← Fullerton Unfiltered
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- [00:01]
A
Yeah, it's true. Brian's got a discount code for just about everything you need to run your business smarter and save serious money. Use promo code Brian's10 with our trusted partners like LeanScaper, CycleCPA, iotsotunes, Cujo Equipment Defender, Proven Locks, Ballard Industries, and many more. Check the podcast description for the full list of partners and links and use Brian's 10 to start saving today. You're now listening to the Fullerton Unfiltered podcast.
- [00:38]
B
Straightforward, no nonsense business advice completely on unfiltered. Grow your business, grow your life.
- [00:46]
A
Now, here's your host, Brian Fullerton. Hey, it's Mr. Producer. And on today's Fullerton Unfiltered podcast, Brian is teaming up with Troy Woodham to help you know the importance of your numbers and how LMN can help in the process. They help lawn and landscaping companies estimate budget and price so that you can have more profit. If you're looking to improve margins, gain financial clarity, and just make smarter business decisions, this podcast episode is for you. Let's jump in.
- [01:17]
C
All right, so if you guys have any questions, feel free, but last time I forgot to record the replay. Troy, so, you know, sharp as a marble over here.
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B
That was my soft pitch to you
- [01:28]
C
to remind you I appreciate the nudge, you know what I mean? Thankfully, it wasn't a two by four.
- [01:34]
B
That's right, it's the dad touch.
- [01:36]
C
That's right.
- [01:37]
B
Getting into the software as your eyes are getting acclimated here down the left hand column, this is the kind of cascading list of options that you have. Starting off with high overview with dashboards. We'll get into the analytics here in a little bit. Creating budgets for your company. The price list, which is like a repository of all the things you need to create an estimate from your labor, equipment, materials, subs, production rates. From there, of course, we have a really robust CRM to manage all your leads, your clients, your employees, your vendors. Obviously you want to be able to create those estimates whether it's install or maintenance, and then those get converted into jobs. From here you have all types of abilities to manipulate the jobs and of course you got to get them on the schedule, right? Whether you're looking at a whiteboard or more like holistic view of a calendar, creating wait lists for those jobs where you know you're going to do them, but you don't quite know when. Of course, being able to bulk schedule or doing like unscheduled jobs or routes, great for like snow, spring cleanups, fall cleanups kind of things. And of course those timesheets come start come flowing in from the crew app. Yeah, with our professional plan you have things like live job and live crew tracking and then once those jobs are done, you want to get those things things on invoices and do your payment runs. Right. So everything we DO connects with QuickBooks. We do a one way sync, whether it's online, desktop, professional enterprise plan. So that's kind of a high overview. Let me get a little more granular here. Going into that budget. What you're seeing is a really just our standardized budget. But also know that we have what we call an express budget. So no matter what size company you are, if you're just getting started, you may not have a whole lot of nitty gritty stuff to account for. We can simply do quick markups on your overall revenue. Otherwise we would recommend diving into a budget like this where we just break down your work areas as a percentage of your business. And then from here we want to quantify it by your different divisions. How much did you do last year? What are you going to forecast for this year? We want to capture all the field labor, all the salary, staff, allary staff. Keeping in mind key factors like your labor burden, your overtime multiplier to your state. We'll take a look at your equipment again. This is all the bigger pieces of equipment so like not like your wheelbarrows and shovels and you know, trimmers. This is your blowers and your, excuse me, your mowers and your trucks and your skid steers and excavators and bobcats, all the big stuff. And there's calculators built in so we can break it down to a monthly and ROI on what it's costing you as an overhead. We'll do the same thing for your materials by division. What did you spend last year? What are you going to spend this year when it comes to subcontracting? Did you hire any last year? How much did you spend? How much did you spend this year? Want to capture all your non revenue line items, right? This is in your overhead budget. Now we're staring at a sandbox. So this is not a real account. This is a fake account we put up here so you can put as many line items as you like into your overhead expenses. Some examples would be like utilities, rent, legal accounting, the cost of travel to associations or seminars, the cost of software, including any overhead wages, Maybe this is like your personal salaries, any ops, managers, et cetera and then any overhead equipment ranging from like maybe your personal vehicle to Repairs to it, fuel, pieces of equipment used at the yard, not in the field. You get the gist of this. So this is all your overhead. And once we identify how much that's truly costing you on an annual basis, then we'll recommend some overhead recoveries ranging from a single overhead to a field labor or to what we recommend the highest is our multiple overhead recovery known as Morse method. And this is where you mark up your labor, your equipment and your materials and subs to recoup the cost of this. Because as an owner operator, you should not be coming out of pocket to pay for that. You should not have to take out loans for future advances. In terms of work, if you know next year you need to hire that new crew lead, put it in the budget now, start forecasting for that. If you know that piece of equipment is going to break down, it has been for years, or it's time to buy a new piece of snow equipment. Excuse me. It's hard to think about, but it is that time of the year to start thinking about those kind of decisions. But in that forecast now and then, Elements supports all this by providing you some analysis on what your revenue per man hours should be on every single job to achieve whatever goal you set for your company. So Whether you're at 200,000, 2 million, 20 million beyond, this is where Element comes in to help show you by division what your revenue per hour goal should be. And this is. Yeah, go ahead, Brian.
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C
I was going to say. Do you mind if I just chime in for a quick second?
- [06:32]
B
Because yeah, super important area. Go ahead.
- [06:35]
C
This is the whole like, if you guys have ever heard somebody say, like know your numbers, you know, this is really where it starts. And I really want to just pause for a quick second because sometimes if you're coming from yardbook or jobber or honestly just Excel sheets or like a family owned business, I noticed a lot of this happens. Troy, you probably have seen this too. Like 2nd gen will pick up the torch and mom and dad, maybe immigrant parents or something, right? Like they've never really dialed into any of their numbers. So the sun or some of us listening in were like, holy crap, I don't even know. All this information will help you. Like elements designed to help you. The onboarding team will get this going. If you had access to your QuickBooks, maybe you got access to some of this data and your other CRM, you know, you're a bookkeeper. Like that's why I promote CycleCPA so heavily. They're like the chart of Accounts for overhead. Like, we will help you get this going and massage it and refine it over time. But again, whether you have all this information or you don't, we'll get you some standardized numbers in here so you can start at least being effective and, you know, dangerous in a good way, so you can start charging appropriately. But when a lot of folks say, like, know your numbers, or a lot of folks come from Yardbook and Jobber, which are great products and great softwares, the problem is that there's no financial data behind it for you to start building out, which we'll get into in a minute. Your price lists and your estimates. And so this is really, really an important section because this is something that you basically put together foundationally once a year, maybe twice a year. One other quick last note. I'll just say overhead. Overhead's the silent killer of the business. And we're probably 80 to 90% of folks migrating to LMN find that they were not charging for. So really, simply, like, we have a mulch job, 10 yards of mulch, $35 a yard, like 350 bucks. Awesome. We're like, hey, five labor hours at whatever, 60 bucks an hour, it's $300. Now your mulch job's 600 bucks. And you're like, you know what? I'm going to add 10% profit to it. So it's 660 bucks. Sure. That's usually what most of us do. And then we get to the end of the year and we go, well, how come I made no money? Well, what we didn't account for was the marketing, the insurance, you know, T shirts for the crew, the lunches. That's the silent killer that none of us are tracking. So that $660 mulch job, if we have 20% overhead, should have been $730. But that's. That's the portion where I have found, Troy, that most folks just don't keep track. And again, if you can imagine, if we're not tracking overhead, part of a job, where is that money coming from? Profit. And so I know, like, Troy is going to give us the 50,000 foot high level, but if there's any one thing you can remember from this is that you have to work with good data, with your price list and your budget to get those good estimates to be able to make money in the field. And point blank, none of the other softwares even offer this. And so they might be great at scheduling and great at collecting reviews and maybe good at invoicing, but what Are you invoicing for, like, what. What are you invoicing? Do you know if it's a profitable job? So I know Troy's by design going through this pretty quick, but I just wanted to pump the brakes and say, like, hey, if. If this is where it all starts, and if you don't know, I will help you. Steven will help you. Like, we will get this going for you. So go ahead, Troy. I didn't mean to jump in there, but this changed everything for our company.
- [10:15]
B
Yeah, no, I was actually going to pause and see if you wanted to chime in, because I know just how passionate you are. I think back to that quick 60 second story where you and I, earlier this year were at the grow event, and that young man walked up to you. You and I were about to go do a podcast together, and that young guy grabbed you in the hallway. Super excited to meet you. He said he just broke a million dollars and he's using spreadsheets and no software. And he's so proud of himself, and he's doing great. He's crushing it. And I know you glanced over at me and I just asked the kid one question. I'm like, you're from Pennsylvania. And he's like, yeah, we're in Dallas. Did you fly here? He's like, yeah, I'm staying at this beautiful Hyatt regency hotel. Yeah, 400 bucks a night. The cost of the ticket there, you know, a couple thousand dollars. He's probably four grand into this trip. And I said, are your customers paying for this trip? And it kind of stopped him in his tracks. And I said, without a proper budgeting tool, you're not recovering the cost of all these expenses. And that's where, as a business owner operator, you absolutely should. And it has sharpened me over the years where I feel so compelled to help guys. I've had demo calls where owners are telling me they rent this equipment, but they never thought about charging a customer for it. They don't know who to charge. They just run it for the week. Well, If I handle 30 customers, who do I charge? Everybody. Like, that's the whole. Like, it's. It's. It's such a great feeling that you get to really help an owner with the budget once they start to realize, okay, now that I've gotten this built out, when you're down here creating your estimates, all your overhead recoveries will be in every single estimate. You'll see it right in front of you. And that allows you to be aggressive with your pricing, because now you know the number. Now you put a quote out to a customer using Brian's example, 600 bucks. You can now see which it needs to be 730. If that customer asked you for 600, you get to decide, hey, do I want to get that aggressive? Do I think my competitors are going to take this job? Or do you hold firm and say, you know, client looking at the job. I, we quoted this accurately. This is with a, A minimal, you know, you know, net profit for the job. We're making a hundred bucks. Like, do you want to spend the next four hours doing this or we can do it for you? Like it's you, you, you now have the ability to negotiate how whatever your file is because now you know that number. So, yeah, great stuff there, Brian. Thanks for jumping in. And like he said during onboarding, we will massage this with you. We will. We want to make sure we nail this down. But we have some really cool features though. Like if you are using QuickBooks, we now have the ability to import your P and L statement from last year directly into our software. And some of those tools are even getting better as we speak. I just saw it yesterday. So we're able to massage entering this data so you don't have to do that heavy lift. Know that we want to do the most of this. We can. And we have some new tools right now that are making this being able to be accomplished in hours versus days or weeks. So we're pretty excited about that on the back end. So the. And that's one of three things we do during onboarding between the budget, the price list and the CRM. So I'm going to jump into the price list. Think of this as what do you need in your back pocket when a customer calls you and says, I'm interested in ABC service? Well, the first thing you would need is your labor. So this is a sandbox environment again. So we just built as many examples as we can to show you. But maybe you have like just a irrigation tech or a maintenance crew or an install crew, maybe that's all you have. But within this, you can now understand how many employees you have and figure out what your average wage is. So if you got one guy making 15, one guy making 35, and one guy making 26, Element is going to figure out your average wage is 25, 56 for those three individuals. So it doesn't matter who shows up, you're going to get the right return on your employee cost. You throw in the overtime factor. This is typically found in your QuickBooks. Here's that unbillable. So like think of route density for like an install job. It's usually around 10% of their windshield time is spent driving in the truck to and from the job sites. With maintenance, it gets to know 25, 27, snow route, same thing. So if you have two jobs side by side on a maintenance route and the next job is 15 minutes away, well, who pays for that windshield time? This is where it comes back. It would be everybody. You throw on your labor burden respective to your state, the taxes, insurance fees, and then here it is, you got the overhead markup. It's now taking this $25 an hour employee. We've paid everybody but your break even now is 49. And then when you throw in that profit margin from the budget, in this example, it's 10%. You have to charge the customer 5489. Now of course you have full control. If you want to set the own custom price or your own profit margins, you can do that yourself. But this is what element is recommending and you have full control of this. We'll do that same example like with your equipment, if we will build out like let's say a crew truck and a maintenance trailer. Now this is where we want to understand your shovels and your skid steers and excuse me, your, your mowers and trimmers and blowers. And once we have your trailers built out, you can break it down to either an hourly or a daily rate. So if you're spending 20 minutes on a job site or two hours or all day, you can recoup the cost of your equipment for materials. We'll do. We have a sync tool with SiteOne so we can populate your price list from sync one directly into here. Of course you can control the overhead and the profit from that budget we built back up here at the top. If you happen to buy materials not from site one, but from other vendors, you can come in here and plug that price in as well. I'll just do a quick example like mulch. And now you can see all your different vendors here where you buy mulch from along with the SKUs and the profit margins on these. And by all means, if you just say this is an overhead as in holistic, I can also dive right in. Let's go into this Apache BlackBerry. I can also set the price for this flower on my own as well. Also controlling shipping factor, warning factors, etc.
- [16:30]
C
Hey Troy, I gotta hop in for a quick second. This is another like a quick little area pet peeve. Of mine. And I promise I won't jump in 20 times. But the, when you go to like a, when you go to an event. And I remember this vividly, I went to a spring open house last year. Young Buck, 22 year old kid, follow him on tick tock. You know, just green, right? He's excited. And I was like. He's like, you, you used lmn, right? And I go, for sure. He goes, oh, I use, I think it was jobber. And he goes, what are you guys getting for, for a yard of mulch these days? And I'm like, ah, you know, it just depends. He goes, well we're getting 125A yard. And I go, awesome. And he goes, what do you get for plants installed? And again, he's just coming at me spitfire. He's a butt kicker, you know. And I'm like again, dude, I, I don't know my number. I gotta look at my element account, you know, and tell me what I would charge. And he goes, yeah, yeah, we take plants and we 2x, you know, 2x it if we're installing it, 2 1/2x if we're warranting it. And I'm like, cool. And at this point, you guys realize it's probably just kind of a one sided conversation here. It was just telling me how excited he is about how awesome he's doing and I'm here for that. I love listening to people brag on themselves. So I was like, hey, you know, awesome. And it sounds like you got it all figured out. The, the problem though, as you guys can imagine, is that's just guessing, right? That's guessing at best. And when you come into your price list here, it can really help you to have the baseline numbers. And as Troy's going to show you in a minute on our estimate, show you our break even and then plus profit. And it's really, really important to put your labor, equipment and material list in here correctly because that's what's going to give you the foundation to price correctly and for any of you guys. And I'm not making, this isn't an indictment on anybody. If you said this two weeks ago at your spring open house, but that was me as well, by the way, and I saw like a snapback version of myself 20 years ago getting started in the industry regurgitating the same nonsensical talking points that everybody else does because it's what I've just come to find a lot of the blind leading the blind. And, and I hope I can say that it doesn't mean I have it all figured out. Hardly the case. But what it does mean is that you can get accurate for you with what you need to charge for what you need to do. And these equipment calculators, including like the, the trucks and the trailers, like, this is super critical to get dialed in. I burn my eyes out, my brain out on this many times a year because this is what's going to allow me to know my numbers, what to charge, what to price, and even maybe work on some of these numbers to get them down. Or maybe they're better than I even thought and we're able to be more competitive to earn more work. So you can see Troy's manipulating a couple different values here. It's actually really fun when you get really involved with it and you kind of nerd out. And honestly, a lot of this is set it and forget it, but it really is a fun exercise. And this is what is like just the maturation of you being a business owner. Going from not even like CRM to CRM, but going from guessing to yeah, 50 bucks a card and, you know, $100 a yard installed to no, you know, Ms. Smith, it's 8,927 per yard. And you know, we have our minimums. You know what I mean? Like, it's just a much more mature conversation. And again, everybody on the Granum team is here to help you do it. And if for some reason they're unavailable, like, holla at your boy, smash the keys and I will get on a zoom and help you dial this in. And that's not lip service. I've done probably, I mean, literally 50 plus one on one demos and account questions like this. So just wanted to chime in again, Troy, because this is like the foundation. And if your buddy or your friend is like, I get 50 bucks for this or 100 bucks for that, and we'll show you the estimates here in a minute. It'll probably blow your mind again, but maybe, maybe, probably don't take business advice from those folks anymore. So for what it's worth, folks, now is the time to get registered for equip Expo 2026. You can use promo code Brian to save half off your Registration. Come join 30,000 industry peers as we descend onto Louisville, Kentucky for the super bowl of green industry trade shows and expos. There's over a million square feet of exhibit space on the inside where you can see all of your favorite brands and all the equipment that they have the offer. And also 40 acres of outdoor demo where you can test before you invest, and you can try before you buy. There's education, there's community, and there's training. All available for you at no extra cost. Come check it all out. And we hope to see you guys there again. Save 50% with promo code, Brian, and register today. And we look forward to seeing you guys in Louisville October 20th through the 23rd this fall.
- [20:59]
B
It's super important to set this, the budget and the price list. You know, that's kind of. Those are your North Stars, right? If you don't have that North Star set, then when you are creating those estimates, how do you know it's helping your business is that job? How is that job going to help you achieve your. Your goal that you set up for your company and knowing your number and just say, well, you know what? This job needs to be at $80 per minute hour, but I'm going to give it away at 75 because I want to stay competitive. You now know that versus, hey, this element is recommending 80. I'm going to try and make up a little bit more on this other job over here. I'm going to make it actually 90. And you can get aggressive either direction. So that's the whole point of this. It helps you know your numbers when you're out there doing, you know, all your estimates every single day, living, breathing, this.
- [21:51]
C
And, and to be clear, I knew none of my numbers. Not one zero, not one. So if anybody's like, dude, I don't know any of this. Look at this. This is ridiculous. Like, I have eight or 10 in my account, you know, of. Of my equipment. We got a small business, you know, maybe 10, you know, five or six for different labor categories. But I'll tell you what, like, folks, we didn't know any of this three years ago. I had general ideas. We were making some money. But again, if you're like, dude, I don't know any of this stuff, I assure you it's not as complicated as it might look or overwhelming as it might seem. Trust me, the Element team can help you dial it in, and so can I. So don't fret if you don't know. And if you do know, if you do know, you do have some good general ideas. Maybe you do have some good data, and you're doing $2 million. Awesome. Let's not leave any extra money on the table is what I like to say to those folks.
- [22:42]
B
Yeah, you hit the nail on the head with that one, because that's what I think. A lot of times I hear in the field, if somebody walks up to me and says, hey, you sold me element years ago, this is how it helped us. And that's typically what I hear for owners who are already at that 2 million beyond mark. Leave money on the table. All right, so that's the labor equipment. Same thing goes for materials. You know, we'll put it, oh, I just did the material, excuse me. And then the fun part of the price list is getting those, your production rates in the system. I'm just going to use like commercial mowing here first. In residential, you would, we would understand what size decks you guys have. This is all customizable. We would put in the units of measures. Again, you can have square footage, linear footage, acres, whatever is appropriate here for you. But those production rates are, that are going to flow into your templates. So when we're down here creating a brand new work template, let me go into something. You know, mowing is pretty simple. It's just a truck and trailer and your time grab like a concrete application just to show you the differences because, you know, in a concrete job it could be very routine or it could be extremely unique and customizable. Well, the point of creating these templates is that, you know, you're going to have labor equipment, you're going to have, of course, materials that you just can't get away from. So with that materials comes these production rates. So it'll automatically tell you, hey, we need, you know, for every 125 square feet, we need about a half a unit of work, whatever this, what did I select? Concrete ready mix, Cold weather mix. So that's where your production rates from here flow down into your templates down here. And creating templates is how you're going to create estimates that are repeatable and easy to use. We now have mobile estimating in the crew app. So you create those templates, customer walks out and says, hey, you're mowing my grass. But what would it be to do a mulch job or to replace these flowers? You can do that now from the app or you can do it from the element system here. So that's the. I'm going to move away from the price list and jump into the CRM. This is where you could have all your different leads, your clients, your vendors, subcontractors, lots of different search categories, drop down filters. Always recommend putting as many tags as you can to filter your clients through here. I'm going to go ahead and just jump into my trustee, Walker Shaw, school board and I'm going to start to Breeze through this. Just from a time standpoint, we're on the second half of the hour here. So with this, this is where your information tab comes in. This is all your pertinent information about the client, the general information, the tracking and assignments. Are they a lead at this point? Are they a client, a vendor? Who are they again? Commercial, residential, government? Who are they assigned to as a project leader? Tracking your referrals. These are all customizable things. Where, where you know when your phone or your lead comes into your website? Where did that come from? We want to track that. Do you have customers out there referring business to you? Who is it adding those tags to your client? The ability to put in your credit card or debit card information is really simple. And being able to store this live in the system, this allows you to turn on autopay, get paid consistently. From here you go into the Contacts tab. This is where you would enter all your customers information. Their titles, their phone numbers, email addresses, any notes about them. Hey, don't call before 5pm or don't call Saturday morning at 7am from here all the job sites can be listed. So this, since this is a commercial account, maybe this is a residential owner who has two or three properties. Maybe it's a commercial account and they have multiple locations underneath each of these. You're going to have its own respective locations and information. Who in the Contacts tab are you going to associate with this respective location? Any notes about them? With our professional plan so we have two starter and professional. Professional allows you to upload any files or photos regarding this customer. Timesheet photos. This is a little bit of foreshadowing with our professional plan. Your crews can take pictures with the crew app and they since we're cloud based, they'll automatically populate in your CRM along with when was that crew leader there? What do they do? Who was it? And then any comments the crew left behind on that picture. We do have a simple job site measurement tool. It's powered by Google so we use what's called drop pins. So I can come in here, let me just grab like a front yard and I'll put it as acres and I'm just going to measure a site out. Let's zoom out a little bit here. Let's come into this property. If I wanted to come over here and try and map this property, I can do it this way and move my drop pins around. If I can't see the property lines because of foliage, I can just click the map view and this way I can scroll in. So let's go ahead and grab this other house over here. Looks to be. So I can just simply do my little map views this way. Let's drag this one over here. It's going to get better. There we go. So now I can see this is about a third of an acre. Right. So simple to use on the measuring site from here. All your estimates Troy 1 quick no
- [28:09]
C
attentive is integrated now there which is pretty cool. So for any of you guys that are drinking the attentive Kool Aid like myself, it's you can have your takeoffs go right into the job site measurements. It's actually really neat and we'll show how those numbers relate back to an estimate here in a second. But pretty cool. No more dropping pins if you want to be part of the cool kids club.
- [28:32]
B
Right. If you don't know about 10 of AI it's really designed for commercial maintenance but it's high res 4K imaging. Take an apartment complex. Let's say you have 109 different small work areas and in LMN that could be really robust to build that and attentive. Super simple. You're going to map out hey these are all you know, mulch. This is weed eating, this is applications, this is pruning. You can do all that. So very, very simple and attentive and those like Brian said that data flows into your NOW element estimate. Speaking of estimates, any estimate you ever send this location or this job would be stored here. We now have a new feature. This came out just a few weeks ago. You're able so the customer calls you and says hey when's the next you know scheduled job for us to come do like a maintenance or mowing. You can see if what's active, what's inactive. You're able to say hey we're going to come out on June 9th. The last time we were there was June 2nd. Just it's really easy reports to for your employees, whoever's answering the phone to have that data. Top of mind there that pulling of schedules etc. Invoices again with the location. This is a newer tab about a year ago. You're able to see where they're you know just the status of their invoices. If something's pending or approved or queued up in QuickBooks. I do have some quick call out action items here meaning I don't have to change the CRM go down to the invoices. I can just stay right in here and add payments export to QuickBooks and invoices print and mail it out to them, etc. Just makes your life easier. In the back office, you can store all the communications you ever have with a client phone message. Emails, you're not able to email out of our system, just like regular correspondence. But if you blind copy this email address when you're using like Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, then all those communications would be stored here in element for you. So you got emails, you can track those phone calls to dos. This is something. An example would be, you know, customer calls in, I answer it and they say, can I speak to Brian Fullerton? He's out in the field right now. I can go grab Brian. I'm going to call Brian Eisenberger and then put a note here and drop it on Brian's calendar to call Troy. So that's that files again. This is where if you want to start to upload with a professional plan images that your crews can have access in the Crew app. This is one of the areas you can do that. You can also upload your your files down in the job list for a respected job, a customer portal. This is a great way for your customers to know exactly what's going on, like when you're coming, pay their invoices, update their own payment information. If you had professional, they can see images of the job you're doing. But of course, it all starts with permissions. So if you want to show your customers the scheduled dates you're going to arrive versus the actual date you get there, your crews get there. If you want to show your customers things like GPS location, crew notes, weather notes, equipment notes, etc. You have full control of all this. So just know that the benefit is when the customers are using the portal. You can now start to see if they paid with a debit card, credit card, if they viewed proposals, rejected it, if they looked at the invoices, you know, it's a much different conversation from a customer where you got to call and say, hey, did you get the invoice? Versus saying, hey, I see that you viewed the invoice last week and you clicked on it. Any questions I can help with? Let's get this thing secure. And you can take the credit card information over the phone, or you can send them a link to that portal and then they can pay it right there. Of course, you can see the portal users and what the portal looks like is this. This is your branded logo, your customer's information. Of course, there's a dashboard here, so they can see like proposals or invoices waiting for them, some things that are overdue, they can of course, pull their own estimates up. They can pull it by statuses, they can pull it by date range. They can quickly see what's been approved or what's waiting for them with regards to their job sites. They can come into the schedule and they can see like, hey, when are you coming to my property next? And what service are you doing when it comes to the details? Let me drop this back to 2025 just for a date range. So if a customer calls and says, hey, when was your crew there last? You can the portal, they don't have to do that. They can see what time you arrived, what time you left. Weather coordinates, GPS coordinates would be here, what services they were doing. Any notes that you want to share with the client could be seen here. And then any pictures that the crews take with our professional plan, you can see those images here as well. And then of course, they have the ability to see all their job sites as well. So they had like, let's say this is a commercial property and it was a gas station. And they have. They're servicing nine of their gas stations. They can pull up all nine of their gas stations and just click right on each location. And the color of this little icon is indicative of when the crews were there last. So they can quickly see by the color where the crews are by property or when they were there last. And they can see, of course, the schedule when you're going to show up. Your customers can also make requests to you if you have, like, hey, storm damage, no damage, hurricane, tornado, whatever that looks like. Can you come out and like, I have a tree down. I'm looking for a quote for a paver walkway or a new fire pit. They can make those requests to you. They can obviously come in here and pay their invoices. They can see their payment history. Of course, they can pull it out by what's due, what's overdue, et cetera. Down here is where they could update their payment information. Whether it's ACH or credit card or debit card, they have the ability to do that themselves. All right, let's get into some estimates. I think Brian mentioned that. So what I pulled up for myself
- [34:31]
C
is, Troy, I just want to mention cool thing that we did on our website. My brother, Brandon Bull, he put in the top right. You know, it says like, pay bill. So when we do a pay bill, if the customer clicks it, it goes to their portal off of our main website. Because you'll get somebody in the office that like, you know, is new or somebody is tasked with paying the bill. So now if they just go to brianzlm.com in the top right, it says, you know, pay bill or request a quote, that's where we bake that portal link for any of our commercial accounts specifically that will utilize a link like that. And they do, believe it or not, like they really do, especially if we're paying their invoice. So it's kind of cool to see like a plus one. It's like a forward front account for the business and for your business that people can pay their bill on. So it's a, it's a quick little nuance item, but it's just again, another way to like make your business look a little bit bigger and feel a little bit bigger than it is if it isn't yet. So just had to mention that.
- [35:26]
B
Excellent. Absolutely. And it also saves time. That's, you know, we're all strangers here. And I tell people on planes, I sell software to landscapers for a living that puts hours back in their day. Like those little minutes will add up throughout the year not having to answer that phone call and pay it. Right. Customers can do it self sourced. All right, so a little trick here. Again, back on the CRM system, I just created a contact using my own name. I actually got this idea from Brian, I don't know, a couple years ago. And so I took this and I created my fake customer is me and I created a bunch of estimates. So this way, if I'm talking to a client and they say, yeah, I'm looking for, it's that time of the year, not do a leaf removal. Let's say I'm looking for a maintenance contract. I have a quarter acre or I have a one acre lot, you can create these for like, you know, whatever. Create these for us, whatever is relevant to your business. If you do small residentials, if you do larger commercials, create it, call it maintenance, you know, maintenance, commercial maintenance template, call it residential, call it whatever you like. These are, again, I created all these. But if a customer said, yeah, I'm looking for, you know, a service contract, what do you guys do? Well, these are all the services that we provide, from spring cleanups to edgings to bed maintenance, fertilizations, etc, and if, you know, because again, I built this, if none of these, some of these things aren't relevant to you, you just wouldn't build them out. But if a customer called me and said, I'm looking for mowing, and again, this is a quarter acre so I've already built into like the, the, the job site measuring. I know it's about 10,800 square feet. I know this is a quarter acre. And if I want to charge the customer like on a per visit or a per season or by the hour, I can choose whatever how you guys bill your customers. In this case, I'm going to put it as per season, we typically get about 20, 28 visits here, maybe 30 in Georgia on an average. So. And then my billing rate on my equipment and my labor would be down here. So this again is based on a 60 inch deck. This is 10,890. But let's say I use a 30 inch deck. This is now about 0.36 of an hour. So a third of an hour, change this stuff. This is your cost for that labor. This is the unit price the customer pays. Same thing with your equipment. And you have full control of this. So let's bounce this back. This is originally based on a 10% profit. I can tell by the color this is what the system was suggesting. Now you have full control. If you want to come in here and say, you know what, this customer, I think I can get higher. Let's do a 30% margin on the equipment or the labor. I can do it independently like this, or I can go to this little drop down tab here on the left and I can just customize the per season or the per visit price so I don't have to come in and change these individually because I have full control of this.
- [38:30]
C
Hey, Troy, let me, let me, let me just jump in for a second. I know we're about 45 minutes in and we'll, we'll wrap this up at 8 on time for you guys. But I want to just mention a quick note just in case, just to shake it up in our brains for a second. Up until about three minutes ago, this is where your day to day process is going to start. When you're pretty much using the platform. Everything Troy talked about for the first 40 minutes, I don't want this to feel like, oh my God, it's 45 minutes to get here. Not that anybody's thinking that, but if you are looking at the platform, please know the budget, the price list, all of the stuff that Troy really was talking about is foundational. You do that for your first 10, 20, 30 hours. Setting up the platform, you dial it in once or twice a year. What we're talking about with the CRM and the estimate portion is what I do day to day, just for a Quick note for workflow, and we're going to get into it. But what Troy has here is super, super cool. And I do know Jobber created this a little while ago, so congrats to them. But this is the ability for you to. Now a new mowing customer comes in or a new commercial site comes in, pick that specific estimate. And now, as you can see, Troy is just manipulating values. How much time, what equipment, what services, and how many of them to start building out an estimate. We can build estimates start to finish. Once I know what the customer wants in 15, 20 minutes, it's really not that big of a deal. You enter them into the CRM, you start building out an estimate here that Troy is going through. But I just want to let you guys know, like, this is. This is bread and butter, what I use the platform for, you know, a couple of hours a day, a couple of hours a week. Right? Like, it's not that complicated. Once you get to this part of the business, to get here, it's going to take you 10, 20, 30 hours of onboarding or, you know, however adept you are at tech and software and can actually dedicate the time to understand the macro of what's going on here. But to get to this screen and to start building estimates, dude, this is like the coolest feature ever in my opinion. And where I spend 95% of my time is estimates, schedule, and invoicing. I just wanted to mention that toy because it's. I don't want anybody to think like, oh, my God, like, this is a lot to freaking take in. Look, the first 40 minutes, dude, you do that once or twice a year in January. That's about it.
- [40:48]
B
100%. Yep. Thank you for the time check as well. So I do need to dip a little bit here, but this. So the point of all this is you're able to come in and build out your templates. And then this is the power of LMN right across the top here. You're getting me able to see the hours for this entire project, the cost, your break even, your subtotal. And then we have this analysis tab that allows you to understand, hey, this is a $3,000 job. My cost of goods, my gross, my overhead, as I mentioned, and now I can see that break even. So this, I paid everybody, but now this is the profit for the company. So if this Customer said, Wow, 3000, would you take 2500? Well, right there, your break even is around 2500. So this, this is where the ball is now in your court. Am I am I happy with this budget for the company goal is 33, but my estimates giving me 44. My budget goal for net is 10. This job is giving me 19. My buckets all look about appropriate based on this cost ratios. And this is what the element is recommending. $88 per revenue hour. And this job is literally right at the mark. 8798. So no customer. I'm not going to take 2,500. I'm going to stick with this. This is helping me achieve my company goal. Maybe you want to meet him in the middle. Yeah. So this, this is the whole point of element right here. And then the rest of this stuff is pretty straightforward. You're going to send this proposal to a client. They're gonna that proposal that gets converted to a job. It now goes into your job list. From here, you're gonna schedule that workout. I'll just touch on this. Actually, let me save that one real quick. Let me come into my scheduling tools. So we have a whiteboard feature and a calendar feature. Both are extremely easy to use. There's no jobs here because today's Saturday. Let's bounce back to Friday. So you would have your crude lead or crude leads across the top. You can call them whatever you like. This is a sandbox environment. We just call them whatever we like. The jobs you can move from one person to another. If you have a lot of jobs and you don't want to grab each one, like this one here, for example, let's say it rained on this crew. I can select all these visits. I can reschedule from Friday. Let's put them into my Saturday. If I have professional, I can text those clients. But from here, I'm just going to move all that work from Friday. Now I bounced it all into Saturday. I can see when these jobs are scheduled, if they're started, if they're skipped, I can reschedule them easily. I can of course change them to a different crew lead. I can reassign a bunch of these from one person to another. If I have professional, I can text, I can type in whatever I want, or I can come into my templates and I can have these pre built out. We did this as a sandbox, so you're all customizable as a sales team. We just created these. Let's say I want to send the customers a reschedule notification. It'll fill in the customer's name, their address, their days, etc. All automatically. So the point of all this, really seamless. Great ways to use this to save time. Same thing with the whiteboard. Top left hand corner. You're going to select your click cruise. Whichever you have the color of the cruise, it's all subjective to you. You can select whatever color you like. There's well over 100 for Crew Leaf and then the same thing. I can move these jobs around. Looks like today. Here's the six. Looks like this. Enterprise Boulevard is a really long job. It goes all the way up to the 23rd. Well, let's say I called and said, hey, don't work on Saturday, please, can you come on Monday? Yep. It'll push all of these jobs out for you by a day. If I just want to keep moving in a couple days, let's do two more days out so it fills up down here. There it is. But the customer says you know it. Change of plans. Can you come back and work here on Saturday? I sure can. It'll push all these jobs back so it's intuitive forwards and backwards. I hear a lot. Like with jobber on the whiteboard, if you change a set scheduled job from today and you move it, it messes up the rest of the schedule. Ours does not. It'll stick. It'll go back to their original schedule plan. Wait list. Great way to add jobs onto a schedule. You know you're going to do them, but you don't quite know when. Of course. Unscheduled routes. Great for snow jobs, great for maintenance jobs. They're just in the crew app waiting for your guys. Time sheets. This is pretty straightforward. Once the crew app is engaged and it's used, the crew leader clocks out their employees for the day. You're going to know who your leader is. Other employees. The timesheets can sync directly into your QuickBooks. We do have two other integrations with ADP or Paycheck if you use them by any chance. Our professional plan allows you to see live crew and live job tracking. And this is based on punch in tasks. So when they punch into a job, you're going to see where they're at. They punch into the next job. It'll then show them there. So if they punch in away from the job, you know they're supposed to be over here at this location, but looks like they're over here at this D spot. Dessert Pickering. Sounds amazing. Who doesn't like a good dessert? But you can tell the crew, hey guys, I need you over here at the job site.
- [46:05]
C
No. No more calling your team. Hey, where you at? Hearing the guy in the background hit the pto, rip out His ISO tunes. What's up, man? You're like, hey, just seeing where you at. He's like, I'm mowing. What do you think I'm doing? You know, like.
- [46:18]
B
Yeah.
- [46:18]
C
And then he gets pissed off at you for calling them, you know.
- [46:21]
B
Yeah, great. Of course. And you can see exactly where they are as well. There's some other tools here, so you can see, you know, they punch in, pull that map up. All right, so invoicing, pretty straightforward. You generate invoices, they go into an invoice run. Let me just grab this first one here. These have all been approved already. So let me just change the statuses back the way. How would it would normally look when you pull up a blank one? So all your invoices are pending. I can pull this up real quick. Billing address, job address. If you're doing installs and you want to add PO numbers, the line descriptions, who your crew leaders are, you can come in and just grab a crew leader, put in the price. You can add services to this real quick. So if you forgot something, you need to add a new service. You can do this down here, put whatever price it is. Let's add another $300. And now my bills at 858 versus the 4, the 798. What do we have here? 794, that's what, taxes. Yeah, of course. You got like, you know, your invoice list, invoice groups. If you have customers that you know, you, you, you Pay on the 5th or you charge on the 15th of the month, the 1st of the month, whatever it is, you can have a bunch of invoice groups. Payment runs extremely easy for customers who have credit cards on file. You would come up here, select it and do that payment run. I'm going to dip real quickly into the crew app just to get a set of eyes on it. The crew app available, obviously Android, iOS available in English or in Spanish, just allows your crew leaders to come in, clock in their guys for the day. They have the ability to have mobile estimating contacting your contacts on the system. Of course, you have full admin control. So if you want to hide these features, you can. Your crew leader clocks in the guys for the day. It's like what job they're going to and all their jobs will be listed for them. It literally is just they hit the start button and the job gets moving. You do have gamization to show the crews how well they're performing throughout the day. Your hourly employees who cannot clock themselves out, those are Your crew members, they can still use the app to see where they're going, what they're doing. They feel like a value team member that it gives them a digital time sheet. So today is Saturday, and I want to see how many hours that I work this week. I can have the call or remember it. I can just pull my app up and see what my hours and overtime is. If I have like a design build example here, they would just punch in the cooler punches. Cruising for the day, punch into the job. All your tasks you have associated with this job would be highlighted again, that green button to get started, and they hit the same button again to end it. You can show the crews, like daily instructions or task instructions. With our professional plan, you can upload files or images on the backside. Your crews can take pictures of the job site. And again, they're going to see how well they performed against the hours associated for that day. Same thing with maintenance. It allows you just to have all your different services or materials you're using already pre filled in for them. They can just validate. Yep, I actually use 4 yards of mulch on this job. Or maybe I'm going to tell you, I actually use five and a half. So I'm just letting you know from a cost point, we actually use more materials. That's where you're getting those rich analytics.
- [49:48]
C
This is, this is huge for the field, by the way. Like, obviously, like when you schedule a job, the guys get it in crew. You're putting it on the calendar. They know the route or the job. The work that they log and punch creates timesheets. Timesheets generate invoices. It's very, very simple, but it's a feedback loop of data so you know that you're tracking hours correctly for the jobs you're scheduling. Lawn, snow, design, build. So if your guys are taking too long or maybe even too short, right? You can at least say, was it an estimating issue or a production issue? And again, you need this data as you continue to grow in scale and put other people in leadership seats from a crew lead and above, you know, for your operations. Huge, huge news. And by the way, my guys are all like 18 to 28 years old, dude. They were able to adopt this app in like 10 minutes. Okay? Like, we did like two teammate meeting trainings on it. It's not that hard. People are like, I can't get my guys to use an app or I can't get my guys to use fuel cards. I'm like, dude, it's a training issue. Like you know, like, what else do you want me to tell you? Every buddy on any job in any company on the planet punches in and out of a job or attendance. It's not that hard. Troy, quick question for you. A great question that came in. I know offline mode is a thing now. Somebody was asking, can they use it if they don't have cell phone service? Like if you're in a crappy area of town or some subdivisions just have like dead zones, man. I don't know what to describe it, but they have an offline mode, right? I think now?
- [51:16]
B
Yeah, absolutely. So everything will continue to cache while you're in the offline mode. So your crews can still log their hours, take their pictures, send messages, and as soon as you get that first signal, everything will then populate through. So cool. Yep, that's that.
- [51:32]
C
I know that's new from like a year ago, and I don't want to be like super pitchy, but, dude, Element is like really making the investment to the platform. They're cleaning up and fixing a bunch of stuff and a lot of these features didn't even exist a year or two or years ago. So if anybody's. I use element in 2017. You know, I get that sometimes I'm like, hey, wildly different than what you got access to today. So. And that's good.
- [51:55]
B
Yeah, yeah. And there's. I just saw in the product call yesterday, like even like the camera features being completely redone because when you're going to be able to take mobile estimates, you can add images right to your proposals directly from the mobile app feature. So we're completely revamping the pictures to make them larger. You can do edits on them, you can write messages, but emojis, all that fun stuff on your pictures for your customer. So pretty exciting. Just again, better experience overall. I do want to make sure I just throw out to you guys. Again, not pitchy, but there is a promo that was running in May that they extended through June 15th. So if you were looking to get started with Element, our pricing is very transparent. It's on the website. Starters, 300amonth. Professional, 650amonth. Both of them have onboarding fees that are one time the month of June till June 15th. We're waiving those onboarding fees. It's $800, 1500, respectfully. So great savings right there. Plus you pay the first month and then the next three months are waived. So if you got started, what's today's date? June 6th. You would not. Your next payment would be October 6th. So this allows you to have a really fun environment when you're going through onboarding. You can go as fast or as slow as you like. We've done some new AI tools that allows us to expedite onboarding to about 45 days for professional starters at 30 days. But Luke, the guy who oversees that starter department, his team are even getting that down shorter. So great opportunity there. If you're looking, if you, if you're on that bubble and you've been thinking about it, now's the right time. If this is just pure introductory, there's always promos in the future. In the chat is my contact information, I may be sold. Yeah, let's go. Well, I'm gonna stick around for about a half hour. Here it is Saturday. I can actually hear Darling is great beer for you guys. I got a 10 year old son, my wife and I in our mid-50s, but I can hear the monster stirring in the background. So if he comes in here wearing underwear and like no shirt, don't be alarmed. It's just my little man. He's not so little you ever met me. He's a big dude as well, so. So with that being said, Brian, thank you for the opportunity to connect with your team as always. If I see you at a trade show and event, please don't hesitate to come up to me. You'll see me before I see you. That's what I tell everybody. So because I'm a tall, big dude, I just. And people come up and go, Troy, I'm like, thank you for coming up to me. I never would have been able to find you in the crowd.
- [54:35]
C
So that's awesome. That's awesome. Troy, do me a solid, throw your link again, because I know some people might have joined after you posted that first up when we started this thing. So. Yeah, but book a demo if you know you're a green light, you want to get signed up. Rock and roll. I. I'm not like a, you know, need 20 demo kind of person. I'm a, you know, pooper, get off the pot kind of guy. So this is what I know we needed. Mark Bradley's like, he just looked at me, he's like, you need, you need to get on the platform. I'm like, here's my credit card. You know, like, duh. But if you do want 10 demos, that's fine too. I know Troy's is the guy that would literally do a half dozen demos to help you out and go through every nook and cranny of the platform. The last thing I'll say is. Two last things I'll say. One, it's like an iPhone. You know, it can do 10,000 things. I literally use it for about the same 6 to 10 features day in and day out. Same with my crew, same with my VA. So just because it can do 20 different things, you'll learn a workflow as you progress through the software, and you'll really find out, like, your sweet spots and your workflow as you continue to use the platform more. And it's going to take time. The last thing I'll say is it's a process, right? To get onboarded and to learn that workflow, you have to give yourself some Runway. It's not going to just be like, sign up today, use it tomorrow. It can be signed up today and use it in 30, 60 days, for sure. So if you guys are looking to start thinking ahead, give yourself some Runway. You're thinking snow, you're thinking fall, you're thinking, you know, have the best 20, 20, what, seven, you know, season ever. Like, that's where you start getting the wheels in motion. Now, again, I'm into my third season with the platform, and we've pretty much dialed it in, like, you know, 95% of the way there, and we're getting 1% better every day kind of deal. But please know, like, give yourself some time, give yourself some Runway, give yourself some some mental bandwidth to utilize the platform. I know it's a commitment both financially and time, but again, I really just want to charge you guys, like, if you're doing 2, 3, 4, 500 grand in revenue and you got a half dozen guys or a larger business, I mean, Troy and I have seen and do demos with guys all the time that do 5 and 10 million. And, dude, it's wild. It's literally baffling that they've made it that far. And they'll tell you. They're just guessing. Educated guess, but they're just guessing. So give yourself some time as you guys use the platform. Last thing I'll say as I wrap up five times, like your pastor tomorrow, the best question that was proposed to me about a week ago. This one's just stuck with me. It's my little humdinger. Somebody said, could you imagine not running a business with Element at this point? And I about freaked out. Rob's one of my buddies. He's in here as well. And I was like, what do you guys, like, deleting the platform or something? I, like, freaked out. I was like, don't mess with my cookie jar, okay? I was like, nobody touch anything. This freaking thing is finally working. My business is growing. We're making money. You know what I mean? And I was laughing, but if somebody literally told me, hey, we're doubling the rates tomorrow or we're taking it away, I would say, like, no problem. Charge me double. It's that good. You know, I. I would budget for it. Life would go on. But I could not even imagine not running my business at this point with lmn. And that's not me just drinking the Kool Aid. So I. I couldn't imagine going back to what we were doing, which was honestly the good old throw mud up against the wall and sees what sticks. And so it's been made all the difference for. For my business, for many others out there. Troy sees that, I see that. And again, like, the finances and the budget and the projections and the profitability folks, like, let's be really clear here. What that yields to me and you is more time with the family, more money in the checking account, better raises for the guys, less invoicings at 10pm at night when we're tired, less losing sleep on Saturday mornings because we're up at 5am doing end of month. That's what we're trying to help you guys shore up. It takes some time to learn the platform, but that's what we want to help you guys buy back and get better at is making more time, having more money, and having less hassles in your life. And really, when you get invested into the platform, that's what it will do for you. So that's my last 2 cents if it helps. Using past history to see when renewing, adjusting rates. Yeah, Cool, cool, cool. If you got questions and specifics, like I said, get with Troy. He's available this morning as well, but that's where I'll leave you guys. If you sign up, Troy's got some great promos there for you. We love you. Appreciate you, Troy. Any final thoughts again?
- [59:13]
B
Thank you, guys. I know it's early Saturday morning, so I appreciate your time.
- [59:16]
C
Let's all get out of here and go get our dunkin. Amen.
- [59:18]
B
So.
- [59:18]
C
All right. Love you guys. Appreciate you. Have a great day, and we'll catch up with you guys here soon. Bye.
- [59:23]
A
Listen to what lawn care pro Joel Adams said after buying the SOP training bundle. Quote, that's the least painful $999 I've ever spent. It would take my team $200 to make lesser clean content. That's five bucks an hour. I don't work for five bucks an hour, so it was a no brainer. Smart move Joel. If you're a lawn care business owner drowning in bottlenecks and burning daylight training your team from scratch, stop reinventing the wheel. The SOP Training Bundle gives you plug and play systems that bring clarity, remove bottlenecks and free you up to grow. Just $999 using the link in the description or by visiting thelauntrepreneuracademy.com stop duct taping your business together and be like Joel. Pick up the SOP Training Bundle today.
- [60:20]
D
Thanks for taking the time to listen to the Fullerton Unfiltered Podcast with Brian Fullerton. We hope you enjoyed this production. If so, please consider leaving us a follow 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.
- [60:54]
B
Fullerton Unfiltered Podcast thanks for listening and
- [60:57]
D
we hope to see you on the next episode.
- [61:00]
A
This has been a Brian Fullerton and Mr. Producer Production.