← Fullerton Unfiltered
Fullerton Unfiltered
974. Under the Hood: Brian Fullerton's Million-Dollar LMN Business Blueprint
01:06:21
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Foreign.
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You're now listening to the Fullerton Unfiltered podcast. Straightforward, no nonsense business advice, completely on unfiltered. Grow your business, grow your life. Now, here's your host, Brian Fullerton.
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Attendees, good morning. All right, I think we're hopping on in here. Are you guys rocking and rolling? Let me see in the chat if you guys are jumping on in here this morning. All right, well, I am nervous, I'm anxious. You know, there's a lot of good folks in here this morning, and I know we're hopping on into it here, doing a under the hood look for our Element account and showing you guys a little demo of Element. So we're really excited about having you guys on here this morning. Ironically enough, my guys are doing a salt run. So if I seem a little preoccupied, it's because I'm probably answering, excuse me, my phone, texting back and forth a little bit, and making sure that all of our sites get salted, as, of course, it always snows, or there's a clipper or assault run anytime I do anything, which is how it works in real life. So, all things being said, the guys are out there kicking butt doing that. We're going to be showing you guys for the next 45 minutes to an hour, just an under the hood look at our Element account like I was talking about. I know a lot of you guys were even on the demo that we did with Troy Woodham about six weeks ago, maybe now, and we were able to look at my account a little bit. But today we're hopefully hoping to dive a little bit more into it and show you guys how we run our actual lawn landscape company, Brian's Lawn Maintenance. And again, I'm about two years deep into lmm, and it has been one of the most transformational things we've ever did, done, adopted for our business, for so many reasons that I hope to share and break down with you guys here today. Uh, that being said, a couple, uh, great guests, uh, on here as well. Let me see if I can, uh, do a quick spotlight or, uh, show who those guys are. But first off, we got Mr. Troy Woodam. So I'm gonna pin you up here and spotlight you. So, Troy, you want to take it away? And. Good morning, brother. How you doing?
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Hey, I'm doing great, and thanks for having me this morning. I think if I'm messing with my space heater down here because it's cold in Georgia. Yeah. So the last time we did this, I think one of the overwhelming takeaways was people love to see the software, but they really want to dive into Brian's particular software account. So today's call, what I'm going to do is just go briefly through a high overview of what the features of the software does and then turn this right back into your hands to allow you to go right into your account. Look at your budgeting, your estimating, your scheduling, those kind of wonderful features.
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Awesome, awesome. And We've also got Mr. Bennett. I'm going to hit Spotlight really quick. Ad Spotlight. Let's see how this goes. And Mr. Bennett, good morning. So if you guys don't know Stephen Bennett is after you get signed up, you have a whole success team behind making sure that this thing works great and account manager. So I would not be here today without Stephen Bennett and all the great folks part of his team and crew. I can start naming a half dozen of them. They are instrumental about helping me figure out how to actually make the software work for my business. So Mr. Bennett, good morning. How you doing brother?
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Good morning. Happy to to be on little, little tired this morning. Traveled again to help some customers and got in about four hours ago. So I would miss this for the world though.
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Awesome, awesome. Well, Steven's got a couple slides he's going to share with you guys later as well. So we're going to hop on into it here. I'm going to kick it over to Mr. Troy and let's do this really quick. So Troy, he's got a couple slides that he's going to go through just for you know, some housekeeping, you know, and laying the groundwork. We do have an offer obviously for you today if you guys do want to sign up with Element. No hard pitch here, but we do have some really exciting incentives and discounts if you will available for the platform. And and then after this we're going to jump into my account. So before we do though, let me know down in the comments where you guys are coming from and also if you guys have been getting some freaking snow because we have been getting pummeled with about nine events in about 11 day window. So let me know if you guys are getting snow. Let me know where you guys are calling in from if you want to do a roll call. I love to see where you guys are at in the chat and love to see what you guys are dealing with because it has been a doozy. Like Steven said, coming in hot and no sleep. That's about me the last three days as well as if we came off a 24 hour plow run. So that Means that Troy, I got a couple of slides and I'll kick it over to you, brother. So great to have you again. And take it away.
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You bet. And can you see my screen okay?
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Yes. You're looking good.
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Thank you so much. Just want to verify that. So again, I'm not going to go anywhere near what we did the last webinar here. We just want to kind of go through a little bit about what to expect. So give me about three to five minutes here going through this presentation and then I'll pass it back over to Brian. Just a little bit about me. I've been in the industry here for a few years. I absolutely adore all the customers I get to meet and greet at events like Lal Equip. I'm a dad, I'm a husband. So you get it here to help you the software. So one of the things that I just kind of want to make aware is that our software is going to be able to grow and scale as you grow and scale. So if you're doing 150,000 or you're doing 15 million, Element is here to do it. And everything starts with a proper budgeting tool. We'll have of course, clean CRM and sales capability in the software. Obviously our estimating tool is one of our fan features. Best things at the end of every year we'll do a survey with all of our clients and between the budgeting and estimating, these things are always the highlight and rock stars of the software. The Crew app. This was launched in late 2023, going in 2024. It'll replace our previous Element Time app. So if you've been looking at Element historically and you haven't quite jumped ship and you're thinking about it, this Crew app has just been a game changer for the last year and a half. Obviously you want to be able to track all the ops and you want to have control of the flow of the work and you want some great job costing and analytics. Element can provide that. And of course you always have live event tracking, live crew tracking. With the professional plan, you're able to invoice and payments. We do sync one directionally with QuickBooks. Whether you're using QuickBooks online, desktop, professional, whatever your plan is, we merge with them. And then of course you have wonderful dashboards and productivity measurement guides. So if you want to learn more, if you want to hop on a longer demo with me, please scan this QR code. It does work this time, I promise. We tested this from the last webinar. It did not work. Always love doing live demos. And then I have a special offer. We can touch on it real quickly, but I'll come back to it as well. In the month of December, if you sign up, you would pay the first month and we waive onboarding completely. And then you get two free months. And the special promo for Brian will also throw in a third month for free. So advertised on our website is this promotional, but if you do it with Brian in this month, we'll actually give you three months. An example would be you sign up December 15th, you pay December 15th, but you don't pay January 15th, February or March 15th, you resume your your payment April 15th. That will get you through the snow season.
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Love with that.
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Yeah, Right. So pretty strong stuff. So with that, Brian, I'm going to turn this back over to you and get off my beautiful bearded face. Put it back onto your account.
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There you go. There you go. Appreciate that. Let me see really quick here. How do I remove spotlight? All right, there you go. I am not a professional webinar hoster on Zoom. Definitely not at 7 o' clock in the morning as my brain just starts waking up and turning on. Let me do this really quick. I'm going to hit share. And let me just. Really quick as we're doing this, I'm going to toggle back and forth through Zoom that we're using to host this. But if you guys can throw in the chat down below what you guys want to see while I'm here, I'll do my best to toggle back and forth and look at that. So I'm showing the stuff that you guys actually want to see. And also Mr. Bennett can ask answer any questions that you guys might have. And also, Troy, they're going to work the chat a little bit here today. So let me do this really quick. I'm going to toggle over to my actual Element account. And if you guys have not seen the platform before, like, really simply, it is a CRM tool that we use to run the business. Like if somebody was to buy Brian's Law Maintenance. Yeah, you're going to get the trucks, the equipment. Yeah. Hopefully, you know, some great team members and personnel that stick around and, you know, a functioning business. Yes. A tech stack with our fuel cards and our payroll and, you know, attentive and some logins there. But really what you're absorbing is like the actual book of business as well. And this is like the nucleus, this is the hub. This is. This is. If somebody says Brian's Law Maintenance, what do I think, I think it's my Element account at this point. And if somebody was to assimilate me into their company or if I was to absorb another company, you know, into my business, the first question I would have was, what CRM are you using? If they said Element, I'd be like, okay, cool. Like that would keep the conversation going. It wouldn't be a deal breaker if they didn't. But I would just know like, hey, there's like an actual real functioning business here. And hopefully they have, you know, all their data in one spot. They're not making it up on QuickBooks, they're not making it up on Excel spreadsheets, They're not just making it up on Google Drive with endless amounts of documentation. Right. And you know, routes if you will. There's one place for all of it. And maybe you guys are coming from or you have used things like square or yard book or jobber or real green. Like there's so many other CRMs out there and they're all good in their own regard. But as you continue to build a bigger business, the biggest part of Element is really the budgeting and pricing feature, in my opinion. And again, if you don't have an ability to plug in your data to spit out great information back at you. I have said this for about two years now. Respectfully, you're probably just guessing and that was absolutely me about four or five years ago. We even came up with our own tools to get closer to the mark, but we were still guessing 80 cents, 90 cents on the dollar and not 100% accurate. And the reason I say that, and I heard a pastor once say, you can't put 90 cents into a pop can machine that cost a dollar and get 9, 10 of a can. Either you're all in or you're not. And the reason I say that is because as you guys grow a bigger business, bigger meaning 2, 3, 400 grand of revenue or above, or you start hiring your second, third, fourth team member, in my opinion, you shouldn't be guessing anymore because now you're messing with people's livelihoods, their jobs, their careers, etc, so we want to make sure we're as accurate as possible. So the first thing that a lot of you guys are going to see and as you onboard with lmn, is they're going to ask you to set up a budget. Now I thought a budget was like my family budget. Hey, we got 20 in the envelope. We can go to the movies. Once we use our 20 bucks, we're out like the little Dave Ramsey budget, you know, method with your envelopes, similar but a little bit more grand than that, as you guys can imagine. Right here. I'm just going to show you an example. Those are $1 million budget for Browns on maintenance over 2026 budget. That's pretty much done, but we haven't hit publish on it just yet.
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If you are enjoying today's podcast, you'll want to go behind the scenes with Brian and the team from LMN for an exclusive live webinar. Tomorrow morning at 6, 7 Eastern. You'll get an under the hood look at how Brian is using LMN to run and grow his lawn care business. The link to register is in the show notes.
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But the first thing that they're going to have you do when you onboard with lmn, and again, free onboarding, somebody will help you do this. I was telling Troy a funny story when I first signed up with LMN that I had no clue about 90% of the information to plug into this software. So if you don't, don't fret, like, don't freak out. We've all been there at best. I had a couple times, you know, that I knew at least intuitively how long it took to do some of my properties and maybe a couple of my commercial sites, how many yards of mulch you know, I previously used the year before, two years before, 26 yards, 32 yards. Right. And that was about at most what I had. I barely had my QuickBooks functioning. I barely had a bookkeeper that was keeping tabs on this. So trust me, even if you don't have all that just yet, you can continue to build and refine year over year over year as you continue to build a better team, better bookkeepers, more data year over year, better logging, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Right. So really quickly and again, I'm not going to pretend like I'm a know it all with element. Folks like Stephen Bennett, thank God they get paid what they do to be able to help folks like me. Without them, I would not be this far along. But they can help you get more granular on all this stuff. And if you want to book a second look demo or go a little bit deeper down the rabbit hole with Troy, he can explain how all this works as well. But you can see we have our sales goal, we have everything else budgeted for what we're going to hopefully use and produce and do in 2026. We have our field labor. You can see what we're going to spend for our team. So we're building out a projection for next year. I won't go in the salary field staff, but I've got a bunch of my guys that are rounded up and we call it salary. You can see that we have all of our equipment factored into this. And I'll explain how all this makes sense in our price list and our estimate list coming up in a second. But everything that we have that we own or we're financing, we bring it all into lmn. And you can see that I can look at what we actually spend, you know, per hour, per day, what it should be making us back for the equipment that we're using, you know, for our snowplows, to our work trucks, so on and so forth. Right. Once we punch all that in, we're able to calculate how much material we're going to use or projected to use. So, for example, we're continuing to build on last year's budget. So last year might have been 2, 500 in material on mulch. This year we might use $50,000, you know, or whatever. The jump is based on our sales growth. And they're all ratios, so it's proportional. Okay. Subcontracting, we're putting in here how much we plan to use on subs. And then the big one that I think gets a lot of folks is you don't factor in the actual cost of doing business. It's called overhead. And a lot of folks will say, well, you know, I did 100 grand last year and, you know, I made 50 grand profit. And you ask them like, hey, what did you pay yourself? Well, I paid myself 50 grand profit. Oh, okay. So you didn't factor in a $40,000 year salary or position for the labor and the work that you did do. So now you only had ten grand in profit. Right. Like all these different things that might be an overhead wage. You know, with Brian's law maintenance, Brian's getting paid, in theory, 100 grand a year. He's got a fractional CFO to help him with his bookkeeper work and a virtual assistant that is going to help him run the business behind the scenes. Like, all that overhead has to get accounted for and priced and built into the work that we're doing. And I'll show you exactly how it works in an estimate. It's super cool. And again, you're not going to get it all the first time. But just understand, like, this right here is going to give you the roadmap to bid in price your work Accurately and to make profit. All right? And profit shouldn't be this, hey, we get to the end of your December and hope that we have 50 grand, 100 grand, 500 grand left in the account and we made money. It should be a planned event and that's what elements really going to help you to do. If you look at our sales goal at least this year for a million bucks, we have our field labor budgeted, we have our equipment budgeted, we have our hours, part of that field labor.
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Right.
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We know how much we're spending on materials, subcontracting work, our overhead. Right. We know how much it's going to cost to run the company. Obviously we're minusing that from our sales. We should in theory have 170 grand in profit left over. Now, industry averages are like 15 to 20%. I'm not going to get super granular on that. Work with your onboard specialist, maybe ask Steve Bennett some questions or somebody like Mark Bradley or somebody who has a $10 million business that does coaching. They can help you get more granular on where you might be for an industry average. But this is just where we were at for this year if we were to hit this sales number. So as you're onboarding, first things first. Everything's going to start with the budget. And you're probably gonna get tired of hearing that. At least I did for the first year or two until I realized the budget wasn't there to confine me. The budget was there to set me free. The budget allowed me to spend money on labor. The budget allowed me to buy equipment when I needed to, even preemptively as we look to grow, knowing that if we make these certain investments into people and equipment and then we have a sales process to boot, we should be able to build another building block of business, whether it's law and landscape or snow, to continue to grow the company. And again, I wanted to just take an extra minute or two to talk about this because if you are coming from a different CRM like Jobber, like Yardbook, with all due respect to those folks, and again, I love the Jobber folks, they, they do so much for the industry. They throw so much an investment into training and education and events and conferences, just like lmm. So I have nothing against them. My only caveat though is there's no budget software built into their platform. And I've asked dozens of my friends with Jobber, I said, so how are you coming up with your pricing? Oh, well, you know, we get a dollar a minute per lawn or two dollars a minute a lawn. We take a shrub, it's 35 bucks. We double it or we two and a half exit if we're going to warranty it. You know, Christmas lights, oh, eight bucks a foot. Well, how do you know that that's what you should be charging? And if you said stuff like that, it's okay. It's not an indictment. I was saying the exact same stuff not even two and three years ago. And I'm the guru, right? So if I can admit that, hopefully you can as well. We're all friends here. And just know that as you continue to grow, especially, you know, past 350, 450 grand in revenue, the wheels will start falling off the bus because you can't just go with your gut feeling anymore and guesstimate, does that make sense? And so I want to be super clear with that, because if you've never used a tool like this, it could look very daunting and very heavy. And it is until you continue to just build and refine on it year over year over year. So the first year, yeah, you're gonna have to put 30, 40, 50 hours into element to get good at it. You got an opportunity right now going into fall, winter for the next three, four months. Yes. There's always stuff to do with snow or fixing equipment. There's always something to do, but it's not like the spring rush where you're gonna get just inundated with work and you can't spend the time to onboard with something like this. So winter's a 100% the best time to onboard, in my opinion. Of course, Troy's got some great sales offers and incentives, so save you some money as well. That's always nice. But if you're looking to onboard honestly, like the next three months, take advantage of it. Because if you're going to try to onboard in spring, could you do it? Yes. Would I recommend it? No. And by the way, I did onboard in spring. I was sick as a dog with pink eye for eight weeks. Living in a camper, building a home, two kids, two and a half and under. So trust me, like, if I can do it, you guys can do it. Okay, so let's do this really quick. I'm going to switch to our next tab, and I want to show the price list. All right, so first things first. As you can imagine, the macro, we're setting up our budget now. We know what we're trying to do for a sales goal and what we have allocated that we can spend for overhead. What we can spend for equipment what we can spend for labor as we come in here. Your onboard specialist will help you set all this up. They can start to help you with your price list. Now again, if I was to ask you, hey, how much does it cost to run your truck per hour? Or how much does it cost to run a skid steer per hour? Most folks would say, I don't know. And myself an example, I would say the exact same thing two or three years ago. In fact, I remember watching the old Stanley dirt monkey video, gosh, probably six or seven years ago, he was talking about a set of tracks for a skid steering. He goes, do you know that it costs $7 per hour to run that set of rubber, that rubber track? You know, because of the overhead cost recovery that it took to not only recoup the cost of those things, but to pay for them and to maybe make profit on them as you're billing them out. And I remember hearing stuff like that six or seven years ago, but it never clicked until about 18 months ago for me. I'm embarrassed to admit that, you know, I'm, you know, been in college, quote unquote here for, you know, 19 years, and I'm finally getting to like the two or two classes. So trust me, some of you guys are guarantee are way further along than myself. But I just want to take it from the top. In case any of you guys have never heard that before in the price list, I'll click to this really quick. They'll help you with figuring out your wages for your landscape apprentices or snow apprentices. As you can see, the rates vary because we have an inflated hourly rate for our snow guys. You can see as we come down into here what it costs to run our equipment, what we're trying to do with the cost of it, the overhead recovery of it with our set budget. You can see our hourly rates for this piece of equipment. It's actually really slick. Now, I'm not gonna get lost in the weeds here because I don't spend a lot of time here. Again, kind of set this once or twice a year, maybe refine it quarterly just so you're on, on par for your budget. And maybe the economy's up or down. Maybe your sales goals are up or down, right? You can always refine. You can see what we're charging for our materials. And a lot of this is already kind of like pre loaded in here. You just got to refine, you know, your top five, top 10, you know, things that you use the most. Your Mulch, no red mulch, of course, so on and so forth. So, number one, we set our budget. Number two, we have a price list. And just to keep this thing moving. Number three is our CRM. So you can see this workflow that's starting to build out as you're growing your company. You've got your budget for the year, we got our pricing for what we're going to charge. Then as you can imagine, we're going to start growing our business with new customers. And that's the CRM. That's like your data collection tool. That's where you're going to have all of your customers that are going to start plugging into here. And I'm not going to click my CRM because it's going to throw up on you, all of my customers. And there's no way to blur any of that out. So I'm trying to show as much as I can without giving away my actual account, if you will. But you'll see your full customer list. And it's very easy to import a new customer. It's like adding their name, their address, their email, their phone number, and that's where you're going to dump all your contacts into the actual element platform. Now, from there, once we have established a customer that we're looking to work with and they have a new submission form that comes off the website or a phone call, we're obviously going to go through our sales process and figure out what do they want, what are we trying to do, what kind of services are they looking for? And we're going to build out what we would call an estimate. Now, a lot of you guys have heard anybody who's talking about lmn, promoting LMN share about is the estimate tool and what we would call like our templates. And really simply, whether you're doing maintenance, snow or landscape and hardscape design, it's really cool because you can continue to just copy and paste estimates once you have the foundational estimate set up. And we've got a handful of estimates that we do, as you can imagine, from lawn to landscape to snow and mulch, because those are some of our core services. But this is where we kind of take all of the costs, all of the labor, all of the materials and everything that we're doing for that job, and we throw it into an estimate. We're able to manipulate these based on the measurements that we're going to take with our takeoffs, maybe with something like attentive, so we know how many square foot we punch that square foot into the calculators. It gives us how much time on site. We're able to know the unit cost, our overhead that gets added to it, adding our desired profit, and that's going to kick out our price. Now, what I just explained to you took me about six months to mentally understand. So if that went quick, trust me, I get it. But the long story short is, as we're building out these estimates, like this one, for example, is bidding out our snow. You guys can see here that we have snowplowing 1 1/2 to 3 inches sidewalk, shoveling bulk salt, bagged ice melt. And it's really cool because I can come down here and say, I have a commercial site that I just did my takeoff with attentive and got my measurements. And there's a car wash, and the car wash had, you know, 3,000 square feet of sidewalk. And I know I get 1,000 square foot of ice melt coverage per bag. I can put in three bags. The unit cost is 1250. My market rate is 35 bucks. I have my profit, which kind of invertedly, I'm working backwards on this, But I'm making 58%, you know, gross. I'm sorry, 58% net on that. And I get. My price per application is 105 bucks. Now, let's say I have 25 visits that I'm doing with ice melt, 25 visits I'm doing with bulk salt. You can see that I can manipulate it for the seasonal price, right? And start getting my numbers as accurate as possible for that bid. Same thing. Let's say I'm doing snow plowing, and it's going to take me 45 minutes to plow this site for the operator, 45 minutes to have the truck there. You can see my unit cost, my break even, my desire, you know, desired, gross, and that which are obviously allowed to manipulate. And you can see that, you know, to go plow this car wash parking lot, it's $175. And then maybe I'm building out a program where I'm gonna sell them 10 visits for the season. And you can start to see if we take our snow, plowing our sidewalks, our bulk and our bag. Then it comes up to, you know, five grand or eight grand or whatever the number happens to be. You can see how I can now build that out as an estimate to sell that to the customer. And so all I really have to do each time is get my measurements, understand how much material I'm going to use, put it into the element, estimate, continue to just refine all the service intervals that I'm going to do or however I'm selling. And that's really it. Like I can do an estimate in about 15 to 20 minutes. I mean, 20 minutes would be generous or it would be long. I should say 10 minutes is probably being generous, but 20 minutes would be a pretty long process to be able to do this. Now, again, this is just a snow estimate. We have these for our seasonal maintenance. We have these for mulch. It's not that hard to set up knowing what I know now. I don't know why I was making it so complicated. You know, I had a couple of great sessions onboarding, of course, but then folks like Stephen, and that's why Stephen's here today, you have an account manager that can help you with this. If you get stuck on anything, you know, you're more than welcome to reach out to them and they will help you with this. Steve's actually a part of our link membership and Steve's probably got an extra 100 or 200 hours deep doing one on one breakouts, you know, zoom meetings with folks to help them with their Element account, pro bono. Usually it's a paid for play service. With Element, you have to typically hire a growth accelerator for I think it's like 100 bucks a month. Whatever it is, it's the best money you'll spend. But they can help you get more granular with your account if you get stuck or jammed up. And you will, and you will, the first couple of times, no doubt about it, it's going to take you, you know, a couple of months to onboard, probably about a year or two to really get this thing under your belt. So use these folks, use myself. If you are signing up with our code, I'm always here to help you. If you don't use our code, I'm always here to help you out and answer any questions that I can. All right? So I don't want to spend too, too long on this because I don't want to, you know, put everybody back to sleep. But this is what we do again, we can manipulate these estimates however we want. As you come back in here, we'll develop a contract. This isn't going to be accurate because I've been, you know, mixing with everything. We can figure out our calculations to build our contracts out. We have our client notes. Long story short, we can go to reports, which is how we send a quote. We can hit preview. Hopefully it doesn't mess up because I just have been clicking through all this. But as you can see, we're going to send a contract out for this amount of money with this amount of stuff, you know, and then once we do this, we hit email and publish, which is send. The customer can either either receive it via email and do a PDF sign off on it, or they can click approve in their portal and the quote is approved from there. It's really, really simple. I don't want to make it any more complicated than it is, but as we, you know, have had a good snow selling season up until, you know, end of September and even into Halloween, snow is pretty much pencils down for us. And then, of course, the first snow hits and folks out there in the marketplace realize what they have with other contractors and some bad, some good, right? And so the last, like week and a half, we had four or five new commercial sites come in because they wanted a quote in a bid because their last guy dropped the ball. All I had to do was. And what I'm using is attentive, not here to overly promote them, but we have a promo code for them, too. Go figure. But all I do is I order up my takeoffs, my measurements, I drop those measurements into lmm, I can have a. Depending on when I get that takeoff back within a couple of hours, hopefully I can then put those numbers into my estimate. I can submit that proposal, refine it a little bit with a couple questions back and forth, maybe from the property manager or the decision maker, the facility manager, et cetera, and we can have a quote back to them, honestly, same day, if not like three or four hours. And speed is feet around here, especially when it comes to commercial. Because when somebody's calling commercial, I want them to stop calling other folks for a bidding estimate. Right? So we take that submission form. Yes, we're on it. I order my takeoffs, we get them an estimate. And usually commercial is if you're first to the race, you're going to get to work. All right? And so that's how we do this very quickly. Other folks that are still like going on site with a measuring wheel, you can do that. You should always double check your sites, obviously. But for the most part, stuff like this in today's age, I'm not driving around, you know, the world trying to measure stuff. I can use Attentive. I'm not trying to create a PDF or some Word document contract. It's all right here in lmn. You know, it's all spelled out, including all the client notes and all the details.
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If you are enjoying today's podcast. You'll want to go behind the scenes with Brian and the team from LMN for an exclusive live webinar. Tomorrow morning at 7 Eastern. You'll get an under the hood look at how Brian is using LMN to run and grow his lawn care business. The link to register is in the show notes.
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Let me double check the chat. I want to make sure that Steve or Troy, do we have any questions that popped up? I don't want to.
- [29:55]
B
Yeah, there's been a lot of good ones.
- [29:57]
C
What do we got? I want to rambrod, but go ahead.
- [29:59]
B
No, no. Also maybe just back up just a second and go show your price list again. Do you want to click into a laboratory and maybe show how the cogs are actually calculated? Like what things we're taking into consideration when you take a look at the labor. A lot of people don't. Yeah, they don't do these, these extra items here.
- [30:17]
C
Yeah. So I'll. Great, great point. Great question. And I can even piggyback showing this to the estimate. This was one of the most revealing things in business for me along the way. And Stephen remembers me having some of these aha moments the same time, March or so this year. If you guys have an employee out there, right, and you're like, hey, he's 25 bucks an hour. And somebody says, well, to have a guy on site, you know, for an hour, it's going to cost me 25 bucks. Obviously that's extremely remedial overstatement. But how many of us approach and price our work that way? Well, at best, you know, you need to make some profits. You're like, hey, I'm going to make 20% on that guy, so I should charge 30 bucks an hour for him. Well, not a bad thought process, but when you get more granular. And again, this is the stuff that eats you alive as you continue to grow. Because either one, you don't factor it or two, you just didn't know, which again, goes back to number one, you just didn't factor it in. So if you have an employee that's out there for 23 or let's say $25 an hour, there's an overtime factor. He's obviously going to get some overtime, especially in the spring. He's going to work an average of 45, 48, 50 hours a week. So his $23 an hour isn't as an aggregate $23 or $25 an hour. It's probably $27 an hour. Then we also have unbillable time. This is a big question. A lot of folks get like, who's paying for my guys to drive from site to site? Well, all the customers we have to take the amount of time that they're not producing, which, you know, on an average is a fifth of the day, believe it or not. And we have to make sure that we're padding that drive time into the cost of doing the work that we are producing on so we have an unbillable time. Then there's another portion of this called labor burden. And labor burden is like all of your payroll taxes, your fica, your federal income tax, all that stuff. And again, I'm not an expert, but all the costs get associated with adding an employee. So when I punch in my gusto payroll and it's, you know, 9200 for my salary guys, every two weeks, the cost breakdown is like 6800 bucks goes to them and they're like two grand goes to the freaking three lettered organizations. And you're just like, oh, that's, that's America 101. Remember when we dumped tea in the harbor for, you know, a penny a pound? You know, now, Now I'm given 20% of my payroll just withholding tax, for crying out loud. Another webinar for another time. Right, but it's ridiculous. Even more in Canada from what I hear, right? It's ridiculous. Now again, another portion of that we. For every hour that we bill out, for every material, yard or ton or plant that we put in, for every piece of our that that equipment runs, we have to recover that overhead. It's called multiple overhead recovery system, Morris. And I'm not going to get too granular on that right now because that'll fry your brain. That's a whole nother hour webinar session on its own. Trust me. I, I have been going down the ringer of education. If you guys can't tell the last two years. And again, if I sound like I'm talking a foreign language today, if I was on this thing two years ago, I'd be like, dude, just get to the bottom line. Is this thing good or not? Yes. But it is an education process. And this is absolutely what you have to focus on as you continue to grow. Because it's no longer you just cutting grass, billing out, cutting grass, billing out, answering a service call, cutting grass, billing out like yard booker jobber can help you to do when you start deploying people and crews and significant amount of materials and a significant amount of equipment, every jot and tittle thing has to be documented, recorded, priced, and billed for. And there's no one catch all with those other CRMs out there. And again, I personally don't know of any other way that you could be pricing your work accurately and making the profit you deserve and desire accurately if you're not getting granular with every single thing that's getting built out. And so that's what Element has to offer. So if I sound like a fanboy, it's not so much because Elements so fantastic, it's that this is just the one that has everything you need to actually build a big business. And go figure, all the biggest companies out there, they're using Element. Some of the biggest. You know, Maybe they're doing 20, 50 million using Aspire or something like that. That is way, way over your skis for anything that most of us or most of my audience is doing up until 20 or 30 million bucks. And I do know there's these folks that we're doing a hundred millions of dollars literally in Canada, the biggest companies, we're using Element. So I don't want to get into a, a pitch fest that Element versus Aspire. But if you have those questions, Troy can help you navigate both because he's helped make giant enterprise level switchovers as well at that level. So there is something for everyone at every level. Let's just go back really quick, and I want to wrap this thought up. $25 an hour, guy. When you take in the overtime factor, the unbillable time, the labor burden, and then the overhead that we're trying to recover, that quarter million bucks of overhead for my business, added to every hour that we bill out for a break even, actually means I have to put my guys out there for $54 an hour. And with some profit added in, we're at $65aman hour build out for my team. So when you send a guy back or you send a guy out to go do some weeding and the customer says like, hey, I've got two hours of weeding. And you're like, yeah, 50 bucks. All right, well, you covered cost at most with just the labor. But if you build them out for 50 bucks an hour, you're like, yeah, like, dude, we're making some money because I took my labor rate and doubled it by two. I've heard people say that on, on YouTube videos. It's just freaks me out. It's like a knee jerk reaction. I'm like, dude, that's not even close. You can see I have to build my guys out at 65 bucks an hour to even make profit. And so one thing I'll say is I see two folks out, two, two camps out there messing this portion up, including your equipment, either charging not enough to actually recover their overhead, pay the cost of the labor or the equipment, and then desired profit. So they're not charging enough because they don't know. Or number two, they scream from the tops of their lungs. And unfortunately, a lot of YouTubers and, you know, thought leaders guys have no idea what they're talking about. Say you gotta charge 85 bucks an hour, 90 bucks an hour per man hour. And in fact, that's just not the case either because now you're overcharging and you're pricing yourself out competitive, competitively for the work that you're doing, whether it's maintenance, landscape, snow, hardscaping, it doesn't matter. And so one thing I'll tell you guys, and this is actually like a surprising truth that I didn't know that I could actually do this or say this even, you know, a year ago, is that a lot of my costs to actually do my work have come down. And I realized this when I started a bit more commercial work that is just razor thin margin. It's cutthroat, it's dog eat dog out there for sure. What I've noticed is that by getting more granular and now that I have about two years of data to work with with my LMN account, I'm able to actually bring my prices down, which has allowed me to earn more work. Now I'm not giving away margin, but I'm able now to know exactly, or at least 99 cents on the dollar right about where I should be. And I'm able to get more granular now with my pricing, bring those prices down and be more competitive to earn and win more bids. And people are like, well, how you go from eight commercial sites four years ago to 34 commercial sites, which is. Is big revenue growth. And we're right now at like a running 500 grand in revenue. Our 12 out of 12, if we took a ruling 12 right now would probably be pushing about 600, 650,000 bucks. Like the business is growing 10 to 20% year over year right now. And to be having that kind of growth with commercial is, is actually really impressive. And I'm really proud of myself and really proud of my guys because it is very hard to earn and grow a commercial business, especially when you're, you know, swimming with sharks like we are in my market. Just like, you guys are as well. So I want to get a little bit more granular on that. You can imagine the exact same thing with equipment. Right? So I'm not going to spend too much time on that, but dove into this. If this freaks you out or you don't understand this. Look, I totally understand. I know how you feel. I felt the exact same way. Take time to learn. Like, it's not going to just be a plug it all in, this thing's going to solve all your problems kind of program. I'm not going to paint it that way. It is going to take an investment of education and time to learn. But once you learn, it's like taking the red pill. You couldn't imagine going on back into the matrix. Okay. And so I want to make sure I answer that one, Mr. Bennett, you got any other good ones?
- [38:24]
B
Yeah, no, that was a good one. I mean, I think it was like, what, 10 minutes there. And I got to say, Brian, it's like a proud papa moment for me as well, because I'm like, like, you're, like, you're naming, like, the Moore's method. It's. It's perfect. I love it. Yeah. This came from Carl, who sent a Q and A in. And so it was a great question. He's like, hey, like, if element says we have $75 per cut, but, like, in our area, we can only charge 40, like, what do we do?
- [38:48]
C
Right.
- [38:48]
B
And I mean, when you look at that, that, that priceless breakdown, we determine that break even. I element would suggest to never go below that, because then that's not good news. But you do have a gap between that $56 and then I think your profit was saying to charge 65. Right. So you can make that as razor thin as needed to win, you know, some bids. So knowledge is power.
- [39:09]
C
Yeah, and that's a great question. I've actually asked Mark Bradley that as well. I'm like, hey, you know, maintenance. What are we. What are we trying to do for a net versus my landscaping? Because my company budget right now is a blend at 16.9. Well, we might bid maintenance at 10% net. Inside baseball, all the biggest. All the biggest players are basically bidding their commercial maintenance at 10. They're bidding a lot of their landscape at 2025. Snow is typically a 50 gross and about a 30 or so percent net. When you take the blend, you're about 15 to 20%. But as you guys all hear, like, most of these big guys will tell you, and again, if you're in a snow Market, you're just getting the maintenance to get the account to lock them in for snow, to really sell them bulk salt.
- [39:51]
A
Right.
- [39:51]
C
And so, ironically enough, like, I had to look at the biggest fish in town and say, what do they do? And I realized, well, I'm not in a snow state. I'm in a salting state. And if all the biggest companies here have, you know, 40, 50, 60% of their business is snow, I look at the writing on the wall, like, am I going to be the king of lawnmowers and maintenance, or am I going to do what the big guys do, which all seem to have big snow businesses? And it's just, look, if I'm running a business to make profit and this business is a vehicle to get my lifestyle to take care of my family, I had to look at what the biggest guys are doing while they're all big and snow, they're all big and salt, and go figure. That's where we're finding the most growth opportunity in our company. But we know how to manipulate the pricing to earn the work. And that's part of a greater sales process and a greater macro strategy to grow the company. So you. You can get more granular. Like some of my gross and net. I can manipulate this a little bit more. I don't need to. I'm high on all my profit and my numbers in my element account for snow because we're hitting industry averages. But if I had to get razor thin and just get this down to budget and snipe sites, I know exactly what my floor would be. And so that's an education process. I have a lot of YouTube videos on this. More to come, of course, but it's a great way to know exactly. And again, no guessing with how you can bid and price your work. So any other ones on that one, Stephen? If not, I'll keep moving a little bit more.
- [41:06]
B
I mean, that's great. Yeah. If anybody else wants to see something specific in the account while we have time, you know, post it in the chat and I'll try to steer Brian for sure.
- [41:14]
C
Yeah. So let me just continue, and I'll pretty much land the plane here in the next, like, two minutes. I want to be respectful of everybody's time. I can hear feet stomping up stairs, so I know my kids are up. And three on one for Mama Bear is not a good sign. You know, I'm saying so. But we got a little bit of time here, so let me give the macro. We set our company budget and our price list typically Once a year, maybe quarterly, just to review new leads come in. However you guys have it set up for your business, you punch them into your CRM. From there, the conversation is, what are you guys looking for? Do you need a patio? Do you need commercial snow? We're going to continue to build out an estimate. From there, it actually goes really quick. We're going to schedule that estimate. You can see down here in this blue tab. We're going to create a job from the job list. We're going to schedule it so we sell the job, then we're going to schedule the job timesheets, produce the job, which means actual work in the field, and then eventually we're going to invoice for it. Okay. That's the holistic approach for elements. So I got a couple examples here. We've had a quote or a bid. It was for a Sherwin Williams. We were subbing it out for us. You can see that we had nine visits because it was a biweekly cut. And this is what's going to then go into the crew app. And that's where your team gets to use crew. And they'll open up crew. They'll go into the route or group or whatever you have set up for that lawn or snow, and they'll be able to punch in and punch out that task once they hit save and they, you know, submit a timesheet. Timesheets will then be able to be generated into invoices. It's. It's really that simple. So you can also create job groups, right, with all your stuff, lawn or snow. You can see this is our commercial routing for our current snow. At least a portion of it, right? This is our master salt list. So you can see all of our sites. You can do all the basic stuff in any of the other CRMs. You know, routes and groups and quick dispatch, and you can, you know, give this to your guys. But most of it, honestly, it's just in your crew app, which is very easy to use. I've had some folks say, well, like, I can't get my team to use crew. I'm like, if you can't get your folks to use crew, then there's 100% a hardcore training and culture issue at your company. I'm just going to be honest with you. If you can't plug in and out and check in and out of crew or any CRM for your routing, you just won't be able to scale your business because you can't keep handing you guys route sheets, you know, or MapQuest directions like you did back in the day at Trugreen.
- [43:29]
B
Right?
- [43:30]
C
It's very, very simple. From there again, you create your timesheets, your timesheets generate into invoices and you can see my account, we've got, I'll show some of this here. We've got a lot of invoices. Nothing too, too exhausted. But you can see this is what's currently my receivables. Probably, I don't know, 20 or 30 grand at the most. And we keep up on a lot of this with a pretty short leash. From there, you can use your bookkeeper to sync with QuickBooks. That's a whole nother conversation for a whole other time. And that's pretty much Element in a nutshell. Now, one last thing I'll show you guys, not to make it a pitch by any means, but I will tell you guys candidly, like Greenius is where it's going to be in the future. Not only for my company, but hopefully for a lot of you guys. And last demo, we didn't get a ton of time to have a conversation about Green. Yes. But I will tell you guys, one of the coolest things of LMN is the integrated elearning platform called Greenius. And the reason I want to take a quick second on it, not to convince you of it, but just to let you know, like this is actually part of your account now. It's a separate, I think it's like a thousand bucks to sign up one time and you pay per user. Again, if you're running a 3, 4, 500,000 a year company, a grand is like an hourly problem these days. So it's not a lot of money just to keep it in context. But you can then populate as many training videos into your Element account that can now be used for your onboarding and training for your team. And as you guys have been hearing a lot of great folks talking about out there about building training and SOPs like this is all integrated into your Element account. They have hundreds of default videos that you can use to start building these pathways or onboarding, you know, courses for your new team members or you can build your own. And right now I'm in the process of building not only training videos for the field, but also training and SOP videos for our office help as I'm continuing to build out my office team right now with an EA va. So I'm really excited about this and very bullish about this because in about March or April, I'm going to have another training Resource out there with about 50 to 75 SOP training videos for the field and another 10 to 15 not only training videos but documentated documented word docs if you will that explain what the video says and the video explains what the document says for your office help. So when you're hiring a virtual assistant, whether somebody local or offshore, like from the Philippines or whatnot, you can give them those training videos from the office and get them competent on creating newsletters, how to run payroll, et cetera, et cetera with a lot of the brands that I recommend. Now another awesome part about LMN is they have the LMN Academy. My VA right now is, is about 20 hours deep in element part of their element training academy. Like that stuff is priceless. So no picture for greenness. But I will just say way back in the day there was a brand called Circuit City. I don't know if you guys remember those. I know Troy would but. Troy, Troy Clark or Troy would. I'm probably member Circuit City way back
- [46:28]
A
and can you give me 20 seconds?
- [46:31]
C
Yeah, go ahead, push it, push it,
- [46:33]
A
click it, tune it on, turn it on. This is what you want anyway you like it anyway you want it at the circuit Circuit City.
- [46:39]
C
See. Okay, so like, like circus, it was like the phenomenon. Like that was like the Amazon back in the day, right? It was Circuit City. And every four hours I was working part time in the car audio stereo department. That's why I'm a car audio nerd. But for every four hour shift I had, I was mandatory. I had to go in the back Office for like 30 or 45 minutes and watch eLearning videos. And it was like how to approach a customer, how to ring up a sale. Sirius versus xm. Like at the time of satellite radio was the big craze. Like elearning has been a thing for a long time. And at my company as we continue to grow and scale, I'm realizing the bigger bottleneck isn't so much the customers, isn't so much the equipment, it's the people. And we have to have a well trained army of folks that can go on out there. That's why I'm building these SOP videos to then populate into my Greenius account. And we're going to be working with Greenius over the next six to 12 months to get our videos part of their platform. Or I can sell them through launchpreneur academy.com and then you guys can use them in your own company and just say hey, hey, we do what this guy does. And how to use a mower, how to cut grass, how to plow snow. Like literally, really, really good videos.
- [47:41]
D
If you are enjoying today's podcast, you'll want to go behind the scenes with Brian and the team from LMN for an exclusive live webinar. Tomorrow morning at 7 Eastern. You'll get an under the hood look at how Brian is using LMN to run and grow his lawn care business. The link to register is in the show notes.
- [47:59]
C
This is all part of your Element platform. It is an additional investment, but it's nominal, It's a one time fee. And as my videos come out, maybe you want to invest into those or even build your own. You can continue to build these pathways for training and education part of your Element account. And it's all right there. You have to send them to another website. You don't have to send them and get another subscription to something else. It's all integrated here. And by the way, this is what is currently available with Element. They just got bought out by Single Apps a little over a year and a half ago and the investment that they're making into the platform is second to none. Actually the CEO Mark Sedgley was on our last Element demo webinar about six weeks ago and it was kind of cool to have like the CEO of a significant size company, you know, joining us at 6:30 in the morning on a Saturday. Like that's how much he believes in what we're doing and he just wants to make sure that you guys know like they're going deep with LMN and their parent company Grum, on the green industry. They're not trying to get the garage door business guys and the service cleaning guys and the window washing guys, like they're all in on the Greenist platform or on the LMN platform with Granum. So that's really, really refreshing to hear that we're not just like padding sets for private equity and building a bigger portfolio for them to roll up and flip into sell in five years. I don't want to be married to something like that. You can see that they're making the investment into the platform and it's already significantly better just in the last year. And they're just getting started. All right, so I'm really excited about that. As you guys can see, the whole ball of wax here, right, is you set your budget, you build your price list, you got your CRM, you build estimates, you turn those into jobs, you schedule them out, the crew produces them and creates time sheets and then we bill an invoice. It's really that simple. It took me a little bit over about a year to really get my feet under me with lmn. Now that we're about two years deep, I'm pretty adept, I feel, with the platform. Is it gonna be a couple of hours to onboard and learn and to get educated? Yep. Are you gonna get stumped once in a while? For sure. But you have a whole team that's here to help. And that's my last two minutes here that I want to just share with Mr. Stephen Bennett. We got a couple slides because getting signed up with Troy is one part having ongoing support. Somebody in your corner is absolutely the most important thing I think, after the sale is somebody supporting you guys on your journey. So I think we got a couple slides here that Steven's gonna walk through. Let me see if I can spotlight Mr. Bennett and Troy. You wanna. Yeah.
- [50:29]
A
Well, you pulled it up.
- [50:30]
B
I'm gonna answer Ethan's question here as well. So he said, brian, what's the juggling act look like trying to use the CRM, especially sometimes when you're out in the field. My concern is that when you're out in the field, might not be ease of access and do you have to jump back on your laptop? So, Ethan, there's two things there. We can definitely use the Element Crew app. It now has embedded the CRM app into it, so you can add new customers, call customers directly, create to DoS or requests within the organization to flag other people, all from your cell phone. And there's an update coming. I don't think it's out there. I think it's Troy. Do you have access to it as well? The Element Crew has mobile estimating rolling out. And I know it was in beta. I know some people have access to it. You would check your Crew app, see if you have it. But you would be able to start building standard estimates using the mobile platform. And service estimates are rolling out here shortly as well as they build out that feature.
- [51:34]
A
That's awesome.
- [51:35]
B
You can do that all from the field without having to break out in your laptop. So, yeah, Rob, you confirmed. Yeah. It was there for some users and they're slowly rolling it out to everybody. But having having the ability to. To estimate or bid on the fly without needing to pull out your laptop, I think is a huge advantage.
- [51:53]
C
Absolutely. And again, more to come. Like, there's a. Well, I can't say stuff because I'll probably get in trouble, but Mr. Sedgley, the CEO, gave us a Couple teases of some stuff coming down the, the pike in the future and I'm really, really pumped. Chat, conversations, etc. So Troy, you got those slides with the, the arrows that I could just queue up really quick for Bennett because I can't emphasize enough. If it wasn't for Bennett and Mike Poler and Dan and Leslie and a couple other great folks that were part of the team. Without them your boy wouldn't be here. So. Because I would have, I would have gave up. I would have smashed my keys like a toddler and. And I gave up and I'm just being real, like I'm a landscaper, I'm like now I gotta learn software. But really quick here. Bennett, you can go through this. So again I'll let you take it away. Steven, I'm over talking here.
- [52:42]
B
Yeah, yeah, no, yeah, I'm gonna leave this slide up here so people can just look at it for a second. Ethan's asking follow up questions here in chat and so is Chris, so we'll answer those quickly. Ethan, unfortunately today don't have a ton of time. We do want to be respectful of people Saturday mornings. So I won't be able to show off the Crew app here today. What I can tell you is if you want to book some time with Troy, Troy can definitely showcase that to you. Plus any other questions that might come up if you want to do a demo with him. Otherwise you can go to the Granum website and go to our resources page. We do have live recordings and upcoming webinars that focus just purely on how to use Element Crew and I would say that that would be the best place to turn into. And then Chris's question here is, can you record notes, photos, etc. On the job? Absolutely. So you can do that both as a sales manager, owner on a customer's property so that your folks can have those drawings accessible when they go there. I know Brian, you can get a chance to show it today. But they actually took their attentive AI drawings and then they would actually mark them up and say like pile all my snow here. Those are viewable on every single one of Brian's properties. So when his crews are out there in the truck, they have access to that right through the Crew app.
- [53:59]
C
And sorry, I was going to say. And that's helpful, Chris, I think you're asking about that. Yes, you can absolutely take photos, throw them into your job site files, your CRM files. We have a new plow sub and we set him up with an Element account so he can log in as a crew lead, and he's got access to all the routes, all the photos in that route. And so he knows, like, where to plow. But also we have, like, before photos. We have maps that we've marked up where to plow and stack snow, obviously. But then also, yeah, you can take photos once you're punching out of a job for, like, proof that you did the service. And not only do we require that, I have a couple sites that I sell about for another company that, go figure, uses lmn. They set me up with a login, so I'm logging into their account, and same thing, I'm punching into their crew app. Same group app, obviously, but the crew sites for their account, snapping photos, completing work as well. And that's how they're building their timesheets to invoice for their work. So it's really, really cool. Again, you know, it's pretty slick. It. It does take an investment to learn, but once you learn it, it's just like most things. You learn how to ride a bicycle once, and from there it's, you know, wax on, wax off. So, Troy, you want to do next slide? So we got this one, the. The Element Academy. I can't speak highly enough about it. My VA is probably about 15 or 20 hours deep into this learning elements. So if you have office staff or teams or people or somebody who's proactive or crew leads, you know, if you will, this is a great time for them to start going through some of this and not just taking the whole load on your shoulders by yourself. Right? Like, start having some of your crew leads. At least watch the timesheets, the jobs, the scheduling portion, especially their ops focus. Next slide.
- [55:42]
B
And yeah, there's 10 more boot camps in coming up in Q1. We're actually back in Michigan early January.
- [55:47]
C
Oh, that's what's up.
- [55:50]
B
Also, I don't know if you still have me pinned or if people can see the content, but, yeah, you're good.
- [55:55]
C
You're pinned into Spotlight, I think. Next slide, Troy.
- [55:59]
A
That's it.
- [56:00]
C
All right, so there you go. Well, I will give it back to Troy. Maybe we can take it back to the QR code page and we'll land the plane there. But.
- [56:06]
B
And hey, Troy, just one more open question, if I could. There was a question in chat. Is there any thoughts that either us, Brian, like myself or yourself, could speak on when it comes to running LMN with another CRM, they're very specific in here saying that to use something called followsoft, I'll Speak from my experience, you can absolutely run LMN with any additional tech stack. You just need to be very cautious. Why? It's going to require double entry. You can't just move something organically from IE followsoft into lmn. But we absolutely see the need for some folks to use things like HubSpot or some sort of a project management software like ClickUp. And if you need to use those in tandem with lmn, you absolutely can. But you'll have to make any changes in both platforms. Right. So good data in, good data out. And Brian, I don't know if you want to share any other insight on that.
- [57:01]
C
No, we're pretty exclusive. I know. You know, I have a bunch of peers that have 5, 10 million dollar companies and they're using nine different tech stack CRMs and you know, one for lawn, one for snow, one for landscape and they're all in the process of, you know, consolidating, you know, for the most part down to lmn. I, you know, I don't envy those problems obviously. If you can, I'm sure there's a workaround. Troy and Stephen have helped the smallest of the biggest companies do all the above. It's way above my pay grade. I'm a kind of a purebred here. You know, we run exclusively all of our snow operations through, through lmm. I don't know how it could get any better. You know, like we dispatch everything through crew, every time sheet, through crew photos, through crew for a pretty, I mean, robust quarter million dollar snow business. I mean it's from there we're just scaling more crews, more routes, you know. And the other guy that I plug into, I'm not going to tell you his company's name but it's kind of like a, like a teddy bear of a company and he's huge by us, but I log into my crew app, into his account if you will, that they made for me as a crew lead and they've got like 26 routes, you know, and everything is dispatched through Element, especially for snow. And, and I tried to click into some of the other routes. I was, I didn't have access unfortunately because I was like, do look at all these sites. This is crazy. And I'm just kind of a nosy person and. But I'm like there's 26 routes, like probably 15 subs. My myself was like sub route 14. I'm like damn, like 14 sub routes. That's crazy. You know, so again everybody's got their own way, they got their Own approach. I don't want to make a pitch that anything's better or worse. You just got to figure out what works for you. I remember the last thing I'll probably say here is Mark Bradley said, the best software is the software that you use and whatever that looks like for you folks. Sincerely, like, I know Troy wants to make sales. Steven wants to help you guys and keep retention. I'm probably in the same boat from both sides. You know, I play all sides. Like, yeah, I want to make some sales and all that stuff. Sure. But really, like, I want you to have a better way to run your business. And I was pulling my hair out as we started to scale this thing over a quarter million bucks. And, you know, I needed to mobilize a small army of guys, and I couldn't even imagine running this thing without Element. From the pricing, the estimating side, to dispatching team members now with crew. And again, we just added a new sub three weeks ago for Snow. We took him to all of the sites. We got him a crew login. It was the easiest thing for him to learn. There was no real onboarding process, you know, so it took two minutes for him to learn. And if he can figure it out, I guarantee you almost anybody here can figure it out as well. So my pitch is, I don't want you to get LMN and not use it. I don't want you to get Element and pay a couple hundred bucks a month or a couple thousand bucks if you're just paying it off on the annual, and then not use it or get frustrated with it. You know, use the software that makes your business better. That gets the job done for you. This is just another tool in the tool belt. But what I will just say is you have an incredible amount of support here to help you guys do that right at the end of the day. So that's what I'll probably give. My last thought is, we're here for you. I'm here for you. Steven's here for you. Troy's here for you. I say if. If us three knuckleheads can't figure it all out together, then we're all in the wrong business. You know what I'm saying? So, that being said, Troy, any. Any final thoughts with you? I'll give you the final, and you can. You can wrap it up, brother.
- [60:18]
A
Yeah, I appreciate this. So, Brian, you know what a great sales pitch you just did there for l. But at the end of the day, you can see the gray in my beard. I've been Doing this for years. The biggest thing I hear from customers coming from other softwares is it's such a pain in the ass to switch from one software to the next. And knowing when you do invest in lmn, at that point you're done. You don't have to switch again. You don't have to go out and find other resources. When I tell you our company has grown for the better over this last 12, 13 months since the acquisition. If you just look at like our engineering support team, that whole department has, I think 5x, the amount of staff on that department and the amount of product releases that are coming every single month consistently, you know, we're about to change. Like Esther, we're putting images and proposals doing, you know, easier estimating out in the field, collecting credit card fees. All those things that have been requested are now happening all because of the direction granite is going in. And it's phenomenal. And I'm going to leave on this last note, there are wonderful, really hard working service industries out there that other softwares are going after. And lmn, our only singular focus is the landscaping and snow industry.
- [61:39]
C
That's it.
- [61:40]
A
We're not looking at roofers or electricians or plumbers. Those are other softwares. And you mentioned a few, you mentioned the big boy and you mentioned the small guys. Other softwares are doing that. I wouldn't be a great ambassador if I didn't just land on that point. We are only building for you. That's our mission. Your success, that's our mission. So with that being said, I threw in my cell number in the, in the chat. That's my real phone. Text me with questions. You got the QR code here. Block town, my calendar. Let's, let's chat, man. And if I, if this element is perfect for you, love to have you into our community. If you're using something else, let's still be friends. I want to shake your hand the next LA event, right. I want to be able to swap stories. So with that said, thank you for your time this morning. I know it's early and we respect that.
- [62:27]
C
There you go. Awesome. Cool. Deal. All right, guys, no, no pitch here. Again, I, the, the best conversation here is that there is no pitch. The pitch is do what works for you, what makes sense for you. If you have questions, we're here to help. I know a lot of you guys are looking to grow. I know a lot of you guys are looking to make the switch. You are looking to, to upgrade or graduate, as I've been saying. A lot lately, like myself just a couple of years ago. Again, I thought this was for hardscapers, or I thought this for guys running $50 million companies. Not the case. In fact, if I could convince you that you should use something like this from day one, I mean, revenue $01, like that would be my, my heart's desire. Because, my gosh, I probably left. Actually, I don't even want to estimate how much money I've left on the table doing this the wrong way. And so I have hundreds of war stories and terrible pricing stories that I could share with you guys. So that being said, really glad that you guys made it on for the webinar and the demo today. Maybe you guys are watching the replay here even later. If you ever have any questions, obviously the team's here for you. But also, last thing I'll say, like, not to be salesy, but don't wait either, because this is the last big hurrah sale that these guys do through the end of the month. So if you haven't booked time with Troy, don't put it on your back burner too long. You know, we're going to get busy with the Christmas and the holidays, rightfully so. But don't freak out, you know, on January 31st or 30th and be like, oh, crap, I need to sign up with lmn. And Troy's like, look, dude, I'm drinking some eggnog. I'm, I'm busy, you know, so I'm sure he'll make time for you. But that being said, like the savings, the couple of free months, I think Brian's code is stacking on that to get an extra free month. Like that is 100% pencils down at the end of the year here with the December. So then you got three or four months to onboard and you'll be ready to rock and roll come spring. So you got some time to think about it for a couple of weeks. I'm definitely a mullet over kind of person. Some of you guys are more green lights. And you're like, I'm signing up right now with Troy. I got a meeting at 9:30. Okay. As soon as we get off of this. Awesome. Some of you guys need a couple weeks to think about it. I'm right there with you. I'm one of those guys. But just make sure that you decide, you know, by the end of the month. That way you can get the best savings possible. All right, that's what I got for you guys today. Appreciate you guys, as always. Love you. Appreciate you. Thanks for the support too. If you need anything, we're always here for you. And I'm gonna go upstairs and make some bacon out. See you guys. Bye.
- [64:36]
E
What would you change in your business if your team could operate with confidence without needing you at every turn? That's the goal behind the LaunchPreneur Academy SOP bundle. This powerful training system was built from real world processes used inside a growing company designed to help you train your field crews, develop your office staff, and create the structure needed to scale. You'll get over 50 field training SOPs covering everything from mowing and snow to trailers, blades and equipment basics. You'll also get office training for leads, estimates, payroll, marketing systems and more, plus over 30 documents and resources to help you build a stronger business foundation. Best of all, it works with the systems you already use. The price is only $9.99.
- [65:22]
C
You heard that right.
- [65:23]
E
Just 999. Get in early at launchpreneuracademy.com.
- [65:37]
F
Thanks for taking the time to listen to the Fullerton Unfiltered Podcast with Bryan Fullerton. We hope you enjoyed this production. If so, please consider leaving us a five star review for the show. While the techniques and ideas presented here are designed to help you grow a more successful and profitable business, no one can guarantee these results for you. We want to emphasize that entrepreneurship is not easy and the ideas presented here are just the opinions of Brian Fullerton and his respective guests. No one can guarantee success for you. That being said, we hope the ideas presented here help you and motivate you to go on out there and crush it with your own business.
- [66:10]
B
Fullerton Unfiltered Podcast thanks for listening and
- [66:13]
F
we hope to see you on the next episode.
- [66:16]
E
This has been a Brian Fullerton and Mr. Producer Production.