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As soon as the customer that gave me money, I'm reviewing them, immediately, everyone's on the side of the customer.
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That's why everyone just assumes these reviews are correct and they're not, they're scams.
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It's the guy or gal that posts a one-star review and then basically they're like, hey, give me what I want, I'll take it down.
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So they post a one-star review and they use this on you all the time, you're a hostage.
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Because if you want to go by $350,000, now you're negative in terms of cash flow for two months.
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Can you actually even sustain that kind of growth for this upcoming year?
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Or do you run out of cash and have a profitable, fast-growing business that runs out of money, goes bankrupt?
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100 clients will drive $300,000 in revenue, but you're not selling them all on January 1st.
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You're selling a lot of them in May.
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So that means you're only going to get just over half the revenue for the year, theoretically.
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So you need way more than 100 clients.
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It's all the things that could break in a process.
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What if we lost a person?
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What if we have crew issues?
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What if we don't have enough people for the phones?
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What if we lose our one and only sales guy?
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Have you basically one day say, Hey, we're six weeks booked out on whatever, irrigation, or three months booked out on landscape.
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Just stop taking sales.
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Stop taking it or turn off the marketing.
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That stuff kills people.
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Welcome back, everyone, to the podcast.
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Jonathan Potosianic, Mike Andes here.
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Today we're going to be talking about two different topics.
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We're going to first talk about customers that are bad and how we want to rate them and show the world why they're bad.
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And then we're going to pivot to something more in your business, what you can do this offseason.
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to prepare for next spring rush a lot of times you have so many things that are going on throughout your busy season like i will get that to that one day but what are the actual things you can do this off season to prepare for next year and make sure that 2027 is a landmark year for you and your business but first because jonathan hijacked the docket he's like i gotta talk about this i've been venting i've been thinking about this for years i just i want a place to vent he's been talking to philip about it so
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The basic concept is this.
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We have Yelp, we have Angie, we have all these services, Google reviews that rate us as contractors.
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But when you look at Uber, Airbnb, VRBO, they all allow you to rate the host and the person that shows up is the person driving, et cetera.
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So there's no two-way action in the home service industry.
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Jonathan, he's been looking through bad reviews recently.
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He's been talking to Phillips Jaded.
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Oh, I'm back involved in the business, so yeah.
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Yeah.
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And now he's considering taking all the chops of software and just hijacking every homeowner possible to be able to make sure that we keep them accountable.
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these Karens and Kens around the world, they're going to write bad reviews, try to get us out of our deposits, not pay their bills.
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So Jonathan, take it away.
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I set the platform.
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Tell us about this huge problem in your life and what you're doing to fix it.
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Well, I mean, I got to say, since I've been back involved in the business, I'm hyper aware of all this stuff because I watch it.
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So then it leads to me and Philip chatting about this same conversation over and over again and moaning and groaning to each other.
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And so last night I dropped...
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in the docket this idea to talk about in the future.
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And then like five minutes later, I don't know if you would have noticed, I dropped it up top and then I moved it to the very bottom as I thought about it.
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I was like, we don't really need to talk about this right now.
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And then Mike texts me today.
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It's like, hey, let's talk about this.
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Here's the basic problem.
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And I have an idea for it, but I just don't know how it would go.
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And I really shouldn't do this.
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I keep getting myself distracted with things that really I shouldn't spend a minute of time on.
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It's for the people.
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This one's for the people.
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This is me giving back.
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That's right.
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Exactly.
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Exactly.
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So it's like, I got to imagine that anybody that's been in business for a while has felt this.
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It's the guy or gal that posts a one-star review.
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And then basically like, hey, give me what I want.
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I'll take it down.
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They take it down.
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And then they stay your client.
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And then five months from now, they want something else.
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So they post a one-star review and they use this on you all the time.
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You're a hostage or the number of...
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issues we deal with where people are flat out lying.
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Like it's a full on scam.
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Yeah.
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It is.
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We've got several going right now that are full on.
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Really?
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Oh man.
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Oh, big ones.
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What happens in Augusta Cloud is because once they find out after like you get a Karen that's calling all the time, they figure out, okay, this is a call center.
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Like they pit them like us against the owners or like they'll tell the owner, someone said this on the phone and like, look, we can go back and see the recording.
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We never said that.
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Or you never said that.
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Anyways, go ahead.
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Yeah, Phillips has mentioned that because there are some things that people will do where you don't have a picture or a video, so you can't prove it's not time stamped.
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But there are things like if it's said on the phone, there's a variety of things you can catch people on.
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And one thing that Phillips said to me, because I'm not out in the field dealing with this, but Phillip has made the point that sometimes what happens is when we catch people, they're like, yeah, well, I tried.
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And it's like, no remorse for the scam that they were just trying to pull on us.
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It's like, why not?
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I tried.
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It didn't work, but we'll just continue on.
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Then he wants to stay client.
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I saw it in a Reddit forum.
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I was just going to give it a shot.
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I thought maybe I could get a free landscape in my backyard.
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But anyway, I tried.
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Anyway, so it just keeps happening.
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Now, to be fair on this particular issue, it's like all issues in the business.
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When you actually look at the data and say, how often does it happen as compared to how big my business is or how fast we're growing?
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It's like, okay, we should just ignore this.
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But it's such a frustrating personal thing.
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This one really rises to the top when Philip and I are talking because you're getting scammed.
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Yeah.
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We do mess up.
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We do deserve some not great reviews sometimes.
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We readily admit that.
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I'm talking about the stuff where you feel like you're being scammed.
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So anyway, we've just talked over the years, probably for two years now, off and on about this, but really this year quite a bit.
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It's like, there needs to be a system that you can...
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In our system, we can flag people that we will never take back as a client.
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But I've got so many friends that are all my competitors in the local market.
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Like we need a shared list.
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So if my friend, like at their company,
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fires this client, I'd love to know because they're going to call my company next and try to sign up with us.
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And so I want to not take them.
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And so that's one idea.
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And the other one is like, why in the world is there not...
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It's probably because it would never work with...
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The public wouldn't go for this.
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But why in the world is there not a product where we can review the customer to your opening?
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Like that...
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It just, this whole review thing just feels, anyway, I'm rambling, but this whole review thing feels so scammy sometimes and so frustrating, and there's no way to really fight these things.
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Right.
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You're gonna get a lot of support for this.
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I have seen multiple people try to build this.
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Um, have you?
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Okay.
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See that I've looked, I've wondered if anybody has ever tried it.
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Nothing's gotten traction.
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Everybody's got to feel it.
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Oh yeah.
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I guarantee you in the comments, there's gonna be five examples of people like, I built this here it is.
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Yeah.
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Okay.
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The other thing is I think we need to expand the aperture, right?
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I don't think this is just a home service issue.
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I think this is true.
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No, it's absolutely not.
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Restaurants, hotels.
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Oh, for sure.
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Like this, we can expand this, you know?
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We can become the Angie's List for the customer.
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But now you gotta see what their laundry person says, what their cleaning company says, what the local bakery says about them.
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You know, the people, when you see the one star view, click on their profile, and all they leave is one star views.
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You're like, I think this person deserves a one star.
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Exactly, yeah, I just,
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There's got to be some way to fight back on this stuff.
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Like it's just... And so, yeah, the reason this started was I think I want to take this a step further here in a second and just talk about a little bit of advice and brainstorm for just a moment before we jump into the real topic today.
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But I was curious if you'd ever seen a product out there.
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I do remember that when I started CityTurf, there was a company in my market.
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Their name was Just Mowing.
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And I believe they had a list of people that they, that was public that they considered bad clients.
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I'm almost sure that's correct.
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It's like the barber.
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I have this like faint memory.
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At my barber they have this like, if you show up late, you put your name up on the board.
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If you don't, if you no show, it goes in this different box and you gotta pay $20 to get it erased off the board.
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So you just have this list of bad customers on the board.
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But okay, so here's the problem.
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As I'm thinking through it, you're only helping your competition.
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And unfortunately, home services or a lot of the... You're only helping the people in your local market if you tell them don't use this... Don't do business with this customer.
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Most people are very happy that their competitor gets their worst client.
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They just make sure they internally document.
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So the problem I see is this... Like, why does this not spread?
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Because I've seen these built before.
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They don't spread because the only reason you would tell
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put that in a database is to prevent your local competitors from using that, having that customer.
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And most people don't want their competitors to win.
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I'll have a city turf.
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We'll put 11,822 people in the list.
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No, but we'll put all our good customers on there.
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So every time somebody, one of our competitors goes back, not arresting a memo.
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That's smart.
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You see reverse psychology.
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Now we're talking.
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Oh, that's awesome.
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Well, that's a problem with any sort of marketplace is you have to have the two sides.
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Like you could immediately have thousands of people on the contractor side, but there's no database.
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there's not any value to sign up that's that's yeah you would need the the the funding of uber to make this work yeah yeah i had i had thought well maybe just something with my local you know competitors that that's how facebook started just harvard just saying oh yeah true yeah just my local competitors and i i can picture a couple of my friends right now they'd be like oh yeah i'd be all in on that we do this
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But you're right.
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As soon as you broaden that out, it would start getting gamed.
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And then also you can imagine like the same people that are crazy on Google.
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Well, some of the contractors are crazy too.
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So they'd be blaming consumers for stuff that's not even there.
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It'd go both ways.
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It's a mess that maybe there's no resolution to, but it sure feels one-sided right now.
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Yeah, customers should have to respond back to their views.
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You know, you go back there as a homeowner, like, no, that didn't happen.
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That's awesome.
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Yeah.
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All right.
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Let's move on to something more valuable for everyone that wanted to humor us.
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But we do believe that given the success of JP in software, I think this is a give back moment.
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It's one of those moments where we extract as much as possible from the people that have succeeded.
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And in this case, I think that time well spent if you built this.
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That's the other part.
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If you built this, see, I feel like you could get publicity for this.
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Like you could get free PR because you could get the, you could get people.
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What I've wondered is would people get upset about this?
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Like, would people feel like it's wrong for them to get reviewed?
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Like it's okay for you, us to review your business, but the idea that you would review me back, like, would you get people up in arms about a service like this?
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So here's my philosophy on this.
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You can always give your opinion on the person that you're giving money to.
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But very rarely does this work logic like in our psychology.
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If I'm giving you money that you can review me.
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Oh, yeah.
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If wait, if I'm giving you money, yeah, you can review the person.
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Yeah.
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But as soon as as soon as the customer that gave me money, I'm reviewing them immediately like everyone's on the side of the customer.
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That's why everyone assumes these reviews are correct.
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And they're not their scams.
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Yeah.
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So the other thing I always have to remind myself of is people don't live in our businesses.
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So they don't understand the problem.
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They just like, it's kind of like talking to people about how challenging it is to find labor.
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In my argument, I don't want to go down the short, just how hard it is to find labor.
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And so people don't understand how hard it is to find labor when you talk or team members, when you talk to somebody that's not in these businesses.
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And or the parent that wants the friend, it's like, hey, can my kid work at your company for the summer?
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No, we're not gonna train your kid to work hard and not play video games all day and not be lazy.
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Like that's not gonna be our joke.
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Now you can review parents.
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There you go.
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That's another part of the application.
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Let's go.
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All right.
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That's enough of my tangent.
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Okay, cool.
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Let's move on the second topic.
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I want to go over the real topic.
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Yeah.
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The what we can do in the off season as home service business owners, and ideally come up with some real tangible solutions that for most of us during November to February, approximately, especially in North America, um,
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that allows us to be able to improve the business.
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And so my goal here is that both of us offer two strategies.
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We'll go back and forth of real things that you can do now in preparation of the off-season or during the off-season to make sure that 2027 is a great year for your business.
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So Jonathan, go ahead and tee it up with one of your first ideas.
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Okay, so...
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I'm bringing two to the conversation and the two are directly related to each other.
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Oh, man, I have a bad feeling we're going to overlap a bunch.
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I was like, maybe on this one, I should let him know what I'm going to talk about.
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But let's see.
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Go ahead.
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We'll see where it goes.
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All right.
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So the best way I know to kind of start this and tell me if I'm going to step on whatever you're going to say.
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But it's this it's it's initially.
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I'll call it the plan.
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Is this going anywhere in the direction of what you're going to talk about?
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Go ahead.
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Okay.
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All right.
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So...
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I think what we do, what I've done, I suspect a lot of us do this, is we sort of have a plan for the next year.
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And my belief is most of us, our plan is based around revenue.
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You'll, of course, say, hey, I want to fix this or I want to get a new truck or I want to replace this person.
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I need to hire another person.
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That's part of it.
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But if you think about the way most people think about what would make a better next year, it's usually I want to grow my business by X.
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I want to make more money.
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It's something revenue related.
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And so most of us technically have a plan.
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I want to grow my revenue by 100 grand.
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I want to grow it by a million.
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I want to grow it by 20%.
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That's sort of our plan.
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And then we think about the next step.
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And the next step is that, okay, for me to do that, I need to write some emails and sell some more stuff to my clients.
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And this is what I think I'll sell.
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And I need to...
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I've heard Mike talking about Facebook.
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I need to do Facebook.
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And I was listening to this other podcast.
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And I really should start doing LSA or spending more on LSA.
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That's kind of the plan.
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We go a little further than that.
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Also, we'll pull into the plan.
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Hey, I need to recreate some SOPs and some processes.
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We'll pull that in there.
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And that's kind of... You go a little more than that, but sort of the plan.
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And so where I want to take this is that...
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the plan actually takes quite a bit of work.
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And it's not how I lived for a good part of my career.
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Like we would plan, but the way I'm about to talk about is not how I did it for many, many, many, many years.
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And the way I'm going to talk about is what I think actually works.
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Okay.
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And so the gist of the idea is that
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In your off-season here, when you can get a clear mind, you dedicate some very focused time to trying to figure out what is it that I want.
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I'm taking this a different direction than what you've probably normally heard.
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And what I mean by that is, we'll go back to the revenue example.
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So the revenue example is, I want to grow my business by $400,000 in revenue this year.
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Okay, great.
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That's a great starting place.
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We'll just start with that.
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That's the revenue number.
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All right, so, and you kind of want to, where I'm going with the starting point is you kind of want to do a brain dump and just think about all the things I want to improve, but I know that one of your things is going to be the revenue.
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So I'm just going to use revenue as my example here.
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I understand there will be other things.
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Okay.
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So then the next thing that comes from that, which will kind of get into my second point a little bit later, but I'm not going to go too deep with this here, is, okay, the next thing that needs to be on my list is what broke this year?
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So what what in it's like revenue, I know it's going to be on your list.
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The next thing is what broke this year?
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So what were the things we were frustrated about?
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You know, think about spring, think about through the year, just think about all the things that sort of went wrong.
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And I would suggest you get those down.
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You could talk to Claude or ChatGPT and just have it make a list for you.
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You could write it in a document.
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It doesn't matter, but I want you to do a brain dump of the things I want to accomplish, my goals, revenue being one.
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And then next, what broke?
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What went wrong?
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What were we frustrated about?
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Okay.
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So if one of the goals is revenue, then...
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one thing that's absolutely imperative is that you then think about, okay, knowing what broke last year.
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Let's put some numbers to it.
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Let's say we are a million dollars this year and our goal is we want to do 1.35 million next year.
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If I were to add another 350 revenue to the business, and let's think specifically about spring, or maybe another way to do this, think about your worst week last year.
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And now you're layering in, taking on all those new clients, getting them up and running and serve them.
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What would break?
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So you kind of think about what broke last year.
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But now if we pile on more revenue, just trying to imagine this, what's going to break?
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Yeah.
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Okay?
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So we think through that.
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So that starts to form what I'm going to call your plan.
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And the plan is, we want to get this amount of revenue.
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So we got to get this growth.
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And the plan is also, these are the things that could go wrong.
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They went wrong last year and they could go wrong again this year.
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And they could go wrong in an even bigger way as we add more revenue to this business.
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And that starts to kind of block out the plan of, we need to do this.
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We need to do that.
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It starts to make that list.
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Okay?
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And then...
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So you sort of have on your plan your biggest offenders and your big opportunity, which is the revenue.
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And then that needs to get broken down into steps.
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And the steps are what, in my opinion, makes the plan reality and it exposes the weakness in the plan.
332
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Case in point, I'm sure everybody's done this.
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I sure have.
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It's like, it's easy to say, well, next year I'm gonna do this thing and this thing and this.
335
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I'm gonna get all these things done over the winter and we're gonna grow this much next year.
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We're basically just making stuff up and it feels good.
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And we're way overly optimistic because we're exhausted coming out of the year.
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So we wanna take a little bit of a break.
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Like there's just a lot of stuff
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happens and we don't get even half of our list done.
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I suspect that happens to a lot of people.
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And so this is why I think this brain dump, this plan, breaking the plan into steps is really, really important.
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And I feel that as I've moved this direction over the years, we have more often than not lived in reality.
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And that's really, really important to getting the outcome that you want.
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So if you've listened to many of our episodes, if you think about this conversation or this thing you've heard about from me for a while, which is the marketing calendar and my task list, we've talked about it several times.
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That's exactly what I'm doing.
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So whenever we say marketing calendar, you might hear it as...
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It's just a calendar saying this thing needs to get emailed, this thing needs to get printed and mailed, this thing needs, you know, they need to change the, they need to look at analytics in Google and maybe change some of the copy and the ads.
349
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Like, that's, those are the kinds of things that you might picture go on a marketing calendar.
350
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And that is all true.
351
00:20:10.467 --> 00:20:13.649
But the marketing calendar does way more than that.
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The marketing calendar says on February 15th, this thing has to go out the door and drop.
353
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So that means 60 days in advance or whatever period is required, we have to have done the work to be ready to ship that thing on February 15th.
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It's the thing that says, hey, we need to do an audit of our marketing at the end of the first quarter and an audit again at the second.
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It defines the things we do as a business and it defines when they have to get done, both when they deliver and when we need to start working on them.
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That's a plan.
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And it's not just a plan for me.
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It's not just a plan for the business.
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It's a plan for the people inside the organization that I need to...
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I need to give them enough information so they can just run and perform without constantly asking me what to do or what's next.
361
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And then you also heard me talk about this task list.
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So if I say we want to drive X amount of additional revenue next year, it's all the things we need to do.
363
00:21:18.096 --> 00:21:19.036
There's a lot to say here.
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Are we going to grow the business through acquisition?
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Meaning, are we going to get new clients?
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Are we going to grow the business through expansion?
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Meaning, we sell more to our existing clients?
368
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Are we going to grow the business through reactivating old clients?
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Like people that canceled, maybe we're going to try to bring them back.
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Are we going to reactivate old leads we never closed?
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Are we going to try to get them to buy?
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That's four different ways right there I can grow revenue.
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And a fifth is, are we going to focus on things that drive down churn?
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All five of those things grow revenue in the business.
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So part of the plan is, where are we going to get our growth from?
376
00:21:52.820 --> 00:21:58.765
If I want 400,000 in growth this year, I could get maybe 150 from acquisition, new clients.
377
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I could get 100 from expansion, selling more to existing clients.
378
00:22:02.968 --> 00:22:05.070
I could get 50 by losing fewer clients.
379
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Where am I going to get this growth?
380
00:22:06.531 --> 00:22:07.311
That's the plan.
381
00:22:08.170 --> 00:22:24.241
And then once I know that, it's like, okay, well, if we need 100 grand from acquisition, and I know that I convert 50% of all my leads, and I know that a client is worth 2000 bucks a year, I can back in and say, I need whatever 200 leads.
382
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Or I can back into that math.
383
00:22:27.202 --> 00:22:31.163
Well, if I need 200 leads, then that's like, I need this many door hangers going out.
384
00:22:31.283 --> 00:22:35.284
I need to be spending this much on LSA or you're possibly guessing.
385
00:22:35.304 --> 00:22:39.025
You don't, you know, we don't always know, but it starts to inform an actual plan.
386
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That's a plan.
387
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A plan is this is the goal.
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I'm going to break it into steps.
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I'm going to back into what I need.
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It's like,
391
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How are we going to attract people to the business?
392
00:22:49.296 --> 00:22:51.517
What are the different marketing channels we're going to use?
393
00:22:52.118 --> 00:22:53.718
How many leads do we need to get?
394
00:22:54.539 --> 00:22:55.760
Qualified leads.
395
00:22:55.780 --> 00:22:59.782
We're looking at, in the past, as I said, how many people are generally converting.
396
00:23:00.062 --> 00:23:01.523
We're thinking about deadlines.
397
00:23:01.543 --> 00:23:04.044
We're thinking about the best time of year to do this marketing.
398
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We're thinking about who on the team is going to do what.
399
00:23:07.954 --> 00:23:11.917
We're thinking about, well, now that I've made my plan, I've broken the tasks, this is insane.
400
00:23:11.977 --> 00:23:12.697
I can only do...
401
00:23:12.917 --> 00:23:13.718
I got 90 things.
402
00:23:13.738 --> 00:23:14.718
I could probably do nine.
403
00:23:15.479 --> 00:23:19.241
So I'm going to have to figure out how to get my 100 in revenue from a few things.
404
00:23:19.281 --> 00:23:20.602
So what is the real priority?
405
00:23:20.622 --> 00:23:22.543
Because I can't do all these different ideas.
406
00:23:22.563 --> 00:23:23.283
I can only do a few.
407
00:23:23.343 --> 00:23:24.424
Can I get my 100 grand?
408
00:23:24.784 --> 00:23:29.447
If I can't, and I can't do all these things, then my 350 or 400, I want to go to the business.
409
00:23:29.487 --> 00:23:30.427
It's not even realistic.
410
00:23:30.467 --> 00:23:32.208
So that should modify the plan.
411
00:23:35.251 --> 00:23:39.942
of being, of really dedicating some time and not...
412
00:23:41.253 --> 00:23:49.678
I feel like what we often do, again, I always point at myself when I say this kind of stuff, is it feels good to be busy because it feels proactive.
413
00:23:50.138 --> 00:23:59.463
And sometimes I think as leaders and owners, we can feel guilty doing this kind of work because we don't feel like we're doing anything.
414
00:23:59.483 --> 00:24:02.825
But this is the most important work in the business.
415
00:24:03.125 --> 00:24:04.406
So that's why you have to do it.
416
00:24:04.426 --> 00:24:04.987
Okay.
417
00:24:05.167 --> 00:24:07.288
And also, this is what...
418
00:24:08.489 --> 00:24:10.772
If you set this up right, this is how you delegate.
419
00:24:11.332 --> 00:24:14.836
And this is how you get the team clear on where we're going.
420
00:24:15.797 --> 00:24:19.421
And you, again, get people marching in the right direction.
421
00:24:19.922 --> 00:24:23.186
And you give them absolute clarity on what they need to be working on.
422
00:24:24.220 --> 00:24:25.561
And so I think I'll pause there.
423
00:24:25.581 --> 00:24:28.363
That's a lot, but we can kind of volley back and forth.
424
00:24:28.383 --> 00:24:30.504
But this plan, I think, is your starting point.
425
00:24:30.544 --> 00:24:36.108
And it doesn't feel as big and as exciting as training and creating processes.
426
00:24:36.148 --> 00:24:37.409
And I'm not raising prices.
427
00:24:37.429 --> 00:24:38.910
I'm not saying you shouldn't do any of these things.
428
00:24:38.930 --> 00:24:42.732
But I'm telling you, based on my experience, this is the top level thing.
429
00:24:42.752 --> 00:24:48.596
And once that plan is nailed down, then there's a simplicity to know that now we just go into execution mode for the year.
430
00:24:49.417 --> 00:24:50.998
And we're just going to execute the plan.
431
00:24:51.733 --> 00:24:52.193
Yeah, that's great.
432
00:24:52.213 --> 00:24:52.773
I'll pause there.
433
00:24:52.833 --> 00:24:53.354
That's excellent.
434
00:24:53.374 --> 00:24:58.616
This past year, we saw a huge gap for our owners of the planning aspect.
435
00:24:58.656 --> 00:25:01.076
And so we actually, we have a whole day.
436
00:25:01.257 --> 00:25:05.278
It's our national holiday in Augusta nation and it's called projection day.
437
00:25:05.378 --> 00:25:06.318
It's in February.
438
00:25:06.438 --> 00:25:09.940
We take the entire day and everyone goes live and creates their projections.
439
00:25:10.720 --> 00:25:30.814
and one thing if someone's struggling with the breakdown that really helped with our owners and that we do is we take a p l uh and if you export it from quickbooks as an excel document you have every single item or expense item of in revenue item of the p l and then you have every single month so you show all 12 months
440
00:25:31.574 --> 00:25:34.115
And then, say, okay, well, I want to grow revenue by 350,000.
441
00:25:34.455 --> 00:25:35.395
Okay, great.
442
00:25:35.415 --> 00:25:41.776
You have identified one excelled, you know, square over here, one cell of how much revenue you want to grow by.
443
00:25:42.116 --> 00:25:45.117
Okay, well, where, which months is that revenue growth going to come in?
444
00:25:45.677 --> 00:25:48.298
Because if you're doing expansion, it's going to look very different than acquisition.
445
00:25:48.758 --> 00:25:53.119
So, like, then I work backwards from the end of the year, backwards throughout each month.
446
00:25:53.279 --> 00:25:54.939
Where is that revenue actually coming up?
447
00:25:55.440 --> 00:25:57.860
And then how does that impact every line below it?
448
00:25:58.520 --> 00:26:00.581
Most of us are pretty decent, like, I want to grow by 350,000.
449
00:26:02.221 --> 00:26:05.102
most of us are not great at figuring out, okay, where that revenue is going to come in the year.
450
00:26:05.502 --> 00:26:13.744
And then even fewer of us are good at expecting where is that going to impact my P&L and my cash flow throughout the entire year?
451
00:26:13.804 --> 00:26:23.366
Because if you want to go by 350,000 and that's all going to land in two months, and you're also going to have to go buy a truck, equipment, trailers, et cetera, now you're negative in terms of cash flow for two months.
452
00:26:23.826 --> 00:26:27.387
Can you actually even sustain that kind of growth for this upcoming year?
453
00:26:27.447 --> 00:26:30.348
Or do you run out of cash and have a profitable, fast growing business
454
00:26:31.488 --> 00:26:31.949
goes bankrupt.
455
00:26:31.969 --> 00:26:32.189
Yeah.
456
00:26:32.610 --> 00:26:40.867
And so this is really helpful for us to come up with the task list because the task list for us, a lot of times is like, well, I know the revenue and I generally know what I need to work on.
457
00:26:41.548 --> 00:26:42.129
And what helped.
458
00:26:43.098 --> 00:26:49.339
really pumped through like what is the things I need to go do is Oh, like that month, I'm gonna be doubling my marketing budget.
459
00:26:49.519 --> 00:26:52.660
Oh, I haven't created that upsell email or text message yet.
460
00:26:53.080 --> 00:27:04.922
So the task was a great I kind of was a byproduct or a result of going to the P&L for every single month and asking if I grew revenue from 50,000 to 80,000 in March, what happens?
461
00:27:05.282 --> 00:27:08.822
Oh, I've got to hire someone, okay, in order to hire that person, when do I need to put the ad up?
462
00:27:09.182 --> 00:27:11.423
Oh, then my task list starts getting built out.
463
00:27:11.803 --> 00:27:12.403
So that's
464
00:27:12.963 --> 00:27:13.724
Really helpful for us.
465
00:27:14.725 --> 00:27:18.309
I think that's an incredibly good addition to what I just said.
466
00:27:19.009 --> 00:27:21.752
And I've talked about this very same thing before.
467
00:27:21.772 --> 00:27:26.637
And I'm so glad you added that because I think you said this, but I just want to add a little more color to it.
468
00:27:27.478 --> 00:27:31.262
In a lot of our businesses, if we look, if we do exactly what you said...
469
00:27:32.285 --> 00:27:37.786
then we'll notice that 60 or 70% of our year is made in 90 days.
470
00:27:38.646 --> 00:27:44.507
There's a big, in a lot of these businesses, recurring revenue business, because so much work sold in a moment of time.
471
00:27:44.587 --> 00:27:55.769
And so everything you just said, having enough money for the growth, being able to get the trucks, being able to get the people, all that stuff happens to happen way earlier in the year than you think, because the growth happens to happen then.
472
00:27:56.449 --> 00:27:58.189
That's one thing you see when you do it your way.
473
00:27:58.209 --> 00:28:01.170
The other thing you see when you do it that way is if you plot your revenue,
474
00:28:01.890 --> 00:28:03.312
There's two kinds of revenue.
475
00:28:03.512 --> 00:28:04.774
There's realized revenue.
476
00:28:04.995 --> 00:28:08.380
So I say I want 350, at least I think this is the right terminology.
477
00:28:08.400 --> 00:28:09.401
It's terminology I use.
478
00:28:09.882 --> 00:28:12.406
Realized revenue is I say I want to grow 350,000 this year.
479
00:28:12.426 --> 00:28:14.629
And so I actually collect all 350,000 in 2027.
480
00:28:16.812 --> 00:28:24.934
And then there's run rate revenue, which is I want to grow by 350,000, but I don't actually collect all that revenue in that year.
481
00:28:25.014 --> 00:28:32.036
Like I've sold 350,000 in revenue, but I will collect 200,000 in 27 and the other 150 in 28.
482
00:28:32.116 --> 00:28:35.216
I don't know if those are the exactly right terms.
483
00:28:35.236 --> 00:28:37.397
Those are the terms I use realized in run rate.
484
00:28:38.057 --> 00:28:52.449
And so that's another awakening you have when you look at it the way you're talking about, Mike, because you can see on the calendars, like, gee whiz, to get the 350 and actually collect it on this year is even harder than we thought because a lot of our clients aren't going to get sold till like May.
485
00:28:52.669 --> 00:28:52.870
Yeah.
486
00:28:53.830 --> 00:28:55.812
So we need to sell even more clients.
487
00:28:55.832 --> 00:29:03.880
Like if you were to do the simple math that 100 clients will drive 300,000 in revenue, but you're not selling them all on January 1st.
488
00:29:03.941 --> 00:29:04.962
And there's churn.
489
00:29:05.482 --> 00:29:06.103
And there's churn.
490
00:29:06.323 --> 00:29:07.684
You're selling a lot of them in May.
491
00:29:07.965 --> 00:29:12.189
So that means you're only going to get like just over half the revenue for the year theoretically.
492
00:29:12.209 --> 00:29:13.991
So you need way more than 100 clients.
493
00:29:14.011 --> 00:29:14.371
Yeah.
494
00:29:14.631 --> 00:29:19.233
I have been doing this math a lot because I have like literally a couple months of spring rush.
495
00:29:19.853 --> 00:29:23.054
So I'm like, where are we going here?
496
00:29:23.274 --> 00:29:29.437
But like, when it comes to projections, another thing that does when you break it down is, I think to your point,
497
00:29:30.237 --> 00:29:36.183
when it comes to seasonal business of any sort, you have to almost anticipate what the next constraint of the business will be.
498
00:29:36.883 --> 00:29:39.326
Because in winter, yes, your constraint will be leads.
499
00:29:39.606 --> 00:29:44.811
You don't have any like no one's showing up asking for your services, but you will have to anticipate that once this problem
500
00:29:45.391 --> 00:29:47.452
is no longer a problem because of my task list.
501
00:29:47.812 --> 00:29:48.853
I will complete these things.
502
00:29:49.273 --> 00:29:50.494
I will have tons of leads.
503
00:29:50.954 --> 00:29:53.135
I need to anticipate the next constraint.
504
00:29:53.215 --> 00:29:57.037
Otherwise, it'll bottleneck my growth when all of a sudden I'm in spring rush.
505
00:29:57.437 --> 00:29:58.358
I don't have enough workers.
506
00:29:58.858 --> 00:30:03.500
And it's because I failed to realize the next constraint after solving the current constraint.
507
00:30:03.821 --> 00:30:07.863
And so it only emphasizes the importance of planning because otherwise you
508
00:30:08.503 --> 00:30:10.145
You turn your leads off, you turn your ads off.
509
00:30:10.345 --> 00:30:15.892
You turn away customers in the middle of your rush because you didn't anticipate that that would be the next constraint to the business.
510
00:30:16.552 --> 00:30:18.395
Yeah, that could be my second.
511
00:30:18.555 --> 00:30:19.576
Oh, well then we've got it.
512
00:30:19.636 --> 00:30:20.377
Okay, we'll move on.
513
00:30:21.839 --> 00:30:28.524
So I wanted to go, I actually had something very similar to yours, and Jace will test.
514
00:30:28.664 --> 00:30:42.695
I think I sent him like three different dockets today in preparation because I wanted to take it to very specific to this off season, meaning 2026 going into 2027, because this advice I would not have given a year ago.
515
00:30:43.635 --> 00:30:58.724
um and that is centered around what i believe is the first off season that this is a real tool for us to use and it is around ai um but it's building an ai operating rhythm and okay that is a
516
00:30:59.885 --> 00:31:06.108
a monthly, quarterly, and daily rhythm so that when you hit the spring rush, you can take advantage of it instead of waiting for next spring rush.
517
00:31:06.608 --> 00:31:21.175
And again, you might have heard us talk about AI, but like during the off season is the time to actually sit down and really clean the data, make sure it's useful, and then look for areas where there's lost profit and that gives you time back as a manager or your manager's time if you have a larger organization.
518
00:31:21.775 --> 00:31:26.943
And so the task that I would say for this offseason specifically is connecting.
519
00:31:27.424 --> 00:31:28.325
I just have three tools.
520
00:31:28.625 --> 00:31:30.468
You could obviously connect a whole lot more.
521
00:31:30.929 --> 00:31:35.235
And whether you want to use connectors or terminology, but essentially connect
522
00:31:36.217 --> 00:31:38.859
Your email, your CRM, and QuickBooks.
523
00:31:40.040 --> 00:31:47.986
And if you connect those three to your AI agent, the amount of data that it has, assuming your data is clean inside of those systems, is tremendous.
524
00:31:48.706 --> 00:31:54.211
And so the three applications I would want someone to build is first around quarterly pricing reviews.
525
00:31:55.011 --> 00:32:20.076
and so combining the customer revenue with actual labor labor hours uh looking at your labor costs so your direct cost of the labor that's going to come from typically quickbooks or your payroll provider looking at cost of materials all your overhead that's going to come from quickbooks but be informed by the data that's inside of your crm and then flag the accounts that need to be repriced potentially go to reroute certain people if you have a recurring based business
526
00:32:24.897 --> 00:32:33.802
Determining how you're going to set up that data infrastructure during the off season is what makes it useful when spring rush hits and you get 300 or 400 or 500 new customers.
527
00:32:34.302 --> 00:32:39.184
If you haven't set it up to actually have that auditing and you haven't tested to make sure it's it's clean.
528
00:32:39.605 --> 00:32:50.971
That's what causes doubt around whether or not I take action in on July 1st when I know that there's 20 customers I need to cut or a service that's unprofitable or I know I need to do this, but I don't really have the data to back it up.
529
00:32:51.011 --> 00:32:51.691
It's kind of murky.
530
00:32:51.711 --> 00:32:53.272
These guys aren't really clocking in and out.
531
00:32:53.932 --> 00:32:59.959
And so setting that up now on the quarterly basis, on the monthly side, these would be like management scorecards.
532
00:33:00.620 --> 00:33:08.730
And so whether you are the owner-operator or you have managers inside the organization, having a monthly scorecard that they see
533
00:33:09.451 --> 00:33:11.572
based upon their specific department.
534
00:33:11.933 --> 00:33:15.675
So a couple of the ones that I use is like a sales tax audit.
535
00:33:16.576 --> 00:33:27.283
What are the things that I do that suck my time or suck my energy that myself or my managers are doing that if I could just spend a little bit of time during the off season setting this up with AI, it can do a lot of it for me.
536
00:33:28.244 --> 00:33:30.267
Sales tax audit is one of the things.
537
00:33:30.527 --> 00:33:31.809
Catching trends on the P&L.
538
00:33:32.090 --> 00:33:41.444
So especially if you are removed from daily operations, how can I set up a system that I'm not micromanaging, but rather I have a system in place that is, okay, we went from 10% to 15%.
539
00:33:43.487 --> 00:34:11.187
on that of revenue going to this thing labor went from 45 to 49 and that's not statistically consistent with last year little things that i can set up now to prevent me micromanaging and taking off all my mid-level managers or my technicians simply because i don't have a system to give me that data and i think the overarching theme that as we go into this off season i think is different than every other year is we have always talked about knowing our numbers and this is in my opinion the first time that anyone with
540
00:34:11.407 --> 00:34:26.791
regardless if you're earning 100,000 or a $10 million organization, we have the ability to do it, and it's not a function no longer of having the data, it's no longer the function of having the time to parse the data or put it through some sort of algorithm or get an analyst or get a consultant.
541
00:34:27.071 --> 00:34:29.392
This is a function of do you want to do this?
542
00:34:30.233 --> 00:34:35.156
And do you actually just want to take a few moments to connect it and ask it questions in English?
543
00:34:35.496 --> 00:34:40.918
And no longer, I don't, I believe this is this term of like, it's no longer about knowing your numbers, it's about knowing what questions to ask.
544
00:34:41.699 --> 00:34:44.320
And getting the data is no longer the bottleneck.
545
00:34:44.440 --> 00:34:46.201
It is what questions do I need to ask?
546
00:34:46.221 --> 00:34:50.743
And this goes back to your point, like knowing the plan informs which questions to ask.
547
00:34:50.943 --> 00:34:53.705
But now the knowing of your numbers is, it's a commodity.
548
00:34:54.425 --> 00:35:03.651
And for what used to be, I believe, for a five or $10 million company to have an analyst or have someone that's just looking at the data or pooling reports, that's for all of us now.
549
00:35:04.291 --> 00:35:05.432
And I don't think it's an excuse.
550
00:35:05.672 --> 00:35:07.753
There's no excuse to not know our numbers now.
551
00:35:08.514 --> 00:35:13.176
And if that means you need to clean up the data so that these things I'm talking about are actually possible, we got to do it.
552
00:35:13.717 --> 00:35:16.898
Whether it be like on a monthly basis, comparing efficiency.
553
00:35:18.039 --> 00:35:18.960
against good quality.
554
00:35:18.980 --> 00:35:20.222
How many callbacks did we have?
555
00:35:20.502 --> 00:35:30.393
Well, that might mean that I have to create an event type in my CRM that's four callbacks so that the the AI is able to see that, oh, this is a callback and that's how much time was tracked against it.
556
00:35:30.653 --> 00:35:36.340
And now I can actually see what percentage of my crew's time is spent to callbacks and have a real dollar amount of what that's costing.
557
00:35:37.360 --> 00:35:42.843
A lot of this is though has to do a setting it up and taking a little bit of time and during the off season is the time to do it.
558
00:35:43.244 --> 00:35:46.466
So we don't have the excuse in the middle of spring rush or next year.
559
00:35:46.486 --> 00:35:49.127
I just don't know what the guys aren't clocking in and out.
560
00:35:49.367 --> 00:35:51.789
I don't really know how long, how much is costing us for callbacks.
561
00:35:51.809 --> 00:35:53.410
I don't really know how efficient the crew is.
562
00:35:54.050 --> 00:35:59.454
And I think this is a golden opportunity as we head into this off season, because like even last year.
563
00:36:00.459 --> 00:36:05.223
I would say it was like October, November 2025 that these started to become very powerful.
564
00:36:05.683 --> 00:36:07.645
But for a lot of us, it became more mainstream.
565
00:36:07.665 --> 00:36:11.247
A lot of people, even listening to this, probably just gotten a cloud and chat to PT in the past six months.
566
00:36:11.948 --> 00:36:18.213
And so utilizing this to this fullest degree, I talk about quarterly, monthly, and then like daily end of day reports.
567
00:36:18.613 --> 00:36:21.756
So in the past, you might have had your admin person kind of scrub the dispatch board.
568
00:36:22.156 --> 00:36:24.118
Hey, I want you to look for jobs that were not complete.
569
00:36:24.258 --> 00:36:26.020
I want you to look for jobs that are skipped.
570
00:36:26.080 --> 00:36:31.365
I need you to reconcile a specific payment because it's by the minute, it's a first service.
571
00:36:32.006 --> 00:36:35.349
I want you to go through the dispatcher notes or look at the media that was attached to the job.
572
00:36:35.689 --> 00:36:36.690
These are things that now,
573
00:36:37.331 --> 00:36:38.853
can absolutely be automated.
574
00:36:39.354 --> 00:36:49.027
And I would be looking at sales operations and admin as a way, how can I get the most relevant information to my manager at the end of the day to ensure that one, I don't have to micromanage them.
575
00:36:49.567 --> 00:36:51.189
And two, nothing falls through the cracks.
576
00:36:51.830 --> 00:36:53.913
And I consistently see people failing automatically.
577
00:36:53.973 --> 00:37:13.339
to be a great leader or grow their business past one or two million because they do micromanage, they do get into everyone's business, but I believe that AI is a huge opportunity to be able to have the KPIs, know the numbers, but not have to be stepping on people's toes, looking over their shoulder, asking for the login to their email, like things that there's consistently
578
00:37:14.567 --> 00:37:36.643
undermine your mid-level managers and so some examples of this that even we're using is like google business profile reviews you can absolutely set up a very simple automation using a go check the reviews if there's any any unresponded go ahead and respond them here's the criteria for how you're going to respond to them if it's zero to four stars don't just surface it because i want to respond myself
579
00:37:37.584 --> 00:37:39.805
back to our scam artist customers.
580
00:37:40.365 --> 00:37:42.206
If it's five stars, though, here's what I want you to say.
581
00:37:42.346 --> 00:37:44.087
Here's here's the kind of framing I want you to use.
582
00:37:44.547 --> 00:37:46.908
Another thing is like following up on sent estimates.
583
00:37:47.268 --> 00:37:54.391
If you have a salesperson, one of the biggest things I see an owner failing to delegate or trust their manager with is like, hey, I need you to follow up on estimates.
584
00:37:54.451 --> 00:37:55.012
And so what do they do?
585
00:37:55.032 --> 00:37:56.893
They bother them every week of like, hey, how many?
586
00:37:57.033 --> 00:37:57.793
What's our close rate?
587
00:37:58.113 --> 00:38:18.396
this is all just an automation that keeps you informed and allows the manager to remember oh i forgot to call mr miss susie again she said to call back tomorrow these are the type of things that could be done in a daily report to my sales my operations my admin for operations like where's the labor efficiencies which of my crew members should i potentially offer some more training um
588
00:38:19.057 --> 00:38:21.118
for admin, it's even like payment discrepancies.
589
00:38:21.138 --> 00:38:27.562
Like if you connect Stripe, like your payment processor, and you say, hey, I just want you to reconcile at the end of each day, make sure nothing got bounced.
590
00:38:27.922 --> 00:38:42.110
Was there any discrepancies with a missed payment or a bounced check or anything like this so that I'm not concerned as the owner when I walk by the admin's office and I see a stack of checks or I see, you know, why is it not reconciled correctly at the end of the month?
591
00:38:42.511 --> 00:38:47.914
These are things that I think we can just set automation and use AI, but it will simply take
592
00:38:48.554 --> 00:38:54.076
the humility to realize this is a new method, this is a new way of doing things, but knowing your numbers now is a commodity.
593
00:38:54.396 --> 00:39:01.399
It's a matter of what questions are we asking it and how are we getting creative with taking all the data that is now at everyone's fingertips and utilizing it in the business.
594
00:39:01.819 --> 00:39:05.080
So I would just really encourage this cadence of what are the tasks I do quarterly?
595
00:39:05.480 --> 00:39:06.661
What are the tasks I do monthly?
596
00:39:06.981 --> 00:39:08.442
What are the tasks do I do daily?
597
00:39:09.122 --> 00:39:11.603
And those are the things that even your managers are thinking, like, what do you do?
598
00:39:12.563 --> 00:39:14.204
as an operations manager, what are you doing every day?
599
00:39:14.244 --> 00:39:15.205
What are you doing every month?
600
00:39:15.245 --> 00:39:16.686
What are you looking at every single quarter?
601
00:39:17.086 --> 00:39:23.351
And then creating automations to ensure that they get their job done and then you're informed as the operator owner without micromanagement.
602
00:39:23.851 --> 00:39:26.793
So to get in the weeds a little bit on that, that's interesting.
603
00:39:27.474 --> 00:39:28.895
Where do you stand on?
604
00:39:29.775 --> 00:39:32.637
Well, let's start with is there for people and I know this could change.
605
00:39:32.718 --> 00:39:36.020
Is there a specific system, Claude,
606
00:39:37.353 --> 00:39:40.138
ChatGPT that you recommend people use to do this?
607
00:39:40.318 --> 00:39:42.081
I think the challenge right now is it's so new.
608
00:39:42.101 --> 00:39:45.867
It kind of depends on which of your CRM, like what your CRM will connect to.
609
00:39:45.887 --> 00:39:46.989
Oh, true.
610
00:39:47.009 --> 00:39:50.475
And if you don't have a CRM that connects, what reports can you extract from it?
611
00:39:51.228 --> 00:39:57.691
And so even if you have a system that doesn't have MCP access or API, okay, which reports do I need to download?
612
00:39:58.451 --> 00:40:08.976
And sometimes this is a matter of, like screenshot the page where it has all the reports listed and ask your AI, which of these reports do I need to give you to be able to complete these tasks in my business?
613
00:40:09.596 --> 00:40:11.857
And just, again, it's like, which questions?
614
00:40:11.937 --> 00:40:13.218
It's, this is why I believe like,
615
00:40:13.998 --> 00:40:19.646
It always comes back to humility because I see the people that are the least humble are the ones incapable of coming up.
616
00:40:19.686 --> 00:40:21.449
What questions should I ask this AI agent?
617
00:40:23.552 --> 00:40:24.193
Because it'll tell you.
618
00:40:24.213 --> 00:40:24.733
It'll tell you.
619
00:40:24.753 --> 00:40:27.658
Download the revenue by service summary.
620
00:40:28.397 --> 00:40:28.597
Yeah.
621
00:40:28.877 --> 00:40:29.117
There.
622
00:40:29.938 --> 00:40:31.839
Is it ideal if it's connected to MCP or API?
623
00:40:31.879 --> 00:40:32.079
Yes.
624
00:40:32.139 --> 00:40:34.960
But you can download a lot of these things and do it more manually as well.
625
00:40:35.220 --> 00:40:36.641
Hey, so the team was editing the podcast.
626
00:40:36.701 --> 00:40:41.823
And something I realized was we didn't give you the actual tools to do what I'm talking about.
627
00:40:42.143 --> 00:40:44.904
And I know I'm talking a lot about AI and MCP and API.
628
00:40:45.225 --> 00:40:50.047
And so what we decided is I just want you to actually go do it yourself and see the power of what I'm talking about.
629
00:40:50.567 --> 00:40:54.710
And so we're doing something we've never done before and that's giving two months free at HomeWorks.
630
00:40:55.111 --> 00:40:58.914
So over the next couple months, as we head into the off season, you can actually put your data in.
631
00:40:59.054 --> 00:41:00.815
We will help you do that for free.
632
00:41:01.096 --> 00:41:02.777
We'll do all the implementation calls for free.
633
00:41:02.797 --> 00:41:08.442
And even if you just stay the two months, but you see the power of what AI can do once it's connected with your CRM
634
00:41:09.202 --> 00:41:10.483
It's such a game changer.
635
00:41:10.523 --> 00:41:23.989
And so everything I'm talking about today, when it comes to connecting your MCP, you can do in those first two free months, we will get you all set up, all of your contacts in just use this coupon code, Mike, when you check out, when you're setting up your account inside homeworks, you'll get your first month free.
636
00:41:24.309 --> 00:41:29.271
And then after you complete your implementation calls and we get all your data in your second month free as well.
637
00:41:29.691 --> 00:41:33.073
So I hope it's helpful so you can actually get a taste of what I'm talking about in the podcast.
638
00:41:33.133 --> 00:41:36.956
Are you imagining for most people, like let's just say you use Claude, okay?
639
00:41:36.976 --> 00:41:40.419
So in Claude, you can set up a project, you can set a folder up on a computer.
640
00:41:41.141 --> 00:41:49.204
or you could connect it to Google Drive, and you could just drop files in a folder, or you can do the MCP approach, which you've talked to, which it just connects directly to the other product, the software.
641
00:41:49.644 --> 00:41:55.486
So let's just say somebody, so if they're working with Homeworks or QuickBooks, they connect direct.
642
00:41:55.646 --> 00:42:07.310
If they're not, they're working with another system, they can do the export, they can dump the files into a folder on a computer, and ChatGPT or Claude, they're both capable of reading that folder and doing this processing process.
643
00:42:07.710 --> 00:42:18.101
Um, do you, is this, when you think about this, this is generally set up on one team member's account or are you telling people to set up like team accounts and share this?
644
00:42:18.301 --> 00:42:21.124
Like, how do you teach people to interact with this?
645
00:42:21.885 --> 00:42:22.646
Does that make sense?
646
00:42:22.666 --> 00:42:22.906
Yes.
647
00:42:23.146 --> 00:42:23.386
Yeah.
648
00:42:24.167 --> 00:42:27.710
We have some where we have team accounts and they can share different projects.
649
00:42:27.730 --> 00:42:28.671
So you can invite people.
650
00:42:29.431 --> 00:42:31.833
And I get confused sometimes because I use Manist, Claude, ChattoBeat.
651
00:42:31.893 --> 00:42:32.754
I kind of use all of them.
652
00:42:33.114 --> 00:42:35.997
But I know for the media team, they do a lot of sharing.
653
00:42:36.437 --> 00:42:37.538
So that's a team account.
654
00:42:37.958 --> 00:42:42.722
But then a lot of the reports that I build, I just do it from my own account.
655
00:42:43.122 --> 00:42:43.343
But then
656
00:42:43.943 --> 00:42:46.304
Cause I can connect my, cause that's why I said connect email.
657
00:42:46.604 --> 00:42:52.127
Cause if you connect your email, you can send out emails to your operations manager and your sales manager, and then I get control of it.
658
00:42:52.527 --> 00:42:55.709
And this is what, again, like it's the ability to delegate and keep people accountable.
659
00:42:56.009 --> 00:43:00.991
Now, like there's no reason to micromanage or get in someone's business cause you can keep them accountable with just the numbers.
660
00:43:01.351 --> 00:43:02.832
You can see it all happening in your account.
661
00:43:03.292 --> 00:43:04.553
You determine what they see.
662
00:43:05.273 --> 00:43:10.556
So I can be like, hey, if everything's good, don't remind my operations manager that there was zero callbacks today.
663
00:43:11.116 --> 00:43:15.239
Only bring up and surface the actual issues that you see inside of the system.
664
00:43:15.779 --> 00:43:19.001
So I generally actually just stay inside my account most of the time.
665
00:43:19.061 --> 00:43:20.382
And that's a little bit of where I was going.
666
00:43:20.402 --> 00:43:25.385
Like, let's say it surfaces something like, hey, this thing's not happening or this number's out of whack.
667
00:43:26.131 --> 00:43:29.454
I was curious how you get that to the operations manager for people.
668
00:43:29.494 --> 00:43:34.878
Is that generally you're like seeing it and then you're telling them, or do you have it set up in some way where it's telling them?
669
00:43:34.998 --> 00:43:38.882
Yeah, I'm having it send usually like that daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly report.
670
00:43:39.682 --> 00:43:44.907
And so for example, my general manager in Texas, it's like at the end of the day, he's gonna see several things.
671
00:43:44.967 --> 00:43:48.530
First off, are there any initial modes, the first service that he needs to go and adjust the pricing?
672
00:43:48.910 --> 00:43:53.154
It also gives them exactly what the pricing should be based upon how long they were clocked into the job.
673
00:43:53.694 --> 00:43:56.156
It also checks, was there any dispatcher notes from the crew?
674
00:43:56.376 --> 00:43:58.818
He technically doesn't even have to go inside of HomeWorks.
675
00:43:58.838 --> 00:44:00.179
You can just look at that.
676
00:44:00.619 --> 00:44:03.061
The other thing that he's getting is quality.
677
00:44:03.401 --> 00:44:05.783
Like, were there any customer complaints?
678
00:44:06.383 --> 00:44:06.963
Who were they?
679
00:44:07.364 --> 00:44:08.544
What actions should he be taking?
680
00:44:09.365 --> 00:44:10.827
because these operations, that's what he's focused on.
681
00:44:10.847 --> 00:44:14.210
It's like getting the work done, making sure the crew's happy and doing a good job.
682
00:44:14.991 --> 00:44:23.459
Whereas for like admin side, they're doing I have one set up for Claude to check Stripe and Homeworks and make sure every single day auto charge is working.
683
00:44:24.040 --> 00:44:28.464
It's like I just don't know if what happens if someone has HCH set up and three days later it bounces.
684
00:44:30.380 --> 00:44:39.463
I hope everything's working on the back end, but I wanna make sure every single day I'm making my money so in three months I'm like, oh, they haven't been paid, charged at all, but it looks like it's getting paid, for example.
685
00:44:40.383 --> 00:44:45.165
So I do it where it sends it out, because you can do it, as long as you connect your Gmail, it sends out reports to everyone.
686
00:44:45.778 --> 00:44:46.618
That's what I wanted to get to.
687
00:44:46.639 --> 00:44:49.060
I just wanted to make sure everybody is understanding.
688
00:44:49.080 --> 00:44:51.681
So you're connecting your email and it's going out through email.
689
00:44:52.282 --> 00:44:52.462
Exactly.
690
00:44:52.482 --> 00:44:56.364
And I assume you're using like a work account email here, not a personal.
691
00:44:56.464 --> 00:44:56.684
Correct.
692
00:44:56.784 --> 00:44:57.545
How do you...
693
00:44:57.685 --> 00:44:59.105
This is a sidestep here.
694
00:44:59.486 --> 00:45:03.568
How do you think about connecting email to these tools?
695
00:45:03.628 --> 00:45:05.389
Would you ever connect your personal account?
696
00:45:06.372 --> 00:45:06.752
I would.
697
00:45:07.133 --> 00:45:10.736
I haven't found a huge need to click my email.
698
00:45:12.217 --> 00:45:17.281
I keep my personal email as like this reserve sacred thing that gets on my cell phone.
699
00:45:17.601 --> 00:45:30.032
But in terms of the business ones, I just have other domains specific for the businesses that like I'm very much okay with setting up automations, firing off the reports from Claude or ChatGPT.
700
00:45:31.373 --> 00:45:33.735
And then I just, in my one-on-ones with the managers, like, hey,
701
00:45:34.783 --> 00:45:35.584
What do you want to see?
702
00:45:35.624 --> 00:45:36.864
What's useful in this report?
703
00:45:37.145 --> 00:45:39.546
And what do you just glaze over every day is like, that's noise.
704
00:45:39.966 --> 00:45:41.287
Cause that's also the challenge.
705
00:45:41.347 --> 00:45:48.212
You can ask it for an end of day report and it will just create this ginormous of like everything that happened inside of your CRM.
706
00:45:48.332 --> 00:45:49.613
And it's like, that's useless.
707
00:45:49.793 --> 00:45:53.075
It's like very much you have to intentionally tell it.
708
00:45:53.095 --> 00:45:54.076
This is a signal, this is noise.
709
00:45:54.096 --> 00:45:55.216
This is what I need them to know.
710
00:45:55.657 --> 00:45:59.039
Here's what I would do based, if these things pop up, here's what I want them to do.
711
00:45:59.459 --> 00:46:03.842
And then it's just feeding them from a report perspective instead of me looking over their shoulder, telling them what to do.
712
00:46:04.517 --> 00:46:05.598
Yeah, makes sense.
713
00:46:05.618 --> 00:46:07.120
I hope, hopefully everybody understands.
714
00:46:08.101 --> 00:46:11.024
Do you have any concerns about running this?
715
00:46:11.705 --> 00:46:14.008
This is kind of a question for everybody to hear.
716
00:46:14.588 --> 00:46:17.071
Do you have any concerns about the data not being sandboxed?
717
00:46:17.091 --> 00:46:23.318
So in other words, you're essentially sharing your company data with Claude, Anthropic, or OpenAI.
718
00:46:23.738 --> 00:46:25.921
You know, if they want to get into lawn care,
719
00:46:27.699 --> 00:46:30.900
I will refer them to your new platform.
720
00:46:31.000 --> 00:46:32.321
I will give them a one star.
721
00:46:34.161 --> 00:46:34.861
That's about all.
722
00:46:35.341 --> 00:46:36.002
I don't know.
723
00:46:37.262 --> 00:46:43.884
I think that absolutely there are cases where the data security is important.
724
00:46:44.904 --> 00:46:46.885
I think that if we were doing something that is...
725
00:46:48.320 --> 00:46:51.645
so unique and so proprietary, I would be worried.
726
00:46:52.285 --> 00:47:00.096
When I am simply sharing customer ID numbers, when I am sharing, because again, if you're connecting your CRM, it can use customer IDs.
727
00:47:00.116 --> 00:47:01.418
It can use a lot of backend stuff.
728
00:47:02.139 --> 00:47:04.462
Uh, I'm not personally super concerned about it though.
729
00:47:04.642 --> 00:47:14.328
to be perfectly honest, I am much more in the camp of give it full access, let it know everything about me because I want the context to be as good as possible so the answers are as complete as possible.
730
00:47:14.829 --> 00:47:24.275
And so usually what I do instead of even dropping files in, I will just give it access to a Google folder and then everything just goes into that folder and that way I have the record.
731
00:47:24.975 --> 00:47:28.878
If something happened to Cloud or I could immediately cancel it, I'd still have all my data.
732
00:47:29.518 --> 00:47:33.521
Um, I'm not usually the camp type that I store stuff in a project and then deletes it.
733
00:47:33.581 --> 00:47:36.563
I'm going to usually have Google drive or something that I control a little bit more.
734
00:47:36.583 --> 00:47:37.224
I have the keys to.
735
00:47:38.445 --> 00:47:38.625
Yeah.
736
00:47:38.865 --> 00:47:40.206
I fall in the same category.
737
00:47:40.246 --> 00:47:44.009
I've decided that because there's a lot of conversation around this and that's why I wanted to ask.
738
00:47:45.250 --> 00:47:51.476
I've come to the conclusion that I am fully comfortable trading all my privacy away for the advantages that I gain.
739
00:47:51.756 --> 00:47:54.699
And I feel like we traded all our privacy away as soon as we got this thing.
740
00:47:54.779 --> 00:47:55.279
Yeah, totally.
741
00:47:55.440 --> 00:47:58.042
As soon as we... Everything we do, we have no privacy.
742
00:47:58.122 --> 00:47:59.824
Everything crosses an ISP.
743
00:47:59.864 --> 00:48:01.125
Everything sits on a server.
744
00:48:01.145 --> 00:48:03.127
There's data copies of everything everywhere.
745
00:48:03.147 --> 00:48:04.448
It kind of doesn't matter.
746
00:48:04.488 --> 00:48:09.273
But to your point, if I was working on researching the next big drug that we were going to release...
747
00:48:09.933 --> 00:48:12.273
I wouldn't be running across these AI models.
748
00:48:12.333 --> 00:48:13.314
I'd be sandboxing it.
749
00:48:13.354 --> 00:48:22.435
So the one thing I will say, and I haven't done this yet, I have not connected my personal account because I am a little paranoid about this one thing.
750
00:48:22.455 --> 00:48:29.717
And that is, I will eventually move all my financial stuff to a completely new email.
751
00:48:30.137 --> 00:48:33.297
And that email will never be checked on my computer that I run AI.
752
00:48:33.557 --> 00:48:36.098
And that may be a little paranoid, but man...
753
00:48:37.476 --> 00:48:41.019
Because your email is the unlock to everything you have.
754
00:48:41.279 --> 00:48:45.262
And so I don't want my financial accounts being...
755
00:48:46.743 --> 00:48:55.010
I don't want my email account that has the email address used in my financial accounts anywhere near anything.
756
00:48:55.450 --> 00:48:59.733
That's the only thing that I think I'm still like a hard line on that I won't do.
757
00:48:59.773 --> 00:49:02.035
But otherwise, I'm just like, whatever.
758
00:49:02.495 --> 00:49:03.296
Yeah.
759
00:49:03.336 --> 00:49:04.116
The tools are so good.
760
00:49:04.136 --> 00:49:08.159
I find some of the, there are some, this could be like an outdated thing now.
761
00:49:08.679 --> 00:49:13.363
I do find some, I did find some limitations around personal Gmail accounts.
762
00:49:13.903 --> 00:49:15.825
of what you could do in terms of automations.
763
00:49:16.345 --> 00:49:18.047
But I've never connected it.
764
00:49:18.267 --> 00:49:22.310
I've always just used the Augusta or my homeworks email or something like that.
765
00:49:23.151 --> 00:49:27.395
I don't know if that's a matter of our level of Google workspace, but anyways.
766
00:49:28.684 --> 00:49:32.226
The last I remember testing it was you still had to approve things.
767
00:49:32.506 --> 00:49:33.507
I haven't tested that late.
768
00:49:33.527 --> 00:49:34.768
I don't know if that's still the case.
769
00:49:34.948 --> 00:49:38.390
Yeah, even when it comes to approvals, I'm like, just let it fire off.
770
00:49:38.530 --> 00:49:39.190
Let's go.
771
00:49:40.291 --> 00:49:45.994
I'm pretty hands off when it comes to, it's like, as long as I protect my customers' data, I'm actually much more concerned about that.
772
00:49:46.315 --> 00:49:53.459
So we have a lot of strict internal policies about not dumping clients' data into AI because they haven't signed off on that.
773
00:49:53.759 --> 00:49:59.743
And if we're going to use a model with their data, they've got to sign off on us using models to do things.
774
00:50:00.003 --> 00:50:14.411
So for example, importing clients into the database, for example, there's a lot of really cool stuff we can automate, but we need to make sure that if we're going to use a model, we let someone know, or we say, here's the manual way of doing it in case you want to just export, import on a more manual process.
775
00:50:14.772 --> 00:50:14.972
Yeah.
776
00:50:15.352 --> 00:50:15.532
Yeah.
777
00:50:15.892 --> 00:50:16.092
Okay.
778
00:50:16.112 --> 00:50:16.793
What's your second one?
779
00:50:17.313 --> 00:50:18.134
We're moving along.
780
00:50:18.772 --> 00:50:22.720
Yeah, so my second one was a very, very much a build on the first one.
781
00:50:22.740 --> 00:50:23.843
And I sort of alluded to it.
782
00:50:23.863 --> 00:50:26.508
And it's this idea of how do you preempt
783
00:50:28.113 --> 00:50:31.536
or better said, what will preempt your growth plan?
784
00:50:31.837 --> 00:50:32.798
You've made this plan.
785
00:50:32.938 --> 00:50:33.699
What could go wrong?
786
00:50:33.779 --> 00:50:36.121
So how do you think about what you...
787
00:50:36.161 --> 00:50:37.903
It's exactly what you started to talk about.
788
00:50:37.943 --> 00:50:41.747
It's like, how do you think through what the bottlenecks are and then preempt them?
789
00:50:41.787 --> 00:50:43.929
Meaning, preempt means solve them in advance.
790
00:50:44.750 --> 00:50:49.795
And so as you're making this plan, I alluded to this already, we're very much thinking about...
791
00:50:50.490 --> 00:50:52.232
What went wrong last year?
792
00:50:52.252 --> 00:50:58.197
We're very much thinking about in spring, like really, because spring is the make or break a year time.
793
00:50:58.578 --> 00:51:00.820
So what can go wrong in spring?
794
00:51:01.460 --> 00:51:05.864
Another example would be, I have all these grand plans for the marketing that we could do
795
00:51:06.885 --> 00:51:09.147
This is another example where the marketing calendar comes in.
796
00:51:09.167 --> 00:51:12.630
I have all these things we could be talking to the client about to sell them stuff.
797
00:51:12.650 --> 00:51:16.013
So I'm going to promote this service and this service and this service.
798
00:51:16.113 --> 00:51:18.075
And that's how we're going to achieve our revenue growth.
799
00:51:18.515 --> 00:51:24.140
Well, the problem is we can't talk to them about all those things in the same 30-day period or 60-day period.
800
00:51:24.180 --> 00:51:26.022
So as soon as you put this on paper...
801
00:51:26.262 --> 00:51:39.692
and you put it to a calendar and you see exactly all the things we're going to have to do during that period, you quickly realize like, wait a second, my plan is based on selling this amount of revenue and there's no way I could ever even get their attention or I couldn't talk to them about all these services.
802
00:51:39.712 --> 00:51:40.833
This is impossible.
803
00:51:41.193 --> 00:51:47.058
And so you're wanting to think about what broke last year, what could go wrong this year,
804
00:51:47.618 --> 00:51:53.899
That example I just gave where you're like, well, I have these plans to sell this service, but people don't even worry about this service.
805
00:51:53.919 --> 00:51:57.080
They don't have pain around it or concern around the service till later in the year.
806
00:51:57.400 --> 00:52:01.761
So this is a pipe dream that we're going to get much conversion trying to sell this service this early in the year.
807
00:52:02.221 --> 00:52:03.682
You want to really think through that.
808
00:52:04.142 --> 00:52:10.043
And then you... Again, we really kind of touched on this, but I'm going to say it again.
809
00:52:10.103 --> 00:52:12.764
So if the plan says that I need to onboard...
810
00:52:14.106 --> 00:52:21.568
200 clients in spring or in CityTurf's case, 1,000 or whatever that number is going to be.
811
00:52:21.589 --> 00:52:22.409
It's a big number.
812
00:52:22.989 --> 00:52:29.031
Then you start to back into who and what is going to touch this process.
813
00:52:29.071 --> 00:52:33.052
So in my mind, the first place this stuff breaks is generally the phone.
814
00:52:33.572 --> 00:52:34.813
It's generally the office.
815
00:52:35.613 --> 00:52:41.195
Because if 60% of your sales are going to happen in 90 days for the year, then...
816
00:52:41.895 --> 00:52:58.299
the turning the estimates, the talking to people on the phone, the answering the questions, all that, the office is what will generally break it because you've probably built a staff that'll work for a 12-month period and not a staff that will hit work for a 90-day period.
817
00:52:58.319 --> 00:52:59.359
It's always the problem.
818
00:52:59.399 --> 00:53:06.761
How do you afford to pay for all the people you need for only 90 days and then what in the heck are they going to do for the other nine months?
819
00:53:06.801 --> 00:53:07.641
No time off.
820
00:53:07.681 --> 00:53:08.541
That's the solve.
821
00:53:08.561 --> 00:53:09.401
That is the solve.
822
00:53:09.702 --> 00:53:09.962
Yeah.
823
00:53:10.122 --> 00:53:11.702
Overtime and no time off.
824
00:53:12.262 --> 00:53:12.443
Yeah.
825
00:53:13.283 --> 00:53:17.167
And so that's an example of the stuff you have to think about.
826
00:53:17.427 --> 00:53:21.230
And so to rattle off a few other things, Matt, think of all the crew issues you had.
827
00:53:22.011 --> 00:53:30.078
So people that get sick, people that got hurt, people that called in for whatever reason didn't show up, people that you gave them no time off.
828
00:53:30.098 --> 00:53:32.721
But it's like, but my family member is getting married.
829
00:53:32.781 --> 00:53:33.481
I have to go.
830
00:53:33.582 --> 00:53:34.763
Think about all those things.
831
00:53:35.163 --> 00:53:37.705
Well, how do you staff up enough to cover that?
832
00:53:37.745 --> 00:53:37.965
Yeah.
833
00:53:38.646 --> 00:53:41.388
Because there's always going to be things that happen.
834
00:53:41.408 --> 00:53:44.890
So have you staffed up to cover the things that are going to happen?
835
00:53:44.910 --> 00:53:46.791
Because all of this will blow up your plan.
836
00:53:47.411 --> 00:53:53.815
And then another way to think about it is, do you have what we'll call a dependency?
837
00:53:54.055 --> 00:53:55.876
Or no, we'll go with the capacity scenario.
838
00:53:56.337 --> 00:54:01.500
Capacity is, I could sell all this work, but right now I have one person that does...
839
00:54:02.490 --> 00:54:05.091
all the dispatching, all the scheduling in the business.
840
00:54:05.611 --> 00:54:06.971
Well, that's a capacity risk.
841
00:54:07.011 --> 00:54:12.693
So another way you might think about this is, who within my company owns certain things?
842
00:54:12.813 --> 00:54:21.375
Or if somebody owns dispatch, you've got just one person trained to do this, and we give them even more work, or if they're out, what do we do?
843
00:54:21.415 --> 00:54:25.876
Does that mean I have to pull my estimator or me over to do this, and then I'm not selling?
844
00:54:26.277 --> 00:54:28.997
And when I'm not selling an estimate, and that means we're not growing?
845
00:54:29.357 --> 00:54:30.998
Like some of these things you can't solve.
846
00:54:31.478 --> 00:54:34.039
yet because you're not big enough, you don't have enough money.
847
00:54:34.719 --> 00:54:46.064
But unless you think about them and try to solve as many of them as you can or come up with backup plans, this is why the majority of companies do not hit their goals.
848
00:54:46.404 --> 00:54:50.486
I think if you were to look and survey most people, they do not hit their goals.
849
00:54:50.806 --> 00:54:52.047
The vast, vast majority.
850
00:54:52.067 --> 00:54:53.587
If they have them.
851
00:54:53.607 --> 00:54:55.768
That's one way to hit your goals is just not have them.
852
00:54:57.949 --> 00:55:12.495
My analogy over the years is the way that most goals are set is it's two guys sitting outside in 68 degree, wonderful, sunny weather, having a beer, and they're talking a big game like, ah, this year, we're going to fix all this because they're feeling good.
853
00:55:12.935 --> 00:55:14.176
It's like the weather's good.
854
00:55:14.216 --> 00:55:17.597
They're having a cocktail and they're like, that's their dreaming moment.
855
00:55:17.617 --> 00:55:18.797
And they're talking all the big game.
856
00:55:18.817 --> 00:55:20.098
We're growing revenue by this much.
857
00:55:20.118 --> 00:55:21.098
We're going to do all this stuff.
858
00:55:21.558 --> 00:55:22.659
None of that stuff ever happens.
859
00:55:23.379 --> 00:55:25.540
The reason it doesn't happen is, well, that's not a plan.
860
00:55:26.001 --> 00:55:29.222
And then the other reason it doesn't happen is because of this, what I'm talking about now.
861
00:55:29.242 --> 00:55:35.926
It's like, it kind of goes back to last week we were talking about, I think it was last week we brought up the book, The Theory of Constraints.
862
00:55:35.986 --> 00:55:38.667
It's all the things that could break in a process.
863
00:55:39.427 --> 00:55:41.989
And so that's essentially what I'm talking about here.
864
00:55:42.009 --> 00:55:43.810
It's like, what if we lost a person?
865
00:55:44.270 --> 00:55:45.991
What if we have crew issues?
866
00:55:46.771 --> 00:55:47.392
What if...
867
00:55:48.290 --> 00:55:49.931
We don't have enough people for the phones.
868
00:55:49.991 --> 00:55:52.452
What if we lose our one and only sales guy?
869
00:55:52.872 --> 00:55:54.833
What if I have to get back out in the field?
870
00:55:55.553 --> 00:55:58.574
What if we have too much work and we have to shut off marketing?
871
00:55:58.974 --> 00:56:01.255
Or we have too much work and we're not answering the phone?
872
00:56:01.576 --> 00:56:02.756
What if the estimates...
873
00:56:02.876 --> 00:56:04.237
There's all these scenarios.
874
00:56:05.117 --> 00:56:06.118
that can break things.
875
00:56:06.158 --> 00:56:08.179
And so it's really important to think through those.
876
00:56:08.439 --> 00:56:18.584
And the reason for that is because when we find the biggest offenders, like the biggest thing that could go wrong is all this landscape project work that we're selling means I'm back out in the field.
877
00:56:18.624 --> 00:56:20.365
And that means I'm not selling the maintenance work.
878
00:56:21.226 --> 00:56:25.208
And every if I just look at what's happened in the last few years, every year, the same thing happens.
879
00:56:25.268 --> 00:56:26.909
So why is that not going to happen this year?
880
00:56:27.469 --> 00:56:32.672
So that like right there's the clue, okay, that is one of the single most important things that has to go on the plan.
881
00:56:33.144 --> 00:56:38.148
That's what I'm wanting to bring up here and have you think through as you're doing your plan.
882
00:56:38.188 --> 00:56:41.031
It's not just about breaking down how we get the revenue.
883
00:56:41.791 --> 00:56:44.413
And are we going to get through acquisition or expansion?
884
00:56:44.994 --> 00:56:46.295
Are we going to get it from Facebook?
885
00:56:46.335 --> 00:56:47.456
Are we going to get it from LSA?
886
00:56:47.616 --> 00:56:48.417
That's part of it.
887
00:56:48.697 --> 00:56:50.178
This is the other side.
888
00:56:50.619 --> 00:56:58.866
If all of that works perfectly, like you assume that all that's going to work perfectly, as in Facebook could drive enough revenue...
889
00:56:59.728 --> 00:57:10.375
and LSA could drive enough revenue, I mean, get you enough revenue or sell you enough clients to get the revenue, what will keep you from actually making those sales or keep you from actually delivering the work?
890
00:57:10.895 --> 00:57:24.584
Or what I've seen so much over the years is have you basically one day say, hey, we're six weeks booked out on whatever, irrigation, or six weeks, we're three months booked out on landscape, just stop taking sales.
891
00:57:25.064 --> 00:57:27.406
Stop taking it or turn off the marketing.
892
00:57:27.706 --> 00:57:29.207
That stuff kills everything.
893
00:57:29.527 --> 00:57:30.567
You don't hit goals over that.
894
00:57:30.607 --> 00:57:32.408
So that's this last part.
895
00:57:32.488 --> 00:57:38.069
It's like, again, we're going to break down the revenue strategy and then we're going to break down the bottleneck side.
896
00:57:38.229 --> 00:57:40.209
Everything that could keep us from getting that.
897
00:57:40.669 --> 00:57:42.710
And it's based on everything we've experienced before.
898
00:57:42.750 --> 00:57:52.592
And then imagining if I pile on more revenue, more clients, more phone calls, more trucks, more everything, what becomes the new problem that might happen?
899
00:57:52.912 --> 00:57:56.373
And that too goes onto our task list, which is our plan.
900
00:57:57.073 --> 00:58:01.945
And then as we've talked about weeks previous, you've got a task list that's too big.
901
00:58:02.105 --> 00:58:03.448
You'll never be able to get it all done.
902
00:58:03.729 --> 00:58:05.032
So now we have to stack rank it.
903
00:58:05.912 --> 00:58:08.454
And part of stack ranking it is what we talked about.
904
00:58:08.474 --> 00:58:11.117
It's like return on what's going to drive the most revenue if I do this thing?
905
00:58:11.137 --> 00:58:13.299
What's going to give me the most benefit?
906
00:58:13.900 --> 00:58:19.805
But the other part of stack ranking it is what in my to-do list that if I don't do it, will hold up thing above it.
907
00:58:20.165 --> 00:58:21.987
And so that's the ordering and the ranking.
908
00:58:22.007 --> 00:58:30.515
And that's the, if you'll go through that exercise in the early part of your off season, and it takes some real frustrating work.
909
00:58:31.396 --> 00:58:31.496
Yeah.
910
00:58:32.723 --> 00:58:36.725
It can be actually tiring work to really truly do this and think through it.
911
00:58:37.165 --> 00:58:41.827
And it can be frustrating to see, I have to do all this stuff and there's no way we can do it.
912
00:58:43.287 --> 00:58:45.368
That's usually the outcome of projects like this.
913
00:58:45.728 --> 00:58:47.349
But that's exactly the point.
914
00:58:47.829 --> 00:58:50.110
And then once you have that, it's about just getting to work.
915
00:58:51.308 --> 00:58:52.108
and delivering on it.
916
00:58:52.208 --> 00:59:02.458
And then the other thing I would add is that if you're a bigger company and you've ever wondered, well, what does a big company talk about or meet about?
917
00:59:02.478 --> 00:59:05.802
Like if I could go be in a 10 million or 20 or $30 million company,
918
00:59:06.282 --> 00:59:07.102
What would I see?
919
00:59:07.522 --> 00:59:10.624
I can tell you what you would see is they would have this plan.
920
00:59:11.064 --> 00:59:19.267
And if they're having weekly meetings or issue meetings or any kind of meeting, this plan is being discussed every week, every two weeks.
921
00:59:19.427 --> 00:59:20.287
Are we on track?
922
00:59:20.588 --> 00:59:21.148
What's off?
923
00:59:21.548 --> 00:59:22.768
How do we need to course correct?
924
00:59:23.109 --> 00:59:28.851
Because you're looking at this every single week as a team and saying, are we going to hit...
925
00:59:29.511 --> 00:59:33.093
the deadline so we can start delivering March 1 or whatever that month is.
926
00:59:33.113 --> 00:59:36.095
So it's not just about identifying what to do.
927
00:59:36.475 --> 00:59:39.137
It's not just about identifying when you need to do it.
928
00:59:39.217 --> 00:59:44.220
It's about having a guide that you can constantly look back at and say, are we on track?
929
00:59:44.640 --> 00:59:46.241
Are we going to hit goal or not hit goal?
930
00:59:46.541 --> 00:59:48.162
If we're not hitting goal, what do we need to do?
931
00:59:49.163 --> 00:59:53.686
One thing we're trying to build with that projection day is once they fill it out, is then...
932
00:59:54.908 --> 00:59:58.010
every single month they can see, okay, I'm ahead on this, I'm behind on this.
933
00:59:58.030 --> 01:00:01.693
Because once I even built that for myself, I was like, okay, I'm 3% behind.
934
01:00:01.773 --> 01:00:03.194
All right, where can we find the revenue?
935
01:00:03.234 --> 01:00:06.916
Okay, we're 5% above and let's focus a little more on defense or some other measures.
936
01:00:06.956 --> 01:00:14.782
So I think another issue for a lot of owners is they're so eternally optimistic this time of year because cash is in the bank.
937
01:00:15.122 --> 01:00:17.103
We made it through the spring rush by the sea of our pants.
938
01:00:17.864 --> 01:00:22.487
And it's hard to envision the problems that are going to arise because I've never experienced them before.
939
01:00:22.927 --> 01:00:25.211
I don't know what it's like to have that many leads.
940
01:00:25.732 --> 01:00:27.394
I just know I need to advertise to get more leads.
941
01:00:27.975 --> 01:00:34.185
But we never identify the next problem that will inevitably occur when demand for most of us doubles, triples, or quadruples.
942
01:00:34.926 --> 01:00:36.548
And that's always been the hardest thing for me is like,
943
01:00:37.767 --> 01:00:39.068
we have kind of two seasons.
944
01:00:39.208 --> 01:00:44.032
One is spring and summer command center goes three to four times medicals.
945
01:00:44.633 --> 01:00:47.716
Vesta owners are all under stress, like way more problems.
946
01:00:48.276 --> 01:00:51.599
And then that one kind of dies and then very quickly software and franchise.
947
01:00:51.619 --> 01:00:54.802
That's, that's where we make all of our growth is the other six months.
948
01:00:55.182 --> 01:00:56.763
And so it's very much of this weird.
949
01:00:57.184 --> 01:01:00.647
I'm always offensive on one while other ones in defense and vice versa.
950
01:01:01.367 --> 01:01:03.729
Uh, but it's interesting to watch sometimes the, uh,
951
01:01:04.450 --> 01:01:09.232
the ability to be able to say, okay, what's the problem going to be next year if we are going to grow this much?
952
01:01:09.632 --> 01:01:22.736
And then the challenging part for any business is forecasting demand and then being able to then, okay, based upon that forecasted demand, I need to go higher, I need to create the supply end of this and be able to project that is the challenging part.
953
01:01:23.617 --> 01:01:23.897
Very.
954
01:01:24.137 --> 01:01:25.918
And we don't know what the economy would be like.
955
01:01:25.938 --> 01:01:26.298
We don't know.
956
01:01:26.498 --> 01:01:27.998
I mean, there's a million factors.
957
01:01:28.298 --> 01:01:31.079
Economy is just one that go into trying to forecast.
958
01:01:31.119 --> 01:01:32.400
So it's complicated, but...
959
01:01:33.988 --> 01:01:34.689
And you won't nail it.
960
01:01:34.969 --> 01:01:35.711
It won't be perfect.
961
01:01:36.191 --> 01:01:40.558
You'll, but if you don't do it, you're, in my opinion, pretty much guaranteed not to get it.
962
01:01:40.926 --> 01:02:05.072
i like i like the point too of like consistently tracking against where you're at because i kind of look at like a compass so it's like okay that's north great that's your one day at the beginning of the year you got your goals great if you put that down and you start walking in that direction there's a very good chance that in 365 days you will be off someplace very different versus you got to keep looking at the compass to actually ensure you stay on course and
963
01:02:05.472 --> 01:02:08.436
And that's why it's so important, in my opinion, not just to have like a goal day.
964
01:02:08.456 --> 01:02:10.258
And it's like, I'm trying to do this much in revenue.
965
01:02:10.278 --> 01:02:11.119
And here's all my numbers.
966
01:02:11.139 --> 01:02:13.022
And I did a great job for talking to AI.
967
01:02:13.042 --> 01:02:13.602
It's like, great.
968
01:02:14.323 --> 01:02:18.849
Month two, where are you at according to that compass that you set out now to go?
969
01:02:19.939 --> 01:02:20.980
Yep, good analogy.
970
01:02:21.680 --> 01:02:22.321
What's your next one?
971
01:02:22.621 --> 01:02:25.283
Okay, so this one is building an AI brand library.
972
01:02:26.805 --> 01:02:30.768
And so you've talked about this a little bit in the past when we did our examples of how to use AI.
973
01:02:30.788 --> 01:02:32.249
You talked specifically about one of these.
974
01:02:32.709 --> 01:02:37.914
I break into three categories, and that is a voice OS, a brand OS, and a creative OS.
975
01:02:38.454 --> 01:02:41.616
So I'll go through each of these to hopefully give everyone an idea.
976
01:02:41.896 --> 01:02:56.164
And again, the reason I use this one is because 12 months ago, I could not have said this because the models were not good enough to generate a lot of these creative elements, specifically when it comes to your crew working out in the field, vehicles, logos, text, all that is better now.
977
01:02:56.704 --> 01:02:57.125
And so...
978
01:02:58.295 --> 01:03:20.835
anyone that's like ai slop you have not given it enough inputs to make the output good so during the off season i want you to take the time to build these three assets and if you do that it'll be a whole lot easier to create the marketing material create the emails create the marketing calendar if you do the work on this back end so three elements first is voice os so i operating system voice os
979
01:03:21.616 --> 01:03:28.299
Inside of that, you want to ask the AI, Jonathan went very deep on this one, and that is, what's my ideal customer?
980
01:03:29.180 --> 01:03:30.301
What are their buying motivations?
981
01:03:30.461 --> 01:03:31.821
What are some of the objections that I have?
982
01:03:32.362 --> 01:03:34.243
What tone do I want to have when I talk to them?
983
01:03:34.923 --> 01:03:36.544
What are phrases I never want to say?
984
01:03:37.444 --> 01:03:39.285
Like, for example, cheap, right?
985
01:03:39.405 --> 01:03:40.646
Maybe I talk about high value.
986
01:03:41.526 --> 01:03:43.907
What are the things that I do not want to say to a customer?
987
01:03:44.408 --> 01:03:50.211
And then give examples of really good emails or ads that you like that maybe you've written, or you even like out in the wild.
988
01:03:50.938 --> 01:03:56.742
And then you can take those examples, make the edits, and then tell the AI why you did.
989
01:03:57.022 --> 01:03:59.743
So for example, I will screenshot a competitor's ad.
990
01:04:00.064 --> 01:04:02.605
I will say, here's what I like about it, and here's what I don't like about it.
991
01:04:02.945 --> 01:04:10.170
You do that several times, and it really guides AI on how you want to communicate with your customers in your local market.
992
01:04:10.450 --> 01:04:12.071
So that's the first part is the voice OS.
993
01:04:12.512 --> 01:04:16.555
Again, this is probably a 20 to 30 minute conversation if you're just getting started and just say it.
994
01:04:16.655 --> 01:04:19.717
These are the things that I want to build for my business.
995
01:04:19.737 --> 01:04:27.443
I want to create a voice OS document that I can inject as a prompt into my AI to get the copy of my business nailed down.
996
01:04:27.503 --> 01:04:32.067
And again, a really good example, Jonathan went really deep on this, showing it in real life.
997
01:04:32.767 --> 01:04:57.415
second one is i call brand os so each of each department i have has these three folders inside of the the brand library voice os second is brand os so this is going to be logos colors fonts don't just tell it i use times new roman give it the font file put it put it in there because then it'll be able to take the file and use the actual font in your marketing creative etc
998
01:05:02.600 --> 01:05:08.925
If you show one image of your mascot, it'll do a horrible job of putting that on marketing creative, on trucks, et cetera.
999
01:05:09.266 --> 01:05:10.487
Give it everything you have.
1000
01:05:10.587 --> 01:05:12.368
Give it the different versions of the file.
1001
01:05:12.969 --> 01:05:16.552
Large, small, PNG, JPEG, PDFs, et cetera.
1002
01:05:17.873 --> 01:05:20.215
And then give examples of when it's correctly used.
1003
01:05:20.615 --> 01:05:25.219
So what I will sometimes do to refine my brand to us is I will throw it all that I have.
1004
01:05:25.619 --> 01:05:28.501
I will ask it to create 10 different images on, for example, a truck,
1005
01:05:29.300 --> 01:05:54.497
my crew and their uniform and then I will tell it nope that's wrong you messed up the font nope that's wrong because the dog his ears do not look like that and you just constantly are trying to shape it so that way you have this folder the brand OS that you know you can immediately get creative or you can immediately have these elements of font colors being consistent across the board the last one's creative OS this is the one
1006
01:05:55.438 --> 01:05:57.502
that is really powerful when it comes to marketing.
1007
01:05:58.144 --> 01:06:03.314
And that is go out and get real pictures of your crews, your vehicles, your equipment,
1008
01:06:04.214 --> 01:06:05.715
Have them do the services that you offer.
1009
01:06:05.755 --> 01:06:09.236
Like if you offer five services, I want pictures of all five of those services.
1010
01:06:10.197 --> 01:06:12.698
If you have before and afters, if you have local landmarks.
1011
01:06:13.138 --> 01:06:19.461
So for example, if you live in a city, get all the images of those local landmarks and inject them into this document.
1012
01:06:19.721 --> 01:06:27.164
So that way, when your truck is driving down the street on an AI-generated image, it's showing a landmark in your local town, in your local area.
1013
01:06:27.364 --> 01:06:29.685
This is actually, okay, spoiler alert.
1014
01:06:30.065 --> 01:06:31.066
When we're going to Texas is...
1015
01:06:32.006 --> 01:06:34.727
I have five or six different cities that we kind of go into.
1016
01:06:35.227 --> 01:06:39.708
And each of those I now have pictures and a creative OS for each one.
1017
01:06:40.288 --> 01:06:46.730
So when I go into the city, here's all the landmarks, and here's everything else we talked about, my trucks, my uniform, etc.
1018
01:06:46.970 --> 01:06:52.592
But now my billboard or my truck is going to be in front of that city's landmark.
1019
01:06:53.489 --> 01:07:03.932
More importantly, even if you go more specifically, put it in front of like, there's a school, put it in front of a water tower, things that are identifiable to their area that is gonna help them stop on an ad.
1020
01:07:04.732 --> 01:07:10.994
And even your social media creative, like the ability to be able to have it customized to your local area, but you have to give it this information.
1021
01:07:11.314 --> 01:07:11.974
Like you have to show it.
1022
01:07:11.994 --> 01:07:15.275
These are the four landmarks that everyone knows in my area, it's a local business.
1023
01:07:17.048 --> 01:07:21.570
And so the last part that I do on the creative OS is different angles.
1024
01:07:22.131 --> 01:07:26.713
So when you take this, Jonathan just did this with his thumbnails.
1025
01:07:26.733 --> 01:07:27.633
Let's go.
1026
01:07:27.773 --> 01:07:32.115
You can't just take one image of Jonathan's face and tell it to make an AI generated thumbnail.
1027
01:07:32.475 --> 01:07:38.318
He took all angles of his face doing different impressions and different images.
1028
01:07:39.358 --> 01:08:04.446
uh facial expressions and so the same thing is true when it comes to like your trucks don't just take a picture of your truck and expect it to do a good job generating image take 20 images from every angle of the truck and now inside of your creative os you have a folder called truck and it will do a really good job of making sure that when it uses that information on a generated ai image it's super good anyways that was my my little rant on uh that's awesome an ai brand library
1029
01:08:05.153 --> 01:08:07.895
I have all of that except the landmarks.
1030
01:08:08.155 --> 01:08:09.296
That is a great idea.
1031
01:08:09.376 --> 01:08:09.597
I know.
1032
01:08:09.617 --> 01:08:11.258
I might have to cut this out of the podcast.
1033
01:08:12.559 --> 01:08:13.479
I like that idea.
1034
01:08:15.020 --> 01:08:18.183
So yeah, I mean, I just second all of that.
1035
01:08:19.564 --> 01:08:23.907
One of the things I thought about when you were talking, and you may have a better idea to do this.
1036
01:08:24.527 --> 01:08:26.629
I built all this stuff.
1037
01:08:26.669 --> 01:08:30.472
Voice and brand has been... All of it was built last year.
1038
01:08:31.819 --> 01:08:34.621
early last year for me.
1039
01:08:34.961 --> 01:08:37.782
And then, or brand was, actually brand was built in 2024.
1040
01:08:38.182 --> 01:08:39.503
And it doesn't matter.
1041
01:08:39.863 --> 01:08:48.708
Creative has been a this year project where you have a person that's working about 70 hours a month, just taking images and video in the field.
1042
01:08:49.545 --> 01:08:53.069
And so the local landmarks is really good.
1043
01:08:53.089 --> 01:08:54.530
But here's why I said all that.
1044
01:08:54.971 --> 01:09:01.037
I wonder, in terms of creating it, as you were talking, it's almost picturing like on... Let's just use Claude, for example.
1045
01:09:01.338 --> 01:09:07.444
You have a thread that would be voice, a thread that would be brand, a thread that would be creative.
1046
01:09:08.265 --> 01:09:09.906
And those threads persist forever.
1047
01:09:10.246 --> 01:09:19.392
So as I have new great examples of marketing or reasons why we do something, reasons why we don't do something, we're constantly just adding it to that thread.
1048
01:09:19.432 --> 01:09:26.117
And then periodically, we're having it generate us a new creative guide or voice guide or whatever the case might be.
1049
01:09:27.588 --> 01:09:28.328
I don't do it that way.
1050
01:09:28.408 --> 01:09:36.216
I've sort of created all this stuff and then I moved on, but you got me thinking I should have a live thread where I'm just constantly dumping more and more.
1051
01:09:36.456 --> 01:09:39.139
We're doing that with the creative thread, but not with the voice thread.
1052
01:09:39.679 --> 01:09:41.321
I periodically update that.
1053
01:09:41.361 --> 01:09:42.682
How do you guys build yours?
1054
01:09:43.182 --> 01:09:45.184
I have it where it's just a Google Drive folder.
1055
01:09:45.625 --> 01:09:47.847
So that way any output will go in there.
1056
01:09:48.387 --> 01:09:50.850
And I've just trained that if it's in there, it's good.
1057
01:09:52.586 --> 01:09:54.307
So that way you just have to read the Google Drive.
1058
01:09:54.327 --> 01:09:55.168
It keeps refining.
1059
01:09:55.588 --> 01:09:55.748
Yes.
1060
01:09:55.768 --> 01:09:57.849
For example, it'll give me an output for an email.
1061
01:09:57.929 --> 01:10:01.190
A lot of times we will copy that, go edit it and send it out to a customer.
1062
01:10:01.210 --> 01:10:10.114
The one part that I'd encourage everyone to do is like make the edits, then you got to give it back to the AI and like, oh, I made these five changes and it starts to get better.
1063
01:10:10.174 --> 01:10:12.815
Oh, he doesn't like this, doesn't like that word.
1064
01:10:13.075 --> 01:10:18.978
They always take out this sort of phraseology and it will refine itself and make the voice OS even better.
1065
01:10:19.628 --> 01:10:28.555
But in that example right there, you dumping it back into the thread, or are you just putting the document back in there and then telling the model to look at the updated document?
1066
01:10:28.655 --> 01:10:33.919
I don't, this is like my one data thing is like, I want that file somewhere I can always access it.
1067
01:10:34.239 --> 01:10:38.202
So I've always just made it where I have a kind of like my source of truth is my Google drive.
1068
01:10:38.322 --> 01:10:38.762
That's just me.
1069
01:10:39.023 --> 01:10:40.865
You could definitely dump it back into the chat.
1070
01:10:41.345 --> 01:10:44.148
But I've always just said like, hey, reference the Google Drive.
1071
01:10:44.208 --> 01:10:46.991
I just put back the final product and make sure you see the differences.
1072
01:10:47.251 --> 01:10:47.972
Tell me what they are.
1073
01:10:48.352 --> 01:10:50.694
I wanna make sure it understands why I did certain things.
1074
01:10:50.935 --> 01:10:53.797
Cause then over time, it gets better and better and better.
1075
01:10:54.698 --> 01:10:56.180
And you don't have to keep making little tweaks.
1076
01:10:56.992 --> 01:11:00.835
I think I'm just wanting to be very clear for people because like you, I actually use a Google Drive as well.
1077
01:11:00.855 --> 01:11:01.076
Oh, you do?
1078
01:11:01.136 --> 01:11:01.376
Okay.
1079
01:11:01.876 --> 01:11:02.697
Yeah.
1080
01:11:02.937 --> 01:11:03.838
Now, there's...
1081
01:11:03.858 --> 01:11:11.164
But I also have other projects that are just folders on my computer where Claude or Chajubiti are writing to and from a folder on my computer.
1082
01:11:11.184 --> 01:11:12.946
But for CityTurf, it's all Google.
1083
01:11:13.146 --> 01:11:13.907
Yeah.
1084
01:11:14.127 --> 01:11:14.567
You get the idea.
1085
01:11:14.707 --> 01:11:17.150
My question, what I'm wanting to be very clear on people...
1086
01:11:17.810 --> 01:11:25.338
for people is you download an email, you rewrite it, you re-upload it to Google Drive.
1087
01:11:25.978 --> 01:11:27.780
I just want to be clear.
1088
01:11:28.180 --> 01:11:30.002
You're still doing one more step, right?
1089
01:11:30.102 --> 01:11:39.151
Aren't you going into Claude to the thread or to a thread and telling it to read that new document or just the act of uploading?
1090
01:11:39.191 --> 01:11:39.892
Is that enough?
1091
01:11:39.912 --> 01:11:40.072
Yeah.
1092
01:11:40.292 --> 01:11:41.533
I've trained it pretty good.
1093
01:11:42.033 --> 01:11:47.076
When I mill the projects, I usually say, this is your source of truth, any file in here is what I consider good.
1094
01:11:47.416 --> 01:11:49.477
So I don't have to inject it back in.
1095
01:11:50.097 --> 01:11:54.019
If I was trying to iterative process, I'd probably put it back in and keep working with it.
1096
01:11:54.499 --> 01:11:59.042
But I've made it where it's just like, always look at this for the source of good.
1097
01:11:59.462 --> 01:12:05.225
That's why I'm like, the defensibility around my private Gmail even, that's my Google Drive.
1098
01:12:05.445 --> 01:12:09.107
Everything in there, I consider it to be able to scan and use for the model.
1099
01:12:10.010 --> 01:12:12.993
okay, maybe I need to test again.
1100
01:12:13.013 --> 01:12:19.619
The reason I'm bringing this up is historically that's not worked for me because the context window isn't big enough to scan all the documents.
1101
01:12:19.959 --> 01:12:24.643
So I feel like I have to point it very specifically at these examples.
1102
01:12:24.963 --> 01:12:26.705
And so that's why I was asking.
1103
01:12:26.725 --> 01:12:29.968
Maybe the context windows are better now and I'm not realizing that.
1104
01:12:29.988 --> 01:12:32.130
Do you open a new chat inside the project each time?
1105
01:12:32.670 --> 01:12:33.011
Yes.
1106
01:12:33.231 --> 01:12:33.531
Okay.
1107
01:12:33.591 --> 01:12:34.412
I see what you're saying.
1108
01:12:35.133 --> 01:12:43.122
But yes, if you're doing it that way, but even then there's a limitation to how much you can read in a folder.
1109
01:12:43.362 --> 01:12:43.643
True.
1110
01:12:43.943 --> 01:12:46.486
Only ingest so many tokens.
1111
01:12:46.526 --> 01:12:51.231
And that's why I was wondering if you were telling it specifically, go look at this, go look at that.
1112
01:12:51.371 --> 01:12:56.956
Honestly, it's a lot of times when I'm talking to it, I'm usually saying like, Hey, go reference the voice OS and look at previous emails.
1113
01:12:56.976 --> 01:12:57.096
Okay.
1114
01:12:57.156 --> 01:12:58.617
I do that command it still.
1115
01:12:58.717 --> 01:12:58.917
Yes.
1116
01:12:59.097 --> 01:12:59.458
You're right.
1117
01:12:59.478 --> 01:12:59.618
Okay.
1118
01:12:59.658 --> 01:12:59.758
Okay.
1119
01:12:59.778 --> 01:13:00.679
That's what I was trying to get.
1120
01:13:00.739 --> 01:13:09.266
I wasn't trying to get too much in the weeds, but you said something thought made me think, Oh, maybe I've, uh, I'm missing something and it can do something I'm not realizing it's capable.
1121
01:13:09.286 --> 01:13:09.666
Great point.
1122
01:13:09.927 --> 01:13:16.612
And like, sometimes too, I'll get on this kick, especially on copywriting where like a specific type of copywriter, I've been reading their books.
1123
01:13:16.692 --> 01:13:18.674
I really like to craft towards that.
1124
01:13:19.194 --> 01:13:19.595
I'm just like.
1125
01:13:20.680 --> 01:13:24.281
you know, a slippery slope, for example, like how do I create a slippery slope throughout an email?
1126
01:13:24.681 --> 01:13:31.043
And if it's resonating with me, I'll be like, hey, reference that document about, and I want to tailor it towards that approach.
1127
01:13:31.483 --> 01:13:33.323
So I do guide it to your point.
1128
01:13:33.903 --> 01:13:34.163
Okay.
1129
01:13:34.663 --> 01:13:34.924
All right.
1130
01:13:34.984 --> 01:13:35.404
Very good.
1131
01:13:36.024 --> 01:13:37.264
I thought all that's great.
1132
01:13:37.364 --> 01:13:38.945
I would add one last thing.
1133
01:13:40.205 --> 01:13:48.467
And that is, you might have, whomever's listening, you might have heard this and say, well, man, when I work with my model, it's really good.
1134
01:13:49.533 --> 01:13:51.094
And it might be really good.
1135
01:13:51.134 --> 01:13:53.015
And I don't need to create all this stuff because it's really good.
1136
01:13:53.035 --> 01:14:00.099
And it might be because you've been doing this stuff inside your model and it has a memory and context and other threads it can reference.
1137
01:14:00.799 --> 01:14:04.221
But none of this is scalable for team members.
1138
01:14:04.261 --> 01:14:08.703
You'll never be able to hand this off unless you create these documents because this is what educates their model.
1139
01:14:08.703 --> 01:14:09.945
And this is why I do Google Drive.
1140
01:14:10.205 --> 01:14:13.110
Because then I can share that folder, make them a viewer only.
1141
01:14:13.170 --> 01:14:15.333
They get all the context, not can't edit it.
1142
01:14:15.654 --> 01:14:18.779
And I don't have to share them in my AI accounts.
1143
01:14:18.979 --> 01:14:20.381
It's always updated on their end.
1144
01:14:20.582 --> 01:14:23.206
So anyways, very useful.
1145
01:14:24.774 --> 01:14:25.054
Cool.
1146
01:14:25.415 --> 01:14:25.775
What else?
1147
01:14:26.195 --> 01:14:26.916
I think that's all we got.
1148
01:14:26.936 --> 01:14:27.616
Yeah.
1149
01:14:28.217 --> 01:14:32.179
I think what I want to know, though, for everyone listening, we've been like super tactical today.
1150
01:14:32.220 --> 01:14:33.801
So we'll see how this does in terms of the algorithm.
1151
01:14:33.821 --> 01:14:38.464
But there's a bunch of stuff we mentioned specifically that you can change in your business this offseason.
1152
01:14:39.265 --> 01:14:45.689
The tax on this episode is you've got to let us know down below which one are you going to do first, which one resonated the most with you.
1153
01:14:45.709 --> 01:14:47.651
And you're like, I got to at least do that one thing.
1154
01:14:47.671 --> 01:14:48.612
I don't want to list five things.
1155
01:14:49.152 --> 01:14:53.474
Because a lot of these things, if you just did one of these things this offseason, it would completely change your business.
1156
01:14:54.154 --> 01:14:57.616
And instead of going into the offseason with 20 things you want to do, I just want to know one.
1157
01:14:58.416 --> 01:15:01.717
Because it will absolutely set up 2027 to be a fantastic year.
1158
01:15:02.758 --> 01:15:04.058
I 100% agree with that.
1159
01:15:04.078 --> 01:15:05.099
Appreciate you all watching.
1160
01:15:05.139 --> 01:15:05.759
We'll see you next week.
1161
01:15:06.039 --> 01:15:06.440
Likewise.
1162
01:15:06.820 --> 01:15:07.200
See you later.
1
00:00:00.831 --> 00:00:07.574
As soon as the customer that gave me money, I'm reviewing them, immediately, everyone's on the side of the customer.
2
00:00:07.694 --> 00:00:11.836
That's why everyone just assumes these reviews are correct and they're not, they're scams.
3
00:00:12.176 --> 00:00:19.439
It's the guy or gal that posts a one-star review and then basically they're like, hey, give me what I want, I'll take it down.
4
00:00:19.559 --> 00:00:25.061
So they post a one-star review and they use this on you all the time, you're a hostage.
5
00:00:25.181 --> 00:00:29.104
Because if you want to go by $350,000, now you're negative in terms of cash flow for two months.
6
00:00:29.545 --> 00:00:33.128
Can you actually even sustain that kind of growth for this upcoming year?
7
00:00:33.188 --> 00:00:37.411
Or do you run out of cash and have a profitable, fast-growing business that runs out of money, goes bankrupt?
8
00:00:37.731 --> 00:00:42.976
100 clients will drive $300,000 in revenue, but you're not selling them all on January 1st.
9
00:00:43.196 --> 00:00:44.557
You're selling a lot of them in May.
10
00:00:44.817 --> 00:00:49.061
So that means you're only going to get just over half the revenue for the year, theoretically.
11
00:00:49.081 --> 00:00:50.802
So you need way more than 100 clients.
12
00:00:51.002 --> 00:00:53.704
It's all the things that could break in a process.
13
00:00:53.824 --> 00:00:55.085
What if we lost a person?
14
00:00:55.545 --> 00:00:57.266
What if we have crew issues?
15
00:00:57.466 --> 00:00:59.788
What if we don't have enough people for the phones?
16
00:00:59.848 --> 00:01:02.329
What if we lose our one and only sales guy?
17
00:01:02.469 --> 00:01:10.474
Have you basically one day say, Hey, we're six weeks booked out on whatever, irrigation, or three months booked out on landscape.
18
00:01:10.514 --> 00:01:12.276
Just stop taking sales.
19
00:01:12.296 --> 00:01:14.637
Stop taking it or turn off the marketing.
20
00:01:14.957 --> 00:01:15.918
That stuff kills people.
21
00:01:16.278 --> 00:01:18.100
Welcome back, everyone, to the podcast.
22
00:01:18.400 --> 00:01:20.202
Jonathan Potosianic, Mike Andes here.
23
00:01:20.222 --> 00:01:22.624
Today we're going to be talking about two different topics.
24
00:01:23.184 --> 00:01:29.390
We're going to first talk about customers that are bad and how we want to rate them and show the world why they're bad.
25
00:01:29.850 --> 00:01:34.794
And then we're going to pivot to something more in your business, what you can do this offseason.
26
00:01:35.595 --> 00:01:59.368
to prepare for next spring rush a lot of times you have so many things that are going on throughout your busy season like i will get that to that one day but what are the actual things you can do this off season to prepare for next year and make sure that 2027 is a landmark year for you and your business but first because jonathan hijacked the docket he's like i gotta talk about this i've been venting i've been thinking about this for years i just i want a place to vent he's been talking to philip about it so
27
00:02:01.169 --> 00:02:02.390
The basic concept is this.
28
00:02:03.090 --> 00:02:09.433
We have Yelp, we have Angie, we have all these services, Google reviews that rate us as contractors.
29
00:02:09.934 --> 00:02:21.180
But when you look at Uber, Airbnb, VRBO, they all allow you to rate the host and the person that shows up is the person driving, et cetera.
30
00:02:21.600 --> 00:02:24.283
So there's no two-way action in the home service industry.
31
00:02:24.824 --> 00:02:27.747
Jonathan, he's been looking through bad reviews recently.
32
00:02:28.227 --> 00:02:29.769
He's been talking to Phillips Jaded.
33
00:02:29.969 --> 00:02:32.212
Oh, I'm back involved in the business, so yeah.
34
00:02:32.272 --> 00:02:32.452
Yeah.
35
00:02:32.632 --> 00:02:41.081
And now he's considering taking all the chops of software and just hijacking every homeowner possible to be able to make sure that we keep them accountable.
36
00:02:41.682 --> 00:02:47.424
these Karens and Kens around the world, they're going to write bad reviews, try to get us out of our deposits, not pay their bills.
37
00:02:47.884 --> 00:02:49.144
So Jonathan, take it away.
38
00:02:49.304 --> 00:02:50.205
I set the platform.
39
00:02:50.565 --> 00:02:55.026
Tell us about this huge problem in your life and what you're doing to fix it.
40
00:02:55.546 --> 00:03:00.668
Well, I mean, I got to say, since I've been back involved in the business, I'm hyper aware of all this stuff because I watch it.
41
00:03:01.128 --> 00:03:07.230
So then it leads to me and Philip chatting about this same conversation over and over again and moaning and groaning to each other.
42
00:03:07.870 --> 00:03:10.191
And so last night I dropped...
43
00:03:10.751 --> 00:03:13.395
in the docket this idea to talk about in the future.
44
00:03:13.835 --> 00:03:19.724
And then like five minutes later, I don't know if you would have noticed, I dropped it up top and then I moved it to the very bottom as I thought about it.
45
00:03:19.744 --> 00:03:21.766
I was like, we don't really need to talk about this right now.
46
00:03:21.786 --> 00:03:23.549
And then Mike texts me today.
47
00:03:23.609 --> 00:03:25.251
It's like, hey, let's talk about this.
48
00:03:26.713 --> 00:03:28.195
Here's the basic problem.
49
00:03:28.575 --> 00:03:31.819
And I have an idea for it, but I just don't know how it would go.
50
00:03:32.159 --> 00:03:33.281
And I really shouldn't do this.
51
00:03:33.321 --> 00:03:37.526
I keep getting myself distracted with things that really I shouldn't spend a minute of time on.
52
00:03:37.586 --> 00:03:38.407
It's for the people.
53
00:03:38.467 --> 00:03:40.489
This one's for the people.
54
00:03:40.789 --> 00:03:41.871
This is me giving back.
55
00:03:41.891 --> 00:03:42.291
That's right.
56
00:03:42.391 --> 00:03:42.792
Exactly.
57
00:03:42.832 --> 00:03:43.452
Exactly.
58
00:03:44.869 --> 00:03:50.354
So it's like, I got to imagine that anybody that's been in business for a while has felt this.
59
00:03:51.014 --> 00:03:54.557
It's the guy or gal that posts a one-star review.
60
00:03:55.218 --> 00:03:57.459
And then basically like, hey, give me what I want.
61
00:03:57.499 --> 00:03:58.300
I'll take it down.
62
00:03:59.121 --> 00:04:00.001
They take it down.
63
00:04:00.602 --> 00:04:01.983
And then they stay your client.
64
00:04:02.423 --> 00:04:04.785
And then five months from now, they want something else.
65
00:04:04.805 --> 00:04:09.569
So they post a one-star review and they use this on you all the time.
66
00:04:09.589 --> 00:04:12.472
You're a hostage or the number of...
67
00:04:13.712 --> 00:04:16.834
issues we deal with where people are flat out lying.
68
00:04:17.174 --> 00:04:18.835
Like it's a full on scam.
69
00:04:18.875 --> 00:04:19.315
Yeah.
70
00:04:19.375 --> 00:04:19.535
It is.
71
00:04:19.575 --> 00:04:21.876
We've got several going right now that are full on.
72
00:04:21.917 --> 00:04:22.357
Really?
73
00:04:22.497 --> 00:04:22.817
Oh man.
74
00:04:23.117 --> 00:04:23.537
Oh, big ones.
75
00:04:23.557 --> 00:04:30.221
What happens in Augusta Cloud is because once they find out after like you get a Karen that's calling all the time, they figure out, okay, this is a call center.
76
00:04:30.301 --> 00:04:37.785
Like they pit them like us against the owners or like they'll tell the owner, someone said this on the phone and like, look, we can go back and see the recording.
77
00:04:37.805 --> 00:04:38.886
We never said that.
78
00:04:39.026 --> 00:04:40.146
Or you never said that.
79
00:04:40.346 --> 00:04:41.067
Anyways, go ahead.
80
00:04:41.387 --> 00:04:50.395
Yeah, Phillips has mentioned that because there are some things that people will do where you don't have a picture or a video, so you can't prove it's not time stamped.
81
00:04:50.955 --> 00:04:55.059
But there are things like if it's said on the phone, there's a variety of things you can catch people on.
82
00:04:55.820 --> 00:05:03.987
And one thing that Phillips said to me, because I'm not out in the field dealing with this, but Phillip has made the point that sometimes what happens is when we catch people, they're like, yeah, well, I tried.
83
00:05:04.467 --> 00:05:08.911
And it's like, no remorse for the scam that they were just trying to pull on us.
84
00:05:08.971 --> 00:05:09.831
It's like, why not?
85
00:05:09.911 --> 00:05:10.292
I tried.
86
00:05:10.312 --> 00:05:12.473
It didn't work, but we'll just continue on.
87
00:05:12.693 --> 00:05:13.814
Then he wants to stay client.
88
00:05:13.934 --> 00:05:15.856
I saw it in a Reddit forum.
89
00:05:16.016 --> 00:05:18.058
I was just going to give it a shot.
90
00:05:18.158 --> 00:05:21.480
I thought maybe I could get a free landscape in my backyard.
91
00:05:21.580 --> 00:05:22.781
But anyway, I tried.
92
00:05:22.801 --> 00:05:25.483
Anyway, so it just keeps happening.
93
00:05:25.503 --> 00:05:30.907
Now, to be fair on this particular issue, it's like all issues in the business.
94
00:05:31.708 --> 00:05:38.231
When you actually look at the data and say, how often does it happen as compared to how big my business is or how fast we're growing?
95
00:05:38.251 --> 00:05:40.172
It's like, okay, we should just ignore this.
96
00:05:40.212 --> 00:05:42.893
But it's such a frustrating personal thing.
97
00:05:42.913 --> 00:05:48.115
This one really rises to the top when Philip and I are talking because you're getting scammed.
98
00:05:48.255 --> 00:05:48.415
Yeah.
99
00:05:48.815 --> 00:05:49.675
We do mess up.
100
00:05:49.775 --> 00:05:53.376
We do deserve some not great reviews sometimes.
101
00:05:53.456 --> 00:05:54.817
We readily admit that.
102
00:05:55.017 --> 00:05:57.457
I'm talking about the stuff where you feel like you're being scammed.
103
00:05:57.818 --> 00:06:05.460
So anyway, we've just talked over the years, probably for two years now, off and on about this, but really this year quite a bit.
104
00:06:05.480 --> 00:06:10.421
It's like, there needs to be a system that you can...
105
00:06:10.761 --> 00:06:13.862
In our system, we can flag people that we will never take back as a client.
106
00:06:15.199 --> 00:06:20.089
But I've got so many friends that are all my competitors in the local market.
107
00:06:20.149 --> 00:06:22.714
Like we need a shared list.
108
00:06:23.255 --> 00:06:25.820
So if my friend, like at their company,
109
00:06:26.927 --> 00:06:31.830
fires this client, I'd love to know because they're going to call my company next and try to sign up with us.
110
00:06:32.550 --> 00:06:34.431
And so I want to not take them.
111
00:06:35.311 --> 00:06:36.852
And so that's one idea.
112
00:06:36.872 --> 00:06:39.633
And the other one is like, why in the world is there not...
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It's probably because it would never work with...
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The public wouldn't go for this.
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But why in the world is there not a product where we can review the customer to your opening?
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Like that...
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It just, this whole review thing just feels, anyway, I'm rambling, but this whole review thing feels so scammy sometimes and so frustrating, and there's no way to really fight these things.
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Right.
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You're gonna get a lot of support for this.
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I have seen multiple people try to build this.
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Um, have you?
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Okay.
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See that I've looked, I've wondered if anybody has ever tried it.
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Nothing's gotten traction.
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Everybody's got to feel it.
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Oh yeah.
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I guarantee you in the comments, there's gonna be five examples of people like, I built this here it is.
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Yeah.
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Okay.
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The other thing is I think we need to expand the aperture, right?
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I don't think this is just a home service issue.
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I think this is true.
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No, it's absolutely not.
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Restaurants, hotels.
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Oh, for sure.
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Like this, we can expand this, you know?
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We can become the Angie's List for the customer.
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But now you gotta see what their laundry person says, what their cleaning company says, what the local bakery says about them.
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You know, the people, when you see the one star view, click on their profile, and all they leave is one star views.
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You're like, I think this person deserves a one star.
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Exactly, yeah, I just,
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There's got to be some way to fight back on this stuff.
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Like it's just... And so, yeah, the reason this started was I think I want to take this a step further here in a second and just talk about a little bit of advice and brainstorm for just a moment before we jump into the real topic today.
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But I was curious if you'd ever seen a product out there.
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I do remember that when I started CityTurf, there was a company in my market.
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Their name was Just Mowing.
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And I believe they had a list of people that they, that was public that they considered bad clients.
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I'm almost sure that's correct.
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It's like the barber.
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I have this like faint memory.
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At my barber they have this like, if you show up late, you put your name up on the board.
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If you don't, if you no show, it goes in this different box and you gotta pay $20 to get it erased off the board.
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So you just have this list of bad customers on the board.
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But okay, so here's the problem.
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As I'm thinking through it, you're only helping your competition.
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And unfortunately, home services or a lot of the... You're only helping the people in your local market if you tell them don't use this... Don't do business with this customer.
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Most people are very happy that their competitor gets their worst client.
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They just make sure they internally document.
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So the problem I see is this... Like, why does this not spread?
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Because I've seen these built before.
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They don't spread because the only reason you would tell
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put that in a database is to prevent your local competitors from using that, having that customer.
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And most people don't want their competitors to win.
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I'll have a city turf.
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We'll put 11,822 people in the list.
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No, but we'll put all our good customers on there.
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So every time somebody, one of our competitors goes back, not arresting a memo.
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That's smart.
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You see reverse psychology.
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Now we're talking.
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Oh, that's awesome.
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Well, that's a problem with any sort of marketplace is you have to have the two sides.
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Like you could immediately have thousands of people on the contractor side, but there's no database.
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there's not any value to sign up that's that's yeah you would need the the the funding of uber to make this work yeah yeah i had i had thought well maybe just something with my local you know competitors that that's how facebook started just harvard just saying oh yeah true yeah just my local competitors and i i can picture a couple of my friends right now they'd be like oh yeah i'd be all in on that we do this
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But you're right.
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As soon as you broaden that out, it would start getting gamed.
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And then also you can imagine like the same people that are crazy on Google.
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Well, some of the contractors are crazy too.
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So they'd be blaming consumers for stuff that's not even there.
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It'd go both ways.
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It's a mess that maybe there's no resolution to, but it sure feels one-sided right now.
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Yeah, customers should have to respond back to their views.
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You know, you go back there as a homeowner, like, no, that didn't happen.
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That's awesome.
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Yeah.
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All right.
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Let's move on to something more valuable for everyone that wanted to humor us.
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But we do believe that given the success of JP in software, I think this is a give back moment.
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It's one of those moments where we extract as much as possible from the people that have succeeded.
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And in this case, I think that time well spent if you built this.
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That's the other part.
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If you built this, see, I feel like you could get publicity for this.
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Like you could get free PR because you could get the, you could get people.
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What I've wondered is would people get upset about this?
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Like, would people feel like it's wrong for them to get reviewed?
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Like it's okay for you, us to review your business, but the idea that you would review me back, like, would you get people up in arms about a service like this?
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So here's my philosophy on this.
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You can always give your opinion on the person that you're giving money to.
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But very rarely does this work logic like in our psychology.
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If I'm giving you money that you can review me.
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Oh, yeah.
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If wait, if I'm giving you money, yeah, you can review the person.
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Yeah.
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But as soon as as soon as the customer that gave me money, I'm reviewing them immediately like everyone's on the side of the customer.
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That's why everyone assumes these reviews are correct.
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And they're not their scams.
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Yeah.
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So the other thing I always have to remind myself of is people don't live in our businesses.
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So they don't understand the problem.
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They just like, it's kind of like talking to people about how challenging it is to find labor.
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In my argument, I don't want to go down the short, just how hard it is to find labor.
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And so people don't understand how hard it is to find labor when you talk or team members, when you talk to somebody that's not in these businesses.
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And or the parent that wants the friend, it's like, hey, can my kid work at your company for the summer?
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No, we're not gonna train your kid to work hard and not play video games all day and not be lazy.
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Like that's not gonna be our joke.
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Now you can review parents.
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There you go.
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That's another part of the application.
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Let's go.
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All right.
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That's enough of my tangent.
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Okay, cool.
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Let's move on the second topic.
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I want to go over the real topic.
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Yeah.
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The what we can do in the off season as home service business owners, and ideally come up with some real tangible solutions that for most of us during November to February, approximately, especially in North America, um,
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that allows us to be able to improve the business.
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And so my goal here is that both of us offer two strategies.
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We'll go back and forth of real things that you can do now in preparation of the off-season or during the off-season to make sure that 2027 is a great year for your business.
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So Jonathan, go ahead and tee it up with one of your first ideas.
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Okay, so...
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I'm bringing two to the conversation and the two are directly related to each other.
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Oh, man, I have a bad feeling we're going to overlap a bunch.
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I was like, maybe on this one, I should let him know what I'm going to talk about.
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But let's see.
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Go ahead.
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We'll see where it goes.
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All right.
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So the best way I know to kind of start this and tell me if I'm going to step on whatever you're going to say.
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But it's this it's it's initially.
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I'll call it the plan.
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Is this going anywhere in the direction of what you're going to talk about?
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Go ahead.
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Okay.
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All right.
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So...
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I think what we do, what I've done, I suspect a lot of us do this, is we sort of have a plan for the next year.
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And my belief is most of us, our plan is based around revenue.
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You'll, of course, say, hey, I want to fix this or I want to get a new truck or I want to replace this person.
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I need to hire another person.
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That's part of it.
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But if you think about the way most people think about what would make a better next year, it's usually I want to grow my business by X.
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I want to make more money.
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It's something revenue related.
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And so most of us technically have a plan.
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I want to grow my revenue by 100 grand.
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I want to grow it by a million.
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I want to grow it by 20%.
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That's sort of our plan.
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And then we think about the next step.
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And the next step is that, okay, for me to do that, I need to write some emails and sell some more stuff to my clients.
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And this is what I think I'll sell.
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And I need to...
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I've heard Mike talking about Facebook.
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I need to do Facebook.
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And I was listening to this other podcast.
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And I really should start doing LSA or spending more on LSA.
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That's kind of the plan.
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We go a little further than that.
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Also, we'll pull into the plan.
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Hey, I need to recreate some SOPs and some processes.
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We'll pull that in there.
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And that's kind of... You go a little more than that, but sort of the plan.
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And so where I want to take this is that...
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the plan actually takes quite a bit of work.
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And it's not how I lived for a good part of my career.
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Like we would plan, but the way I'm about to talk about is not how I did it for many, many, many, many years.
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And the way I'm going to talk about is what I think actually works.
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Okay.
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And so the gist of the idea is that
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In your off-season here, when you can get a clear mind, you dedicate some very focused time to trying to figure out what is it that I want.
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I'm taking this a different direction than what you've probably normally heard.
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And what I mean by that is, we'll go back to the revenue example.
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So the revenue example is, I want to grow my business by $400,000 in revenue this year.
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Okay, great.
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That's a great starting place.
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We'll just start with that.
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That's the revenue number.
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All right, so, and you kind of want to, where I'm going with the starting point is you kind of want to do a brain dump and just think about all the things I want to improve, but I know that one of your things is going to be the revenue.
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So I'm just going to use revenue as my example here.
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I understand there will be other things.
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Okay.
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So then the next thing that comes from that, which will kind of get into my second point a little bit later, but I'm not going to go too deep with this here, is, okay, the next thing that needs to be on my list is what broke this year?
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So what what in it's like revenue, I know it's going to be on your list.
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The next thing is what broke this year?
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So what were the things we were frustrated about?
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You know, think about spring, think about through the year, just think about all the things that sort of went wrong.
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And I would suggest you get those down.
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You could talk to Claude or ChatGPT and just have it make a list for you.
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You could write it in a document.
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It doesn't matter, but I want you to do a brain dump of the things I want to accomplish, my goals, revenue being one.
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And then next, what broke?
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What went wrong?
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What were we frustrated about?
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Okay.
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So if one of the goals is revenue, then...
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one thing that's absolutely imperative is that you then think about, okay, knowing what broke last year.
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Let's put some numbers to it.
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Let's say we are a million dollars this year and our goal is we want to do 1.35 million next year.
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If I were to add another 350 revenue to the business, and let's think specifically about spring, or maybe another way to do this, think about your worst week last year.
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And now you're layering in, taking on all those new clients, getting them up and running and serve them.
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What would break?
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So you kind of think about what broke last year.
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But now if we pile on more revenue, just trying to imagine this, what's going to break?
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Yeah.
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Okay?
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So we think through that.
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So that starts to form what I'm going to call your plan.
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And the plan is, we want to get this amount of revenue.
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So we got to get this growth.
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And the plan is also, these are the things that could go wrong.
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They went wrong last year and they could go wrong again this year.
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And they could go wrong in an even bigger way as we add more revenue to this business.
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And that starts to kind of block out the plan of, we need to do this.
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We need to do that.
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It starts to make that list.
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Okay?
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And then...
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So you sort of have on your plan your biggest offenders and your big opportunity, which is the revenue.
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And then that needs to get broken down into steps.
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And the steps are what, in my opinion, makes the plan reality and it exposes the weakness in the plan.
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Case in point, I'm sure everybody's done this.
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I sure have.
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It's like, it's easy to say, well, next year I'm gonna do this thing and this thing and this.
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I'm gonna get all these things done over the winter and we're gonna grow this much next year.
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We're basically just making stuff up and it feels good.
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And we're way overly optimistic because we're exhausted coming out of the year.
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So we wanna take a little bit of a break.
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Like there's just a lot of stuff
340
00:19:02.930 --> 00:19:05.252
happens and we don't get even half of our list done.
341
00:19:05.312 --> 00:19:07.293
I suspect that happens to a lot of people.
342
00:19:07.313 --> 00:19:15.039
And so this is why I think this brain dump, this plan, breaking the plan into steps is really, really important.
343
00:19:15.719 --> 00:19:24.245
And I feel that as I've moved this direction over the years, we have more often than not lived in reality.
344
00:19:25.299 --> 00:19:29.822
And that's really, really important to getting the outcome that you want.
345
00:19:30.483 --> 00:19:44.453
So if you've listened to many of our episodes, if you think about this conversation or this thing you've heard about from me for a while, which is the marketing calendar and my task list, we've talked about it several times.
346
00:19:44.513 --> 00:19:46.214
That's exactly what I'm doing.
347
00:19:47.095 --> 00:19:50.617
So whenever we say marketing calendar, you might hear it as...
348
00:19:51.557 --> 00:20:05.209
It's just a calendar saying this thing needs to get emailed, this thing needs to get printed and mailed, this thing needs, you know, they need to change the, they need to look at analytics in Google and maybe change some of the copy and the ads.
349
00:20:05.229 --> 00:20:08.632
Like, that's, those are the kinds of things that you might picture go on a marketing calendar.
350
00:20:08.692 --> 00:20:09.733
And that is all true.
351
00:20:10.467 --> 00:20:13.649
But the marketing calendar does way more than that.
352
00:20:13.689 --> 00:20:19.272
The marketing calendar says on February 15th, this thing has to go out the door and drop.
353
00:20:20.092 --> 00:20:30.458
So that means 60 days in advance or whatever period is required, we have to have done the work to be ready to ship that thing on February 15th.
354
00:20:32.110 --> 00:20:38.794
It's the thing that says, hey, we need to do an audit of our marketing at the end of the first quarter and an audit again at the second.
355
00:20:38.914 --> 00:20:45.458
It defines the things we do as a business and it defines when they have to get done, both when they deliver and when we need to start working on them.
356
00:20:45.538 --> 00:20:46.318
That's a plan.
357
00:20:47.499 --> 00:20:50.380
And it's not just a plan for me.
358
00:20:51.541 --> 00:20:52.942
It's not just a plan for the business.
359
00:20:53.062 --> 00:20:58.405
It's a plan for the people inside the organization that I need to...
360
00:20:59.860 --> 00:21:05.908
I need to give them enough information so they can just run and perform without constantly asking me what to do or what's next.
361
00:21:06.669 --> 00:21:09.353
And then you also heard me talk about this task list.
362
00:21:09.393 --> 00:21:16.383
So if I say we want to drive X amount of additional revenue next year, it's all the things we need to do.
363
00:21:18.096 --> 00:21:19.036
There's a lot to say here.
364
00:21:20.017 --> 00:21:22.118
Are we going to grow the business through acquisition?
365
00:21:22.298 --> 00:21:23.679
Meaning, are we going to get new clients?
366
00:21:24.039 --> 00:21:25.840
Are we going to grow the business through expansion?
367
00:21:25.980 --> 00:21:28.341
Meaning, we sell more to our existing clients?
368
00:21:28.901 --> 00:21:32.123
Are we going to grow the business through reactivating old clients?
369
00:21:32.303 --> 00:21:35.585
Like people that canceled, maybe we're going to try to bring them back.
370
00:21:35.625 --> 00:21:37.926
Are we going to reactivate old leads we never closed?
371
00:21:37.946 --> 00:21:39.266
Are we going to try to get them to buy?
372
00:21:39.467 --> 00:21:42.588
That's four different ways right there I can grow revenue.
373
00:21:42.888 --> 00:21:45.830
And a fifth is, are we going to focus on things that drive down churn?
374
00:21:46.715 --> 00:21:49.057
All five of those things grow revenue in the business.
375
00:21:49.497 --> 00:21:52.780
So part of the plan is, where are we going to get our growth from?
376
00:21:52.820 --> 00:21:58.765
If I want 400,000 in growth this year, I could get maybe 150 from acquisition, new clients.
377
00:21:59.125 --> 00:22:02.528
I could get 100 from expansion, selling more to existing clients.
378
00:22:02.968 --> 00:22:05.070
I could get 50 by losing fewer clients.
379
00:22:05.110 --> 00:22:06.391
Where am I going to get this growth?
380
00:22:06.531 --> 00:22:07.311
That's the plan.
381
00:22:08.170 --> 00:22:24.241
And then once I know that, it's like, okay, well, if we need 100 grand from acquisition, and I know that I convert 50% of all my leads, and I know that a client is worth 2000 bucks a year, I can back in and say, I need whatever 200 leads.
382
00:22:25.662 --> 00:22:27.182
Or I can back into that math.
383
00:22:27.202 --> 00:22:31.163
Well, if I need 200 leads, then that's like, I need this many door hangers going out.
384
00:22:31.283 --> 00:22:35.284
I need to be spending this much on LSA or you're possibly guessing.
385
00:22:35.304 --> 00:22:39.025
You don't, you know, we don't always know, but it starts to inform an actual plan.
386
00:22:39.065 --> 00:22:39.866
That's a plan.
387
00:22:40.406 --> 00:22:41.806
A plan is this is the goal.
388
00:22:42.086 --> 00:22:43.086
I'm going to break it into steps.
389
00:22:43.126 --> 00:22:44.547
I'm going to back into what I need.
390
00:22:44.567 --> 00:22:45.187
It's like,
391
00:22:47.155 --> 00:22:49.236
How are we going to attract people to the business?
392
00:22:49.296 --> 00:22:51.517
What are the different marketing channels we're going to use?
393
00:22:52.118 --> 00:22:53.718
How many leads do we need to get?
394
00:22:54.539 --> 00:22:55.760
Qualified leads.
395
00:22:55.780 --> 00:22:59.782
We're looking at, in the past, as I said, how many people are generally converting.
396
00:23:00.062 --> 00:23:01.523
We're thinking about deadlines.
397
00:23:01.543 --> 00:23:04.044
We're thinking about the best time of year to do this marketing.
398
00:23:05.353 --> 00:23:07.594
We're thinking about who on the team is going to do what.
399
00:23:07.954 --> 00:23:11.917
We're thinking about, well, now that I've made my plan, I've broken the tasks, this is insane.
400
00:23:11.977 --> 00:23:12.697
I can only do...
401
00:23:12.917 --> 00:23:13.718
I got 90 things.
402
00:23:13.738 --> 00:23:14.718
I could probably do nine.
403
00:23:15.479 --> 00:23:19.241
So I'm going to have to figure out how to get my 100 in revenue from a few things.
404
00:23:19.281 --> 00:23:20.602
So what is the real priority?
405
00:23:20.622 --> 00:23:22.543
Because I can't do all these different ideas.
406
00:23:22.563 --> 00:23:23.283
I can only do a few.
407
00:23:23.343 --> 00:23:24.424
Can I get my 100 grand?
408
00:23:24.784 --> 00:23:29.447
If I can't, and I can't do all these things, then my 350 or 400, I want to go to the business.
409
00:23:29.487 --> 00:23:30.427
It's not even realistic.
410
00:23:30.467 --> 00:23:32.208
So that should modify the plan.
411
00:23:35.251 --> 00:23:39.942
of being, of really dedicating some time and not...
412
00:23:41.253 --> 00:23:49.678
I feel like what we often do, again, I always point at myself when I say this kind of stuff, is it feels good to be busy because it feels proactive.
413
00:23:50.138 --> 00:23:59.463
And sometimes I think as leaders and owners, we can feel guilty doing this kind of work because we don't feel like we're doing anything.
414
00:23:59.483 --> 00:24:02.825
But this is the most important work in the business.
415
00:24:03.125 --> 00:24:04.406
So that's why you have to do it.
416
00:24:04.426 --> 00:24:04.987
Okay.
417
00:24:05.167 --> 00:24:07.288
And also, this is what...
418
00:24:08.489 --> 00:24:10.772
If you set this up right, this is how you delegate.
419
00:24:11.332 --> 00:24:14.836
And this is how you get the team clear on where we're going.
420
00:24:15.797 --> 00:24:19.421
And you, again, get people marching in the right direction.
421
00:24:19.922 --> 00:24:23.186
And you give them absolute clarity on what they need to be working on.
422
00:24:24.220 --> 00:24:25.561
And so I think I'll pause there.
423
00:24:25.581 --> 00:24:28.363
That's a lot, but we can kind of volley back and forth.
424
00:24:28.383 --> 00:24:30.504
But this plan, I think, is your starting point.
425
00:24:30.544 --> 00:24:36.108
And it doesn't feel as big and as exciting as training and creating processes.
426
00:24:36.148 --> 00:24:37.409
And I'm not raising prices.
427
00:24:37.429 --> 00:24:38.910
I'm not saying you shouldn't do any of these things.
428
00:24:38.930 --> 00:24:42.732
But I'm telling you, based on my experience, this is the top level thing.
429
00:24:42.752 --> 00:24:48.596
And once that plan is nailed down, then there's a simplicity to know that now we just go into execution mode for the year.
430
00:24:49.417 --> 00:24:50.998
And we're just going to execute the plan.
431
00:24:51.733 --> 00:24:52.193
Yeah, that's great.
432
00:24:52.213 --> 00:24:52.773
I'll pause there.
433
00:24:52.833 --> 00:24:53.354
That's excellent.
434
00:24:53.374 --> 00:24:58.616
This past year, we saw a huge gap for our owners of the planning aspect.
435
00:24:58.656 --> 00:25:01.076
And so we actually, we have a whole day.
436
00:25:01.257 --> 00:25:05.278
It's our national holiday in Augusta nation and it's called projection day.
437
00:25:05.378 --> 00:25:06.318
It's in February.
438
00:25:06.438 --> 00:25:09.940
We take the entire day and everyone goes live and creates their projections.
439
00:25:10.720 --> 00:25:30.814
and one thing if someone's struggling with the breakdown that really helped with our owners and that we do is we take a p l uh and if you export it from quickbooks as an excel document you have every single item or expense item of in revenue item of the p l and then you have every single month so you show all 12 months
440
00:25:31.574 --> 00:25:34.115
And then, say, okay, well, I want to grow revenue by 350,000.
441
00:25:34.455 --> 00:25:35.395
Okay, great.
442
00:25:35.415 --> 00:25:41.776
You have identified one excelled, you know, square over here, one cell of how much revenue you want to grow by.
443
00:25:42.116 --> 00:25:45.117
Okay, well, where, which months is that revenue growth going to come in?
444
00:25:45.677 --> 00:25:48.298
Because if you're doing expansion, it's going to look very different than acquisition.
445
00:25:48.758 --> 00:25:53.119
So, like, then I work backwards from the end of the year, backwards throughout each month.
446
00:25:53.279 --> 00:25:54.939
Where is that revenue actually coming up?
447
00:25:55.440 --> 00:25:57.860
And then how does that impact every line below it?
448
00:25:58.520 --> 00:26:00.581
Most of us are pretty decent, like, I want to grow by 350,000.
449
00:26:02.221 --> 00:26:05.102
most of us are not great at figuring out, okay, where that revenue is going to come in the year.
450
00:26:05.502 --> 00:26:13.744
And then even fewer of us are good at expecting where is that going to impact my P&L and my cash flow throughout the entire year?
451
00:26:13.804 --> 00:26:23.366
Because if you want to go by 350,000 and that's all going to land in two months, and you're also going to have to go buy a truck, equipment, trailers, et cetera, now you're negative in terms of cash flow for two months.
452
00:26:23.826 --> 00:26:27.387
Can you actually even sustain that kind of growth for this upcoming year?
453
00:26:27.447 --> 00:26:30.348
Or do you run out of cash and have a profitable, fast growing business
454
00:26:31.488 --> 00:26:31.949
goes bankrupt.
455
00:26:31.969 --> 00:26:32.189
Yeah.
456
00:26:32.610 --> 00:26:40.867
And so this is really helpful for us to come up with the task list because the task list for us, a lot of times is like, well, I know the revenue and I generally know what I need to work on.
457
00:26:41.548 --> 00:26:42.129
And what helped.
458
00:26:43.098 --> 00:26:49.339
really pumped through like what is the things I need to go do is Oh, like that month, I'm gonna be doubling my marketing budget.
459
00:26:49.519 --> 00:26:52.660
Oh, I haven't created that upsell email or text message yet.
460
00:26:53.080 --> 00:27:04.922
So the task was a great I kind of was a byproduct or a result of going to the P&L for every single month and asking if I grew revenue from 50,000 to 80,000 in March, what happens?
461
00:27:05.282 --> 00:27:08.822
Oh, I've got to hire someone, okay, in order to hire that person, when do I need to put the ad up?
462
00:27:09.182 --> 00:27:11.423
Oh, then my task list starts getting built out.
463
00:27:11.803 --> 00:27:12.403
So that's
464
00:27:12.963 --> 00:27:13.724
Really helpful for us.
465
00:27:14.725 --> 00:27:18.309
I think that's an incredibly good addition to what I just said.
466
00:27:19.009 --> 00:27:21.752
And I've talked about this very same thing before.
467
00:27:21.772 --> 00:27:26.637
And I'm so glad you added that because I think you said this, but I just want to add a little more color to it.
468
00:27:27.478 --> 00:27:31.262
In a lot of our businesses, if we look, if we do exactly what you said...
469
00:27:32.285 --> 00:27:37.786
then we'll notice that 60 or 70% of our year is made in 90 days.
470
00:27:38.646 --> 00:27:44.507
There's a big, in a lot of these businesses, recurring revenue business, because so much work sold in a moment of time.
471
00:27:44.587 --> 00:27:55.769
And so everything you just said, having enough money for the growth, being able to get the trucks, being able to get the people, all that stuff happens to happen way earlier in the year than you think, because the growth happens to happen then.
472
00:27:56.449 --> 00:27:58.189
That's one thing you see when you do it your way.
473
00:27:58.209 --> 00:28:01.170
The other thing you see when you do it that way is if you plot your revenue,
474
00:28:01.890 --> 00:28:03.312
There's two kinds of revenue.
475
00:28:03.512 --> 00:28:04.774
There's realized revenue.
476
00:28:04.995 --> 00:28:08.380
So I say I want 350, at least I think this is the right terminology.
477
00:28:08.400 --> 00:28:09.401
It's terminology I use.
478
00:28:09.882 --> 00:28:12.406
Realized revenue is I say I want to grow 350,000 this year.
479
00:28:12.426 --> 00:28:14.629
And so I actually collect all 350,000 in 2027.
480
00:28:16.812 --> 00:28:24.934
And then there's run rate revenue, which is I want to grow by 350,000, but I don't actually collect all that revenue in that year.
481
00:28:25.014 --> 00:28:32.036
Like I've sold 350,000 in revenue, but I will collect 200,000 in 27 and the other 150 in 28.
482
00:28:32.116 --> 00:28:35.216
I don't know if those are the exactly right terms.
483
00:28:35.236 --> 00:28:37.397
Those are the terms I use realized in run rate.
484
00:28:38.057 --> 00:28:52.449
And so that's another awakening you have when you look at it the way you're talking about, Mike, because you can see on the calendars, like, gee whiz, to get the 350 and actually collect it on this year is even harder than we thought because a lot of our clients aren't going to get sold till like May.
485
00:28:52.669 --> 00:28:52.870
Yeah.
486
00:28:53.830 --> 00:28:55.812
So we need to sell even more clients.
487
00:28:55.832 --> 00:29:03.880
Like if you were to do the simple math that 100 clients will drive 300,000 in revenue, but you're not selling them all on January 1st.
488
00:29:03.941 --> 00:29:04.962
And there's churn.
489
00:29:05.482 --> 00:29:06.103
And there's churn.
490
00:29:06.323 --> 00:29:07.684
You're selling a lot of them in May.
491
00:29:07.965 --> 00:29:12.189
So that means you're only going to get like just over half the revenue for the year theoretically.
492
00:29:12.209 --> 00:29:13.991
So you need way more than 100 clients.
493
00:29:14.011 --> 00:29:14.371
Yeah.
494
00:29:14.631 --> 00:29:19.233
I have been doing this math a lot because I have like literally a couple months of spring rush.
495
00:29:19.853 --> 00:29:23.054
So I'm like, where are we going here?
496
00:29:23.274 --> 00:29:29.437
But like, when it comes to projections, another thing that does when you break it down is, I think to your point,
497
00:29:30.237 --> 00:29:36.183
when it comes to seasonal business of any sort, you have to almost anticipate what the next constraint of the business will be.
498
00:29:36.883 --> 00:29:39.326
Because in winter, yes, your constraint will be leads.
499
00:29:39.606 --> 00:29:44.811
You don't have any like no one's showing up asking for your services, but you will have to anticipate that once this problem
500
00:29:45.391 --> 00:29:47.452
is no longer a problem because of my task list.
501
00:29:47.812 --> 00:29:48.853
I will complete these things.
502
00:29:49.273 --> 00:29:50.494
I will have tons of leads.
503
00:29:50.954 --> 00:29:53.135
I need to anticipate the next constraint.
504
00:29:53.215 --> 00:29:57.037
Otherwise, it'll bottleneck my growth when all of a sudden I'm in spring rush.
505
00:29:57.437 --> 00:29:58.358
I don't have enough workers.
506
00:29:58.858 --> 00:30:03.500
And it's because I failed to realize the next constraint after solving the current constraint.
507
00:30:03.821 --> 00:30:07.863
And so it only emphasizes the importance of planning because otherwise you
508
00:30:08.503 --> 00:30:10.145
You turn your leads off, you turn your ads off.
509
00:30:10.345 --> 00:30:15.892
You turn away customers in the middle of your rush because you didn't anticipate that that would be the next constraint to the business.
510
00:30:16.552 --> 00:30:18.395
Yeah, that could be my second.
511
00:30:18.555 --> 00:30:19.576
Oh, well then we've got it.
512
00:30:19.636 --> 00:30:20.377
Okay, we'll move on.
513
00:30:21.839 --> 00:30:28.524
So I wanted to go, I actually had something very similar to yours, and Jace will test.
514
00:30:28.664 --> 00:30:42.695
I think I sent him like three different dockets today in preparation because I wanted to take it to very specific to this off season, meaning 2026 going into 2027, because this advice I would not have given a year ago.
515
00:30:43.635 --> 00:30:58.724
um and that is centered around what i believe is the first off season that this is a real tool for us to use and it is around ai um but it's building an ai operating rhythm and okay that is a
516
00:30:59.885 --> 00:31:06.108
a monthly, quarterly, and daily rhythm so that when you hit the spring rush, you can take advantage of it instead of waiting for next spring rush.
517
00:31:06.608 --> 00:31:21.175
And again, you might have heard us talk about AI, but like during the off season is the time to actually sit down and really clean the data, make sure it's useful, and then look for areas where there's lost profit and that gives you time back as a manager or your manager's time if you have a larger organization.
518
00:31:21.775 --> 00:31:26.943
And so the task that I would say for this offseason specifically is connecting.
519
00:31:27.424 --> 00:31:28.325
I just have three tools.
520
00:31:28.625 --> 00:31:30.468
You could obviously connect a whole lot more.
521
00:31:30.929 --> 00:31:35.235
And whether you want to use connectors or terminology, but essentially connect
522
00:31:36.217 --> 00:31:38.859
Your email, your CRM, and QuickBooks.
523
00:31:40.040 --> 00:31:47.986
And if you connect those three to your AI agent, the amount of data that it has, assuming your data is clean inside of those systems, is tremendous.
524
00:31:48.706 --> 00:31:54.211
And so the three applications I would want someone to build is first around quarterly pricing reviews.
525
00:31:55.011 --> 00:32:20.076
and so combining the customer revenue with actual labor labor hours uh looking at your labor costs so your direct cost of the labor that's going to come from typically quickbooks or your payroll provider looking at cost of materials all your overhead that's going to come from quickbooks but be informed by the data that's inside of your crm and then flag the accounts that need to be repriced potentially go to reroute certain people if you have a recurring based business
526
00:32:24.897 --> 00:32:33.802
Determining how you're going to set up that data infrastructure during the off season is what makes it useful when spring rush hits and you get 300 or 400 or 500 new customers.
527
00:32:34.302 --> 00:32:39.184
If you haven't set it up to actually have that auditing and you haven't tested to make sure it's it's clean.
528
00:32:39.605 --> 00:32:50.971
That's what causes doubt around whether or not I take action in on July 1st when I know that there's 20 customers I need to cut or a service that's unprofitable or I know I need to do this, but I don't really have the data to back it up.
529
00:32:51.011 --> 00:32:51.691
It's kind of murky.
530
00:32:51.711 --> 00:32:53.272
These guys aren't really clocking in and out.
531
00:32:53.932 --> 00:32:59.959
And so setting that up now on the quarterly basis, on the monthly side, these would be like management scorecards.
532
00:33:00.620 --> 00:33:08.730
And so whether you are the owner-operator or you have managers inside the organization, having a monthly scorecard that they see
533
00:33:09.451 --> 00:33:11.572
based upon their specific department.
534
00:33:11.933 --> 00:33:15.675
So a couple of the ones that I use is like a sales tax audit.
535
00:33:16.576 --> 00:33:27.283
What are the things that I do that suck my time or suck my energy that myself or my managers are doing that if I could just spend a little bit of time during the off season setting this up with AI, it can do a lot of it for me.
536
00:33:28.244 --> 00:33:30.267
Sales tax audit is one of the things.
537
00:33:30.527 --> 00:33:31.809
Catching trends on the P&L.
538
00:33:32.090 --> 00:33:41.444
So especially if you are removed from daily operations, how can I set up a system that I'm not micromanaging, but rather I have a system in place that is, okay, we went from 10% to 15%.
539
00:33:43.487 --> 00:34:11.187
on that of revenue going to this thing labor went from 45 to 49 and that's not statistically consistent with last year little things that i can set up now to prevent me micromanaging and taking off all my mid-level managers or my technicians simply because i don't have a system to give me that data and i think the overarching theme that as we go into this off season i think is different than every other year is we have always talked about knowing our numbers and this is in my opinion the first time that anyone with
540
00:34:11.407 --> 00:34:26.791
regardless if you're earning 100,000 or a $10 million organization, we have the ability to do it, and it's not a function no longer of having the data, it's no longer the function of having the time to parse the data or put it through some sort of algorithm or get an analyst or get a consultant.
541
00:34:27.071 --> 00:34:29.392
This is a function of do you want to do this?
542
00:34:30.233 --> 00:34:35.156
And do you actually just want to take a few moments to connect it and ask it questions in English?
543
00:34:35.496 --> 00:34:40.918
And no longer, I don't, I believe this is this term of like, it's no longer about knowing your numbers, it's about knowing what questions to ask.
544
00:34:41.699 --> 00:34:44.320
And getting the data is no longer the bottleneck.
545
00:34:44.440 --> 00:34:46.201
It is what questions do I need to ask?
546
00:34:46.221 --> 00:34:50.743
And this goes back to your point, like knowing the plan informs which questions to ask.
547
00:34:50.943 --> 00:34:53.705
But now the knowing of your numbers is, it's a commodity.
548
00:34:54.425 --> 00:35:03.651
And for what used to be, I believe, for a five or $10 million company to have an analyst or have someone that's just looking at the data or pooling reports, that's for all of us now.
549
00:35:04.291 --> 00:35:05.432
And I don't think it's an excuse.
550
00:35:05.672 --> 00:35:07.753
There's no excuse to not know our numbers now.
551
00:35:08.514 --> 00:35:13.176
And if that means you need to clean up the data so that these things I'm talking about are actually possible, we got to do it.
552
00:35:13.717 --> 00:35:16.898
Whether it be like on a monthly basis, comparing efficiency.
553
00:35:18.039 --> 00:35:18.960
against good quality.
554
00:35:18.980 --> 00:35:20.222
How many callbacks did we have?
555
00:35:20.502 --> 00:35:30.393
Well, that might mean that I have to create an event type in my CRM that's four callbacks so that the the AI is able to see that, oh, this is a callback and that's how much time was tracked against it.
556
00:35:30.653 --> 00:35:36.340
And now I can actually see what percentage of my crew's time is spent to callbacks and have a real dollar amount of what that's costing.
557
00:35:37.360 --> 00:35:42.843
A lot of this is though has to do a setting it up and taking a little bit of time and during the off season is the time to do it.
558
00:35:43.244 --> 00:35:46.466
So we don't have the excuse in the middle of spring rush or next year.
559
00:35:46.486 --> 00:35:49.127
I just don't know what the guys aren't clocking in and out.
560
00:35:49.367 --> 00:35:51.789
I don't really know how long, how much is costing us for callbacks.
561
00:35:51.809 --> 00:35:53.410
I don't really know how efficient the crew is.
562
00:35:54.050 --> 00:35:59.454
And I think this is a golden opportunity as we head into this off season, because like even last year.
563
00:36:00.459 --> 00:36:05.223
I would say it was like October, November 2025 that these started to become very powerful.
564
00:36:05.683 --> 00:36:07.645
But for a lot of us, it became more mainstream.
565
00:36:07.665 --> 00:36:11.247
A lot of people, even listening to this, probably just gotten a cloud and chat to PT in the past six months.
566
00:36:11.948 --> 00:36:18.213
And so utilizing this to this fullest degree, I talk about quarterly, monthly, and then like daily end of day reports.
567
00:36:18.613 --> 00:36:21.756
So in the past, you might have had your admin person kind of scrub the dispatch board.
568
00:36:22.156 --> 00:36:24.118
Hey, I want you to look for jobs that were not complete.
569
00:36:24.258 --> 00:36:26.020
I want you to look for jobs that are skipped.
570
00:36:26.080 --> 00:36:31.365
I need you to reconcile a specific payment because it's by the minute, it's a first service.
571
00:36:32.006 --> 00:36:35.349
I want you to go through the dispatcher notes or look at the media that was attached to the job.
572
00:36:35.689 --> 00:36:36.690
These are things that now,
573
00:36:37.331 --> 00:36:38.853
can absolutely be automated.
574
00:36:39.354 --> 00:36:49.027
And I would be looking at sales operations and admin as a way, how can I get the most relevant information to my manager at the end of the day to ensure that one, I don't have to micromanage them.
575
00:36:49.567 --> 00:36:51.189
And two, nothing falls through the cracks.
576
00:36:51.830 --> 00:36:53.913
And I consistently see people failing automatically.
577
00:36:53.973 --> 00:37:13.339
to be a great leader or grow their business past one or two million because they do micromanage, they do get into everyone's business, but I believe that AI is a huge opportunity to be able to have the KPIs, know the numbers, but not have to be stepping on people's toes, looking over their shoulder, asking for the login to their email, like things that there's consistently
578
00:37:14.567 --> 00:37:36.643
undermine your mid-level managers and so some examples of this that even we're using is like google business profile reviews you can absolutely set up a very simple automation using a go check the reviews if there's any any unresponded go ahead and respond them here's the criteria for how you're going to respond to them if it's zero to four stars don't just surface it because i want to respond myself
579
00:37:37.584 --> 00:37:39.805
back to our scam artist customers.
580
00:37:40.365 --> 00:37:42.206
If it's five stars, though, here's what I want you to say.
581
00:37:42.346 --> 00:37:44.087
Here's here's the kind of framing I want you to use.
582
00:37:44.547 --> 00:37:46.908
Another thing is like following up on sent estimates.
583
00:37:47.268 --> 00:37:54.391
If you have a salesperson, one of the biggest things I see an owner failing to delegate or trust their manager with is like, hey, I need you to follow up on estimates.
584
00:37:54.451 --> 00:37:55.012
And so what do they do?
585
00:37:55.032 --> 00:37:56.893
They bother them every week of like, hey, how many?
586
00:37:57.033 --> 00:37:57.793
What's our close rate?
587
00:37:58.113 --> 00:38:18.396
this is all just an automation that keeps you informed and allows the manager to remember oh i forgot to call mr miss susie again she said to call back tomorrow these are the type of things that could be done in a daily report to my sales my operations my admin for operations like where's the labor efficiencies which of my crew members should i potentially offer some more training um
588
00:38:19.057 --> 00:38:21.118
for admin, it's even like payment discrepancies.
589
00:38:21.138 --> 00:38:27.562
Like if you connect Stripe, like your payment processor, and you say, hey, I just want you to reconcile at the end of each day, make sure nothing got bounced.
590
00:38:27.922 --> 00:38:42.110
Was there any discrepancies with a missed payment or a bounced check or anything like this so that I'm not concerned as the owner when I walk by the admin's office and I see a stack of checks or I see, you know, why is it not reconciled correctly at the end of the month?
591
00:38:42.511 --> 00:38:47.914
These are things that I think we can just set automation and use AI, but it will simply take
592
00:38:48.554 --> 00:38:54.076
the humility to realize this is a new method, this is a new way of doing things, but knowing your numbers now is a commodity.
593
00:38:54.396 --> 00:39:01.399
It's a matter of what questions are we asking it and how are we getting creative with taking all the data that is now at everyone's fingertips and utilizing it in the business.
594
00:39:01.819 --> 00:39:05.080
So I would just really encourage this cadence of what are the tasks I do quarterly?
595
00:39:05.480 --> 00:39:06.661
What are the tasks I do monthly?
596
00:39:06.981 --> 00:39:08.442
What are the tasks do I do daily?
597
00:39:09.122 --> 00:39:11.603
And those are the things that even your managers are thinking, like, what do you do?
598
00:39:12.563 --> 00:39:14.204
as an operations manager, what are you doing every day?
599
00:39:14.244 --> 00:39:15.205
What are you doing every month?
600
00:39:15.245 --> 00:39:16.686
What are you looking at every single quarter?
601
00:39:17.086 --> 00:39:23.351
And then creating automations to ensure that they get their job done and then you're informed as the operator owner without micromanagement.
602
00:39:23.851 --> 00:39:26.793
So to get in the weeds a little bit on that, that's interesting.
603
00:39:27.474 --> 00:39:28.895
Where do you stand on?
604
00:39:29.775 --> 00:39:32.637
Well, let's start with is there for people and I know this could change.
605
00:39:32.718 --> 00:39:36.020
Is there a specific system, Claude,
606
00:39:37.353 --> 00:39:40.138
ChatGPT that you recommend people use to do this?
607
00:39:40.318 --> 00:39:42.081
I think the challenge right now is it's so new.
608
00:39:42.101 --> 00:39:45.867
It kind of depends on which of your CRM, like what your CRM will connect to.
609
00:39:45.887 --> 00:39:46.989
Oh, true.
610
00:39:47.009 --> 00:39:50.475
And if you don't have a CRM that connects, what reports can you extract from it?
611
00:39:51.228 --> 00:39:57.691
And so even if you have a system that doesn't have MCP access or API, okay, which reports do I need to download?
612
00:39:58.451 --> 00:40:08.976
And sometimes this is a matter of, like screenshot the page where it has all the reports listed and ask your AI, which of these reports do I need to give you to be able to complete these tasks in my business?
613
00:40:09.596 --> 00:40:11.857
And just, again, it's like, which questions?
614
00:40:11.937 --> 00:40:13.218
It's, this is why I believe like,
615
00:40:13.998 --> 00:40:19.646
It always comes back to humility because I see the people that are the least humble are the ones incapable of coming up.
616
00:40:19.686 --> 00:40:21.449
What questions should I ask this AI agent?
617
00:40:23.552 --> 00:40:24.193
Because it'll tell you.
618
00:40:24.213 --> 00:40:24.733
It'll tell you.
619
00:40:24.753 --> 00:40:27.658
Download the revenue by service summary.
620
00:40:28.397 --> 00:40:28.597
Yeah.
621
00:40:28.877 --> 00:40:29.117
There.
622
00:40:29.938 --> 00:40:31.839
Is it ideal if it's connected to MCP or API?
623
00:40:31.879 --> 00:40:32.079
Yes.
624
00:40:32.139 --> 00:40:34.960
But you can download a lot of these things and do it more manually as well.
625
00:40:35.220 --> 00:40:36.641
Hey, so the team was editing the podcast.
626
00:40:36.701 --> 00:40:41.823
And something I realized was we didn't give you the actual tools to do what I'm talking about.
627
00:40:42.143 --> 00:40:44.904
And I know I'm talking a lot about AI and MCP and API.
628
00:40:45.225 --> 00:40:50.047
And so what we decided is I just want you to actually go do it yourself and see the power of what I'm talking about.
629
00:40:50.567 --> 00:40:54.710
And so we're doing something we've never done before and that's giving two months free at HomeWorks.
630
00:40:55.111 --> 00:40:58.914
So over the next couple months, as we head into the off season, you can actually put your data in.
631
00:40:59.054 --> 00:41:00.815
We will help you do that for free.
632
00:41:01.096 --> 00:41:02.777
We'll do all the implementation calls for free.
633
00:41:02.797 --> 00:41:08.442
And even if you just stay the two months, but you see the power of what AI can do once it's connected with your CRM
634
00:41:09.202 --> 00:41:10.483
It's such a game changer.
635
00:41:10.523 --> 00:41:23.989
And so everything I'm talking about today, when it comes to connecting your MCP, you can do in those first two free months, we will get you all set up, all of your contacts in just use this coupon code, Mike, when you check out, when you're setting up your account inside homeworks, you'll get your first month free.
636
00:41:24.309 --> 00:41:29.271
And then after you complete your implementation calls and we get all your data in your second month free as well.
637
00:41:29.691 --> 00:41:33.073
So I hope it's helpful so you can actually get a taste of what I'm talking about in the podcast.
638
00:41:33.133 --> 00:41:36.956
Are you imagining for most people, like let's just say you use Claude, okay?
639
00:41:36.976 --> 00:41:40.419
So in Claude, you can set up a project, you can set a folder up on a computer.
640
00:41:41.141 --> 00:41:49.204
or you could connect it to Google Drive, and you could just drop files in a folder, or you can do the MCP approach, which you've talked to, which it just connects directly to the other product, the software.
641
00:41:49.644 --> 00:41:55.486
So let's just say somebody, so if they're working with Homeworks or QuickBooks, they connect direct.
642
00:41:55.646 --> 00:42:07.310
If they're not, they're working with another system, they can do the export, they can dump the files into a folder on a computer, and ChatGPT or Claude, they're both capable of reading that folder and doing this processing process.
643
00:42:07.710 --> 00:42:18.101
Um, do you, is this, when you think about this, this is generally set up on one team member's account or are you telling people to set up like team accounts and share this?
644
00:42:18.301 --> 00:42:21.124
Like, how do you teach people to interact with this?
645
00:42:21.885 --> 00:42:22.646
Does that make sense?
646
00:42:22.666 --> 00:42:22.906
Yes.
647
00:42:23.146 --> 00:42:23.386
Yeah.
648
00:42:24.167 --> 00:42:27.710
We have some where we have team accounts and they can share different projects.
649
00:42:27.730 --> 00:42:28.671
So you can invite people.
650
00:42:29.431 --> 00:42:31.833
And I get confused sometimes because I use Manist, Claude, ChattoBeat.
651
00:42:31.893 --> 00:42:32.754
I kind of use all of them.
652
00:42:33.114 --> 00:42:35.997
But I know for the media team, they do a lot of sharing.
653
00:42:36.437 --> 00:42:37.538
So that's a team account.
654
00:42:37.958 --> 00:42:42.722
But then a lot of the reports that I build, I just do it from my own account.
655
00:42:43.122 --> 00:42:43.343
But then
656
00:42:43.943 --> 00:42:46.304
Cause I can connect my, cause that's why I said connect email.
657
00:42:46.604 --> 00:42:52.127
Cause if you connect your email, you can send out emails to your operations manager and your sales manager, and then I get control of it.
658
00:42:52.527 --> 00:42:55.709
And this is what, again, like it's the ability to delegate and keep people accountable.
659
00:42:56.009 --> 00:43:00.991
Now, like there's no reason to micromanage or get in someone's business cause you can keep them accountable with just the numbers.
660
00:43:01.351 --> 00:43:02.832
You can see it all happening in your account.
661
00:43:03.292 --> 00:43:04.553
You determine what they see.
662
00:43:05.273 --> 00:43:10.556
So I can be like, hey, if everything's good, don't remind my operations manager that there was zero callbacks today.
663
00:43:11.116 --> 00:43:15.239
Only bring up and surface the actual issues that you see inside of the system.
664
00:43:15.779 --> 00:43:19.001
So I generally actually just stay inside my account most of the time.
665
00:43:19.061 --> 00:43:20.382
And that's a little bit of where I was going.
666
00:43:20.402 --> 00:43:25.385
Like, let's say it surfaces something like, hey, this thing's not happening or this number's out of whack.
667
00:43:26.131 --> 00:43:29.454
I was curious how you get that to the operations manager for people.
668
00:43:29.494 --> 00:43:34.878
Is that generally you're like seeing it and then you're telling them, or do you have it set up in some way where it's telling them?
669
00:43:34.998 --> 00:43:38.882
Yeah, I'm having it send usually like that daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly report.
670
00:43:39.682 --> 00:43:44.907
And so for example, my general manager in Texas, it's like at the end of the day, he's gonna see several things.
671
00:43:44.967 --> 00:43:48.530
First off, are there any initial modes, the first service that he needs to go and adjust the pricing?
672
00:43:48.910 --> 00:43:53.154
It also gives them exactly what the pricing should be based upon how long they were clocked into the job.
673
00:43:53.694 --> 00:43:56.156
It also checks, was there any dispatcher notes from the crew?
674
00:43:56.376 --> 00:43:58.818
He technically doesn't even have to go inside of HomeWorks.
675
00:43:58.838 --> 00:44:00.179
You can just look at that.
676
00:44:00.619 --> 00:44:03.061
The other thing that he's getting is quality.
677
00:44:03.401 --> 00:44:05.783
Like, were there any customer complaints?
678
00:44:06.383 --> 00:44:06.963
Who were they?
679
00:44:07.364 --> 00:44:08.544
What actions should he be taking?
680
00:44:09.365 --> 00:44:10.827
because these operations, that's what he's focused on.
681
00:44:10.847 --> 00:44:14.210
It's like getting the work done, making sure the crew's happy and doing a good job.
682
00:44:14.991 --> 00:44:23.459
Whereas for like admin side, they're doing I have one set up for Claude to check Stripe and Homeworks and make sure every single day auto charge is working.
683
00:44:24.040 --> 00:44:28.464
It's like I just don't know if what happens if someone has HCH set up and three days later it bounces.
684
00:44:30.380 --> 00:44:39.463
I hope everything's working on the back end, but I wanna make sure every single day I'm making my money so in three months I'm like, oh, they haven't been paid, charged at all, but it looks like it's getting paid, for example.
685
00:44:40.383 --> 00:44:45.165
So I do it where it sends it out, because you can do it, as long as you connect your Gmail, it sends out reports to everyone.
686
00:44:45.778 --> 00:44:46.618
That's what I wanted to get to.
687
00:44:46.639 --> 00:44:49.060
I just wanted to make sure everybody is understanding.
688
00:44:49.080 --> 00:44:51.681
So you're connecting your email and it's going out through email.
689
00:44:52.282 --> 00:44:52.462
Exactly.
690
00:44:52.482 --> 00:44:56.364
And I assume you're using like a work account email here, not a personal.
691
00:44:56.464 --> 00:44:56.684
Correct.
692
00:44:56.784 --> 00:44:57.545
How do you...
693
00:44:57.685 --> 00:44:59.105
This is a sidestep here.
694
00:44:59.486 --> 00:45:03.568
How do you think about connecting email to these tools?
695
00:45:03.628 --> 00:45:05.389
Would you ever connect your personal account?
696
00:45:06.372 --> 00:45:06.752
I would.
697
00:45:07.133 --> 00:45:10.736
I haven't found a huge need to click my email.
698
00:45:12.217 --> 00:45:17.281
I keep my personal email as like this reserve sacred thing that gets on my cell phone.
699
00:45:17.601 --> 00:45:30.032
But in terms of the business ones, I just have other domains specific for the businesses that like I'm very much okay with setting up automations, firing off the reports from Claude or ChatGPT.
700
00:45:31.373 --> 00:45:33.735
And then I just, in my one-on-ones with the managers, like, hey,
701
00:45:34.783 --> 00:45:35.584
What do you want to see?
702
00:45:35.624 --> 00:45:36.864
What's useful in this report?
703
00:45:37.145 --> 00:45:39.546
And what do you just glaze over every day is like, that's noise.
704
00:45:39.966 --> 00:45:41.287
Cause that's also the challenge.
705
00:45:41.347 --> 00:45:48.212
You can ask it for an end of day report and it will just create this ginormous of like everything that happened inside of your CRM.
706
00:45:48.332 --> 00:45:49.613
And it's like, that's useless.
707
00:45:49.793 --> 00:45:53.075
It's like very much you have to intentionally tell it.
708
00:45:53.095 --> 00:45:54.076
This is a signal, this is noise.
709
00:45:54.096 --> 00:45:55.216
This is what I need them to know.
710
00:45:55.657 --> 00:45:59.039
Here's what I would do based, if these things pop up, here's what I want them to do.
711
00:45:59.459 --> 00:46:03.842
And then it's just feeding them from a report perspective instead of me looking over their shoulder, telling them what to do.
712
00:46:04.517 --> 00:46:05.598
Yeah, makes sense.
713
00:46:05.618 --> 00:46:07.120
I hope, hopefully everybody understands.
714
00:46:08.101 --> 00:46:11.024
Do you have any concerns about running this?
715
00:46:11.705 --> 00:46:14.008
This is kind of a question for everybody to hear.
716
00:46:14.588 --> 00:46:17.071
Do you have any concerns about the data not being sandboxed?
717
00:46:17.091 --> 00:46:23.318
So in other words, you're essentially sharing your company data with Claude, Anthropic, or OpenAI.
718
00:46:23.738 --> 00:46:25.921
You know, if they want to get into lawn care,
719
00:46:27.699 --> 00:46:30.900
I will refer them to your new platform.
720
00:46:31.000 --> 00:46:32.321
I will give them a one star.
721
00:46:34.161 --> 00:46:34.861
That's about all.
722
00:46:35.341 --> 00:46:36.002
I don't know.
723
00:46:37.262 --> 00:46:43.884
I think that absolutely there are cases where the data security is important.
724
00:46:44.904 --> 00:46:46.885
I think that if we were doing something that is...
725
00:46:48.320 --> 00:46:51.645
so unique and so proprietary, I would be worried.
726
00:46:52.285 --> 00:47:00.096
When I am simply sharing customer ID numbers, when I am sharing, because again, if you're connecting your CRM, it can use customer IDs.
727
00:47:00.116 --> 00:47:01.418
It can use a lot of backend stuff.
728
00:47:02.139 --> 00:47:04.462
Uh, I'm not personally super concerned about it though.
729
00:47:04.642 --> 00:47:14.328
to be perfectly honest, I am much more in the camp of give it full access, let it know everything about me because I want the context to be as good as possible so the answers are as complete as possible.
730
00:47:14.829 --> 00:47:24.275
And so usually what I do instead of even dropping files in, I will just give it access to a Google folder and then everything just goes into that folder and that way I have the record.
731
00:47:24.975 --> 00:47:28.878
If something happened to Cloud or I could immediately cancel it, I'd still have all my data.
732
00:47:29.518 --> 00:47:33.521
Um, I'm not usually the camp type that I store stuff in a project and then deletes it.
733
00:47:33.581 --> 00:47:36.563
I'm going to usually have Google drive or something that I control a little bit more.
734
00:47:36.583 --> 00:47:37.224
I have the keys to.
735
00:47:38.445 --> 00:47:38.625
Yeah.
736
00:47:38.865 --> 00:47:40.206
I fall in the same category.
737
00:47:40.246 --> 00:47:44.009
I've decided that because there's a lot of conversation around this and that's why I wanted to ask.
738
00:47:45.250 --> 00:47:51.476
I've come to the conclusion that I am fully comfortable trading all my privacy away for the advantages that I gain.
739
00:47:51.756 --> 00:47:54.699
And I feel like we traded all our privacy away as soon as we got this thing.
740
00:47:54.779 --> 00:47:55.279
Yeah, totally.
741
00:47:55.440 --> 00:47:58.042
As soon as we... Everything we do, we have no privacy.
742
00:47:58.122 --> 00:47:59.824
Everything crosses an ISP.
743
00:47:59.864 --> 00:48:01.125
Everything sits on a server.
744
00:48:01.145 --> 00:48:03.127
There's data copies of everything everywhere.
745
00:48:03.147 --> 00:48:04.448
It kind of doesn't matter.
746
00:48:04.488 --> 00:48:09.273
But to your point, if I was working on researching the next big drug that we were going to release...
747
00:48:09.933 --> 00:48:12.273
I wouldn't be running across these AI models.
748
00:48:12.333 --> 00:48:13.314
I'd be sandboxing it.
749
00:48:13.354 --> 00:48:22.435
So the one thing I will say, and I haven't done this yet, I have not connected my personal account because I am a little paranoid about this one thing.
750
00:48:22.455 --> 00:48:29.717
And that is, I will eventually move all my financial stuff to a completely new email.
751
00:48:30.137 --> 00:48:33.297
And that email will never be checked on my computer that I run AI.
752
00:48:33.557 --> 00:48:36.098
And that may be a little paranoid, but man...
753
00:48:37.476 --> 00:48:41.019
Because your email is the unlock to everything you have.
754
00:48:41.279 --> 00:48:45.262
And so I don't want my financial accounts being...
755
00:48:46.743 --> 00:48:55.010
I don't want my email account that has the email address used in my financial accounts anywhere near anything.
756
00:48:55.450 --> 00:48:59.733
That's the only thing that I think I'm still like a hard line on that I won't do.
757
00:48:59.773 --> 00:49:02.035
But otherwise, I'm just like, whatever.
758
00:49:02.495 --> 00:49:03.296
Yeah.
759
00:49:03.336 --> 00:49:04.116
The tools are so good.
760
00:49:04.136 --> 00:49:08.159
I find some of the, there are some, this could be like an outdated thing now.
761
00:49:08.679 --> 00:49:13.363
I do find some, I did find some limitations around personal Gmail accounts.
762
00:49:13.903 --> 00:49:15.825
of what you could do in terms of automations.
763
00:49:16.345 --> 00:49:18.047
But I've never connected it.
764
00:49:18.267 --> 00:49:22.310
I've always just used the Augusta or my homeworks email or something like that.
765
00:49:23.151 --> 00:49:27.395
I don't know if that's a matter of our level of Google workspace, but anyways.
766
00:49:28.684 --> 00:49:32.226
The last I remember testing it was you still had to approve things.
767
00:49:32.506 --> 00:49:33.507
I haven't tested that late.
768
00:49:33.527 --> 00:49:34.768
I don't know if that's still the case.
769
00:49:34.948 --> 00:49:38.390
Yeah, even when it comes to approvals, I'm like, just let it fire off.
770
00:49:38.530 --> 00:49:39.190
Let's go.
771
00:49:40.291 --> 00:49:45.994
I'm pretty hands off when it comes to, it's like, as long as I protect my customers' data, I'm actually much more concerned about that.
772
00:49:46.315 --> 00:49:53.459
So we have a lot of strict internal policies about not dumping clients' data into AI because they haven't signed off on that.
773
00:49:53.759 --> 00:49:59.743
And if we're going to use a model with their data, they've got to sign off on us using models to do things.
774
00:50:00.003 --> 00:50:14.411
So for example, importing clients into the database, for example, there's a lot of really cool stuff we can automate, but we need to make sure that if we're going to use a model, we let someone know, or we say, here's the manual way of doing it in case you want to just export, import on a more manual process.
775
00:50:14.772 --> 00:50:14.972
Yeah.
776
00:50:15.352 --> 00:50:15.532
Yeah.
777
00:50:15.892 --> 00:50:16.092
Okay.
778
00:50:16.112 --> 00:50:16.793
What's your second one?
779
00:50:17.313 --> 00:50:18.134
We're moving along.
780
00:50:18.772 --> 00:50:22.720
Yeah, so my second one was a very, very much a build on the first one.
781
00:50:22.740 --> 00:50:23.843
And I sort of alluded to it.
782
00:50:23.863 --> 00:50:26.508
And it's this idea of how do you preempt
783
00:50:28.113 --> 00:50:31.536
or better said, what will preempt your growth plan?
784
00:50:31.837 --> 00:50:32.798
You've made this plan.
785
00:50:32.938 --> 00:50:33.699
What could go wrong?
786
00:50:33.779 --> 00:50:36.121
So how do you think about what you...
787
00:50:36.161 --> 00:50:37.903
It's exactly what you started to talk about.
788
00:50:37.943 --> 00:50:41.747
It's like, how do you think through what the bottlenecks are and then preempt them?
789
00:50:41.787 --> 00:50:43.929
Meaning, preempt means solve them in advance.
790
00:50:44.750 --> 00:50:49.795
And so as you're making this plan, I alluded to this already, we're very much thinking about...
791
00:50:50.490 --> 00:50:52.232
What went wrong last year?
792
00:50:52.252 --> 00:50:58.197
We're very much thinking about in spring, like really, because spring is the make or break a year time.
793
00:50:58.578 --> 00:51:00.820
So what can go wrong in spring?
794
00:51:01.460 --> 00:51:05.864
Another example would be, I have all these grand plans for the marketing that we could do
795
00:51:06.885 --> 00:51:09.147
This is another example where the marketing calendar comes in.
796
00:51:09.167 --> 00:51:12.630
I have all these things we could be talking to the client about to sell them stuff.
797
00:51:12.650 --> 00:51:16.013
So I'm going to promote this service and this service and this service.
798
00:51:16.113 --> 00:51:18.075
And that's how we're going to achieve our revenue growth.
799
00:51:18.515 --> 00:51:24.140
Well, the problem is we can't talk to them about all those things in the same 30-day period or 60-day period.
800
00:51:24.180 --> 00:51:26.022
So as soon as you put this on paper...
801
00:51:26.262 --> 00:51:39.692
and you put it to a calendar and you see exactly all the things we're going to have to do during that period, you quickly realize like, wait a second, my plan is based on selling this amount of revenue and there's no way I could ever even get their attention or I couldn't talk to them about all these services.
802
00:51:39.712 --> 00:51:40.833
This is impossible.
803
00:51:41.193 --> 00:51:47.058
And so you're wanting to think about what broke last year, what could go wrong this year,
804
00:51:47.618 --> 00:51:53.899
That example I just gave where you're like, well, I have these plans to sell this service, but people don't even worry about this service.
805
00:51:53.919 --> 00:51:57.080
They don't have pain around it or concern around the service till later in the year.
806
00:51:57.400 --> 00:52:01.761
So this is a pipe dream that we're going to get much conversion trying to sell this service this early in the year.
807
00:52:02.221 --> 00:52:03.682
You want to really think through that.
808
00:52:04.142 --> 00:52:10.043
And then you... Again, we really kind of touched on this, but I'm going to say it again.
809
00:52:10.103 --> 00:52:12.764
So if the plan says that I need to onboard...
810
00:52:14.106 --> 00:52:21.568
200 clients in spring or in CityTurf's case, 1,000 or whatever that number is going to be.
811
00:52:21.589 --> 00:52:22.409
It's a big number.
812
00:52:22.989 --> 00:52:29.031
Then you start to back into who and what is going to touch this process.
813
00:52:29.071 --> 00:52:33.052
So in my mind, the first place this stuff breaks is generally the phone.
814
00:52:33.572 --> 00:52:34.813
It's generally the office.
815
00:52:35.613 --> 00:52:41.195
Because if 60% of your sales are going to happen in 90 days for the year, then...
816
00:52:41.895 --> 00:52:58.299
the turning the estimates, the talking to people on the phone, the answering the questions, all that, the office is what will generally break it because you've probably built a staff that'll work for a 12-month period and not a staff that will hit work for a 90-day period.
817
00:52:58.319 --> 00:52:59.359
It's always the problem.
818
00:52:59.399 --> 00:53:06.761
How do you afford to pay for all the people you need for only 90 days and then what in the heck are they going to do for the other nine months?
819
00:53:06.801 --> 00:53:07.641
No time off.
820
00:53:07.681 --> 00:53:08.541
That's the solve.
821
00:53:08.561 --> 00:53:09.401
That is the solve.
822
00:53:09.702 --> 00:53:09.962
Yeah.
823
00:53:10.122 --> 00:53:11.702
Overtime and no time off.
824
00:53:12.262 --> 00:53:12.443
Yeah.
825
00:53:13.283 --> 00:53:17.167
And so that's an example of the stuff you have to think about.
826
00:53:17.427 --> 00:53:21.230
And so to rattle off a few other things, Matt, think of all the crew issues you had.
827
00:53:22.011 --> 00:53:30.078
So people that get sick, people that got hurt, people that called in for whatever reason didn't show up, people that you gave them no time off.
828
00:53:30.098 --> 00:53:32.721
But it's like, but my family member is getting married.
829
00:53:32.781 --> 00:53:33.481
I have to go.
830
00:53:33.582 --> 00:53:34.763
Think about all those things.
831
00:53:35.163 --> 00:53:37.705
Well, how do you staff up enough to cover that?
832
00:53:37.745 --> 00:53:37.965
Yeah.
833
00:53:38.646 --> 00:53:41.388
Because there's always going to be things that happen.
834
00:53:41.408 --> 00:53:44.890
So have you staffed up to cover the things that are going to happen?
835
00:53:44.910 --> 00:53:46.791
Because all of this will blow up your plan.
836
00:53:47.411 --> 00:53:53.815
And then another way to think about it is, do you have what we'll call a dependency?
837
00:53:54.055 --> 00:53:55.876
Or no, we'll go with the capacity scenario.
838
00:53:56.337 --> 00:54:01.500
Capacity is, I could sell all this work, but right now I have one person that does...
839
00:54:02.490 --> 00:54:05.091
all the dispatching, all the scheduling in the business.
840
00:54:05.611 --> 00:54:06.971
Well, that's a capacity risk.
841
00:54:07.011 --> 00:54:12.693
So another way you might think about this is, who within my company owns certain things?
842
00:54:12.813 --> 00:54:21.375
Or if somebody owns dispatch, you've got just one person trained to do this, and we give them even more work, or if they're out, what do we do?
843
00:54:21.415 --> 00:54:25.876
Does that mean I have to pull my estimator or me over to do this, and then I'm not selling?
844
00:54:26.277 --> 00:54:28.997
And when I'm not selling an estimate, and that means we're not growing?
845
00:54:29.357 --> 00:54:30.998
Like some of these things you can't solve.
846
00:54:31.478 --> 00:54:34.039
yet because you're not big enough, you don't have enough money.
847
00:54:34.719 --> 00:54:46.064
But unless you think about them and try to solve as many of them as you can or come up with backup plans, this is why the majority of companies do not hit their goals.
848
00:54:46.404 --> 00:54:50.486
I think if you were to look and survey most people, they do not hit their goals.
849
00:54:50.806 --> 00:54:52.047
The vast, vast majority.
850
00:54:52.067 --> 00:54:53.587
If they have them.
851
00:54:53.607 --> 00:54:55.768
That's one way to hit your goals is just not have them.
852
00:54:57.949 --> 00:55:12.495
My analogy over the years is the way that most goals are set is it's two guys sitting outside in 68 degree, wonderful, sunny weather, having a beer, and they're talking a big game like, ah, this year, we're going to fix all this because they're feeling good.
853
00:55:12.935 --> 00:55:14.176
It's like the weather's good.
854
00:55:14.216 --> 00:55:17.597
They're having a cocktail and they're like, that's their dreaming moment.
855
00:55:17.617 --> 00:55:18.797
And they're talking all the big game.
856
00:55:18.817 --> 00:55:20.098
We're growing revenue by this much.
857
00:55:20.118 --> 00:55:21.098
We're going to do all this stuff.
858
00:55:21.558 --> 00:55:22.659
None of that stuff ever happens.
859
00:55:23.379 --> 00:55:25.540
The reason it doesn't happen is, well, that's not a plan.
860
00:55:26.001 --> 00:55:29.222
And then the other reason it doesn't happen is because of this, what I'm talking about now.
861
00:55:29.242 --> 00:55:35.926
It's like, it kind of goes back to last week we were talking about, I think it was last week we brought up the book, The Theory of Constraints.
862
00:55:35.986 --> 00:55:38.667
It's all the things that could break in a process.
863
00:55:39.427 --> 00:55:41.989
And so that's essentially what I'm talking about here.
864
00:55:42.009 --> 00:55:43.810
It's like, what if we lost a person?
865
00:55:44.270 --> 00:55:45.991
What if we have crew issues?
866
00:55:46.771 --> 00:55:47.392
What if...
867
00:55:48.290 --> 00:55:49.931
We don't have enough people for the phones.
868
00:55:49.991 --> 00:55:52.452
What if we lose our one and only sales guy?
869
00:55:52.872 --> 00:55:54.833
What if I have to get back out in the field?
870
00:55:55.553 --> 00:55:58.574
What if we have too much work and we have to shut off marketing?
871
00:55:58.974 --> 00:56:01.255
Or we have too much work and we're not answering the phone?
872
00:56:01.576 --> 00:56:02.756
What if the estimates...
873
00:56:02.876 --> 00:56:04.237
There's all these scenarios.
874
00:56:05.117 --> 00:56:06.118
that can break things.
875
00:56:06.158 --> 00:56:08.179
And so it's really important to think through those.
876
00:56:08.439 --> 00:56:18.584
And the reason for that is because when we find the biggest offenders, like the biggest thing that could go wrong is all this landscape project work that we're selling means I'm back out in the field.
877
00:56:18.624 --> 00:56:20.365
And that means I'm not selling the maintenance work.
878
00:56:21.226 --> 00:56:25.208
And every if I just look at what's happened in the last few years, every year, the same thing happens.
879
00:56:25.268 --> 00:56:26.909
So why is that not going to happen this year?
880
00:56:27.469 --> 00:56:32.672
So that like right there's the clue, okay, that is one of the single most important things that has to go on the plan.
881
00:56:33.144 --> 00:56:38.148
That's what I'm wanting to bring up here and have you think through as you're doing your plan.
882
00:56:38.188 --> 00:56:41.031
It's not just about breaking down how we get the revenue.
883
00:56:41.791 --> 00:56:44.413
And are we going to get through acquisition or expansion?
884
00:56:44.994 --> 00:56:46.295
Are we going to get it from Facebook?
885
00:56:46.335 --> 00:56:47.456
Are we going to get it from LSA?
886
00:56:47.616 --> 00:56:48.417
That's part of it.
887
00:56:48.697 --> 00:56:50.178
This is the other side.
888
00:56:50.619 --> 00:56:58.866
If all of that works perfectly, like you assume that all that's going to work perfectly, as in Facebook could drive enough revenue...
889
00:56:59.728 --> 00:57:10.375
and LSA could drive enough revenue, I mean, get you enough revenue or sell you enough clients to get the revenue, what will keep you from actually making those sales or keep you from actually delivering the work?
890
00:57:10.895 --> 00:57:24.584
Or what I've seen so much over the years is have you basically one day say, hey, we're six weeks booked out on whatever, irrigation, or six weeks, we're three months booked out on landscape, just stop taking sales.
891
00:57:25.064 --> 00:57:27.406
Stop taking it or turn off the marketing.
892
00:57:27.706 --> 00:57:29.207
That stuff kills everything.
893
00:57:29.527 --> 00:57:30.567
You don't hit goals over that.
894
00:57:30.607 --> 00:57:32.408
So that's this last part.
895
00:57:32.488 --> 00:57:38.069
It's like, again, we're going to break down the revenue strategy and then we're going to break down the bottleneck side.
896
00:57:38.229 --> 00:57:40.209
Everything that could keep us from getting that.
897
00:57:40.669 --> 00:57:42.710
And it's based on everything we've experienced before.
898
00:57:42.750 --> 00:57:52.592
And then imagining if I pile on more revenue, more clients, more phone calls, more trucks, more everything, what becomes the new problem that might happen?
899
00:57:52.912 --> 00:57:56.373
And that too goes onto our task list, which is our plan.
900
00:57:57.073 --> 00:58:01.945
And then as we've talked about weeks previous, you've got a task list that's too big.
901
00:58:02.105 --> 00:58:03.448
You'll never be able to get it all done.
902
00:58:03.729 --> 00:58:05.032
So now we have to stack rank it.
903
00:58:05.912 --> 00:58:08.454
And part of stack ranking it is what we talked about.
904
00:58:08.474 --> 00:58:11.117
It's like return on what's going to drive the most revenue if I do this thing?
905
00:58:11.137 --> 00:58:13.299
What's going to give me the most benefit?
906
00:58:13.900 --> 00:58:19.805
But the other part of stack ranking it is what in my to-do list that if I don't do it, will hold up thing above it.
907
00:58:20.165 --> 00:58:21.987
And so that's the ordering and the ranking.
908
00:58:22.007 --> 00:58:30.515
And that's the, if you'll go through that exercise in the early part of your off season, and it takes some real frustrating work.
909
00:58:31.396 --> 00:58:31.496
Yeah.
910
00:58:32.723 --> 00:58:36.725
It can be actually tiring work to really truly do this and think through it.
911
00:58:37.165 --> 00:58:41.827
And it can be frustrating to see, I have to do all this stuff and there's no way we can do it.
912
00:58:43.287 --> 00:58:45.368
That's usually the outcome of projects like this.
913
00:58:45.728 --> 00:58:47.349
But that's exactly the point.
914
00:58:47.829 --> 00:58:50.110
And then once you have that, it's about just getting to work.
915
00:58:51.308 --> 00:58:52.108
and delivering on it.
916
00:58:52.208 --> 00:59:02.458
And then the other thing I would add is that if you're a bigger company and you've ever wondered, well, what does a big company talk about or meet about?
917
00:59:02.478 --> 00:59:05.802
Like if I could go be in a 10 million or 20 or $30 million company,
918
00:59:06.282 --> 00:59:07.102
What would I see?
919
00:59:07.522 --> 00:59:10.624
I can tell you what you would see is they would have this plan.
920
00:59:11.064 --> 00:59:19.267
And if they're having weekly meetings or issue meetings or any kind of meeting, this plan is being discussed every week, every two weeks.
921
00:59:19.427 --> 00:59:20.287
Are we on track?
922
00:59:20.588 --> 00:59:21.148
What's off?
923
00:59:21.548 --> 00:59:22.768
How do we need to course correct?
924
00:59:23.109 --> 00:59:28.851
Because you're looking at this every single week as a team and saying, are we going to hit...
925
00:59:29.511 --> 00:59:33.093
the deadline so we can start delivering March 1 or whatever that month is.
926
00:59:33.113 --> 00:59:36.095
So it's not just about identifying what to do.
927
00:59:36.475 --> 00:59:39.137
It's not just about identifying when you need to do it.
928
00:59:39.217 --> 00:59:44.220
It's about having a guide that you can constantly look back at and say, are we on track?
929
00:59:44.640 --> 00:59:46.241
Are we going to hit goal or not hit goal?
930
00:59:46.541 --> 00:59:48.162
If we're not hitting goal, what do we need to do?
931
00:59:49.163 --> 00:59:53.686
One thing we're trying to build with that projection day is once they fill it out, is then...
932
00:59:54.908 --> 00:59:58.010
every single month they can see, okay, I'm ahead on this, I'm behind on this.
933
00:59:58.030 --> 01:00:01.693
Because once I even built that for myself, I was like, okay, I'm 3% behind.
934
01:00:01.773 --> 01:00:03.194
All right, where can we find the revenue?
935
01:00:03.234 --> 01:00:06.916
Okay, we're 5% above and let's focus a little more on defense or some other measures.
936
01:00:06.956 --> 01:00:14.782
So I think another issue for a lot of owners is they're so eternally optimistic this time of year because cash is in the bank.
937
01:00:15.122 --> 01:00:17.103
We made it through the spring rush by the sea of our pants.
938
01:00:17.864 --> 01:00:22.487
And it's hard to envision the problems that are going to arise because I've never experienced them before.
939
01:00:22.927 --> 01:00:25.211
I don't know what it's like to have that many leads.
940
01:00:25.732 --> 01:00:27.394
I just know I need to advertise to get more leads.
941
01:00:27.975 --> 01:00:34.185
But we never identify the next problem that will inevitably occur when demand for most of us doubles, triples, or quadruples.
942
01:00:34.926 --> 01:00:36.548
And that's always been the hardest thing for me is like,
943
01:00:37.767 --> 01:00:39.068
we have kind of two seasons.
944
01:00:39.208 --> 01:00:44.032
One is spring and summer command center goes three to four times medicals.
945
01:00:44.633 --> 01:00:47.716
Vesta owners are all under stress, like way more problems.
946
01:00:48.276 --> 01:00:51.599
And then that one kind of dies and then very quickly software and franchise.
947
01:00:51.619 --> 01:00:54.802
That's, that's where we make all of our growth is the other six months.
948
01:00:55.182 --> 01:00:56.763
And so it's very much of this weird.
949
01:00:57.184 --> 01:01:00.647
I'm always offensive on one while other ones in defense and vice versa.
950
01:01:01.367 --> 01:01:03.729
Uh, but it's interesting to watch sometimes the, uh,
951
01:01:04.450 --> 01:01:09.232
the ability to be able to say, okay, what's the problem going to be next year if we are going to grow this much?
952
01:01:09.632 --> 01:01:22.736
And then the challenging part for any business is forecasting demand and then being able to then, okay, based upon that forecasted demand, I need to go higher, I need to create the supply end of this and be able to project that is the challenging part.
953
01:01:23.617 --> 01:01:23.897
Very.
954
01:01:24.137 --> 01:01:25.918
And we don't know what the economy would be like.
955
01:01:25.938 --> 01:01:26.298
We don't know.
956
01:01:26.498 --> 01:01:27.998
I mean, there's a million factors.
957
01:01:28.298 --> 01:01:31.079
Economy is just one that go into trying to forecast.
958
01:01:31.119 --> 01:01:32.400
So it's complicated, but...
959
01:01:33.988 --> 01:01:34.689
And you won't nail it.
960
01:01:34.969 --> 01:01:35.711
It won't be perfect.
961
01:01:36.191 --> 01:01:40.558
You'll, but if you don't do it, you're, in my opinion, pretty much guaranteed not to get it.
962
01:01:40.926 --> 01:02:05.072
i like i like the point too of like consistently tracking against where you're at because i kind of look at like a compass so it's like okay that's north great that's your one day at the beginning of the year you got your goals great if you put that down and you start walking in that direction there's a very good chance that in 365 days you will be off someplace very different versus you got to keep looking at the compass to actually ensure you stay on course and
963
01:02:05.472 --> 01:02:08.436
And that's why it's so important, in my opinion, not just to have like a goal day.
964
01:02:08.456 --> 01:02:10.258
And it's like, I'm trying to do this much in revenue.
965
01:02:10.278 --> 01:02:11.119
And here's all my numbers.
966
01:02:11.139 --> 01:02:13.022
And I did a great job for talking to AI.
967
01:02:13.042 --> 01:02:13.602
It's like, great.
968
01:02:14.323 --> 01:02:18.849
Month two, where are you at according to that compass that you set out now to go?
969
01:02:19.939 --> 01:02:20.980
Yep, good analogy.
970
01:02:21.680 --> 01:02:22.321
What's your next one?
971
01:02:22.621 --> 01:02:25.283
Okay, so this one is building an AI brand library.
972
01:02:26.805 --> 01:02:30.768
And so you've talked about this a little bit in the past when we did our examples of how to use AI.
973
01:02:30.788 --> 01:02:32.249
You talked specifically about one of these.
974
01:02:32.709 --> 01:02:37.914
I break into three categories, and that is a voice OS, a brand OS, and a creative OS.
975
01:02:38.454 --> 01:02:41.616
So I'll go through each of these to hopefully give everyone an idea.
976
01:02:41.896 --> 01:02:56.164
And again, the reason I use this one is because 12 months ago, I could not have said this because the models were not good enough to generate a lot of these creative elements, specifically when it comes to your crew working out in the field, vehicles, logos, text, all that is better now.
977
01:02:56.704 --> 01:02:57.125
And so...
978
01:02:58.295 --> 01:03:20.835
anyone that's like ai slop you have not given it enough inputs to make the output good so during the off season i want you to take the time to build these three assets and if you do that it'll be a whole lot easier to create the marketing material create the emails create the marketing calendar if you do the work on this back end so three elements first is voice os so i operating system voice os
979
01:03:21.616 --> 01:03:28.299
Inside of that, you want to ask the AI, Jonathan went very deep on this one, and that is, what's my ideal customer?
980
01:03:29.180 --> 01:03:30.301
What are their buying motivations?
981
01:03:30.461 --> 01:03:31.821
What are some of the objections that I have?
982
01:03:32.362 --> 01:03:34.243
What tone do I want to have when I talk to them?
983
01:03:34.923 --> 01:03:36.544
What are phrases I never want to say?
984
01:03:37.444 --> 01:03:39.285
Like, for example, cheap, right?
985
01:03:39.405 --> 01:03:40.646
Maybe I talk about high value.
986
01:03:41.526 --> 01:03:43.907
What are the things that I do not want to say to a customer?
987
01:03:44.408 --> 01:03:50.211
And then give examples of really good emails or ads that you like that maybe you've written, or you even like out in the wild.
988
01:03:50.938 --> 01:03:56.742
And then you can take those examples, make the edits, and then tell the AI why you did.
989
01:03:57.022 --> 01:03:59.743
So for example, I will screenshot a competitor's ad.
990
01:04:00.064 --> 01:04:02.605
I will say, here's what I like about it, and here's what I don't like about it.
991
01:04:02.945 --> 01:04:10.170
You do that several times, and it really guides AI on how you want to communicate with your customers in your local market.
992
01:04:10.450 --> 01:04:12.071
So that's the first part is the voice OS.
993
01:04:12.512 --> 01:04:16.555
Again, this is probably a 20 to 30 minute conversation if you're just getting started and just say it.
994
01:04:16.655 --> 01:04:19.717
These are the things that I want to build for my business.
995
01:04:19.737 --> 01:04:27.443
I want to create a voice OS document that I can inject as a prompt into my AI to get the copy of my business nailed down.
996
01:04:27.503 --> 01:04:32.067
And again, a really good example, Jonathan went really deep on this, showing it in real life.
997
01:04:32.767 --> 01:04:57.415
second one is i call brand os so each of each department i have has these three folders inside of the the brand library voice os second is brand os so this is going to be logos colors fonts don't just tell it i use times new roman give it the font file put it put it in there because then it'll be able to take the file and use the actual font in your marketing creative etc
998
01:05:02.600 --> 01:05:08.925
If you show one image of your mascot, it'll do a horrible job of putting that on marketing creative, on trucks, et cetera.
999
01:05:09.266 --> 01:05:10.487
Give it everything you have.
1000
01:05:10.587 --> 01:05:12.368
Give it the different versions of the file.
1001
01:05:12.969 --> 01:05:16.552
Large, small, PNG, JPEG, PDFs, et cetera.
1002
01:05:17.873 --> 01:05:20.215
And then give examples of when it's correctly used.
1003
01:05:20.615 --> 01:05:25.219
So what I will sometimes do to refine my brand to us is I will throw it all that I have.
1004
01:05:25.619 --> 01:05:28.501
I will ask it to create 10 different images on, for example, a truck,
1005
01:05:29.300 --> 01:05:54.497
my crew and their uniform and then I will tell it nope that's wrong you messed up the font nope that's wrong because the dog his ears do not look like that and you just constantly are trying to shape it so that way you have this folder the brand OS that you know you can immediately get creative or you can immediately have these elements of font colors being consistent across the board the last one's creative OS this is the one
1006
01:05:55.438 --> 01:05:57.502
that is really powerful when it comes to marketing.
1007
01:05:58.144 --> 01:06:03.314
And that is go out and get real pictures of your crews, your vehicles, your equipment,
1008
01:06:04.214 --> 01:06:05.715
Have them do the services that you offer.
1009
01:06:05.755 --> 01:06:09.236
Like if you offer five services, I want pictures of all five of those services.
1010
01:06:10.197 --> 01:06:12.698
If you have before and afters, if you have local landmarks.
1011
01:06:13.138 --> 01:06:19.461
So for example, if you live in a city, get all the images of those local landmarks and inject them into this document.
1012
01:06:19.721 --> 01:06:27.164
So that way, when your truck is driving down the street on an AI-generated image, it's showing a landmark in your local town, in your local area.
1013
01:06:27.364 --> 01:06:29.685
This is actually, okay, spoiler alert.
1014
01:06:30.065 --> 01:06:31.066
When we're going to Texas is...
1015
01:06:32.006 --> 01:06:34.727
I have five or six different cities that we kind of go into.
1016
01:06:35.227 --> 01:06:39.708
And each of those I now have pictures and a creative OS for each one.
1017
01:06:40.288 --> 01:06:46.730
So when I go into the city, here's all the landmarks, and here's everything else we talked about, my trucks, my uniform, etc.
1018
01:06:46.970 --> 01:06:52.592
But now my billboard or my truck is going to be in front of that city's landmark.
1019
01:06:53.489 --> 01:07:03.932
More importantly, even if you go more specifically, put it in front of like, there's a school, put it in front of a water tower, things that are identifiable to their area that is gonna help them stop on an ad.
1020
01:07:04.732 --> 01:07:10.994
And even your social media creative, like the ability to be able to have it customized to your local area, but you have to give it this information.
1021
01:07:11.314 --> 01:07:11.974
Like you have to show it.
1022
01:07:11.994 --> 01:07:15.275
These are the four landmarks that everyone knows in my area, it's a local business.
1023
01:07:17.048 --> 01:07:21.570
And so the last part that I do on the creative OS is different angles.
1024
01:07:22.131 --> 01:07:26.713
So when you take this, Jonathan just did this with his thumbnails.
1025
01:07:26.733 --> 01:07:27.633
Let's go.
1026
01:07:27.773 --> 01:07:32.115
You can't just take one image of Jonathan's face and tell it to make an AI generated thumbnail.
1027
01:07:32.475 --> 01:07:38.318
He took all angles of his face doing different impressions and different images.
1028
01:07:39.358 --> 01:08:04.446
uh facial expressions and so the same thing is true when it comes to like your trucks don't just take a picture of your truck and expect it to do a good job generating image take 20 images from every angle of the truck and now inside of your creative os you have a folder called truck and it will do a really good job of making sure that when it uses that information on a generated ai image it's super good anyways that was my my little rant on uh that's awesome an ai brand library
1029
01:08:05.153 --> 01:08:07.895
I have all of that except the landmarks.
1030
01:08:08.155 --> 01:08:09.296
That is a great idea.
1031
01:08:09.376 --> 01:08:09.597
I know.
1032
01:08:09.617 --> 01:08:11.258
I might have to cut this out of the podcast.
1033
01:08:12.559 --> 01:08:13.479
I like that idea.
1034
01:08:15.020 --> 01:08:18.183
So yeah, I mean, I just second all of that.
1035
01:08:19.564 --> 01:08:23.907
One of the things I thought about when you were talking, and you may have a better idea to do this.
1036
01:08:24.527 --> 01:08:26.629
I built all this stuff.
1037
01:08:26.669 --> 01:08:30.472
Voice and brand has been... All of it was built last year.
1038
01:08:31.819 --> 01:08:34.621
early last year for me.
1039
01:08:34.961 --> 01:08:37.782
And then, or brand was, actually brand was built in 2024.
1040
01:08:38.182 --> 01:08:39.503
And it doesn't matter.
1041
01:08:39.863 --> 01:08:48.708
Creative has been a this year project where you have a person that's working about 70 hours a month, just taking images and video in the field.
1042
01:08:49.545 --> 01:08:53.069
And so the local landmarks is really good.
1043
01:08:53.089 --> 01:08:54.530
But here's why I said all that.
1044
01:08:54.971 --> 01:09:01.037
I wonder, in terms of creating it, as you were talking, it's almost picturing like on... Let's just use Claude, for example.
1045
01:09:01.338 --> 01:09:07.444
You have a thread that would be voice, a thread that would be brand, a thread that would be creative.
1046
01:09:08.265 --> 01:09:09.906
And those threads persist forever.
1047
01:09:10.246 --> 01:09:19.392
So as I have new great examples of marketing or reasons why we do something, reasons why we don't do something, we're constantly just adding it to that thread.
1048
01:09:19.432 --> 01:09:26.117
And then periodically, we're having it generate us a new creative guide or voice guide or whatever the case might be.
1049
01:09:27.588 --> 01:09:28.328
I don't do it that way.
1050
01:09:28.408 --> 01:09:36.216
I've sort of created all this stuff and then I moved on, but you got me thinking I should have a live thread where I'm just constantly dumping more and more.
1051
01:09:36.456 --> 01:09:39.139
We're doing that with the creative thread, but not with the voice thread.
1052
01:09:39.679 --> 01:09:41.321
I periodically update that.
1053
01:09:41.361 --> 01:09:42.682
How do you guys build yours?
1054
01:09:43.182 --> 01:09:45.184
I have it where it's just a Google Drive folder.
1055
01:09:45.625 --> 01:09:47.847
So that way any output will go in there.
1056
01:09:48.387 --> 01:09:50.850
And I've just trained that if it's in there, it's good.
1057
01:09:52.586 --> 01:09:54.307
So that way you just have to read the Google Drive.
1058
01:09:54.327 --> 01:09:55.168
It keeps refining.
1059
01:09:55.588 --> 01:09:55.748
Yes.
1060
01:09:55.768 --> 01:09:57.849
For example, it'll give me an output for an email.
1061
01:09:57.929 --> 01:10:01.190
A lot of times we will copy that, go edit it and send it out to a customer.
1062
01:10:01.210 --> 01:10:10.114
The one part that I'd encourage everyone to do is like make the edits, then you got to give it back to the AI and like, oh, I made these five changes and it starts to get better.
1063
01:10:10.174 --> 01:10:12.815
Oh, he doesn't like this, doesn't like that word.
1064
01:10:13.075 --> 01:10:18.978
They always take out this sort of phraseology and it will refine itself and make the voice OS even better.
1065
01:10:19.628 --> 01:10:28.555
But in that example right there, you dumping it back into the thread, or are you just putting the document back in there and then telling the model to look at the updated document?
1066
01:10:28.655 --> 01:10:33.919
I don't, this is like my one data thing is like, I want that file somewhere I can always access it.
1067
01:10:34.239 --> 01:10:38.202
So I've always just made it where I have a kind of like my source of truth is my Google drive.
1068
01:10:38.322 --> 01:10:38.762
That's just me.
1069
01:10:39.023 --> 01:10:40.865
You could definitely dump it back into the chat.
1070
01:10:41.345 --> 01:10:44.148
But I've always just said like, hey, reference the Google Drive.
1071
01:10:44.208 --> 01:10:46.991
I just put back the final product and make sure you see the differences.
1072
01:10:47.251 --> 01:10:47.972
Tell me what they are.
1073
01:10:48.352 --> 01:10:50.694
I wanna make sure it understands why I did certain things.
1074
01:10:50.935 --> 01:10:53.797
Cause then over time, it gets better and better and better.
1075
01:10:54.698 --> 01:10:56.180
And you don't have to keep making little tweaks.
1076
01:10:56.992 --> 01:11:00.835
I think I'm just wanting to be very clear for people because like you, I actually use a Google Drive as well.
1077
01:11:00.855 --> 01:11:01.076
Oh, you do?
1078
01:11:01.136 --> 01:11:01.376
Okay.
1079
01:11:01.876 --> 01:11:02.697
Yeah.
1080
01:11:02.937 --> 01:11:03.838
Now, there's...
1081
01:11:03.858 --> 01:11:11.164
But I also have other projects that are just folders on my computer where Claude or Chajubiti are writing to and from a folder on my computer.
1082
01:11:11.184 --> 01:11:12.946
But for CityTurf, it's all Google.
1083
01:11:13.146 --> 01:11:13.907
Yeah.
1084
01:11:14.127 --> 01:11:14.567
You get the idea.
1085
01:11:14.707 --> 01:11:17.150
My question, what I'm wanting to be very clear on people...
1086
01:11:17.810 --> 01:11:25.338
for people is you download an email, you rewrite it, you re-upload it to Google Drive.
1087
01:11:25.978 --> 01:11:27.780
I just want to be clear.
1088
01:11:28.180 --> 01:11:30.002
You're still doing one more step, right?
1089
01:11:30.102 --> 01:11:39.151
Aren't you going into Claude to the thread or to a thread and telling it to read that new document or just the act of uploading?
1090
01:11:39.191 --> 01:11:39.892
Is that enough?
1091
01:11:39.912 --> 01:11:40.072
Yeah.
1092
01:11:40.292 --> 01:11:41.533
I've trained it pretty good.
1093
01:11:42.033 --> 01:11:47.076
When I mill the projects, I usually say, this is your source of truth, any file in here is what I consider good.
1094
01:11:47.416 --> 01:11:49.477
So I don't have to inject it back in.
1095
01:11:50.097 --> 01:11:54.019
If I was trying to iterative process, I'd probably put it back in and keep working with it.
1096
01:11:54.499 --> 01:11:59.042
But I've made it where it's just like, always look at this for the source of good.
1097
01:11:59.462 --> 01:12:05.225
That's why I'm like, the defensibility around my private Gmail even, that's my Google Drive.
1098
01:12:05.445 --> 01:12:09.107
Everything in there, I consider it to be able to scan and use for the model.
1099
01:12:10.010 --> 01:12:12.993
okay, maybe I need to test again.
1100
01:12:13.013 --> 01:12:19.619
The reason I'm bringing this up is historically that's not worked for me because the context window isn't big enough to scan all the documents.
1101
01:12:19.959 --> 01:12:24.643
So I feel like I have to point it very specifically at these examples.
1102
01:12:24.963 --> 01:12:26.705
And so that's why I was asking.
1103
01:12:26.725 --> 01:12:29.968
Maybe the context windows are better now and I'm not realizing that.
1104
01:12:29.988 --> 01:12:32.130
Do you open a new chat inside the project each time?
1105
01:12:32.670 --> 01:12:33.011
Yes.
1106
01:12:33.231 --> 01:12:33.531
Okay.
1107
01:12:33.591 --> 01:12:34.412
I see what you're saying.
1108
01:12:35.133 --> 01:12:43.122
But yes, if you're doing it that way, but even then there's a limitation to how much you can read in a folder.
1109
01:12:43.362 --> 01:12:43.643
True.
1110
01:12:43.943 --> 01:12:46.486
Only ingest so many tokens.
1111
01:12:46.526 --> 01:12:51.231
And that's why I was wondering if you were telling it specifically, go look at this, go look at that.
1112
01:12:51.371 --> 01:12:56.956
Honestly, it's a lot of times when I'm talking to it, I'm usually saying like, Hey, go reference the voice OS and look at previous emails.
1113
01:12:56.976 --> 01:12:57.096
Okay.
1114
01:12:57.156 --> 01:12:58.617
I do that command it still.
1115
01:12:58.717 --> 01:12:58.917
Yes.
1116
01:12:59.097 --> 01:12:59.458
You're right.
1117
01:12:59.478 --> 01:12:59.618
Okay.
1118
01:12:59.658 --> 01:12:59.758
Okay.
1119
01:12:59.778 --> 01:13:00.679
That's what I was trying to get.
1120
01:13:00.739 --> 01:13:09.266
I wasn't trying to get too much in the weeds, but you said something thought made me think, Oh, maybe I've, uh, I'm missing something and it can do something I'm not realizing it's capable.
1121
01:13:09.286 --> 01:13:09.666
Great point.
1122
01:13:09.927 --> 01:13:16.612
And like, sometimes too, I'll get on this kick, especially on copywriting where like a specific type of copywriter, I've been reading their books.
1123
01:13:16.692 --> 01:13:18.674
I really like to craft towards that.
1124
01:13:19.194 --> 01:13:19.595
I'm just like.
1125
01:13:20.680 --> 01:13:24.281
you know, a slippery slope, for example, like how do I create a slippery slope throughout an email?
1126
01:13:24.681 --> 01:13:31.043
And if it's resonating with me, I'll be like, hey, reference that document about, and I want to tailor it towards that approach.
1127
01:13:31.483 --> 01:13:33.323
So I do guide it to your point.
1128
01:13:33.903 --> 01:13:34.163
Okay.
1129
01:13:34.663 --> 01:13:34.924
All right.
1130
01:13:34.984 --> 01:13:35.404
Very good.
1131
01:13:36.024 --> 01:13:37.264
I thought all that's great.
1132
01:13:37.364 --> 01:13:38.945
I would add one last thing.
1133
01:13:40.205 --> 01:13:48.467
And that is, you might have, whomever's listening, you might have heard this and say, well, man, when I work with my model, it's really good.
1134
01:13:49.533 --> 01:13:51.094
And it might be really good.
1135
01:13:51.134 --> 01:13:53.015
And I don't need to create all this stuff because it's really good.
1136
01:13:53.035 --> 01:14:00.099
And it might be because you've been doing this stuff inside your model and it has a memory and context and other threads it can reference.
1137
01:14:00.799 --> 01:14:04.221
But none of this is scalable for team members.
1138
01:14:04.261 --> 01:14:08.703
You'll never be able to hand this off unless you create these documents because this is what educates their model.
1139
01:14:08.703 --> 01:14:09.945
And this is why I do Google Drive.
1140
01:14:10.205 --> 01:14:13.110
Because then I can share that folder, make them a viewer only.
1141
01:14:13.170 --> 01:14:15.333
They get all the context, not can't edit it.
1142
01:14:15.654 --> 01:14:18.779
And I don't have to share them in my AI accounts.
1143
01:14:18.979 --> 01:14:20.381
It's always updated on their end.
1144
01:14:20.582 --> 01:14:23.206
So anyways, very useful.
1145
01:14:24.774 --> 01:14:25.054
Cool.
1146
01:14:25.415 --> 01:14:25.775
What else?
1147
01:14:26.195 --> 01:14:26.916
I think that's all we got.
1148
01:14:26.936 --> 01:14:27.616
Yeah.
1149
01:14:28.217 --> 01:14:32.179
I think what I want to know, though, for everyone listening, we've been like super tactical today.
1150
01:14:32.220 --> 01:14:33.801
So we'll see how this does in terms of the algorithm.
1151
01:14:33.821 --> 01:14:38.464
But there's a bunch of stuff we mentioned specifically that you can change in your business this offseason.
1152
01:14:39.265 --> 01:14:45.689
The tax on this episode is you've got to let us know down below which one are you going to do first, which one resonated the most with you.
1153
01:14:45.709 --> 01:14:47.651
And you're like, I got to at least do that one thing.
1154
01:14:47.671 --> 01:14:48.612
I don't want to list five things.
1155
01:14:49.152 --> 01:14:53.474
Because a lot of these things, if you just did one of these things this offseason, it would completely change your business.
1156
01:14:54.154 --> 01:14:57.616
And instead of going into the offseason with 20 things you want to do, I just want to know one.
1157
01:14:58.416 --> 01:15:01.717
Because it will absolutely set up 2027 to be a fantastic year.
1158
01:15:02.758 --> 01:15:04.058
I 100% agree with that.
1159
01:15:04.078 --> 01:15:05.099
Appreciate you all watching.
1160
01:15:05.139 --> 01:15:05.759
We'll see you next week.
1161
01:15:06.039 --> 01:15:06.440
Likewise.
1162
01:15:06.820 --> 01:15:07.200
See you later.