Mike Callahan here with a quick video. Mid-season in lawn care and really the home cleaning industry as well as we just finished QT, quarter two. So we’re going to be talking about today is job or costing reports that you should be running whether you’re using a CRM software or maybe just an Excel sheet or a Google sheet. But the thing we’re going to be looking at here is things we hopefully were tracking for the whole entire season up to this point. Each and every job that we do, we should be tracking the start and stop time of each job, the employees that were on those jobs, and the budgeted versus actual time to accomplish this, we used to do pen and paper or basically Excel sheet, but the process is basically the crew would grab a mobile phone and they would clock into the job and clock out of the job. And then, on the way to the next job, they’re going to basically track their start and stop time for drive time. And we’re going to do that for every single job we do. In addition to that, we’re going to put a budgeted time- how long we think it’s going to take for the crews to finish these jobs. And now, hopefully, through April or so–

[silence]

Service, how long it took from start to stop, and how much revenue we basically generated per man hour or per person on that crew. And then, we would actually have a comparison to our budgeted goal, how many dollars per man hour we wanted to generate. So I’m including a link on this video that you can click and actually see how we actually do this step by step. But as we hit the halfway point of the season, every week, we should be tracking our daily versus actual budgeted time for the entire day and the entire week, but that’s going to allow us to make sure that we’re profitable on an overall look for each crew, each day, each crew does it, and then a company overall view. Now, at the midpoint of the season, we really want to be looking at each particular customer that we service. So by tracking those start and stop times and the actual versus budgeted time for generating dollars per man hour– let’s just say we had a job that was producing $50 per man hour and our goal was actually 60, if you look at the link I’m including with this video, it’s actually going to show you the math that we used that would say based on the actual times your there you need to raise your price for the mowing $2 and 56 cents per cut. So it’s a non-emotional way to double-check each and every job you’re doing at the halfway point.

Why this is important is if the crews are out there and Mrs. Smith added 15 trees to her yard and you traditionally had been basically making the money you wanted on her property, now that she’s added these trees on the property, the job has actually changed significantly. This is going to be a non-emotional benchmark to raise her price. And in addition, it’s also going to go in and give you a benchmark or a gut check on your pricing for all your new clients and it’s not just based on one visit, but hopefully, there’s 10 or 15, maybe 20 visits depending on where you are in the country or the world, and this will give you an average. So now, if we’re losing money on an account, non-emotionally, we should raise that price, in my opinion. Obviously, give them a few weeks’ notice and just say, “Hey. Due to certain things, we’re raising your price. If you’re happy with the price, we’re going to continue this. If now, unfortunately, we aren’t going to be able to provide the service moving forward.” In my opinion, we don’t want to continue to service a property at the halfway point if we’re losing money. In some cases, it may be cheaper to show up at the property and drop a $20 bill off at the front porch. So what I’m proposing is if we’ve been tracking the start and stop times for all our jobs, we run some reports, whether it’s in a CRM system like Service Autopilot or a manual process in Excel or Google Sheets.

If you haven’t been doing this, I highly recommend tracking these start and stop times so at the end of the year, the next time we run this report on each individual job, we’re able to track that. Now, the additional benefit of this is if you are going out and, say, doing lawn mowing or fertilization, if we can track the service area, the area we’re servicing, such as turf square footage, we will be able to create a standardized production rate. So no longer will you have to go on Facebook and ask people what they’re charging or what you should charge. You will have the data from at least the halfway point or for the whole entire year to see how long on average it takes your crews to get the jobs done based on your particular equipment setup, on any normal or average type jobs that you’re doing. So a lot of data right here. A lot of things we’re talking about. Main takeaways, you want to track the start and stop times for each and every job if we have that data, we run reports just we have like in the link that I’ve included in this – check it out – and to show you how to do that. That’s going to give you a non-emotional either leave the price alone or price increase. So we’re not losing money for the second half of the year. We’re going to continue to do that for the second half of the year. And then, we’re going to have the data for the whole, entire season.

Now, the next step to this job costing report that we do for the whole, entire season is going out and running this report and creating a non-emotional price increase for just the customers not meeting the threshold or your hourly goals. So if our goal is $50 an hour and we’re only getting 45, we’re going to raise the price on just the accounts that are not hitting our goal and we’re only going to raise them enough to get to our hourly goal. So a lot of people in these Facebook groups are going, “I’m going to go out and raise my prices 3% or $5 across the board per cut.” In my opinion, that is the absolute craziest thing you could ever do because I’ve got an account I’m making $100 an hour on and my goal is 50, I’m making double my goal. Why would I ever touch that price and run the risk of inviting the competition or losing that job and having to go out to bid? So there’s a lot of foundational information here that you need to get to make this educational play for raising the prices or leaving them alone. So if you’ve got the data, now is the time to do it. If you don’t have the data, now is the time to start tracking it so you’ve got at least the second half of the season so you can non-emotionally raise the prices or keep the prices the same for your current customer base. And if you take the pro tip of tracking custom fields or turf square footage, different areas that you’re servicing, you potentially can have a production rate-based estimating system based on your particular numbers by the end of the season so there’d be no guessing. And by doing so, you are going to create an estimating system that can be delegated without fail.

Gentleman that took lawn care company over had never done landscape maintenance. He was traditionally just a fertilizing applicator, commercial technician. He had never estimated lawn mowing. He had never estimated bush trimming, mulching, any of those maintenance services. Within two weeks, maybe three weeks, with a standardized production rate based on our historical averages that we’ve tracked through through job costing, I was able to send this individual out in the field and create estimates literally dollar to dollar with the ones that I’ve been doing with 25 years of experience in the field in estimating. So a lot of takeaways here. If you’ve got your numbers, let’s do a job costing report, raise those losers up to where they need to be. If not, get rid of them. if you’re not tracking this stuff for start and stop times and drive times, start tracking them now, and we’re going to have another talk probably the end of November, beginning of December how to run this report again to raise your prices and create a production rate-based estimating system on your own production. So no longer will you have to go on Facebook and ask what to charge or raise the prices by, say, $5 a cut or a percentage across the board. We’re going to raise the prices on the ones that aren’t hitting the goal. And the ones above that, we’re going to leave them alone because we don’t want to change the price. We’re making the money we need, so why risk ever losing that customer? So any comments or questions, drop below, and happy to answer them. Keith, what’s up, buddy? Good to see you on here as well, and will talk to you soon.