Latest / Home Service Millionaire with Mike Andes / I Helped 4 Owners With Their $1M+ Home Service Businesses

Transcript

I Helped 4 Owners With Their $1M+ Home Service Businesses · Home Service Millionaire with Mike Andes

• 0:00
  It's tough because there's no immediate pain.
• 0:02
  The only thing you can lean into is the fact that their contract is coming up.
• 0:05
  Yes, although I think I might be sabotaging him just because we also lost the tech.
• 0:10
  So then he's the only person available to fill in for that.
• 0:13
  The reason is, is because you're going to lose 200K for the first two years doing franchising.
• 0:20
  At least.
• 0:20
  Like, minimum.
• 0:22
  I think I lost 480,000 the first year.
• 0:24
  You've got to go get the 10K.
• 0:26
  people that are ready to go sign up.
• 0:27
  And the number one thing you can do is risk reversal for them because they have no confidence in your longevity.
• 0:33
  If you asked your guys right now, how much did you make on P4P?
• 0:36
  Or are you going to make it this month?
• 0:39
  It'd be hard for them to quantify when there's all these variables.
• 0:42
  Today, I'm gonna be doing private coaching with several home service millionaires
• 0:46
  These members are part of the Home Service Boardroom.
• 0:50
  This is a school community that I recently started for seven-figure home service entrepreneurs.
• 0:55
  So if you're interested in joining these calls, in the description there's a link.
• 0:58
  You can join today, and I look forward to seeing you inside the boardroom.
• 1:03
  This year, my business will be making a million dollars in revenue.
• 1:08
  I need help with selling snow removal services in August.
• 1:13
  Okay.
• 1:14
  And right now, how much are you doing in snow out of the million?
• 1:19
  Probably around $300,000.
• 1:21
  It can vary, you know, way down to two, up to four, depending on how much it snows that season.
• 1:29
  Okay.
• 1:29
  And right now, is it mostly residential or is it all commercial for the snow plowing?
• 1:33
  We're probably 40% commercial, 60% residential.
• 1:38
  Okay.
• 1:40
  And so I assume a lot of the commercial stuff is more secure in terms of the locking and that contracting.
• 1:47
  Is that correct?
• 1:48
  Correct.
• 1:49
  Okay.
• 1:50
  So really it's the residential is where the opportunity is.
• 1:52
  If we package this correctly and try to sell it, is that what you're trying to think about?
• 1:57
  Well, I guess what I was trying to think about is best ways to sell it in August.
• 2:05
  Whether I should really be focusing on commercial in August versus
• 2:09
  residential at more of a pain point or, you know, which route I should go and some of that.
• 2:14
  In your market, do most of your commercial contracts renew in December?
• 2:18
  No, I would say 50% of them are between August and beginning of October.
• 2:32
  And then the other half, the folks that are just, don't think about it ahead of time.
• 2:37
  October to December.
• 2:40
  If I was only looking at snow, I would probably be saying we just double down on actually trying to lock in more commercial.
• 2:47
  Because it's steady revenue.
• 2:49
  It's also usually going to be more from a month.
• 2:54
  The revenue is going to come in usually regardless of whether or not it snows as much as residential, which is like boom or bust.
• 3:01
  And the problem with that is it's more of a business decision.
• 3:04
  Like, do you even want to be doing that much commercial or is residential where you want to be going?
• 3:09
  Well, I want to make sure to have enough funds to cover, you know, a team of six or so guys all winter long, whether it snows a lot or not.
• 3:21
  Yeah.
• 3:22
  Yeah.
• 3:23
  Then I would probably go the commercial route.
• 3:26
  My question, though, becomes when you have to take on other aspects of the contract, like mowing, bush maintenance, etc., does that become operationally difficult if you also... Do you have to do those other things outside of just the snow on those contracts?
• 3:41
  Generally not.
• 3:42
  Oh, really?
• 3:43
  So you can just get the snow contract?
• 3:46
  In certain ones.
• 3:47
  If we're talking about an apartment complex or something, that's kind of a
• 3:53
  a full service all the way around.
• 3:55
  But there's a lot of the businesses that are just looking for shows.
• 3:59
  Okay.
• 4:00
  And if you had to... Have you tried any sort of a specific offer to activate these commercial contracts during the summer?
• 4:09
  Or have you not tried anything in the past?
• 4:11
  Just cold calling in August.
• 4:14
  Okay.
• 4:14
  Hmm...
• 4:16
  It's tough because there's no immediate pain.
• 4:19
  The only thing you can lean into is the fact that their contract is coming up.
• 4:22
  Right.
• 4:23
  And so of your commercial, how many how many of those commercial are coming from a couple property managers or is it pretty distributed?
• 4:31
  Pretty distributed.
• 4:32
  OK, mostly commercial like property managers or is it individual landlords and owners of like buildings?
• 4:39
  Or so individual.
• 4:40
  Yeah.
• 4:41
  Really?
• 4:41
  Okay.
• 4:42
  I'd be really interested to see, like, this would be a pretty hands-on way of doing things, but either scraping a list or individually going through the county assessor's office and looking for the owners.
• 4:54
  Because usually, you can see the property owner's information.
• 4:57
  And even if it's their LLC, you'll get their mailing information.
• 5:01
  And it might only be like, let's just call it 200 addresses.
• 5:05
  But you start putting them into a mail sequence, but you're targeting specifically, like...
• 5:10
  likely going to be small commercial, multifamily, and you're actually going after landlords.
• 5:17
  And so I would be targeting their pain points, which is like, they do not want to be called in the middle of the night when it's snowing.
• 5:24
  They do not want insurance claims.
• 5:26
  So around icing, for example, like putting down salt, and you're going to target them slightly different or message them slightly different than a property manager.
• 5:34
  Because property managers just like what you handle everything, they, they are much more like,
• 5:40
  just get it done kind of thing, your owners, if they own like a 10 unit apartment complex or a small strip mall, they are gonna be gonna be more involved in this process.
• 5:51
  I think if you warmed them up like with a three or four mailing sequence to maybe 200 or 300 addresses, your actual cost here is not gonna be the print or the stamps, it's going to be getting the right information and the data to go after this audience.
• 6:10
  And what would be your suggestion on pricing in August, September versus something like October, November, December?
• 6:18
  Yeah.
• 6:18
  So like, I would say trying to activate them prior to that with either an offer or just some sort of a discount if they do buy a certain date.
• 6:26
  So for example, a lot of times priority is one thing you can use with commercials.
• 6:30
  Like, Hey, if you sign up before October 1st, you get priority on, on the route.
• 6:37
  And so we're going to service you before everyone else on our commercial route.
• 6:41
  Therefore, you're going to have better service and just sell the fact that you're going
• 6:48
  If, you know, worst case scenarios, you fill up your schedule.
• 6:51
  And now we're going into the time when most people are calling you anyways, October, November, December, and you're left with the decision of either raising prices or extending capacity by getting another plow truck.
• 7:03
  But I think in this case, which is unique to me is most of the time for snow, they require all the other services.
• 7:11
  If that's not the case, awesome.
• 7:13
  Also, in this case, usually when I say snow, I think that commercial changes the whole way that you do it versus residential.
• 7:21
  It sounds like you're doing small commercial, which is like a niche that you could potentially have two to three hundred people you're actually trying to target.
• 7:28
  And so it's just simply going to come down to getting that information.
• 7:31
  You could use AI a little bit for this, but I also think, again, it's very hand-to-hand, but you could very much go in the property assessor's office, look up for all the properties that are over a certain number of units or a certain value and are commercial, and then just hit that list of...
• 7:48
  three to 500 people, and the actual cost of doing that's gonna be less than $500 to print, and I would do four different types.
• 7:56
  So like every three weeks, I'd be sending them something else hitting a different pain point.
• 8:00
  So it might be insurance, like slip and falls, what the cost of an insurance claim is.
• 8:04
  Then it might be the fact that they're going to get priority in terms of the way you do your routing.
• 8:11
  And then I'd be going after the pain point of like, hey, we have 30 more days to get on the schedule.
• 8:16
  You'll get creative with the ways to hit them.
• 8:19
  But I think this is mostly, most people will not do this because getting the 500 addresses and names is a bit of a pain in the butt.
• 8:27
  Once you got them, you got them.
• 8:28
  Yeah, 100%, right?
• 8:29
  And you might be able to put an agent on this.
• 8:31
  So if you have like Claude Cowork, or if you have played with AI at all, you could open up the Accounting Assessors Office, give it access to your browser, and then just give it the parameters that you want it to search for.
• 8:42
  And it might take it a day or two, and you might eat up some tokens.
• 8:46
  But the alternative is, and I'm not against this option either, which is literally set the parameters for someone to sit down and say, hey, anything over this number of units or this property value that is commercial or is multifamily.
• 8:58
  So I would come up with what the conventions of your codes, like the zoning in your area, and filter by those and then property value, and then come up with that and scrape that data.
• 9:10
  Okay.
• 9:11
  Okay.
• 9:14
  Awesome.
• 9:15
  Hopefully that was like directionally something you can actually take action on.
• 9:18
  It is going to either crush or it's going to fall flat.
• 9:21
  But I think if that would be what I would go after first before residential, which is going to be very difficult because residential people don't usually think about something until there's pain.
• 9:31
  And so until the snow flies, like they'll call you in December when it snows.
• 9:35
  And my hope is that we fill as you could have capacity with the commercial.
• 9:38
  So when they do call in December and you have to have your guys work overtime, you're charging a enormous amount of a premium to the residential customer.
• 9:48
  I have a residential pool service business doing about 1.2 million in sales, probably this year at about 1.1 last year.
• 9:56
  And my problem is keeping up quality in our business.
• 10:03
  full cleans division.
• 10:05
  We have full cleans and repairs separate as I've been sort of cycling through team leads or just ops managers sort of for that division.
• 10:13
  So we lost a couple of good people earlier this year.
• 10:16
  One quit, one got fired.
• 10:17
  So we've had a little bit of turnover and I'm struggling to have my team lead own the standard and make that his whole thing.
• 10:26
  I still get calls from his team.
• 10:28
  And I probably need to because quality is not good.
• 10:30
  I'm struggling to get him to own that.
• 10:33
  Has he worked with you as a technician in the past?
• 10:37
  Yeah, he's been a tech for three years.
• 10:39
  Okay.
• 10:40
  And did you promote him once the last person left or got fired?
• 10:46
  Yes.
• 10:47
  Okay.
• 10:49
  He's sort of interim filling the role.
• 10:50
  Okay.
• 10:51
  Oh, it's more of an interim position.
• 10:52
  Sorry, he was interimly, he was sort of filling the role, even though he was not given the title until a couple weeks ago.
• 11:00
  Okay.
• 11:01
  And is he clear that it's his job responsibility to be taking care of quality on the maintenance side?
• 11:08
  Yes.
• 11:08
  Although I think I might be sabotaging him just because we also lost the tech.
• 11:12
  So then he's the only person available to fill in for that.
• 11:16
  So I feel bad for not giving him enough time to solve the problem.
• 11:21
  And is it clearly defined that you are responsible for hiring?
• 11:25
  No, I've kept that.
• 11:28
  Okay.
• 11:29
  Oh, that's fine that you kept it.
• 11:30
  My point is...
• 11:33
  he might be thinking that you are quote unquote sabotaging him because you're not hiring enough if that's your responsibility.
• 11:41
  And so generally I try not to expect a manager to take full accountability or ownership of a role.
• 11:46
  If one of the ingredients that they need to be successful in their role depends on me doing my job.
• 11:52
  And so if he feels like he's understaffed, I really can't judge him if I'm the one that has to hire for the technician role.
• 12:00
  Okay.
• 12:00
  I've just hired a guy.
• 12:02
  Okay.
• 12:02
  So he's currently training the new guy.
• 12:04
  So the capacity problem will be done, well, should be solved in two to three weeks of training.
• 12:12
  I guess I just, I asked this group in the community the other day, but I struggled to communicate my expectations and hold them to it because I feel like I've not given them enough training.
• 12:23
  You know, how much training is enough training?
• 12:25
  Before it's like, it's his fault and everything that happened.
• 12:28
  iPhone rings, you're not doing your job.
• 12:30
  I struggle to like have that level of clarity until I've given them what I think is everything that they need to succeed.
• 12:37
  No, 100%.
• 12:37
  And this is very common when you have churn of any sort of manager position is the person that gets put in their place.
• 12:44
  They're either A, like you said, in this case, he's been on the team, he's kind of vicariously been doing these tasks before, and now he just kind of assumes that role.
• 12:53
  And so there's no real change in what they're doing because they kind of were doing it already.
• 12:59
  or the other side, which does not happen in this case, is you bring someone in really fast that's outside the organization and don't properly set them up for success because you're just in a rush to fill the role.
• 13:08
  And so I would be, I bet if, I wonder if you talk to him or someone else talked to him and asked him, what do you do differently now than you did six months ago?
• 13:19
  He might not have a great answer for that because we haven't been clear about,
• 13:23
  these are the things you must do and here's how you win.
• 13:27
  And for him, he might know he's responsible for maintenance, but does his compensation change or any of his bonuses or anything change based upon quality of the maintenance department?
• 13:40
  I have not, we do P for P. Okay.
• 13:43
  And I gave him a separate quarterly bonus in relation to being a team lead versus a tech.
• 13:51
  but I have not clearly defined what is the level of standard, what is the quality, which I think part of that comes from, like you said, the churn, where I'm like, at what point is it no longer the last guy's fault that these pools are all broken?
• 14:05
  At what point is it your fault, and it's your problem, and it's your bonus?
• 14:09
  I would feel bad being like, and you didn't get the bonus this quarter, although your first two months was...
• 14:14
  sucking the last guy's problems.
• 14:15
  And now it's on you, but it's been a whole quarter.
• 14:18
  That's great.
• 14:19
  So what you said to me is what you say to him.
• 14:23
  You say, hey, look, I know that there's quality problems because of the last hire.
• 14:27
  How long do you think we can, it's going to take for us to get it up to standard?
• 14:31
  And then starting from there, I'm going to make sure I align bonuses and compensation or their goals, which usually have something to do with making more money.
• 14:40
  I'm going to do a good job of making it clear between them making more money and their goals being accomplished.
• 14:45
  And I'm going to say, I will give you more money once these certain standards are met.
• 14:49
  But how long do you think it's going to take for us to get it up to standard?
• 14:52
  Right?
• 14:52
  Because if he consciously knows the pools, he knows this current standard, he knows the last person, I'm going to assume he thinks that that last person did a poor job.
• 15:01
  He'll be like, hey, I need a solid month.
• 15:04
  So like, give me till the end of August.
• 15:07
  And after that, I think we'll get up to standard.
• 15:09
  He said, great.
• 15:10
  Starting September 1st is when these bonuses will apply.
• 15:14
  And I would probably do it based on a grid system, which is like efficiency on the y-axis.
• 15:19
  X-axis would be the number of callbacks or percentage of callbacks.
• 15:23
  And so he's sort of balanced between quality and quantity.
• 15:27
  Okay, this may be the wrong follow-up question.
• 15:30
  You're fine.
• 15:31
  struggled to let him run meetings and also struggled to let him give me solutions.
• 15:35
  I ended up giving him a lot of solutions because he doesn't talk and I talk too much.
• 15:40
  So I'm like, I hand him a meeting.
• 15:43
  I'm like, all right, you're running the first half of the meeting based on quality and efficiency.
• 15:46
  I'm running the second half on values and general problems with equipment.
• 15:51
  And he'll say like seven words and then throw it back to me.
• 15:55
  Mm-hmm.
• 15:57
  I've not had one-on-ones with him yet, so I haven't exactly addressed this with him directly.
• 16:01
  But I'm like, all right, so what are your ideas?
• 16:03
  I'm not sure.
• 16:04
  And then I'll talk for 20 minutes and be like, okay, let's go do that.
• 16:07
  Yeah.
• 16:08
  So I'm sure, yeah, I don't know how to get him to talk more or if that's just like a genetic trait or something.
• 16:16
  Yeah, I don't know.
• 16:17
  Yeah, like some people just don't like to talk.
• 16:19
  So that's one thing.
• 16:20
  Like they're just inherently more introverted.
• 16:22
  You put them in front of a team meeting, they kind of fall flat in their face.
• 16:25
  So...
• 16:27
  It has to be very clear as to why them talking in front of the team allows them to hit certain metrics and allows them to hit their goals.
• 16:35
  Right now, he doesn't really understand.
• 16:37
  And if there are no metrics that he's trying to hit or bonuses that he's trying to achieve, it's very hard to convince him to change behavior because he's like, look, this is working.
• 16:45
  I'm getting paid the same no matter what.
• 16:47
  I don't need to change anyone's behavior.
• 16:49
  Right.
• 16:49
  But now all of a sudden, if maintenance, that department, needs to improve their quality, and he's responsible to teach the team about quality, and his compensation is tied to that quality metric, now I can actually expect his behavior to change because there's an incentive alignment.
• 17:08
  Makes sense.
• 17:08
  And so what I would probably do is have it- Yeah, his pay has not gone up or down.
• 17:12
  Yeah, like that's a great place to start because in his mind now, it's like, I am taking all this extra responsibility.
• 17:17
  Boss wants me to all of a sudden talk in a team meeting and I haven't got a single extra penny in my compensation.
• 17:22
  That's not fair.
• 17:23
  And if he's thinking that, he's not going to deploy any discretionary effort towards any of these new tasks you're putting on his plate.
• 17:29
  What I would say is in your mind, you're like, well, I can't really give him-
• 17:33
  a fair comp because the previous person's quality is so bad.
• 17:36
  Great.
• 17:36
  Have that conversation with him and be like, I understand we're behind.
• 17:40
  I understand that you've been unequipped in terms of number of team members.
• 17:43
  I understand that there's jobs, pools that we're way behind in terms of quality.
• 17:46
  It's up to our standards.
• 17:47
  How long do you think it'll take for us to get there?
• 17:51
  And then when he says a date, you use that date as the time when his bonus and compensation changes.
• 17:56
  And if you do that, he might be like, well, I might be able to do it in the next two weeks.
• 18:00
  right, and get things back up to standard, because you're going to definitely change his base.
• 18:05
  If he's changed his role title and you're expecting him to do, I would change his base to some degree, but then definitely making sure that he has incentives around the quality of the maintenance department.
• 18:15
  He has incentives around the efficiency of the team.
• 18:18
  Otherwise, if you don't align the incentives, you are betting on this person being these unicorns that will work hard no matter what.
• 18:27
  Long landscaping business this year, we'll probably do just over one.
• 18:31
  So probably 1.1, 1.2 in revenue.
• 18:34
  Question being, currently have a foreman that's, when I say foreman, like he's kind of just running landscape.
• 18:39
  I would say I'm out of the field, but I still, I guess, coordinate some things as far as like jobs go.
• 18:46
  So looking to make him more of a general manager.
• 18:48
  So I wouldn't really say I'm doing operations.
• 18:50
  I guess I'm still one foot in a little bit.
• 18:53
  But he's just running landscape.
• 18:55
  So question being, as far as making him a general manager where I want him to run the majority of it, what do you think the process should be?
• 19:02
  Like 30, 60, 90 day, I guess, process for that?
• 19:06
  And the second thing would be I'm planning to start another location next
• 19:11
  next season.
• 19:12
  So where do you think I should fit in as far as what roles I need to do for that second location?
• 19:16
  The second location is probably only going to have one crew obviously to start out and as it grows, get a little bit bigger.
• 19:22
  But where do you think I should fit in and where should I fit him in the guy that I'm trying to make a general manager?
• 19:28
  And then what roles should each of us have so we're not stepping on toes?
• 19:32
  whatever else, if that makes sense.
• 19:34
  Totally.
• 19:34
  So I'm going to assume that this location that you're currently at 1.2 million, you're not necessarily trying to grow that to 2 million.
• 19:42
  Like you, you kind of have hit a place you're putting in profit mode.
• 19:44
  No, no.
• 19:45
  You're handing it off to the GM.
• 19:46
  Correct.
• 19:47
  Yeah.
• 19:47
  I don't want, yeah.
• 19:48
  Right now it's three crews, two crews are maintenance.
• 19:50
  So those are kind of running like by themselves, obviously like spring and whatever else selling stuff.
• 19:54
  Like,
• 19:55
  It's hectic, but then after that, really, this guy only really has to sell, like, just the landscape.
• 19:59
  So two crews maintenance, one crew landscape, and I, yeah, don't want to add another crew to this location.
• 20:03
  Kind of, yeah, like you said, profit mode and not growing bigger, for sure.
• 20:08
  And right now, is he involved at all in maintenance or pretty much exclusively on the landscape side?
• 20:12
  Only landscape, and he's kind of just running the landscape.
• 20:15
  I'm kind of doing all sales.
• 20:17
  I don't really have anybody in admin, so I'm kind of doing admin as well, which I know you're going to tell me I need to get somebody in admin for sure.
• 20:26
  So he's just doing landscape maintenance.
• 20:28
  I'm kind of dealing with it.
• 20:28
  I mean, the maintenance goes like...
• 20:31
  There's not really much to do, obviously.
• 20:32
  I mean, if something breaks or whatever else, I mean, I'll go out there and see them on a mower, make sure they're good.
• 20:36
  But for the most part, it kind of runs itself.
• 20:38
  I have two foreman doing that.
• 20:39
  So they're kind of just...
• 20:40
  When I say foreman, they're kind of just running it through, is making sure everything's done right.
• 20:43
  But as far as like...
• 20:45
  it doesn't really take much for the maintenance to like oversee as far as obviously landscape is a lot more involved with materials and everything else, obviously, and just get everything scheduled.
• 20:54
  So he doesn't have anything to do with the maintenance crews.
• 20:57
  And how many technicians total do you have?
• 20:59
  So outside of you and him, how many technicians are there?
• 21:03
  Seven.
• 21:04
  So it's two maintenance, two maintenance, and then three on the landscape, including him.
• 21:09
  So then me would be,
• 21:12
  What is that?
• 21:12
  Eight.
• 21:13
  Yeah.
• 21:14
  Yeah.
• 21:14
  That's solid.
• 21:15
  Okay, cool.
• 21:15
  So I do believe he can run this as a GM.
• 21:19
  I think my biggest concern is the sales side on landscape.
• 21:23
  Do you think he can sell the landscape jobs?
• 21:25
  Yeah, which he hasn't done yet.
• 21:26
  Okay.
• 21:26
  Okay.
• 21:27
  I think he can, for sure.
• 21:29
  I think he can, yeah.
• 21:30
  I mean, whenever he's talking to customers about like a job or whatever else, I mean, like there's been a lot of like upsell opportunities that he's already like taken and Google reviews are obviously huge and like he's gotten a crap load of Google reviews this year.
• 21:40
  So I think he definitely like can talk to customers well.
• 21:43
  He can do it.
• 21:43
  And he like went out and went with Colton yet?
• 21:45
  No, which I'm like, I'm thinking I need to start doing.
• 21:48
  And obviously I don't want to just throw and be like, all right, your new job is to sell.
• 21:51
  Like, you know what I mean?
• 21:52
  That's what I'm kind of thinking like 30, 60, 90 days.
• 21:53
  Like what would the process be if like you were in,
• 21:56
  my shoes just to, you know, not just throw them out there.
• 21:58
  And if it works, it works.
• 21:59
  If it doesn't, it doesn't.
• 22:00
  You know what I mean?
• 22:01
  So he has not sold yet, but I am confident that he can, like obviously with some time.
• 22:05
  Yep.
• 22:05
  So before you even do a 30, 60, 90 for him, which is basically 30, 60, 90 is he does it with you, you do it with him and then he's on his own.
• 22:13
  Like that's the 30, 60, 90.
• 22:15
  Before you even start that though, I really want a 30, 60, 90 for the overall business to get it ready.
• 22:20
  Yeah.
• 22:21
  to actually do this.
• 22:23
  And so the, like, there are three levers I would be pulling before I even pull him in.
• 22:29
  The first is simplification.
• 22:31
  And that is, I want to, I want to ask yourself, which jobs when it comes to landscaping are the hardest to bid?
• 22:39
  The ones that, you know, every time you give him or like, you need, you're kind of going to get pulled into it, like strip those out.
• 22:46
  Because before I even bring him into training around sales for projects, I need to make sure I've simplified the 20% of jobs that cause 80% of the headache.
• 22:54
  And so I don't even want to train him on those.
• 22:57
  It makes the training process annoying.
• 22:59
  They don't like it.
• 23:00
  They feel like a failure because it's just a tough thing to learn.
• 23:03
  So I would first be looking, okay, what are the 10 services we do in landscape installs?
• 23:08
  cut two or three of them that you know are just always one off or maybe you do them once every three four months and so you're not even going to get one of them underneath your belt with him under in the 30 60 90 that you do with him i just want them removed and i do believe that if you actually did that like this year okay very good um like last year we were doing like some walls and drainage and everything else and like yeah i mean like you said i mean i was at every single one of those
• 23:32
  So we're not taking on any of that.
• 23:34
  So right now, I'm gonna say landscape.
• 23:35
  I mean, it's cleanups, it's mulch, it's like grading.
• 23:39
  He can do all of it and it's not anything super, super complicated.
• 23:43
  Yeah, so I mean, I would think the most complicated thing is we're having like a lot of new yard installs going, like new construction builds, and we're doing some of those.
• 23:50
  I would say that would be the only thing that's kind of like iffy.
• 23:53
  I mean, it's not hard.
• 23:54
  It's just obviously like bigger scale with creating and landscape.
• 23:57
  But again, I mean, it's just beds and dirt, you know what I mean?
• 24:00
  So it's not like, but no, I did take out everything else.
• 24:02
  So I would say that's like the only thing that might be on the chopping block.
• 24:06
  But everything else is pretty, pretty, pretty simple.
• 24:08
  So, um... And in terms of how far are you booked out with projects right now?
• 24:14
  Like six weeks, probably.
• 24:15
  Give or take.
• 24:16
  It was a little bit more.
• 24:17
  Summer slowed down a little bit, but... Are you spending much on marketing?
• 24:21
  Nothing, no.
• 24:22
  Just website.
• 24:23
  Okay, fantastic.
• 24:24
  So...
• 24:26
  After simplification, which it sounds like you've already done, that's why you've kind of like the revenue is not like skyrocketing right now.
• 24:30
  That's great.
• 24:31
  Then I'd be looking at price and I don't need you to like raise prices a ton, but I'd be seeing if I can optimize it to be able to squeeze out enough to cover admin.
• 24:40
  Because if you need to go get someone to work for you part-time to cover all the admin work that you're doing, because I'm trying to do two things, right?
• 24:47
  I'm trying to make his role easier for him to step into, and I'm trying to make sure you have enough time to go start this next location.
• 24:53
  And so you've done the simplification part.
• 24:55
  The next thing I'm trying to do is optimize price, because right now you only need to increase price by about 5% in order to be able to cover your admin person.
• 25:05
  If you're making $100,000, yeah, you could literally push a button, raise everything by 5%, probably not your bottom line or like at all and go hire an admin person and pay them a few thousand bucks a month to work part time doing emails, phone calls, payroll, all the rest of it.
• 25:21
  Yeah.
• 25:22
  And now, now if you do.
• 25:23
  Okay, that makes sense.
• 25:24
  And I mean, I hadn't even like, I know.
• 25:26
  Go ahead.
• 25:27
  I was gonna say, if you do those things, then, then I think you're in a really good spot.
• 25:32
  Cause now when you're training him, you don't worry about admin throughout the day.
• 25:36
  You're not worried about the price of that admin person.
• 25:38
  It's all been covered.
• 25:39
  And you can just focus on, okay, the, the, the, the simple services that we are going to do, I'm going to make sure they're really, really good at.
• 25:47
  And I don't have to worry about admin throughout the day.
• 25:49
  Then it would just be me and him basically selling, would you say?
• 25:53
  And making sure operations-wise, I think he's fine with that.
• 25:57
  But I think operations is just making sure the jobs are going smoothly.
• 26:00
  So Evan taking off the plate.
• 26:02
  So then I'm just looking at my job.
• 26:04
  I guess my role versus his role next year.
• 26:06
  Is it just me and him selling?
• 26:07
  And where would you see me to fit in, I guess?
• 26:12
  When are you trying to make this?
• 26:13
  I'm starting the next location.
• 26:14
  When do you want to start the second location?
• 26:15
  Next year?
• 26:16
  It's probably not going to be next spring.
• 26:18
  Okay, so my hope is that by that time, you can not be at this location.
• 26:24
  And to do that is going to require all these things and getting him trained up, et cetera.
• 26:30
  And we'll talk about his 30, 60, 90 in a second.
• 26:32
  But the reason is because I want you fully focused on sales when you go to that next location.
• 26:36
  Like you're just going to go there and just be able to scale the thing up.
• 26:39
  Cause finding that person that will do that for you, like start that location from zero, very hard to find.
• 26:43
  You're going to be that person, but in order to be able to have your time and attention over there, I need admin taking off your plate.
• 26:49
  I need him to know the sales process, like the back of his hand and be able to handle all of operations.
• 26:53
  Hmm.
• 26:54
  And so this is quite the load you're putting on him.
• 26:57
  And I think it's possible if you have admin dialed in by then, and if you have completely simplified sales for him to be able to handle it, because he's not going to be as good at sales as you are.
• 27:08
  Yeah.
• 27:09
  And so his- And I probably should even need to start that like this year.
• 27:12
  So we're not just like next spring, oh, here you go.
• 27:14
  Like now you're just saying, like, I should probably start doing something that like this
• 27:17
  Yeah, later summer, fall.
• 27:18
  So what I would do... And we can even recoup in the winter and then what went good, what went bad.
• 27:23
  Yeah, if we're confident the only thing that he's going to really struggle with or the new task he has to take on is sales of projects, I would just change your schedule once you've hand off admin and...
• 27:34
  Change your daily schedule to be where in the afternoon from two to five is when you do all your sales estimates.
• 27:41
  And then he needs to get off of his job sites and come be with you for those few hours.
• 27:46
  And so you're gonna take a little bit of a financial hit for the month or two this summer and fall when he's getting off early and just literally gonna shadow you doing the estimates.
• 27:54
  And then once he's confident enough, you're like, okay, great.
• 27:57
  We're swapping roles.
• 27:58
  I'm going to follow you.
• 28:00
  You're still going to get off at two o'clock, but now you're doing the estimate and I will just be along for the ride.
• 28:04
  And after each estimate, we will go over what you did well and what you didn't do so well.
• 28:09
  I'm going to record them.
• 28:10
  So you're going to get like one of those little Osmo things that stick onto your chest or even the glasses, record the estimate and then watch it back with him.
• 28:18
  And so you have this really, really nice thing.
• 28:21
  You have like eight to nine, no, like nine months before you need to be out of the business.
• 28:25
  And so the first thing is like delegate admin.
• 28:26
  Yeah.
• 28:27
  Then I'm going to take a very slow role of, you know, him following me, then me following him.
• 28:33
  And then once, once you've done this role playing stuff enough, which you're following him and you're watching the game tape, you're, you're going over what worked and what didn't work well in the sales call.
• 28:43
  That's when, you know, you'll be very confident in his abilities.
• 28:47
  When you say follow me, follow him, I know you said the recording stuff.
• 28:50
  I mean, in the beginning, should both of us physically go to the customer?
• 28:54
  Or do you think I should record everything I do and then we watch it back?
• 28:57
  I know two people on the job saying, oh, this is a new guy.
• 28:59
  I'm training him.
• 29:01
  From a customer's perspective, should we both physically be there?
• 29:03
  Or do you think we should just each record it and then we kind of work through it that way?
• 29:07
  Oh, you just 100% say he's my apprentice.
• 29:09
  We're working together on the project.
• 29:11
  Yeah.
• 29:11
  Okay.
• 29:11
  We just bring him apart.
• 29:12
  Yeah.
• 29:12
  Like there's nothing to replace.
• 29:13
  Because like, otherwise him watching your recordings or you giving instruction, like a training session for him on how do you estimates, very hard for him to feel the same nerves that it is when you're in front of a customer and they're asking you a question about a very specific thing.
• 29:26
  Yeah.
• 29:27
  Yeah.
• 29:27
  Okay.
• 29:27
  Okay.
• 29:27
  And then you're going to find over the course of time, when you get back in the vehicle, he's going to be picking up on things, et cetera.
• 29:32
  And then after 30 days, you determine, Hey, after 30 days, you're doing it and I'm going to be watching.
• 29:38
  And so that way he takes the training.
• 29:40
  And we talk about it after.
• 29:41
  Exactly.
• 29:41
  Yep.
• 29:42
  Okay.
• 29:42
  That makes sense.
• 29:43
  That's why I was going to make sure.
• 29:45
  Um,
• 29:46
  Okay, so I mean, yeah, for sure, starting that this year, just so, yeah, he's not getting thrown to the wolves next year, which I think is still good.
• 29:52
  As far as, I guess, one question.
• 29:54
  Obviously, I can just figure this out, but we're on, like, full P4P, like, good.
• 29:58
  If he's getting off early, I guess, like, I mean, I can figure it out.
• 30:02
  But as far as, like, the other guys go, I'm just trying to think, like, how we can, like, still make sure, like... Or no, I guess that's not a big deal.
• 30:09
  As far as pay goes, like, for him, obviously, like, it's not, like, budget hours or whatever else, like, during those times.
• 30:14
  So do you think I should just pay him, like...
• 30:16
  a set... What should pay be as far as the training goes?
• 30:21
  A set per quote, you'll get this much for training?
• 30:24
  How should that work?
• 30:25
  Because right now it's like all P for P and all we care about is like budget hours and everything else.
• 30:29
  But obviously that's different when we're out of the field and doing quotes.
• 30:32
  So how do you think pay should be structured?
• 30:34
  I would have the conversation with him about what you want to happen over the next nine months and just be very clear that, hey, I understand this is going to impact your P for P. What do you think is a fair hourly rate that you would be excited about that after that 2 p.m. rolls around and you're with me?
• 30:49
  What do you want to be paid per hour?
• 30:50
  And I would make sure it's on the top end of his P4P.
• 30:53
  So if he's been making between, let's just say 20 and 30 bucks an hour, I'm going to be trying to probably push that 27, 28 to make sure he's looking forward to that time in the afternoon and not resenting it.
• 31:03
  Not like, yeah.
• 31:05
  Oh no, here we go.
• 31:05
  Like I'm making no money.
• 31:06
  Yeah.
• 31:07
  Exactly.
• 31:09
  But you think there's hourly, obviously, because it's obviously very hard to, like one quote could take 10 minutes, another quote could be an hour.
• 31:15
  Like, so you think there's hourly during that time?
• 31:17
  Yeah, because once you set him up, once he's running a $1.2 million location as GM, he's gonna have a base salary.
• 31:22
  And so I need him to get out, I need to retrain his brain a little bit on like, it's not all about just getting things done.
• 31:28
  Now I need to be efficient with how I schedule my, my estimates at the end of the day.
• 31:32
  I need to be scared.
• 31:32
  I need to be thinking about how I set up my team so they can work the last two to three hours a day and close out the job.
• 31:38
  He's going to have to think about all this stuff.
• 31:40
  And so I would just make it hourly, make it simple, make it high enough of a base pay, use it as a manual adjustment.
• 31:45
  So if you work three hours and it's 28 bucks a pop, that's $54 that he's going to get added to his base pay as a payroll bonus.
• 31:55
  It's not white.
• 31:55
  It can't get removed.
• 31:56
  Yeah.
• 31:57
  And just have him opt into that.
• 31:59
  Like he needs to be excited about it and just have that conversation with him and be like, Hey, once, once this is all done and I've started the second location, you're taking over full time.
• 32:07
  Here's what your salary is going to be.
• 32:08
  But in the meantime, you're going to be done between jobs and learning sales with me.
• 32:13
  And so we need to figure out what your hourly rate's going to be when you're with me.
• 32:16
  I want you to be excited about it.
• 32:18
  Yeah.
• 32:18
  Yeah.
• 32:19
  Okay.
• 32:19
  That makes sense.
• 32:21
  That's good.
• 32:21
  Um, I know you're saying like 30, 60, 90 for that, I think, or, uh,
• 32:26
  I think we're already good with that for him.
• 32:28
  And then next year, just put on a full-time guy, get to second location.
• 32:33
  I mean, I'm thinking kind of same thing, very simple, obviously, services.
• 32:37
  We're just very similar location.
• 32:40
  My house is kind of right in the middle, the two servicers, kind of.
• 32:43
  So, I mean, it's not like we're going hours away or anything, very close.
• 32:46
  Do you think just selling that and just getting that started?
• 32:50
  Because obviously...
• 32:52
  new location, like I'm going to obviously basically start with a real customer.
• 32:55
  So you think that's like just full time for me then next, next spring after this is kind of handed off to him.
• 33:00
  And the hardest part, honestly, for you is going to be not needed at the first location.
• 33:04
  That's the hardest part.
• 33:06
  Cause there's going to be this weird few weeks when you're starting the first location and you're like trying to like do marketing, you're getting like a leader to a day.
• 33:13
  Your first location is just crushing.
• 33:16
  Like it's, it's busy.
• 33:17
  Your guy's going to, your general manager's going to be having some problems.
• 33:20
  You're going to be tempted to jump back in.
• 33:22
  But I would just say the same way that I just talked about with the sales, I need to do the same thing with admin now.
• 33:26
  Then you can do it with sales.
• 33:28
  So that way, when you start your next location, you're going to feel a few months of like, I should be helping them.
• 33:33
  I should be jumping back in.
• 33:34
  And you're going to like avoid that because you're just going to handicap them and they won't take ownership of those roles if you're constantly jumping back in.
• 33:41
  And furthermore, even like early next spring, as things start to pick up, you're going to want to help.
• 33:45
  You're going to feel like useless for a few months before you start the new location.
• 33:50
  Yeah.
• 33:50
  Yeah.
• 33:50
  Okay.
• 33:51
  But just, yeah, stay out because obviously they're not learning if I'm just taking over everything.
• 33:55
  Yeah.
• 33:55
  They're learning, they're learning like quote unquote slower.
• 33:58
  Yeah.
• 33:58
  A hundred percent because they're going to learn that you step in every time there's a problem versus here's the training, here's the 30, 60, 90, and then you're done.
• 34:05
  Like you're off and we will talk once a week.
• 34:07
  We'll be on this cadence.
• 34:08
  Here's your metrics.
• 34:08
  Here's your bonuses.
• 34:09
  Here's your incentives.
• 34:10
  But as soon as you step back in, because you're on your perspective, you're just bored.
• 34:15
  But from their perspective, every time I have a problem, he steps back in and solves it like the genius.
• 34:22
  Yeah.
• 34:23
  Okay, that makes sense.
• 34:24
  Yeah, I think that was the main thing, I don't know.
• 34:27
  Do you think of anything else that'd be useful as far as like that goes?
• 34:30
  I mean, I think that's like the majority of it.
• 34:34
  The unsexy part is gonna be getting the admin off your plate, right?
• 34:37
  And because that part you've juggled yourself.
• 34:39
  And so figuring out like, what's the part-time cadence gonna be?
• 34:42
  What are the tasks you need them to complete?
• 34:44
  What are the videos you're gonna record for that admin person?
• 34:47
  What do you need to prioritize?
• 34:48
  What are the 30 things you're currently doing in admin?
• 34:50
  like everything from running payroll to approving automations, to checking the inbox, to sending out blast texts, whatever you're doing has got to be systematized for the admin person.
• 34:59
  And I would spend all of your time and discretionary effort once he's good to go, refining your admin so that he never gets dragged into admin.
• 35:08
  That's my concern because that's what you've done in the past.
• 35:10
  You've done sales and admin.
• 35:11
  Yeah.
• 35:12
  is a lot of times it's very difficult to now hand sales off because you've always done admin.
• 35:17
  That's why I need you to separate admin first, get it off of your plate so that you're just training him on sales because you don't want him to also have to learn admin.
• 35:25
  That usually falls apart.
• 35:27
  Mm-hmm.
• 35:28
  I know obviously sales and admin should be kind of last question.
• 35:30
  You're good.
• 35:30
  Get out of here.
• 35:32
  But I know obviously sales and admin obviously keep separate.
• 35:35
  But as far as like landscaping jobs go, and if you're given, obviously as a sales guy, you write up the quote and everything else.
• 35:41
  You send it off.
• 35:42
  Say they have questions about that and they want to talk to, well, in that case, just say me.
• 35:47
  But an admin person is the one answering the phone and answering the emails.
• 35:50
  Like,
• 35:51
  how should that work?
• 35:53
  Because the admin person is probably not going to know every little thing about like the landscape.
• 35:56
  So they want to talk to the guy that they were talking to.
• 35:58
  Like, how should that work without like stepping on toes?
• 36:01
  Like, should the admin just like say, hey, like you need to answer this one email or like, how should that work?
• 36:05
  Yeah, this handoff forces systematization because in the past, because you did both roles, you...
• 36:11
  Without knowing it gets sloppy on the sales side.
• 36:14
  So for example, in the past, you just maybe make a shorter estimate description knowing that if they have any questions, they'll call me and I'll clarify it with them.
• 36:23
  Whereas now you might say, okay, it's gonna be difficult for this admin person.
• 36:27
  They're not gonna be able to answer your question.
• 36:28
  They're literally just gonna be like, okay, I'll get back to the estimator and I'll get back to you if the customer calls them.
• 36:34
  What you're going to want to do now is an estimator is ask yourself, how do I prevent that from happening?
• 36:38
  And one of those things might be taking a video for the customer that is also shared with the crew when they get to the project.
• 36:45
  But now the customer has notes and a video for every project.
• 36:48
  Do you share with the other thing is like, so we share, I think video, every single quote, and then that's given to the crew automatically.
• 36:56
  I don't share it with the customer.
• 36:57
  It's just kind of like, I guess the bigger thing is like changes.
• 37:00
  Like say, hey, we're going to install this bed.
• 37:02
  And then now, like this is exactly what we do.
• 37:05
  And then obviously, you know, customers like, obviously, oh, I only want three shrubs instead of this.
• 37:08
  So not like, it's just changes in the estimate, not like a whole new whatever, you know what I'm saying?
• 37:14
  Like how would that go?
• 37:15
  Yeah, so do you use HomeWorks or what software are you using?
• 37:18
  Yeah, HomeWorks, yep.
• 37:19
  So we just do it as a to-do.
• 37:21
  And that to-do is going to trigger a text message to the estimator.
• 37:25
  And so the admin person just knows if there's a work order change, they do WOC, and they say, this customer is wanting this change.
• 37:31
  They can assign that to do to a customer.
• 37:33
  So then I just get a text message as the salesperson saying, oh, so-and-so needs a work order change.
• 37:38
  Here's what they need.
• 37:39
  You can bring the merge tag of the notes in directly and immediately get back to the admin person who would then convey that to the customer.
• 37:46
  Now that is an extra step.
• 37:48
  And so you're always looking for how do I prevent those steps?
• 37:51
  And a lot of times that like a video or better explanations at the estimate can prevent those.
• 37:55
  But to your point, work order changes are going to happen no matter what.
• 37:58
  It doesn't matter how much they like, they're going to change their mind and stuff.
• 38:00
  Right.
• 38:01
  And so I would just make it, okay, if you get a call or an email,
• 38:05
  Here's what you do.
• 38:05
  You create a do, you assign it to the estimator, and then I have an automation that's gonna fire that off to the estimator.
• 38:10
  They're gonna know what they need.
• 38:11
  It's gonna go on their dispatch board, and they can either make notes back to the admin under dispatch notes, or they can record a video that gets sent to the customer, or they can say, hey, yes, change that, take $1,000 off, add four bushes, whatever it might be.
• 38:25
  If you have a home service business and you're doing over $1 million in annual revenue or $80,000 per month,
• 38:32
  I would like to invite you to join Home Service Boardroom.
• 38:35
  That's where all these callers are coming from, and that's just one part of what is valuable inside of the community.
• 38:41
  We also have a monthly course.
• 38:43
  We have a monthly Q&A.
• 38:45
  You're able to be part of a community of other home service businesses that are already doing over a million dollars in annual revenue and trying to get to $10 million.
• 38:53
  The thing that gets you to a million dollars is working hard, figure out how to advertise, figure out how to hire your first few employees.
• 39:00
  But what gets you to $10 million is going to be the skill of leadership, how to be able to manage, how to be able to attract great talent, how to be able to lead your team.
• 39:09
  That's what gets you to 10 million, and that's our focus inside of Home Server's boardroom.
• 39:13
  So if that's of interest to you, click the link down in the description, and you can apply today to join.
• 39:18
  And we have 12 months.
• 39:20
  every single month has a challenge and we tackle one topic.
• 39:24
  And then we hold each other accountable to making sure we actually deliver and execute on that specific topic.
• 39:30
  So if that's of interest to you, click the link in the description.
• 39:33
  I look forward to seeing you inside the boardroom.
• 39:36
  We'll be right around the million dollar mark this year and we need help with franchising.
• 39:42
  I really like the first caller and how it went down.
• 39:45
  You know, talking about getting the first location going.
• 39:47
  We only have one location right now.
• 39:49
  I'm wondering how many locations you get established before you franchise.
• 39:53
  You mentioned in some prior talks about needing to, you know, justify the fees and whatnot.
• 40:00
  I wasn't sure.
• 40:01
  a little bit more in detail what all that entails and trying to get the ball rolling with franchising some of the steps that were taken along the way and um for you to have success in opening i think it's 200 plus locations now yeah totally so what's your goal in franchising just so i can clearly articulate the strategy yeah great question yeah so our goal is um for 50 locations um
• 40:24
  So it's, yeah, we want to start there, but I think it's the first step is to start with getting the first location right, getting the GM implemented, you know, stepping away from sales and all those things that were talked about on the first call.
• 40:35
  So I don't want to waste your time to go back over all those things.
• 40:38
  But, you know, next steps after you get the GM, you know, you get that one location going, you maybe start.
• 40:43
  a second or third location.
• 40:46
  What are the further steps along the way that you took?
• 40:49
  How do you scale it?
• 40:51
  Maybe some insights on some of the different steps you took to succeed in getting to 200.
• 40:56
  Obviously our goal is only 50, but right.
• 41:00
  So the first thing I would say is, what I did is I would recommend to everyone else, and that is I would not franchise until I was pretty confident I could get eight to 10 locations.
• 41:11
  Because I see so many people franchise.
• 41:13
  They get like one location the first year, another two or three the next year, one the next year, and then it just fizzles out because you have no momentum.
• 41:22
  And because let's just say you're taking 5% of revenue from a new location,
• 41:28
  If you get 10 locations, you're still only making 50% of revenue compared to your $1 million location.
• 41:36
  And so it's very, very hard to focus on something when you have one, two locations that literally are going to be $50,000 to $100,000 of annual revenue, and yet they will still demand or require the same attention and support that they will expect at 100 locations.
• 41:55
  And so I would highly recommend, and this is like kind of the 2.0 part of your question before we jump into the ABCs.
• 42:03
  Like I would highly recommend building a following, a community, a social media group to where you would kind of know you have 10 people that are interested in joining franchises.
• 42:13
  Now, you cannot advertise that you are franchising and say, hey, who wants to buy my franchise if I franchise?
• 42:18
  You actually can't say that.
• 42:20
  But what you can do is like, hey, I have considered franchising.
• 42:24
  And I'm just, there's a survey.
• 42:26
  Would you be interested in joining the brand?
• 42:28
  That would be like more of just like a casual survey.
• 42:32
  Obviously survey versus actually signing a franchise agreement and going through all the legal loopholes, very different.
• 42:37
  So I would not be like, ah, 10 people said they're going to.
• 42:40
  I would maybe look for 20 or 30 people that said, yes, I would be interested in joining this brand if you were to franchise.
• 42:45
  Just be very careful because from a legal perspective, you cannot advertise a franchise until you have finished all the legal documents.
• 42:51
  I would just not worry about the franchise.
• 42:53
  Everyone gets hung up on the legal documents and getting the franchise agreement and the operations manual and the FDD.
• 42:59
  That is literally a problem that can be solved with $100,000 in six to eight weeks.
• 43:04
  Okay.
• 43:04
  I wouldn't worry about that.
• 43:05
  I would be worrying about what can I do to provide value to somebody that has an existing or a new business that is going to be hard for them to replicate or do on their own.
• 43:16
  And whether that be building a website, marketing collateral, getting them leads, running ads for them, coaching, there has to be a value proposition.
• 43:26
  And for those first 10 locations, they're the hardest ones to convince because you have no track record and they don't have anyone to talk to.
• 43:32
  Got it.
• 43:33
  That was great.
• 43:34
  Appreciate you answering that in a nutshell.
• 43:35
  That was awesome.
• 43:37
  Like a lot of times people will think that if you get your FDD, your franchise disclosure documents, your operations manual, and your franchise agreement, that like people are gonna be lining up.
• 43:46
  But it doesn't happen that way.
• 43:48
  Like very, very few franchises ever get past 20 locations, let alone 100 locations where most of the time that's where they become profitable.
• 43:56
  And so I would just have a very, very clear path to at least 10 locations before I launch.
• 44:02
  And to do that, you're probably going to want to create content, create a community, share what you're doing, share all the secrets, all the secret sauce, how you do your pricing, how you get leads, all of that, that they would be getting as... Because the reason a franchisee is going to join you is because they see that what you're doing is working and they're like, oh...
• 44:20
  I could definitely build this myself.
• 44:22
  He's giving me the roadmap.
• 44:24
  I would rather just pay him and get the execution done.
• 44:27
  It's done for me.
• 44:28
  I can save myself time.
• 44:30
  That's what a franchisee is buying ultimately is this could, I could do this in five years or I could just buy a part of the system and save myself three or four of those years and jump forward.
• 44:39
  And so you're basically giving them a ticket to jump a bunch of steps that otherwise they would have to figure out on their own.
• 44:45
  Now, when I'm trying to notice that that all makes sense.
• 44:47
  You're fine.
• 44:48
  When I say all of that, because that's kind of like more heady, for you specifically, where does your head go?
• 44:54
  How can I make sure like, if your goal is to get the first 10, where's your first few questions once I say that?
• 45:01
  That's a, that was a good question.
• 45:02
  Hmm.
• 45:05
  I need to think about it.
• 45:06
  I don't want to hold you up on silent, but... You're good.
• 45:09
  Yeah, that's a really good question.
• 45:10
  Yeah, how to get the first tenant.
• 45:12
  It sounds like you gave them away.
• 45:14
  You know, you kind of, you know, you definitely practiced way-draft case.
• 45:18
  You gave the first tenant away.
• 45:20
  You gained recognition, credibility in the community, and...
• 45:25
  you know, in the, in your area and, you know, franchising, and then you kind of scaled from there.
• 45:29
  Do you recommend the same game plan?
• 45:31
  I suppose like you're kind of giving the first time away, or do you have a way to be profitable getting those first 10?
• 45:36
  If that'd be my question.
• 45:37
  Like most franchises have private equity.
• 45:40
  They're going to spend a lot of money on brokers.
• 45:42
  So brokers are typically companies that are, you know, I'm interested in starting a business, I go to a broker, and then they're gonna tell me, here's the five franchises that we recommend for you.
• 45:52
  The broker usually gets between 10 and $30,000 to broker the deal between prospective franchisee and the franchisor.
• 46:00
  That being said, the franchisee is usually not going to sign up for a franchisor that's completely brand new if they're going through a broker.
• 46:07
  Usually they're going to a broker because they want to have established brands that they know have a predictable financial return.
• 46:14
  And so usually brokers won't even take you, or if they do, they're going to sell you on the dream of what they can do for you and then make you pay them outside of a commission.
• 46:25
  So I would never go that route.
• 46:26
  We have never sold via brokers.
• 46:29
  Um...
• 46:30
  But to get over that, you're still going to have to sell and that's going to come from your content.
• 46:34
  And I would be very careful to think that any consultant that pitches you that they're going to get you leads, I would not listen to them at all.
• 46:42
  I went down that route at the beginning.
• 46:43
  It's the trash leads.
• 46:45
  We have not sold up a single one from them ever.
• 46:49
  And don't worry about getting your legal docs.
• 46:52
  Getting legal docs is not going to get you leads.
• 46:55
  Right?
• 46:56
  you need the leads and you know people who wanna join your franchise, then you'll get the legal docs and you'll have more confidence to spend extra and make sure the legal documents are solid.
• 47:04
  Like the person that's gonna do it for 40 grand or 50 grand and go through some like random templatized documents, you don't wanna be doing that anyways.
• 47:11
  So go get the confidence that you're gonna get 10 or 15 locations opened up pretty quick and then go spend 100 grand plus, get the right consultants, the right legal team, I can hook you up with my attorney group and like that's easy, that's the easy part.
• 47:24
  Anyone will take your $100,000 and create franchise agreements for you.
• 47:27
  You've got to go get the 10 people that are ready to go sign up.
• 47:31
  And the number one thing you can do is risk reversal for them because they have no confidence in your longevity.
• 47:36
  So my first 10 locations and every location afterwards, they can leave at any time.
• 47:42
  And so for these first 10 locations, their risk to joining was $5,000 to $10,000.
• 47:48
  Because if they gave me my actual fee and then all of a sudden they didn't like me or they didn't like it, they didn't think I was doing a good job, they could leave with their customers.
• 47:56
  And so think about risk reversal.
• 47:58
  And we also allowed like six to 12 months of free, like no monthly fees for the first 10 locations.
• 48:04
  It was literally $5,000 to $10,000 of risk capital because they could leave at any time and they didn't have any monthly fees for the first 10 months.
• 48:11
  Right.
• 48:11
  Now, I was in a very great position where my first location was spending off $300,000 to $400,000 in distributions so I could float this boat.
• 48:20
  And that's where it comes back to what you said before, which is like, I'm glad you acknowledged like, hey, I'm still optimizing this thing and making it really profitable.
• 48:26
  Because if you do that well, then you can survive the couple first year or two where you're not making much money.
• 48:32
  Like our first year in franchising, I think we made $80,000 of revenue.
• 48:37
  So like, that stinks.
• 48:39
  And it took three and a half, almost four years for the franchise to make more money than the one location that I had.
• 48:53
  Wow.
• 48:53
  So I would just, to your point- Was it worth it?
• 48:56
  Would you do it over again?
• 48:57
  Well, it was worth it because my goal is I need the scale.
• 49:01
  I need a thousand locations.
• 49:02
  If I did one by one by one by myself, I might be at 20 or 30 right now, but we're only at 200 because we've been able to do franchising.
• 49:10
  And I need that level of number of locations to have the impact that I want to have on the industry.
• 49:16
  If that's not of interest to you,
• 49:18
  Then I would say, optimize what you currently have, do it once, twice, three times, and then you're like, okay, now I wanna pass this along to someone else, I've refined the systems more, then you can go franchise.
• 49:30
  But until this location can spit off so much cash that you literally are doing franchising for a tax perspective, I would not touch it.
• 49:38
  I would optimize this first location,
• 49:40
  whether that be getting up to 3 million and making it $400,000 or $500,000 of annual profit, that's closer to what I did for my first location, or start a second and a third location that all do a million, that again, spit off a bunch of cash, and instead of spending that money on real estate or trying to divest or do investments in the stock market, just take that $400,000 or $500,000 of free cash flow
• 50:02
  and float the first year or two of losses at the franchise.
• 50:06
  Because that will happen if you're allowing risk reversal, you've brought the initial fee way down, so you're eating all legal costs, and then you're going to have to front the amount of money that is required to support the owners.
• 50:16
  You're going to have to go get someone to do coaching, you're going to have to get someone to build out website, you're going to have to pay someone to do SEO, and you're going to have to pay for all of that as if you had 100 locations, but you only got 10.
• 50:26
  But if you make that first location super profitable or get two or three of them being really profitable, then you can float the franchise for the first two to three years, which is going to be required.
• 50:37
  Unless you get private equity or a big loan.
• 50:42
  That was super valuable.
• 50:43
  I really appreciate you going in detail and explaining how that means a lot.
• 50:47
  Yeah, man.
• 50:48
  Well, hey, as you as you're I know, like right now, you've acknowledged, hey, I need to optimize the current thing.
• 50:53
  I'll give you an exact target to hit for now.
• 50:56
  It's like step one.
• 50:57
  Step one is I want a quarter million to two hundred fifty thousand dollars of net free cash flow coming out of this location.
• 51:05
  Whether that be this one location, just optimizing it, you could definitely get that.
• 51:07
  It's twenty five percent margin or starting a second location.
• 51:12
  that does a million, and spending a year or two building that up to be able to get $250,000 in net free cash flow.
• 51:17
  The reason is, is because you're going to lose 200K for the first two years doing franchising.
• 51:24
  At least.
• 51:24
  Like, minimum.
• 51:28
  I think I lost $480,000 the first year.
• 51:29
  $480,000.
• 51:32
  Is that why most people don't take that route then due to the risk and not knowing that stuff and you don't have enough cash.
• 51:38
  So you're saying, you know, get the first location in, you know, maybe get the three, three to 4 million 250 K net before you even entertain this idea of franchising.
• 51:47
  And, you know, it's, you know, there's a beast in itself.
• 51:50
  There's a lot of learning.
• 51:51
  There's a lot of money that's going to be involved.
• 51:52
  Don't worry about the documentation, you know, get the 10 people that, you know, you think are going to possibly buy, you know, by, you know,
• 52:00
  invest in your brand, but get that cash plug on before you entertain it.
• 52:08
  Exactly.
• 52:08
  It sounds like that's super wise, otherwise you could probably go bankrupt.
• 52:12
  Yeah, oh yeah.
• 52:13
  Like the legal documents is kind of like equipment, right?
• 52:16
  It's like your franchise agreement, it's kind of like going and buying a truck.
• 52:19
  If you wanna go buy a truck, you can go down the street right now and buy one.
• 52:22
  No, there's no competitive advantage.
• 52:24
  What's hard is get customers.
• 52:25
  The same thing as trend franchising.
• 52:27
  franchisees are hard to get.
• 52:29
  Like winning their trust, showing your value, showing that there's less risk with you than doing it themselves.
• 52:35
  That's way harder than going out and getting legal docs.
• 52:38
  When you need your legal docs done, Derek, you give me a call, I'll give you my attorney's name and he will do it.
• 52:43
  Like he's phenomenal.
• 52:44
  He's great.
• 52:45
  The best attorney we've ever had.
• 52:47
  And that is not the hard part though.
• 52:49
  The hard part is finding the franchisees, building up the brand, building the value proposition for them, making it clearly identifiable as to why joining your brand is better than doing it themselves.
• 52:59
  And the thing that we saw as we went through franchising is we started off with a whole bunch of people that wanted to get started with lawn care to where now the value proposition is strong enough to where a lot of it is actually people that have their existing business, but they realize the value of swapping their brand.
• 53:16
  But at the beginning, you're probably gonna be speaking more to the entry-level person that's just getting started, and that's why you have to go so cheap.
• 53:22
  Now, to your point...
• 53:25
  Yes, you could do this one way, which is the cash flow way, which in my opinion is the most, is the best way.
• 53:31
  The alternative, which some people do is they'll go out and get private equity involved.
• 53:35
  But usually you're going to require connections or collateral of some sort or experience in the industry to where they would actually back you.
• 53:44
  Because this sunk cost in those first couple of years is either coming out of your pocket, the business's distributions, or private equity.
• 53:53
  Perfect.
• 53:53
  And it sounds like you recommend trying to do it yourself, have the cash flow behind you rather than getting the private equity then.
• 54:00
  I do that mostly because I care about this industry and I don't want to see anyone else bring private equity into franchising because I see what it's done to the franchisees.
• 54:09
  But if you can convince someone private equity to give you money, awesome.
• 54:13
  Uh, they didn't start knocking on my door until I had 50 locations.
• 54:17
  Once I got 50, that's when all of a sudden they, you have proof of concept and yeah, they were ready to start giving money.
• 54:22
  And I already saw the path to a hundred where we could actually be profitable.
• 54:26
  And that's when we started being profitable to our 100 locations, but it's because we have the flat fee model.
• 54:31
  Everyone told me not to do it and they did it.
• 54:33
  They told me that because they knew I wouldn't be profitable until I got a hundred locations and they were right.
• 54:38
  And it stunk for the first few years.
• 54:40
  And so you just got to ask yourself, like, okay, if you're only doing 50 locations, a flat fee model is probably not going to work, you're going to have to take a royalty.
• 54:47
  And then you're going to have to have certain requirements on how much they have to spend on advertising, so that you can make sure that they have enough revenue.
• 54:54
  And so that's a perverse incentive that you're gonna have to be very open with them about, but you've gotta show the value that you offer for that.
• 55:01
  For example, if you can get a lead for 30 bucks and they can't get a lead for under 100 bucks, then all of a sudden paying you 5% or 6% doesn't sound so bad.
• 55:13
  And if you're talking to the smaller operators just getting started at the very beginning, their 5% of 100 grand is not very much.
• 55:21
  And so it's pretty easy to say like, hey, I will give you this secret sauce that I've showed how to do it, but I will do it for you now.
• 55:28
  I will do the execution part if you join the franchise.
• 55:35
  There you go, that makes sense.
• 55:37
  So yeah, if I was you, I would use some follow up questions.
• 55:39
  Yeah, go ahead.
• 55:40
  Go ahead.
• 55:40
  Yeah, we got, we got, we got nine more minutes.
• 55:42
  I might send some follow up questions in the chat.
• 55:44
  I don't want to, uh, to hold you up.
• 55:46
  So I might send some more in the chat, but if you have more info, I'd love to keep your in-depth.
• 55:50
  Yeah, go ahead.
• 55:51
  We got nine more minutes and you're the last caller.
• 55:53
  So go for it.
• 55:54
  No, you're good.
• 55:55
  But yeah, so you were mentioning, I think you said some along the lines of justifying 10 to 20K fee.
• 56:03
  This was from like a few days ago.
• 56:05
  You mentioned how you need to be able to justify the fee.
• 56:06
  Were you referring to the 10 to 20K fee?
• 56:12
  what's called that that it takes to you know start the location or the franchise that you're talking about and you need to say hey here's the value by joining us you know it's 10 to 20k fee and you need to explain or share enough value that justifies them spending that 10 to 20k is yeah like anytime you have an initial franchise fee you've got to show that you are making up for that in training and then
• 56:38
  Brand value, so for example, if they join your franchise and go to the first page of Google in two months instead of two years, that's valuable, they're buying time.
• 56:48
  Anytime you join a franchise, like for example, Anytime Fitness, it's like $40,000 or $50,000 now.
• 56:53
  It's because when you join the franchise, they tell you what color to paint everything.
• 56:57
  They tell you all the equipment you should buy.
• 56:59
  They give you preferred vendor relationships where you save more than $40,000 when you've got to buy $300,000 worth of equipment because they're preferred vendors.
• 57:06
  So if you start hooking things up to where you can make sense of asking for 10 grand, 20 grand, 30 grand...
• 57:12
  that's when you can actually start selling with confidence.
• 57:14
  If you can't, and you don't have the preferred vendors, you don't have the systems, you don't have the website, the brand awareness, you don't have the marketing collateral, and you're expecting them to sign a 10-year agreement that literally unless they die, they're gonna have to keep paying you, that's hard to sell.
• 57:29
  And so just giving them as much risk reversal as possible is going to be your advantage at the beginning.
• 57:35
  And that's why we just said, hey, look, you can leave at any time.
• 57:38
  And then we reduce the initial fees for the first six months and then 12 months.
• 57:43
  Because our goal is that by the time they hit, we're actually paying their full monthly fees.
• 57:47
  It's already like, oh, this is mind-blowingly above the value of the monthly fee.
• 57:51
  I got to stay in.
• 57:52
  Now it's my job to make sure that in that year, year and a half, I am juicing their support and making sure that they've grown their business to the point where they're like, it would be crazy to leave.
• 58:05
  Okay.
• 58:05
  Okay.
• 58:07
  Thanks for writing that down.
• 58:08
  I guess to pivot to a couple other questions, if you're down, is P4P is something that's been really big throughout multiple industries, something that people have implemented.
• 58:19
  What has been your best way of implementing that?
• 58:20
  Do you have a software?
• 58:22
  How do you break things down?
• 58:23
  What's maybe a good way to dumb it down for something that's not super familiar with P4P?
• 58:29
  Yeah, is this for your technicians not understanding it, or have you just not really explored it too much?
• 58:36
  Yeah, so we've implemented pay-for-performance in a minor way.
• 58:42
  We do once-a-month evals with each guy on the team.
• 58:47
  If they score an A, then they get their full incentive.
• 58:50
  If they had some issues where they had a callback or they showed up late or they weren't uniformed and they're at a B, then it'll impact their performance.
• 58:58
  So there's
• 58:58
  It's scaled on like, I have to look back at there's like safety, performance, efficiency, professionalism, and a bunch of these different things that it's all weighed in.
• 59:06
  And so depending how they do in safety and all those different things, and depending on their score, you know, they may or may not get their full incentive that month.
• 59:14
  And our goal is to, you know, for everybody to get their full incentive.
• 59:17
  And if they're not, then we need to sit down and say, hey.
• 59:19
  are they really the right fit for this, you know, our company, their 9A player, their B.
• 59:23
  You might have a B that's, you know, an apprentice that's first starting off, but if they don't work their way up 10As, then, you know, maybe a couple months, you know, then maybe they're not the right fit for the company.
• 59:33
  But we've done some minor, you know,
• 59:36
  pay for performance type things, but really looking to dial that in, get more strategic with it.
• 59:41
  I think it might require maybe a software that tracks the numbers, the metrics, analytics, you name it.
• 59:47
  And wasn't sure how we walk before we run on the pay for performance stuff.
• 59:53
  It seems a little bit complex in how it's done and wasn't sure how do we better introduce it outside of just doing the one month eval.
• 1:00:03
  Yeah.
• 1:00:03
  It's like the way you're doing it right now is theoretically pay for performance.
• 1:00:07
  The performances you've just layered in other elements of quality, professionalism, uniforms, attendance.
• 1:00:13
  You've kind of bundled a lot of things into what performance is.
• 1:00:16
  P4P in how we do it and like p4psoftware.com is strictly looking at their efficiency.
• 1:00:23
  Meaning if you did good work and you did it fast and the customer's happy, you make more money.
• 1:00:27
  Now there's yellow slips, but yellow slips inherently mean they're going and fixing the job without getting paid for it.
• 1:00:33
  So it brings their dollars they earn down.
• 1:00:36
  But what you're doing right now, the reason I did not use this path when I wanted to do P4P, the way you do it is it's too...
• 1:00:45
  If you asked your guys right now, how much did you make on P4P or how much did you make on pay for performance last month?
• 1:00:51
  Or are you going to make it this month?
• 1:00:54
  It'd be hard for them to quantify when there's all these variables.
• 1:00:57
  And it's hard for them to change behavior because there's so many things that are impacting it.
• 1:01:01
  My attendance, my uniform, my professionalism, my safety, all of these things.
• 1:01:05
  And those things are all important.
• 1:01:08
  The thing is, when you make it one number and one thing they're getting tracked on, it's easier for them to wrap their head around.
• 1:01:14
  For example, when I say you get 30% of every dollar you make for the business, and they know that today they made $1,000, they know today they made $300 of base pay.
• 1:01:25
  I'm sorry, $300 on P4P.
• 1:01:26
  And they know that their base pay would usually be, let's just call it 20 bucks an hour, $200.
• 1:01:31
  So they made an extra $100 today because they worked their butt off.
• 1:01:36
  And usually the closer you can get compensation to performance and the reward to performance, the faster that feedback loop is, the more reinforcing of the behavior.
• 1:01:50
  And so if you're waiting a whole month to dock someone for a tardy that happened 25 days ago, they forgot about them being late.
• 1:01:58
  They forgot about that safety breach.
• 1:01:59
  They forgot about that customer.
• 1:02:00
  Oh.
• 1:02:01
  Whereas when every single day they get a report of how much they made on base pay versus P2P and what that difference was, that starts to really motivate them.
• 1:02:08
  And so the only way, the only real difference is we only look at efficiency score and the quality element is brought into with yellow slips.
• 1:02:19
  That's a callback.
• 1:02:21
  As well as the fact that eventually if you get enough yellow slips, you get kicked off the team.
• 1:02:25
  And so it's more quantifiable and more measurable for them versus more of an ambiguity around quality and all these other factors that might tie into this grade that again, feels very arbitrary if I'm an employee versus I know that today that because I worked hard, I made an extra 80 bucks.
• 1:02:43
  This week I made an extra 650 bucks because I kicked butt.
• 1:02:46
  Okay, I hit base pay last week because I had a yellow slip, I had to go back and fix the job for half the day, ruin my base pay, ruin my P4P for the week.
• 1:02:54
  Like that close pipe feedback loop is the advantage of using it and in a more singular way around efficiency.
• 1:03:02
  That was awesome.
• 1:03:03
  So yeah, it sounds like, yeah, we might be doing 10 things.
• 1:03:06
  You guys focused it on one thing and you said like, you know, example, 30% of $1 and you guys are just, you guys are strictly focusing on efficiency and with, you know, with the exception of some quality with the yellow slips.
• 1:03:19
  And that's all you guys track.
• 1:03:20
  And so how do you guys track it and, you know, get all those numbers together on a daily basis through a software then?
• 1:03:28
  Yeah, homework syncs up with P4P software.
• 1:03:30
  So it brings in their revenue, brings in their hourly rate, their clock in times.
• 1:03:34
  They can see live while they're completing their jobs throughout the day on a thermometer of like,
• 1:03:39
  as they complete jobs, it fills in how much they're making per hour.
• 1:03:42
  So they start to notice, oh, like I complete my first few jobs of the day.
• 1:03:46
  I'm making like, okay money.
• 1:03:48
  But it's when I'm completing jobs at the end of the day, my hourly rate starts jumping up because I've been way more efficient with less drive time.
• 1:03:56
  And so they start thinking more like a business owner.
• 1:03:59
  They start getting into their truck and like, oh man, I only have to do these six jobs and then I'm going to make X amount today.
• 1:04:04
  Fantastic.
• 1:04:04
  Let's go.
• 1:04:05
  Like it just gets more of a mindset of an owner.
• 1:04:08
  And that is when you get in a truck, you know exactly how many jobs, you know how much revenue you're going to make, you know, which job you make more money on.
• 1:04:15
  You're constantly looking for areas to improve.
• 1:04:18
  the route, you're looking for areas to upsell the customer, get reviews.
• 1:04:23
  And so you bake those things into P4P.
• 1:04:25
  So for example, if they get an upsell, 50 bucks, if they get a Google review, 50 bucks, you start just baking that into P4P.
• 1:04:32
  So it's like, hey, number one, you got to be efficient.
• 1:04:35
  And then we're going to make sure that you are absolutely doing a good quality job.
• 1:04:38
  If you don't get docked and or you're going to lose your job after X amount of yellow slips per month.
• 1:04:44
  All right.
• 1:04:45
  So if you have a threshold of number of mistakes or damage cases that happen, you can just like that person you want out of the team.
• 1:04:52
  And honestly, your team will not want that person around because it's impacting their paycheck.
• 1:04:57
  that what you're currently doing is very individualized, which is like, if you show up on time, if you get your uniform, and so what this can cause is low performers to fly under the radar, but because they're doing all these other things that you've baked into the system, they kind of skate by.
• 1:05:11
  When you just say, hey, you guys gotta be efficient, and now, guess what?
• 1:05:17
  My paycheck is affected by someone else's performance.
• 1:05:20
  So I'm gonna very quickly rat out and smoke out low performers if it's affecting my paycheck because you're slacking off all day long.
• 1:05:27
  That makes sense.
• 1:05:27
  And what's the P4P software?
• 1:05:29
  Is there a name for it?
• 1:05:30
  Is that all?
• 1:05:31
  Yeah, just P4Psoftware.com.
• 1:05:32
  And then on there, there's a free course and you can try it out for a month for free.
• 1:05:36
  So you could just like watch the course.
• 1:05:39
  It'll answer a lot of little questions like what about shop time?
• 1:05:42
  What about maintenance?
• 1:05:43
  What about if someone else has to go back and fix someone's mistake?
• 1:05:46
  All that gets answered in the course, it's free.
• 1:05:48
  And then you get a free month of using the software.
• 1:05:50
  And I do, even if you don't implement it right away, just use that month to run the numbers and see what's going on in the business.
• 1:05:57
  Because you'll really quickly understand that like, oh, so-and-so is getting paid the same amount as someone else, but making twice as much money for the business.
• 1:06:04
  And so just running the numbers in P4P, a lot of times we'll start showing a lot of really cool stuff around efficiencies of the crew.
• 1:06:11
  And do your franchise use HomeWorks or are they required to?
• 1:06:15
  Do all of them use it?
• 1:06:16
  How does that work?
• 1:06:17
  HomeWorks with the P4P software.
• 1:06:20
  They're not required to use HomeWorks, but Command Center only uses HomeWorks because we have to have one system.
• 1:06:26
  And so pretty much all of them use it.
• 1:06:28
  But P4P software, that was actually built originally for Augusta.
• 1:06:32
  And so they get all access to that for free.
• 1:06:35
  But again, you get the first month free.
• 1:06:37
  I would try it out, see if it's even working.
• 1:06:39
  A lot of times, if you have really simple services, you can just take principles of P4P and probably make it inside an Excel spreadsheet.
• 1:06:46
  It's where it gets complicated is when you have like three people on a crew, one person left halfway throughout the day and started a one-time project.
• 1:06:54
  And then like that's when having the sync with HomeWorks is really nice because it just knows where the employees are at, how much revenue they made.
• 1:07:01
  It starts to just pull that data in.
• 1:07:04
  But if you're really simple and you keep your crews completely on the same route all the time, there's no mixing and matching, you might be able to get away with just doing spreadsheets.
• 1:07:12
  And I talk about that in the course.
• 1:07:13
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:07:15
  um so i guess the reason why i'm asking these questions is we're currently using jobber um i don't know if jobber thinks with p4p software initially we talked about hey one large location at 10 mil but if the if the franchise you know steps to get to the target of 50 locations is hey you need to get to a three million location if homeworks can get us to three million you know maybe it does make sense to implement homeworks with
• 1:07:38
  P4P software to get us to, you know, the 3 million and then, you know, build locations from them.
• 1:07:43
  So that's kind of trying to discern, you know, what's the best software to have to implement the P4P and to, you know, create the foundation ultimately grow off of.
• 1:07:52
  And so, yeah, that's why I was asking, you know, what are the different franchises that are they using the homeworks, you know, and all that kind of stuff.
• 1:07:57
  Yeah, and I wouldn't switch over my CRM, which is, I think, the most important software for the business.
• 1:08:04
  I wouldn't switch that over just one thing.
• 1:08:07
  But if you did P4P, and then you'd be able to calculate, okay, how much time am I spending every day looking through my budget hours, which I think in Jobber you have to use custom fields to be able to put your budget hours, then just add those up at the end of each day.
• 1:08:21
  There's a manual test, but honestly, it's going to take you maybe one minute per day per employee.
• 1:08:27
  And so is that really worth switching software?
• 1:08:29
  I don't think at the beginning, but as you begin to scale, maybe it does, but I wouldn't switch over just that one thing.
• 1:08:35
  Like there should be other reasons as to why you're switching a CRM.
• 1:08:37
  It's just so important for the business.
• 1:08:40
  I really appreciate your honesty with that.
• 1:08:42
  I definitely would love to hear more about that and, you know, homeworks and maybe how you built that at a later date.
• 1:08:48
  There's a basic question that came to mind with checks and credit cards.
• 1:08:53
  Obviously credit cards is ideal.
• 1:08:54
  You know, it automatically...
• 1:08:55
  enters into the system.
• 1:08:56
  You don't have to have someone enter it.
• 1:08:57
  You get payment quickly, but you have to pay that processing fee of maybe 3%.
• 1:09:02
  And sometimes for larger jobs, that can be a turnoff for people.
• 1:09:05
  And I wasn't sure if you guys completely nixed the idea of checks and cash and you guys only do ACH and card.
• 1:09:13
  I wasn't sure how you guys handled processing.
• 1:09:16
  And if you have any recommendations on...
• 1:09:18
  hey, get rid of checks or keep them.
• 1:09:20
  Because that hasn't been a thing for sales in the past.
• 1:09:22
  Like, hey, here's what our price is, but hey, and we default to card.
• 1:09:28
  We're like, hey, if someone's really trying to push us or hey, we got a competitor, this and that, our way of being able to work with them is, hey, what if we take out a process and see if you pay by check, save you X amount of dollars?
• 1:09:39
  And they're like, I appreciate that they're trying to work for me, let's do that.
• 1:09:42
  And so then we've been defaulting to check and I'm not a big fan of the check.
• 1:09:46
  I wasn't sure your thoughts.
• 1:09:47
  I'm not a huge fan of check either because it puts more stress on my admin team.
• 1:09:51
  And I have to create a whole system around taking things to the bank and like getting the mail.
• 1:09:55
  I also take way longer to get my money.
• 1:09:58
  So instead of two days, it takes me two weeks, three weeks, like cashflow starts getting hurt.
• 1:10:02
  So like personally, I only want credit cards.
• 1:10:06
  In terms of the hit, you can check a box and pass that fee along if you want to to the customer.
• 1:10:11
  I don't do that.
• 1:10:13
  Other owners do and they have no problem.
• 1:10:14
  They have literally no one bats an eye.
• 1:10:17
  I just personally look at it as a more of a long-term brand play.
• 1:10:20
  I don't want that little mark against me.
• 1:10:23
  I just want to cover it.
• 1:10:24
  I'm like, it's the easiest possible for people to give me money.
• 1:10:28
  And so I eat the fee and I'd rather raise my prices by 5% or 10% on the next increase than trying to get 2% or 3%.
• 1:10:35
  But I know a lot of owners check that box in HomeWorks and get no cancellations and people just roll with it.
• 1:10:42
  So it's a matter of just like, it's more of a brand play.
• 1:10:45
  It's like, are you going to charge fuel surcharges?
• 1:10:48
  Are you going to charge credit card processing fees?
• 1:10:50
  Are you going to start nickel and diming the customer or just have a premium product that makes it really easy for them to check out?
• 1:10:56
  You put a card on file, you never think about it again.
• 1:10:58
  And personally, that's the way I've gone, but it's not like there are hundreds, if not thousands of owners inside HomeWorks that check one box.
• 1:11:06
  And as soon as someone puts a card on file, it's charging 2.9%.
• 1:11:10
  And if you want to do that, that's fine.