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Breaking in the Service Autopilot community and for that matter, all service industry software as Service Autopilot has just released the better chunk of their V3 are to release the second of three major releases. What we’re doing as a Certified Advisor of Service Autopilot myself and the Simple Growth tram are going to commit to continually bringing live and actionable content to help Service Autopilot users go out and crush their business goals and dominate their market. In order to do that we need to go in and have a sound understanding of the new platform and as well as myself I understand that we all are extremely busy especially in this spring rush whether you’re in lawn care, home cleaning or any other industry that uses Service Autopilot. What we’re gonna be doing is going in and breaking down the core functionality and then continuing to retrain the workflow that we always have in Service Autopilot as a Certified Advisor. As we use Service Autopilot in my business and I’m continue to train and help other business owners use Service Autopilot we’ve consistently keen to be the innovator of workflow training so we try not to train just software features and functions but how they actually interact from lead acquisition, through estimating, through scheduling ,through billing and everything else in between and creating a standardized workflow. One thing that SA has done really well is V3 in my opinion is they have given us the tools to consolidate down just like we always talked about the five or six screens of success, this is a huge improvement to continue to drive and streamline the process. What we’re gonna be doing in the next few weeks here is every day at least five days a week myself and one of the Simple Growth team members are gonna come on and break down the new features and then we are gonna dive into those different parts and train that workflow- how it is evolved with V3. Kudos to the SA team- development, support, marketing and everybody else in between one heck of a job! Without any further delay I’m going to open up the screen if you have any comments or questions live in the recorded version drop them for things in V2 or V3 as it’s evolving but we are going to be here as your source of expertise moving your service business to success from 2020 and well beyond on the Service Autopilot platform. I’m gonna pop this out here and dive into it so what we’re gonna be going through today is the what used to be Maps Pro is going to be basically the same exact thing but now it is called SmartMaps, very similar as you’re looking at the new V3 outline here you’re probably looking at it and going well traditionally you should go to the upper right hand corner on the more and go to property measurements so once again a little different look but same functionality with a whole lot more power. So we’re gonna be going right hereto the little house icon next to the address here and we’re gonna click on that that’s gonna open up an entirely different screen so I really like the look and feel of this here and there’s a couple little nuances that originally when we first started playing this that we weren’t necessarily aware of so I’m gonna break down some of the learning curve that Simple Growth has already seen in the system and it’s been spending countless hours trying to master this new program so we can go out and teach you the end-user how to do it. The first time we traditionally do it we’re going to go in our traditional test account we’re gonna go in and add a property measurement on this. Right now you’ll see in the bottom there’s nothing here these are these basically saved just variables here so we need to go upto the upper left-hand corner and hit the edit sign and what we’re gonna do is zoom back in to the property we can bump this out by hitting the icon here and we’re gonna add a area of a measurement sosame exact feature and functionality of the measurement tool we click and drop the pins obviously I’m not gonna do with its on a detail here but I kind of to dive in and show you how some of the really cool features. We’ve got some other features that are kind of pending with this that we’ll get into later but far as best workflow and practice from today on forward in your office we’ve always trained for you to color code the map as you do it it does automatic where you can update the color is right here as we click in here I’m gonna recommend a light color maybe not even green or a very light green, reason being is we really want to be able to do an overlay and if there’s different measurements it’s hard to see under a dark color so you want to go to a more lighter transparent color in my opinion the way we’re doing this so same thing we’re gonna name it turf square footage and then we can add and subtract or exclude so just like we had the plus/minus in zero on the old system this is the same exact thing but it’s in one calculated nice clean spot so one heck of a job by SA here next thing is property data is where we actually go in and grab the custom field so I’ve got a great search bar there but we’re gonna scroll down and I’m gonna grab the turf square footage for the actual property here so I’m gonna go grab our Facebook turf square footage and I’m gonna hit save, now what you’re gonna see is down the bottom is we’ve got the area and we have these saved measurement here in the green. Now one of the first things that I learned when using this is linear feet is really awesome originally in version two you could not add multiple linear feet you had to add them up on paper and then plug them in this will add multiple linear feet automatically for you great feature. One of the learning curve features I want to show you as an SA user is if you have the overlay of turf square footage or bed square footage it will not let you click into the overlay I can run a linear length across the driveway here and I can take the linewidth and bump it out make a little bit thicker so it’s visible and I can change the color of it but obviously you would probably don’t want to measure the linear length of the driveway, but this would be great for stick edging or blowing or linear feet of landscape better edging. One of the things I wanted to go in and explain here is I’m gonna cancel that so you cannot measure over the actual overlay so what you’re gonna have to do in order to do that is you want to see where it says view it’s got the little eyeball with a slash through so we’re gonna click through that and remove that now if you click back on it pulls it backup but in order to do a measurement inside the existing area we need to pull that off so you can click it out and off great feature if you’re just starting to use this we’re tackling a learning curve for you we’re trying to bring you the best practice so in your busy season you don’t have to reinvent the wheel we’re gonna show you how to do it. So we’d click here and maybe that’s the linear length there so I’m gonna leave this stick edge one and I’m going to go in and select the property data for stick edging, so stick edging linear feet andI’m gonna hit okay so obviously that’s just part of it so in this example I’m going to add in one more variable of it just show you how it actually it works this is great for holiday lights as well if we’re doing the roofies so this was a feature that they’ve added in and done a great job in this we’re gonna add the linear feet once again and I’m gonna click down the driveway here and go out to the other side of the sidewalk and then I’m gonna name it again linear stick edge 2 and I’m gonna scroll back down a property data and I’m gonna go in and select the same exact custom feld now one thing that you want to be aware of is when you create these custom fields in different parts of Service Autopilot especially V3 forms you want to make sure you’re categorizing the custom field as it be a text, a number or whatever else you may want to be because it’s it’s going to avoid or help you from avoiding making mistakes it only works if it’s actually a number and not a text field parts of V2 allowed that to have some overlap this is a good feature I add my opinion here so it’s gonna help the end user and simplify the process so now that we’ve got our turf square footage and our linear square feet traditionally we would have to, we have the data here but traditionally we’d have to go into the detail tabs on the bottom to see this also if we wanted to we can go in and under property data on the far left this opens up all our numeric custom fields and what we’re gonna do is scroll down and go into linear stick edging so 140 linear feet and what it’s actually done is it’s taking the two linear ft and added them together so phenomenal job by the SA team here and I really really like this feature . Whether you’re doing bed edging, stick edging, holiday lights all in one place all the measurements add up and under turf square footage that’s basically a area square footage we’ve got all of the same features. Just as a quick review you want to name it you want to add your calculation are you adding them in subtracting or just excluding it’s sitting there but it’s not doing anything and we need to connect it to the proper data so the custom field and we can color code it on the far left we can go in and view property measurements all underneath here we can go to property data these are all the custom fields associated with the actual property itself and coordinates is actually pretty cool so where this would happen is if you’re on property measurements the red pin here is pulling the latitude and longitude the coordinate so you can see it here you can adjust and drag this to wherever you want so if it landed on the wrong house we could update it and in addition if you’re maybe doing a public highway or right away that it doesn’t necessarily have an address you can go in and physically plug that in either on the map or with the mobile. The last cool thing here is under coordinates if we took a screenshot from the computer we can add a photo so the crews know they’re at the right house or if you’re on your mobile you can mobily add this and upload this in so we make sure if i have somebody filling in we’re at the right property or any of the property details. Comments or questions please drop them below in the live version here if you are on live with me right now otherwise if you’re watching the recorded version feel free to drop some questions on here or or if there’s certain areas of Service Autopilot or V3 that’s just been released in version 1 or version 2 the Simple Growth team is coming to the table once again to provide value and be the expert for your workflow and training in Service Autopilot as a Certified Advisor. We’ll see you again tomorrow with Callahan’s Corner V3 edition release number 2 on best practice and workflow training for Service Autopilot. If you’re watching the live video right now in approximately twelve to fifteen minutes we will be going live on the Service Autopilot page with the SA Weekly Talk Show with Cody Owen,myself and special guest Nikki and John Decausmaker of Little John’s Lawn Care and Call Boss. We’ll see over on the SA page if you’re watching live now with about 45 minutes of content in some breaking news so if you want to hear the special announcement make sure you tune in to the SA Weekly Talk Show today in about 10 to 15 minutes or otherwise check out the recorded version at the SA Weekly Talk Show Facebook page so we’ll see you again tomorrow Callahan’s Corner where you ask the questions we answer live right here on Facebook

If I go out about in actually create aeration production rates, what are some industry standards I should be looking at? So we offered to break down some of the best practice that we’ve used in my company for aeration and based on the different type of technologies out there based on walk behind aerator or a stand on aerator and the different sizes and the things we want to take into account when we’re actually creating a production rate based estimating system around aeration whether it’s springtime aeration or fall time variation and overseeding. A lot of questions and a lot of concern around this, this is probably one of the biggest profit margin services in the landscape maintenance industry whether it’s a quick injection of cash up front for your spring time season or fall time season bringing that bottom-line profit when you are actually going out in doing the aeration and overseeding and basically recovered most of your overhead and now it’s just bottom-line profit. The problem is either in the spring or in the fall how much how much time do we really have to get this done it’s a very narrow window to get this in and get it done and get it done right so in my opinion investing in the right technology and production is probably gonna be a great investment on your time. I’m going to break down some industry standard production rates shared with X Mark, Toro and some other industry aeration companies. By all means full disclaimer you need to make sure that you are tracking your production rates but I’ve done some homework for us to get some industry standards based on the different manufacturers and how to break them out and build it out into a production rate based estimating system that can be measured online and delegated to your office team or if you’re still in the field and estimating yourself how to streamline this for predictable results day in and day out based on your numbers and not your competitors down the streets. Without any further delay in normal fashion if you have any questions feel free to ask them while we’re live on here or in the recorded version the next 24 to 48 hours and just before we hop to this I want to make a special announcement here as I open up the screen here to show the other screen is that we’re gonna break into our normal Simple Growth estimating blueprint but a lot a lot of people have been asking -Mike when is Simple Growth going to start sharing this on a podcast so ifI’m in the field driving around either doing jobs or estimates when can I get this live and get that done so great news the SA Weekly Talk Show with Cody Owens on the Facebook page over at Service Autopilot in several episodes of Callahan’s Corner are now live on Spotify we haven’t actually released the actual full release but what we’re gonna be doing here is the early bird I guess announcement here at least is you can go in and sign up for the podcast on Spotify right now but we will be live on iTunes next week already live on Spotify and then Simple Growth team right now is loading the last 25 episodes of the SA Weekly Talk Show and some of the popular Callahan Corner episodes so moving forward starting this week all of the SA Weekly Talk Shows will be live on Spotify and iTunes as well as some of the Callahan Corners top requests will be on there so you can count at least once a week the Sa Weekly Talk Show will be on Spotify and iTunes with the transcript and at least one or two if not three Callahan’s Corner episodes depending on the content will also be live on the podcast you can enjoy this while you’re driving around in your vehicle out the field estimating in the office or if you’re doing the COVID-19 workout if I’m I’mtrying to shed off a couple pounds I’ve been diving into a couple podcast myself. I ‘m gonna dive into the question but I did want to at least announce that the SA Weekly Talk Show and the Callahan’s Corner episodes will be live starting right now on Spotify and next week on iTunes and will be loading in the last 25 episodes of the SA Weekly Talk Show so you can get out and out learn your competition and go out and dominate your local market. Without any further delay we’re gonna hop into the actual question here that we have going so like I said if you have any questions here feel free to drop them and i’ll answer them live or the recorded version. First thing we need to do is go into a estimate blueprint we call this the Simple Growth Blueprint For Success so whether you’re watching live on the screen share or on the new newly published podcast feel free to check it out on the SA Weekly Talk Show Facebook page where all these are going to be posted, but industry standards that we’re looking at right now is aeration and I stand on unit in 24 inch was one hour of production and about 80 percent efficiency is where we based this at because we took out accounted for overlap and loading and unloading and things like that so on a stand on 24 inch aerator between the three to five inch depth of the times we can cover around approximately thirty eight thousand square feet so obviously you don’t want to use this right out the gate you want to test this in do sometime and emotion studies but industry average production rates what we’ve seen as far as reports is around thirty eight thousand square feet what we’ve seen from my company as well this is pretty accurate is definitely in the ballpark know whether you’re in the north, south or southwest this will definitely vary and after working with well over 350 companies with Simple Growth we do see some variation each part of the country so be aware that this is an average. What we’re looking at is between 1-38,000 square feet our base price in this example is 250 bucks we’re not doing an aeration for less than 250 and based on the industry average it is taking us one man hour so if our charge per man hour is $55 an hour our expense break-even was 36 based on this example we have about an eighty five percent net profit margin so we’re walking out with about two hundred fourteen dollars on our base price up to thirty eight thousand square feet. Now what I would probably recommend I did this wide open so we had the actual production rate for approximately one hour across the board here, we would probably want to dial that into our base price of being probably between five or ten thousand square feet and reverse those numbers but between one and thirty eight thousand square feet it’s going to take about one hour and a stand on 24-inch areas you’re aeration based on industry standards I’m gonna say based on every thousand square feet over the base period of 38,000 with the standard production rate it doesn’t get any more efficient at this point it’s going to take .03 man-hours and based at 55 bucks an hour charging 9.20 per thousand and it’s costingus 94 cents now as we evolved into a larger machine a 30 inch stand on aerator if I kept the production rate the same we could gain some efficiency and be a little more competitive if you one to thirty eight thousand four fifty but now it’s only taking 0.76 man-hours but if you’re watching and wondering what the industry standard is for one man hour it’s up to forty seven thousand five hundred square feet at an 80 percent production rate so a 30-inch stand on is gonna run about forty seven thousand five hundred square feet per man-hour but if we’re making an apples to apples comparison instead of one hour at the 24 inch we’re going at 0.76 man-hours at the 30 inch so now based on that efficiency gain it’s only costingas 27.36 and we bumped out profit margin from eighty-five up to 89 so we’ve gained an extra approximately eight or nine dollars here from the efficiency of the machine so if you’re looking at what machine you’re buying depending on fence gates and areas you’re in that extra spend on the larger machine may have a larger payoff across that span and then once again every thousand over 38 thousand we’ve made standard 928 but now it’s gone down by 0.01 man-hours and the cost has gone down from 94 cents to 72 so there’s a massive gain there at scale now the last piece of equipment were looking at here that we’ve done some research for you is a walk behind area at a 38 inch aerator so this variation between 36, 38 and 40 we kind of took the middle through our research now that’s this is a walk behind area where you’re grabbing the handles and when you’re done you’re picking it up and moving it now some of them have a split drum where that’s a little less labor-intensive but what you’re looking at here is a larger unit somewhere between the 24 and 38 this is got obviously an extra 8 inches on the larger stand on but they production rates we’ve seen industry why is reported is a standby behind unit at 80% efficiency it’s gonna be about 23200 square feet for one hour so if we’re looking at it at a base price of 250 with that walk-behind unit for one hour our briefings gonna be 36 and obviously we’ve gone and gone to an 85 percent profit margin net on the base price of 250 bucks versus the 89 or the 85 so interesting to see those different spans and if you broke that every thousand over 23,200 square feet and we did it based on the 920 per thousand as we saw in the higher production area the stand on it is taking double the time and basically 1.5hour 1.50 or 1.54 actually per man-hour cost before profit versus the72 cents or the 94 cents so obviously the stand onions got way more efficiency and is not beating on the individual the guy or girl that’s out on it and they can probably produce more in a longer day. What we’re looking is a lot of people in the industry are going to the standon units whether it’s a 24 the 30 inch to create more production to have a better work experience for their operator and less fatigue. Question was do you have some industry standard so we went out and did some research on production rates based on different manufacturers that are manufacturing the stand on units it’s a 24 30 inches stand on and then they walked behind aerator 38, we found something in the middle so obviously them today you gotta make sure it fits within your budget but what we’re seeing is for the extra money and the spend on units the longevity of the machine lasts a little bit longer less maintenance significantly less hydraulic hoses that were in the past um unless maintenance but we are getting significantly more work and the employees are let’s just say enjoying the work of aerating a lot more getting a lot more done. Callahan’s Corner you ask the questions we bring them live on Facebook, so I’m going to swing over here and see if there is anymore questions before I close this up live and it doesn’t look like there is any questions on the live version here but what we’re gonna do here is just a quick reminder if you enjoy Callahan’s Corner- where you ask the questions we answer them live on Facebook or you’re a follower of the SA Weekly Talk Show make sure you check us out on Spotify right now and later next people make an official announcement we’ll be live on iTunes and Spotify where Sa Weekly Talk Show where Mike Callahan and Cody Owens are going live bringing the top industry experts to you will be on her as well as some of the Callahan’s Corner episodes as well that aren’t relying on more of the visual aspects of breaking down SA workflow. We’ll see you tomorrow on Callahan’s Corner- where you ask the questions and we answer them live on Facebook, quick reminder – if you’re watching right now live or the recorded version before Friday afternoon Cody Owen and Mike Callahan will be going live at 12:00 Central 1:00 p.m.Eastern with Nikki and John Decausmaker of Call Boss and Little John’s Lawn Care located out of the chandler-gilbert area in Arizona we’re gonna be breaking down everything from call center virtual assistant and lawn care in the southwest. Can’t wait to bring some more knowledge to you this coming Friday and make sure to check us out on Spotify and when the official announcement comes out on iTunes next week for Simple Growth and when you’re going into Spotify just type into the search bar SimpleGrowth all one word you’ll find us right up top and we’re gonna have some pretty amazing giveaways here in the next week or two if you do sign up and download us on Spotify or iTunes where we’re actually gonna give away a Facebook automated estimator bot for no setup fee and the first two months free of charge for just checking out the podcast. We’ll see you either on the podcast or the next SA Weekly Talk Show or Callahan’s Corner with your next question you submit where you answer the questions and we answer them live, live on Facebook