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Welcome back to Callahan’s Corner where you ask the questions we answer them live here on Facebook. Had a question submitted in the Service Autopilot Facebook users group… how to go out and create route density? This gentleman owns a lawn care company, but this will be applicable for pretty much any service business that does routing he is midseason and he’s adding a secondary mowing crew and he wants to know how can he go out and not injure or effect the route density on the first crew but allow both crews to have route densities. I’m gonna answer that question and as you’re looking at this, this will actually apply to the beginning of the season. This is something that most of our businesses we work with in the south and southwest don’t deal with a lot because traditionally they run 12 months a year and so if you have a major spike of sales in the spring this is applicable for that south or southwest market but then in addition if you’re in the northern market where I’m at upstate New York we traditionally go dormant for three to four months in the winter we don’t actually go out and service those come those businesses or residential homes so that has forced us to create a process to go out and create route density when we go out and route. I’m gonna show you some best practices in one of our test accounts here and give you an idea of how we tackled it in my business. What I’m gonna do is as usual drop the screen here and lower this out but if you have any comments or questions drop them below here in the live or recorded version I’m happy to answer them. The idea here is were in Service Autopilot so the first thing I want to look at is if you already have the existing routes or you’re going new into the season as you probably want to take so we’ve got 163 jobs in this test account here and what I would do is probably go into the grouping selection and take all of those jobs that you’re looking at and then once you click and we’ve got them I would go in and assign it to a needs to be scheduled account here. What we’re going to do is check it to mowing scheduled to be scheduled and hit update and this would be permanent in this test account I don’t want to screw the data up too much as I’m manipulating it here this may take a few minutes just because there is a lot of data points here but what that is going to do is take all of those jobs and then send them to that one 2020 lawn-mowing needs to be routed you can kind of see as the screens updating here the blues are all turning to yellow so it’s gonna be all on one main and crew. What we’re gonna do is take all of our accounts and bucket them together on one screen and then what I would recommend is going in and routing those two routes so Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday possibly Friday if you are going five days a week. What you’d want to do in my opinion is route truck 1 and truck 2 here so they start from the farthest part apart and they go together. Traditionally Callahan’s this is what we did because if we were all the way out on the east side of town and our shop was on the westside of town we wanted them to be able to help each other if there was a breakdown and it was an issue and then in addition to that once I clear this out so let’s go into this area right here and fictitiously let’s just say we’re gonna be out in this area of town today or actually let’s go over here we’ve got more pins that kind of break this down but we’re gonna split this area up in half so maybe truck number one is going to grab this area here and when you click that in you double click it’s going to close that gap and what it does is it actually updates in the upper left-hand corner here that we had budgeted hours of 18 hours 27 jobs in gross revenue of $900 so if I go into marker display and I break this down to show all markers it will have all the markers so maybe my goal is to have a 20-hour day so let’s grab a couple more here so now we’re up to budgeted hours of 28 with a two-man crew that’s probably going to be too much so it’s going to give us the ability to kind of play the game here to get that so let’s just say this was 20 and we had about a thousand dollars worth of revenue that was our goal for that revenue so total man hours and revenue goal we would go in and then assign it to well go in and say this is gonna be lawn mowing crew number six and we would make it permanent and you want to make sure that we’ve unchecked all and we’re just assigning it to the mowing crew say number six and then we hit update so now we have that route dedicated to the first crew and then the other crew we could go in and do the same process here. When you have those two chunks now you’d want to go in and optimize to start from the outside and go in now there’s two reasons like Isaid if we have a breakdown it’s great they can help each other out if one’s running behind the other main thing is if you have rain delay and maybe your shop isn’t over here where ours was but it’s it’s all the way over here we wouldn’t want to drive all the way back to this area so we could take what’s left of two routes if we got rained out midday and have one crew as the crews are working in work that one consolidated area right here so we’re minimizing the drive type so two crews don’t have to have all the extra nine available drive time one crew can go out and handle that area and then minimize the drive time and the other crew can stay close to the shop. Traditionally Callahan’s what we did is we took the farthest away areas from the shop and worked our way back to the shop all the way through Thursday we went from Monday to Thursday four 10s and then Friday and Saturday were rain delays if we needed them but that allowed us to really optimize and catch up for any rain delays or holidays and we went in. First idea is you want to go in chunk all the areas out and use the group selection for budgeted hours and total revenue and then once you have them each day for two crews together you want to route them so they run into each other so if there’s issues that can help each other and if there’s a rain delay that both crews don’t have to drive all the way to the other side of the town or city if that’s the issue going on. The next step as you’re doing this here you want to pay attention to how many budgeted hours and total revenue foreach crew it makes your your scheduling appropriately because if you set a budget to a certain amount of dollars or man-hours per crew and you’re not paying attention that can erode your bottom-line profits immediately and in addition so like let’s just say our fertilization and weed control crew with Callahan’s was between about twelve to thirteen hundred dollars a day for a one-man technician and that was our revenue point with budgeted hours and we had tied to it for routing as we pulled them off the waiting list. The next thing you want to do is make sure your teams are set up so like we said we’ve got the 2020 Mow Scheduled list so this is if this gentleman’s watching this video I would take all of your lawn mowing accounts and put them all and group them in there with no emotion and then chuck them out geographically so they run into each other and on those crews we want to go down so if we went in to say mow crew number six we are gonna go in and make sure ,I’m just gonna hit some of the highspots that you want to do so you want obviously the description, the team code, the map color icon, the starting address that’s important because when you go to use the route optimization if there isn’t the starting address to that truck it’s not going to be able to fully optimize it so that’s why it’s very important to have that in there and then team assignments we’d go in and add our two resources our two employees and the days of the week they can work so if they couldn’t work on a Sunday we wouldn’t put Sunday on there but otherwise we leave it open all seven days selected because they would then be available to be routed on those jobs so those are the foundational parts of that in addition you want to have your employees set up with payroll and job costing tab taken care of. Now next thing is if we go in and now we’ve seen some kind of gaps in inefficiency as far as density we want to go in and go into the CRM client screen and what’s going to this test account I’ve got all of the clients in here and these are all the pins that we were servicing so what I would do is zoom in and let’s just say we’ve got a gap here and it’s not as dense in this area so I want to build some route density in this residential neighborhood because we’re pretty dense in here right here it looks like we could probably use some help so we’re going to dial into that this area here and I’m going to go to satellite and once you go in there and now you can really see okay yeah we’re pretty dense over here but we need some density over here that’s gonna affect us or maybe we’ve got some stuff all around this area but we don’t have anything in this block here. What you could do is go into the sparsely populated neighborhoods and just continue to dial in and this is actually probably a good example here so we’ve got one home over here but nothing else in this whole area so what I’m going to do is go in and right-click on the houses in this neighborhood so we’ve got one in there but we don’t have that many so as we click those pins down on the left here it’s building a marketing list so I recommend is your admin if they’re slow they can do this if not we used to hire college kids to come in part-time during break and we would take this list and build out custom field so we’d go in and measure the turf square footage of these properties and then through some automations and some processes we used inside the business we could send out automated pricing for these properties with property specific pricing with upsell opportunities. The idea is when you dial in now you’re creating a marketing list so now I’ve got ten homes around the one that I’ve already got and we’re just going to keep selecting and this is how we had upwards of 10,000 homes in our database to continue to do this you just go in and keep dropping those pins. Jonathan Pototschnik of the Lawn Care Millionaire always talks about nine around so we’ve every time we got a new account before we used a product like Send Jim we’ve manually go in and create nine or twelve arounds basicallyof all the properties around it to build density or in this example if we only had one home in the neighborhood that blue pin we’d go in and tag all fifty or sixty of these homes and start sending property specific mailings. In addition depending what part of the country are based on the question that you submitted how do I build more route density or not effect the dents they’re having thatmain crew is what we did is and it probably didn’t make our competition a happy but we would actually go in and drive around all the neighborhood’s we were in or the neighborhoods that we were around here in what we would do is literally drive down the street as we drove down the street we could tell based on the striping in the grass here of the lawn we were cutting because I knew that’s commuter so it looks like there’s another one over here we would write down all the service addresses in a notebook and then once again in the winter season we would go in and create qualified database and physically mailout hard copy contracts or proposals to all the people and on the envelope it would say lawn mowing customer. Two different ways of tackling it I recommend both but the idea here is at first you want to go to your dispatch board and select put all your mowing accounts on one account or one map break them up and then assign days to the route them together for overlap for breakdowns and weather delays to minimize non-billable drive time when you do that you want to set up a a team for let’s say 2020 mow schedule list so that’s the mowing that needs to be scheduled and we take that large bucket and pull it off assign it and optimize and save it to recur weekly or bi-weekly and then our main mowing teams we want to make sure we have a starting addressin team assignments and the final thing is we go into CRM clients and we grab all of our clients there and we go in and actually create a property specific lead list so we have one client we’re gonna grab all the other homes we’re gonna measure them and through some automations and other processes we’ll lsend property specific pricing to all the other homes in this specific neighborhood and as we dial back out it’s really easy to see where are we really dense and where are we needing to add some density in between routes so that’s how I would tackle it hopefully that makes sense. First thing is to take all your accounts put them on one basically bucket account and then we want to go in and chunk them out route them together set up your teams with assignments and starting points then we go into our CRM client list just like we are here we go in and drop the pins where we need to build density we do property specific pricing based on the leadless that we are creating, those are the secrets that we had success in Callahan’s Lawn Care as well as going in and using a product called Send Jim to do those automated nine arounds to build and do this automatically so every time a new client popped in it would grab the nine surrounding homes and automatically fire off a series of postcards to build that route density. Comments or questions drop them now in the recorded or live version. Callahan’s Corner you ask the questions we answer in live right here on Facebook

Hey Mike Callahan here, had a question submitted around creating automations in your service business, whether it’s lawn care or home cleaning pest control doesn’t matter, the question was around how do we go out and create tags and what is the best practice to actually go out and create tags to create an automated system and there’s a two-part approach that really needs to be taken in my opinion. After working with probably four or five hundred different businesses as well as my business that we automated completely there definitely is a best practice and a wrong practice of tags. I’m gonna pull out the screen here and actually break it down for you but it’s pretty interesting that a lot of times when people get into automations that they don’t understand the naming convention and the methodology for creating tags in a successful fully automated service business. I’m gonna take the screen here and pop this up and show you what i’m talking about here. The first thing is automation tagging system so Simple Growth uses a naming convention here and the first thing we’re gonna look at is a category so that’s on the top of the screen here we’re looking at five different categories so their status, history, profile, to do or to do’s, and system tags. A status tag for easy sorting and searching in the system so they are all grouped together so all our statuses are 01.Status, history is 02.History, profile is .03, to do .04 and systems are 05. so that’s where they’re going to group together and sort nicely for you in the list of tags that you have. A status is where somebody is at in your actual campaigns, i’m going to break down some examples of this but this could be a new lead needs an estimate that could be their status. History is just going to basically be where they’ve been in the automation, so we’re just going to continually add those history tags that’s going to be our audit trail where they’ve been where a status tag we are going to go in and either take them on and take them off as they go so status could be a new lead needs an estimate and then once they get an estimate new lead has an estimate that needs to be closed. The status continually updates so we subtract and add statuses as we move through the campaign, history gives us an audit trail we don’t remove those we just continue to add those on, profile is going to keep track of the data not stored in a custom field so if you have custom fields in a process or platform like Service Autopilot your profile tags probably are going to be not really prevalent but if it’s something you’re not storing in a custom field the profile is going to tell you something about the profile of the customer. The fourth one is the to-do so these all the things that a person in your office would have to do or a field manager so we’re going to track the different todo’s and sort them down with an 04 to do tag. Now the 05 system basically tells your automation what to do or Service Autopilot if you’re using it. Easy analogy for this is the system tags will basically tell the automations when to start and stop and actually do something so these are the categories and then i’m gonna suggest breaking out five different types of campaigns that you’re building so they are going to be 10.Marketing, 20.Sales, 30.Fulfillment, 40.Finance and 50.Internal i like to say slash HR. Some examples is that our marketing campaign could be 10.Marketing upsell aeration overseed or 10.Marketing deep clean up sell for a cleaning industry. 20.Sales is an actual sales process so that would be like our 20 days to close. Fulfillment if something has actually been sold. 30.Fulfillment a certain job needs to be done, 40.Finance would be something around overdue invoices or some financial transactions so a lot of our overdue invoices have the naming convention that start with 40.Overdue invoices. Then the last one is 50.Internal/HR so when you go into start automating your employees we would use the 50.Internal campaign name so what what happens now is you’ve got all your campaigns and all your marketing campaigns now are grouped together because they’re 10, all the sales are 20, 30 are fulfillment, 40 are finance and 50 are internal hr. This is going to give you the ability to easily search and filter through each campaign name and then a category of where they’re at the automated. These are the basics that we’ve learned in my business in the last eight or nine years and like i said automating well over 300 companies now in lawn care and home cleaning and pest control. An example if you want to go out and build your own automations is how would you actually use the naming convention and put this into best practice so i’m going to see if i can bump the screen out here but what we’re doing is we’re taking our status so that is going to be where someone is at in your campaigns 01 status and this is where we’re going to start with that and so that’s the category. Then space hyphen space or space dash space 20. so it’s a sales campaign sales estimate to close so we need to close that sales estimate we’re following up on it and 01 is going to be the status now of where the person is that leader client new prospect needs first follow-up phone call. Now we can go in and filter down to the status, the campaign whether it’s marketing, sales, fulfillment, finance or internal and then we can see where the person is actually at in the campaign itself so this is really important in my opinion to really dial this in because it gives you the control to go in and check your automations if certain people are in certain areas of your automation and you want to add or subtract something into it or if there’s ever an update on your automation platform where you need to pull people out insert them back into an area this will allow you that granularity to see exactly the category the campaign name and then the tag detail of where they’re at the actual automation itself. This is a methodology that we use Simple Growth here so we want to break down our categories feel free to borrow these categories are going to be broken into five naming conventions for 01, 02, 03, 04, 05 that’s important for sorting and then our campaigns naming conventions be 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 any more than these five categories and five campaign naming conventions will get really will get really wonky quick so i recommend no more than five categories and five campaign types and everything we’ve seen in the last eight or nine years falls really nicely within these so investing well over 150 000 in figuring out how to do this and make it successful we wanted to lift the hood up a little bit and share this with you for a road map to category and campaign naming success in your tagging system in whatever you’re using automate your business. Comments or questions drop them below here but i thought it was important to answer the question that was submitted regarding automations and tagging and what was the purpose and how would you tackle it. Callahan’s Corner, you ask the questions we answer them live right here on Facebook.

Mike Callahan here with Callahan’s Corner, where you ask the questions we answer live here on Facebook. Questions submitted last week was how to actually go out and fire a bad client so welcome back to Callahan’s Corner had a question submitted last week how to go out and fire a bad customer. Callahan’s Corner where you ask the questions we answer them live here on Facebook so if you have any questions feel free to set them in on the live or recorded version and I’m happy to answer your questions. The questions submitted really was how to go out and fire a bad client so in order to fire a bad client in my opinion what we did in my business that Callahan’s Lawn Care was in our actual lawn care I want to say contractor agreement in the actual estimate document we went out and built a area air of Terms of Service and this Terms Of Service was built for the consumer and the business and what it did is it spelled out a cancellation period. So the cancellation period spelled out it was a two week written notice by either parties the company or the customer to cancel and obviously if the customer called and wanted to cancel for legitimate reason we would let them out immediately but the idea is that we made it a two-way agreement we took the risk out of it for the consumer but it also gave us an out and the out that it gave us if we eventually worked with a client that was a bad fit we had the ability to politely let them go and not injure the relationship as far as getting destroyed on social media or review. There really is two reasons why we did this so the first reason is the obvious of the question being asked if they’re not a good fit and they’re just they’re crazy which some clients are how do we get rid of them so we built it into the contract agreement two week written notice and we can let them go so traditionally we do is we would give them a written notice and then give them a call and within and let them know he unfortunately you know we need to part ways and we were pretty honest about it but you know obviously politically correct but we would also give them a reference of several other contractors that we would recommend inservice area so we didn’t just cancel them and leave them high and dry. The second part of this where I think is a little bit interesting as well is that when we would set that up in the lawn care estimate or contract that it was a two-week written notice for either party to cancel the agreement this allowed us to go out just right pretty much after this video here on the next few weeks we traditionally did the week of July 4th that following week we ran a job costing report and that job costing report would allow us to go in there not emotionally and actually list all several hundred lawn mowing customers and say on average if our goal is fifty five dollars per man-hour are we hitting that goal and if we weren’t hitting that goal the report that we used would actually kick out property specific pricing so if your goal is fifty five bucks an hour you need to raise the price per cut say two dollars and seven cents whatever it was but it was to the penny and it was based on us using our mobiles in the field clocking in and clocking out of the job so based on the historical data on that yard it would tell us what we needed to charge so what we would do is send a written agreement not a cancellation agreement but written contractual agreement that we needed to raise our price X amount of dollars per cut and this is the reason being because we’ve been tracking the time and we’re not hitting our goals and the property is under price but that gave us an out to raise the price and still would fit within the confines of that contract so it wasn’t exactly asked at the Callahan’s Corner question of how do you get rid of a bad customer I recommend putting that in your estimate and contract agreement sending it in writing and then give them a call and give them some different contractors they can contact so that’s if you’re firing them but in addition to that you also want to have some verbiage in there to cover you so you can raise your prices midseason when all the other contractors are too busy to return phone calls and do estimates so if you did underpriced a job or maybe they added fifteen trees in the front yard and your crew didn’t tell you about it and obviously the job was priced for no trees so you’ve doubled or tripled the amount of weed-whacking engine blowing we can account for that so these are the things that I would recommend that we did on our business throughout the years to learn from things we weren’t lucky enough to get right. In your estimate and your contract if you have one contracts are hit and miss there are some pros and cons if you can get away with it in your market I like agreement there is non contractual that runs 12 months a year that auto renews but in the estimate document and agreement you want that clearly spelled out it’s a two-way cancellation with a two-week notice is what we found is the the appropriate time to make that work and that allows you to raise your price mid season or mid rolling contract as well. Comments questions drop them below but that’s how we tackled getting rid of bad customers we literally just had the verbiage in our estimate or contract and mailed that out soon the two-week notice with competitors that we would suggest that they shop to and unfortunately just wasn’t a good fit and we couldn’t meet their needs and if we couldn’t meet exceed their service needs we wanted to basically help them out and provide them with contractors that hopefully could we were able to do that legally through the actual contract agreement that we put together in our estimate and when we wanted to raise our prices we had that ability as well so comments questions drop them below Callahan’s Corner- you ask the questions we answer them live right here on Facebook