Hey, Mike Callahan here Im going to show you how to organize, automate, and dominate your local market and become an absentee owner. So basically the challenge is, can you leave your business for 30 days?

Well, the next thing we’re going to talk about is estimate templates in email. We’ll create a system workflow and processes in the business that will basically standardize your process and procedure and not need you as the business owner to basically have this work. So what we’re talking about here is, I’ve included a link to actually show you how to do this. But on a high level, what we want to do is standardize our service offering. So if we’re in the lawn care industry, we may have landscape maintenance and design-build or if we’re in home cleaning, we’re going to have a template that loads your weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, and top-to-bottom clean. So the whole idea here is to segment all your services on one loaded pre-template,

the template would basically come up, all your services would be there. Behind the services would be a price matrix. So your minimum charge and then every additional unit or a square foot range above that would add an additional price, budgeted time, and cost. So all you’d basically have to do is go in now and hit a template button in your CRM. The one we’re using is Service Autopilot but, basically, that’s going to load in all your services and all the estimator now simply has to do is go in and click quote on the services they want to estimate.

Now if you check out the link below, it goes into detail, but the whole premise is creating a turnkey solution for your office to be able to estimate without them having to think, and without you, the business owner-manager, having to be involved in the system. So it’s standardized production rates, it loads into a template. Once we go and save that estimate template, what we’re quoting, we’re going to go and email it. At that point a pre-templated email loads in with all the marketing copy, we recommend breaking this into two separate templates, one for leads and one’s for clients. Your leads are going to have a significantly different conversation than you would for clients, so if someone’s already doing work with us as a client we’re going to probably reaffirm some of the things that we’re already doing but it’s not overcoming those sales or price objections, or educating them to the way we operate. It’s more educating them to a specific service. Where if it’s a new lead we’re going to go in and educate them how our company’s different, how we overcome some of those hard-asked questions as far as what do you do on a rainy day, what happens if something’s damaged, things like that.

So we’re going to create two template systems that automatically load so the email doesn’t have to be rewritten that sends out the estimate, inside that estimate, we’re going to have a clickable link that pulls up a live estimate that the client can go in and accept what services they want and have an electronic signature. I also recommend replicating yourself through technology with videos on each service level on those templates. So not only do we have the workflow of Mrs. Smith calling our office – we pick it up, “Hey,” – we enter their information into the system. The estimator goes in, clicks the template for lawn care maintenance. All the services for lawn mowing, shrub pruning, mulching, all load based on measuring it on the satellite or asking some pre-qualifying questions over the phone, the price loads in, how long it should take, and the profit projected. And all the estimator does on the phone, goes in and see quote, numbers they want, and hit save. They go up, hit email, pre-templated email loads with a clickable link in the middle. The consumer opens up their email, if we don’t close them on the phone, they check what services they want, scroll down to the bottom and hit accept and sign electronically. At that point, a pre-templated email automatically fires out to the consumer and says, Hey, thanks for accepting the lawn care or home cleaning estimate that we just sent you. We’ll be in contact within the next 24 hours to get you scheduled. And then that pre-templated To Do or task pops up in the office to alert whoever should be responsible for calling and scheduling that service to let them know it needs to be done within the next 24 hours.

So the idea today is to create a templated standardized workflow for estimates that anybody can work. Once that is saved, we hit a button that would basically load a pre-templated email, that doesn’t have to be customized, with a clickable link so they could see the estimate and when the consumer pulls it up they can check the services they want, sign electronically, and once they accept it another automated pre-templated email goes out and communicates with the consumer to let them know that we know they accepted the service and we’ll be in touch.

So I want to challenge you to this 30-day challenge. These are processes and systems that we could put in place in our business to leave the business for 30 days without the business owner intact. So I’ll give you a quick review right now. The first step was a centralized knowledge database- a wiki. So all the things that are in your head you disseminate and stick in a central place for the software for our employees and staff members to be reliant on, not the business owner.

The next one was field equipment and office equipment manuals. Step-by-step, how to use them, how to troubleshoot them. So now we’re talking all the things you’d have to train and create in your head. We’ve made another centralized knowledge database for them to train off of and then refer to.

Next thing is Google Docs. One knowledge place that’s a centralized area for document sharing and creation. You can kind of see the theme here, it’s centralized cloud-based knowledge- not in the business owner’s head but complete accessibility no matter where you are in the world for you and your team.

Next thing is we did voice over IP, voice over internet provider, so it is getting rid of your landline and giving you the ability to basically have phone systems in your office either with a VA, a virtual assistant, or the ability for you to pull up on your cell phone, to dial in and call the consumer as if you were in the physical office, but you’re not. And to send and receive text messages from your office as well as your cell phone, all looking like it’s from your business.

And then the final step that we’re going into today is creating pre-built estimate templates that load all your services with predefined budgeted time, cost before profit, and a price, an email that automatically loads that doesn’t have to be tweaked each time, that sends it out with the clickable links. The consumer opens it up, signs and checks what they want and when they send it another pre-templated email automatically goes out and confirms that we have acknowledged they’ve bought the service and it alerts our office with a To Do or a task with a deadline assigned to a specific role or person that that thing needs to be scheduled and addressed in the next 24 hours.

So these are the top four or five and we’re going to go through about probably 55 or 60 of these here before we’re done with the 30-day challenge under the organize phase, then we’re going to show you how to automate them and then how to go in and dominate your local market through different online-offline marketing strategies. So any comments or questions, drop them below. It’s our next installment of our 30-day challenge, How To Become An Absentee Owner, or at least to leave your business for 30 days at a pop and have it run the same, if not better, without you, the business owner.