How to create a freedom based service business [ standardize your service offering and make it predictable for delegation ]

Hey Mike Callahan here in Rochester New York. I’m walking into another 2-day deep dive and the topic today is- how to create a standardized service business that is delegate able and predictable. So what we’re doing is we’re actually hanging out here, this is a pre room – coming in to a deep-dive for two days. We’re helping another company out to basically standardize their service offering in Service Autopilot, so they can go out and create predictable systems day-in and day-out that are delegatable. This is kind of what we do we setup in a boardroom- if this is something you’re doing yourself I would highly recommend getting out of your office getting a little executive retreat for yourself by yourself or if you have a team but this is what we’re doing here and basically going to post up here for the next two days and we’re gonna go out and create a predictable system. I want to say what’s up Josh. I believe Josh has joined us in this very room here in upstate New York, but Josh and everybody else what we’re talking about is creating a predictable system for estimating and be able to go and standardize your estimating through a production rate based estimating system. Once that is set up we can go and create a minimum price with budgeted-time profit and overhead recovery and then through an on-site or an office form we can standardize the estimating process for someone in your office to go out and do these estimates over the phone and close them live or to go out in the field. The way this came about was in my own company, I wanted to become an absentee owner and the gentleman that took the business over and ran the day-to-day operations was a commercial fertilizer tech, he had never estimated lawn mowing, shrub pruning, bed edging or any of the other things that we do in our service business- but within about a week and a half to two weeks his estimates were identical within probably 50 cents a pop to my estimates, and I had been doing at 24 to 25 years. What we really want to do is take what’s in the business owners head- create an executable blueprint that’s predictable, test it out and create production rate based estimating that’s exactly what we’re gonna do in this boardroom for the next two days. Most people come to us thinking they have 15 to 20 services but at the end of the day when we break it out there’s usually at least 100 to 150 that we build out because it’s a systematic way to create production rate based estimating, we cover each step of the estimate along the way. I don’t know if you can really see it on the screen behind me but what we also do is once we create this system we create a standardized workflow through this flowchart literally from lead acquisition off the website or them calling the office. How do we answer them in our CRM( which is Service Autopilot that we use)… How do we go out then create a templated estimate for leads and clients, so we can have separate marketing conversations based on where they’re at in the customer lifecycle… How do we simplify it to literally hitting a button to add an estimate that the template loads in with all the services particular to-whether it’s landscape maintenance maybe it’s a residential home cleaning so we’d cover our top to bottom weekly bi-weekly d clean move in move out. Whether it’s lawn care home cleaning we could just create this predictable system when we get out of our office and get into a bordering like this like we’re doing in our two-day deepdive. We’ve done this with lawn care companies we’ve done this with home cleaning companies but we’re creating a predictable workflow based on a production rate based estimate so we’re gonna create a system from lead acquisition off the website or them calling getting them into the CRM which is Service Autopilot most of the time we hit add an estimate loads a pre-loaded template with marketing content pre-built for whether they’re a lead ora client those are significantly two different conversations or sales and price objections and education that are going to need to happen based on where they’re at as a customer or not a customer. After that we’re literally just gonna go down and hit quote so whether it’s an exact quote or a price range this can also be done in Service Autopilot we cracked the code four or five weeks ago working with one of the industry leaders in the home cleaning industry Debbie Sardone and that is been instrumental. So now we can do pretty much every type of pricing that you can imagine in Service Autopilot. If you’re in the lawn care industry we can do production rate based estimating for hardscape design and maintenance. If you’re in the home cleaning industry we can go in and do a set price on square footage we can do a set price on small, medium and large rooms we can do a set price on small medium or large rooms with a price range or now we can do a high and low minimum a maximum price based on your top-to-bottom, weekly, bi-weekly deep clean and monthly or move-in / move-out cleans. No matter the industry this workflow works it’s very very similar depending on the industry you’re in we’ve done it with mosquito control we’ve done it with asphalt paving and sealing you name it we pretty much have done it in this boardroom here over the last 12 to 24 months. After we create that standardized estimate we want to be to save it, hit email- a pre template the document loads in again with the marketing content ready to go we hit send the client gets this email there’s a clickable link where they can sign up for the services they are interested in an automated email fires off back to them it’s pre tempted letting know we’ve got the accepted estimate and then that notifies our team in the office basically letting them know they got 24 hours of contact the consumer and get that on the schedule. Next thing we do is we go over how to handle loss estimates, it’s basically close those out in a standardized process so we have list hygiene we can still market to them we want a clean database inside that CRM such as Service Autopilot. If we win the estimate, we go in and convert that lead into a client so we have good hygiene and lead conversion tracking. Then we’re gonna schedule right off the estimate so there’s no double entry there’s no pen and paper and we’ve got a price, a budget, a time and a projected profit directly on to that job. We’re gonna go over the three different ways of scheduling predominantly we’re gonna do a one-time job- that’s when we know the particular time and day that we’re going out to do the job. We can do a recurring so whether it’s a weekly mowing or weekly or bi-weekly cleaning we can go into that scenario. Next thing we do is go into a waiting list, maybe we’ve got a spring cleanup or in a home cleaning industry we’ve got a move in and move out that needs to be done sometime this week but not particularly on a set day, we can put that on a waiting list and we can go in and show you how to actually optimize that routing and minimize the drive time to basically minimize that non billable time. Next thing we do is package job- particularly for the lawn care industry- we go out and do different rounds of fertilizing how to move them off the estimate and get them onto a master package. Next thing we do is we go into the actual route optimization- big misunderstanding that route optimization doesn’t work and it doesn’t optimize the stops- I was gonna make a video last night but I ran out of time getting ready for this deep dive so it will be coming this week. Basically when you set those crews up appropriately with the right start time it needs to start at your shop if you have solo operators such as solo cleaners they need to be based on where they start and if they start from your shop and their home address is on their employee record the route optimization is going to route from their home address which obviously is not good or if you have no address for starting address for those crews or solo cleaners or solo operators in the lawn care that’s a big reason why it’s not working it has no place to optimize off of so that’s also a big issue so we go into that. We show you how to set your crews up under the job costing feature and Service Autopilot under the employee one of the biggest misconceptions is number they’re looking for is a fully loaded overhead recovery number as far as with labor burden so not to totally misspeak they want your labor burden fully loaded on top of them with your hourly and overtime. Then we’re gonna go in and go to the dispatch board- how do we schedule those jobs and get them out in the mobiles or print them out and how do we get the start and stop times and have a quick sanity check to make sure everything we need for the job costing and job reporting is in there in a quick and simple fashion that can be delegated. Closeout days screen this is probably the last part of it where we get the information that we need for automated billing so whether you’re billing weekly, daily or monthly those invoices automatically generate so we go through a process to make sure all the information that should be in there to create those invoices correctly comes at the first time and then at that trigger point those invoices are generated. Then we walk through our accounts and billing so we go in how to charge credit cards how to email how to print those invoices and how to set up contracts so if you’re doing a monthly install for a landscape maintenance or maybe a commercial cleaning how to enter those in correctly and then associate the jobs underneath them with a price and budgeted time. One of the biggest misconceptions is people are putting contract jobs in there’s no price to budget at time because they’re afraid of double billing the client it will not want it to set up appropriately but if you don’t have those data points you are running blind far as your profitability on each job and the whole entire contract. The final part is we go in and go through how to handle your daily KPIs key performance indicators so we go our daily versus actual time for the whole entire day for each crew in the whole entire week as a company as a whole and then twice a year we go in and show you how to actually run job cost reports on each and every job you do so non-emotional you can raise the prices on the jobs you’re losing money on. Just to give you an idea of kind of what we do even if you want to do it yourself that is the framework and I would really recommend if you’re doing it yourself rent a boardroom like this get out of the chaos of your business put your cell phones away for eight to ten hours a day and go in and create predictable systems with the team that can be delegated and create a standardized workflow from lead acquisition all the way through billing and what I like to call them is the five to six screens to success. I can take someone off the street right now and within five to seven days, teach them how to use the CRM basically Service Autopilot for success and have them with the knowledge base of a production rate based estimating system that took me 23 to 24 years because we’re gonna standardize it test it make it predictable and basically train to the four to six screens usually it’s five to six screens of success that are replicable each and every day for standardized production and output of profitable jobs. Then we can go in and test those jobs far as their profitability twice a year and we’re gonna track it daily on each crew and have a sum total each week for each week and we’re gonna show you how to use a public accountability tool to put it on the wall either whether a TV dry erase board chalkboard in your shop or office so we have team buy-in for production with a quality standard. Only took me about 20 years to figure it out but now we’re able to share the knowledge with you guys which I wish somebody had showed with me earlier how to do it but this is what we’re doing so whether you’re doing it yourself or you’re hopping in a 2-day deep dive like Josh did with us here the results speak for themselves whether you do it internally or you hire a professional to help you out but hopefully this helped and that’s the process we use to standardize a production rate based estimating system that was delegated and I wish I had done it sooner but now that we’ve done it we’re sharing the knowledge with everybody else.