like 150, 60,000 customers globally. So when I first came into Copilot, my primary mission was just to really improve the stability of the software, help kind of professionalize the tech and product teams. Now I was brought in to consult, I think sometime around May of this year. And as Mike mentioned, there was hundreds of bugs. There was not a real clear process to resolve those. I'm sure many of you were right, kind of in the thick of that as well. So I started consulting part time and just helped the engineering and product teams organization and just kind of put the processes in place just to build and scale the business. This I've learned over the years. Just working in high velocity, high impact product engineering teams. You have to have extraordinary engineering talent. And you know, I've been fortunate to work with a lot of incredible engineers over the years and some of those people are starting to kind of come fill the ranks at Copilot. So again, stability and just bringing in engineering talent was really the initial focus. We've made some considerable strides. So what have we done to date? I won't go through all of these, but here's some of the highlights. We've reduced the bug count by over 70%, which is substantial. We've also improved email deliverability from 91 to 95%. This means more marketing emails or making it through to customers. I'll tell you from experience, this is a really solid delivery rate and it's super valuable to you when you're trying to spread the good word about your business. We've also improved the throughput of emails by over 10x, so it's much faster, higher volume emails being sent. A couple of the technical things don't spend a ton of time, but we dockerize the code base that just ensures every programmer working in the base runs the same version of software. Helps prevent bugs. We've also moved to ecs, which allows us just to deploy new code kind of more gently, kind of in high traffic in the middle of the days, just to avoid interruption in your workflows. We've also optimized the database. This is probably the most compelling of kind of the technical, which has really increased the page load speed significantly inside the application. So just anecdotally some of the heavier pages went from multiple seconds to load to under a second. We've also put quite a bit of work into the P4P integration, so there's been a ton of work just to improve the stability and reliability of the software, along with just building out the engineering teams with US based talent, which really sets us up for new feature work. Next slide please.

So to that end, here's what's coming in 2025. We plan to continue to invest further in reliability and scalability of the platform, which will continue to set us up for more feature improvements. Innovation again, I'll just cover a couple of these. We're rebuilding the UI in React, so React is a powerful user interface tool because this enables our developers to build dynamic reusable components effectively just ensuring really fast rendering, fostering maintainable scalable front end code. We're investing a ton in improving the automations reliability so our engineering teams have been working hard to improve that feature just to ensure they're reliable and that we can innovate there because we know how much time Automations can save. Quite a bit of work around payments hardening and reliability, so this is usually doubling down on the core loop of the function of the platform, just showing you're not having issues when you're taking payments from customers. So the rest on the list I won't cover. But again it's all about us setting us up to scale and making sure we're super reliable. So enough of the kind of tech nerdy stuff what will be delivered that actually helps your customer move the needle. So the first major flag on the ground for our deliverables is a brand new modern next generation client portal. So our goal with this delivery is really to help you make more money through a modernized design look and feel. Makes makes you look professional but also increases conversion rates. So we're making it easier to see where an estimate is at the process and more obvious for your customers what they need to do. We're also surfacing deposit amounts earlier and just making changes to the deposit flow Reduce time to payment, so intelligently surfacing invoices so you can get paid on time. And customers don't forget we remind them improvements to managing payment methods will just make it easier for your customers to keep their payment info up to date, including expanding the payment options to include Apple and Google Pay, which will actually be rolling out pretty soon. Lastly, on Customer portal we're going to be improving the rate us or reviews function of platform so when a user leaves, a five star review on our native system will prompt them to do the same and give you that same review. On Google Reviews if it's below a 5, we'll ask them what will it take to become a five star service and won't bump them to Google until they actually give you a five on the platform. We're also exploring allowing for reviews or feedback at the job level. So just imagine how nice it'd be to hear feedback from your customers when your service was completed. So we prompt them to give feedback just kind of at your discretion. It's optional of course. Next slide please.

So as a part of the customer portal work we're also updating and improving the estimates and invoices both in the CRM. When you're building an estimate what your options are there but also in the customer portal. So what does it look like to the end customer when they see your estimates or invoices? So here's just a handful of updates, obviously modernized design, look and feel. We want to make sure you're putting your best foot forward in these touch points. So a new header which is prioritized statuses and history, a new cost summary roll up in the sidebar just helps end customers digest cost and just take some actions quickly improving the estimate flow with credit card required for deposit. There's a lot of challenges around that historically in the platform. Also when a customer declines an estimate we can let them give us feedback on why and provide a nudge to request changes instead of declining. So in summary the customer portal and all of the end customer facing assets will be improving your customers interactions with you, making you look more professional, polished and also helping you close more deals and make more money. Next slide please. We're also working on a purpose built mobile application for your field workers. We've seen a ton of demand for a mobile app that performs well in the wild when you might not have service and that is really purpose built for field workers. So easily clock in and out of jobs, find your next job on the schedule, take notes, add pictures all you know even when you're in a remote territory. So really excited about the app. We think it's going to be a major game changer for our crew field workers and just a big differentiator for copilot. Next slide.

We're also just working on a total refresh of the entire user interface in the platform. So this means faster loading times. It's all going to be built in react, just more intelligent and simpler user flows. Just a better all over experience for you and your colleagues. Lastly, here's a few things that we're going to be working on next year. So a wait list for accepted jobs. So easily find and schedule jobs that have been accepted but not scheduled multi route which is something that we're really excited about. We know we'll save considerable time which allows you to optimize your routes in one click for all crews and employees across multiple days. Master routes so master routes for all of your critical routes, easily dispatching them into the field. We're going to be putting a lot of work into our form builder. So for your work order and your visit forms, just giving you flexibility in the fields in the form and also just styling capabilities as well. I think Mike mentioned at the top of the call we're Going to be investing heavily in reporting again, our mission is to provide you with the information to do, to know what to do next and why. And we're really infusing Mike's knowledge in the platform, which will be a major differentiator for us in the coming years. And lastly, not feature related, but we're also building on a customer advisory board, putting together some things that kind of point to our commitment for quality and clear communication on progress. That customer advisory board is going to help us shape our roadmap. We're also going to be building a trust hub where you can see kind of the monitoring of our services, you can see bugs, you can see what our roadmap is where we'd love to get feedback from customers. So all that to say in summary, we have invested a lot in building the team and increasing reliability the platform. We have a lot of exciting things coming up in the 2025 and beyond. Back to you, Mike.

Awesome, thanks so much. So right now, one thing that we did add recently was the White Glove onboarding and that's where the team will actually allow our support team will get all the CSV imports into the system. So we're doing that now for everyone, basically that is joining Copilot. So if you do decide to come back, please let us know. Anyone on this call, we're going to go ahead and continue to honor it. Just know that in December and January as it gets super busy sometimes we'll have to stop that if we start to get behind. But if you do need help getting CSV imports into Copilot, we will actually help White Glove this with the support team and Parker, our head of support will help you with that. So I want to kind of just open it up from there and kind of go into answering some questions and answers and whether or not there are or not is completely fine. You might not have any questions based upon just the presentation, but if you have a specific question for myself or for Josh, feel free to go ahead and unmute yourself or you can even put it in the chat if there's something in the chat. Lindsay, if you maybe want to just let us know because I cannot see the chat, but otherwise feel free to unmute yourself. Anything is on the table and any questions you have for myself or Josh, feel free, go for it.

Looks like. Oh, I did just get a notification from the chat.

Yeah, we've got one from Dave saying, can you give us a quick compare and contrast with. With element?

Absolutely. So first and foremost I would say that the, the strengths of Element are their budgeting, even for free users, the ability to run a budget run against comparable sized businesses in the industry. Specifically for the green industry, very, very powerful. Their budgeting is, I would say, the best free tool in the landscape industry. I think that the part that I want to differentiate Copilot in the future from LMN is the ease and simplicity of the interface, the simplicity of being able to actually utilize those numbers. The struggle that I see because I have used Element before, we actually purchased a company about basically seven years ago in Bellingham, Washington, my location. And they used Element. So we had used it, we used it for about six months as we kind of integrated the companies. And the challenging part, even more recently as I've been in there using some of their tools is the complexity of the system is really built for a company that has a large team in the office. It's very difficult to do some of their functions and understand some of the metrics. We just need to simplify it. We need it to be bite sized. We need to be simplified in the mobile app. The ability to be able to operate on the road, those are some of my major things. But more importantly is the marketing elements. And so like mass marketing from email and mass messaging of text messages through Copilot. Just the other day I was with our franchisees in one of our WhatsApp groups. I'll actually just pull it up here.

And he sent a message to 700 people via text message. There was a blast. And within 30 minutes he had 20 estimates for Christmas lights. So those Christmas light leads, typically you pay about a hundred to two hundred per lead. So immediately with a blast text about 7, 800 of his existing customers getting 20 estimates is a huge boost to business. I am focused a lot when it comes to Copilot on two things. One is getting you more customers and that's through the upsell, getting more leads, getting the text and the mass messaging, the email links, et cetera. And that's really our focus is like the marketing aspect. And that's really what we've been trying to do for so long. And that will be the differentiate, I think in the future. To answer his question more directly is less about the numbers and the budgeting and the reports in a complex manner. But like here's what you should do in your business based upon all these numbers that are happening in the background that we're recording. But here is actually what needs to happen. You need to. There needs to be a price increase on these 48 customers by a minimum of 10%. Otherwise just let them go. Or this service area based upon your service area, these customers outside of that, we should raise prices because you're at capacity. And so these KPIs are actually already in the KPI cockpit. It's a matter of taking those and then actually digesting them and giving them to you with confidence that what we are, I'm saying is the right thing. Because if you've watched some of the turnarounds, you see I'm looking at a couple of things like what's your close ratio? What's your budget hours on the schedule? What's your capacity of budget hours? And then making an assumption based upon just a few metrics of what they should do next in the business. And that's a huge unlock. But that can, can absolutely be done with just knowing the numbers inside the software. And so that's our focus. That said, that's our differentiator as we move forward.

Okay, thanks.

You got Dave.

Chris, we've got a couple more questions.

Go ahead, Lindsay.

You can see them.

You read them off. I can see him now. Yeah.

Okay. Okay. Chris asks, is long care program coming soon? Estimating operations?

I'm not sure what he's mean by. Oh, you mean programing. So you're talking like, like different packages. So this is something that is not currently being worked on, but it is definitely on our horizon. We've been scoping this out. The product team led by Josh as well as Stephen George, our head of product, has been looking and talking with multiple users about how they're using chemicals, how they're using programmin. The waitlist is going to be the first step in that direction. I think that the wait list will probably solve a lot of the problems that I've seen some people run into inside of of copilot. There are chemical companies that do programs inside of Copilot, but they've modified their systems to work inside the constraints. I do believe the waitlist will unlock a large portion of members based upon their workflow. I do believe that there's improvements to the programming for chemical applications specifically and programs that down the road we will work on. It is not currently our priority, but it's absolutely something we know is going to be important, especially in the green. And I believe that there are several things including the multi route, the master routes and the wait list in 2025 that will make a huge dent in what is going to be enabled for those, those services specifically.

Just keep going, Lindsey.

Okay, so we got Erin asking about, can you speak on the quickbooks sync reliability and also chemical scheduling tracking, etc.

Awesome. Yeah. So thanks Aaron. So I've. I've talked to three different founders that have exited CRMs in the past and every single one of them has said that the QuickBooks sync is an absolute nightmare. And the reason for that is because of the two way sync abilities. And so we are moving to a one way sync. This is something that you're going to actually hear about over the next couple weeks. Josh, did you want to speak to.

That just briefly, just to reiterate what you're saying. We're actually have it pushed out into production behind a feature flag. We're just doing a little bit testing but we will be going to one way sync for all net new customers and then updating existing customers with one way Sync. Just exactly what Mike said because of a lot of the complexities with the two way sync.

Yeah. And I think a lot of times when we hear one way sync versus two way sync like two way. That sounds fantastic. It must be twice as good as one way.