[ show notes auto-transcribed using Trint]
Jacob: [00:00:00] Decisions in your business come at you a million miles an hour and the decisions never go away as you grow. They actually just get bigger and these happen every day, it can be employees, it can be money, it can be marketing, it can be anything. Every single thing is a million decision to stand in front of you and the progress you want to make [00:00:25][25.3]
Nicholle: [00:00:26] and you are the as the business owner, you know, you’re the go to a person and like you said, I don’t think it goes away as you grow. I think, yeah, you put more people in levels of leadership. But then those people that you’ve put in leadership are then the ones they’re asking you to help make decisions. And maybe you aren’t the one then acting on the decisions you make so much, but decisions are still always continually forced in front of you. And it all starts with the simple things. I mean, choosing a CRM, for example, which is something we’re going to dive into, may seem like a big, overwhelming decision. Yeah, that’s one of the easy things that you have to start with, you know? Yeah, it just gets bigger and bigger. So today we’re going to talk about decision making in business and how to make the right decisions in and for your business, for sure. So let’s start with that, because this is something you get asked all the time. It’s a huge topic of discussion and not just at the beginning level when someone may be choosing a CRM for the first time. But maybe like something that you just did where you realize the CRM you’re using, there could be better options out there. So I want you to walk us through our CRM journey that started in 2014 when you started your business. What did you start with? [00:01:40][73.9]
Jacob: [00:01:41] OK, so. First CRM we ever had was Jobber. I realized that, you know, the keeping track of stuff on paper and this and that it just did not make sense. And I always knew that I was really wanting to grow the company so we work with. We did that for a year. I think that was the second like the first full time year of our business when we were really starting to push and wanted to rock and roll. And. At the end of that, I realized, although it helped, there was just so many things lacking from it at that time, I don’t know what job it looks like today. I know there’s a lot of people that use it. [00:02:18][37.0]
Nicholle: [00:02:19] And there’s a lot of big people in our industry that push Jobber, but I’m not sure that they’re operating at – [00:02:25][5.6]
Jacob: [00:02:25] That’s the whole thing. Everybody pushes Jobber and LMN and this and that. And it’s like, you know, Jobber was going to be great for a for a small company, you know? But that wasn’t my ambition. And you said it right? I think that’s you always need to look who you’re listening to and check that they are building what you want to build. You know, I would never knock any of these guys because they’re building their own thing. They’re building their own brands with YouTube and whatever, and that all those things are great. But from the business aspect alone, you know, if someone’s pushing a certain brands, pushing job or pushing this, pushing that, pushing the other, just, you know, make sure that what they build is what you want to build. So, you know, and I think that maybe some of these people run smaller companies and there’s nothing wrong with that at all. I’m not I’m not knocking that. But yeah, for us, that 100 hundred thousand like we got up to like one hundred and eight or 120000 or something. And it’s like, man, there’s just no freakin way this is scalable. [00:03:28][63.0]
Nicholle: [00:03:29] Yeah, the scalability within Jobber at that time was just very low. I think my microphone might be a quiet, little quiet. Maybe. Sorry, if so. [00:03:40][11.2]
Jacob: [00:03:41] And and what’s what’s really interesting about that, that I almost stopped in the middle of my conversation, but I didn’t want to lose track was thinking back like a hundred and eight. We spent all year doing that, and that’s what Jobber worked well for at that time. And and now, like, that’s that’s not fathomable to me because we were we’ve got to where we just grow real fast whenever we do something like this here. You know, like just in Florida, first nine months, what it’s done four hundred and twenty five thousand. But it’s like a lot of this is because now we have a system that we use that’s scalable and it’s allowed us to really expand quickly. So from that standpoint, I started looking at what’s going to take me to the next level. I think in Jobber, the problems I had were scheduling. I didn’t think scheduling was fast enough. And when I say scheduling fast enough, you know, if there was a rain day, I want to be able to push a hundred jobs forward to the next day and move that quickly. But then also not just quickly do that quickly move them quickly. Email update all of them quickly move on to the next thing quickly. Email update the list that was already on that day that there may be delays due to, you know, whatever needs, we need communication. OK, and then second of all – well, Jobber may do it now. I don’t know, but I was wanting reporting, I want numbers. I’m a numbers guy. That’s why I’ve got the the Polar watch coming. I want to know I want data about all the things that I’m trying to make better. And with the business, I want to know our man, our rates and all these things. And you know, I’ve always watched all of these companies manually logging this off of a paper sheet. The field techs should be clocking in and out of the job. So I need something that does that and throws a report about the hours and shows the dispatch board that shows the variances in the hours so the office can look over this stuff. And you can ask the people that have been around me for a long time in Illinois from an office standpoint, I’m like, OK, cool. I want to ask, how’s this work with a thousand, how’s this work for 4000? Has this work of five thousand? Is it scalable? Can you do it? Does it make sense or is it a total fucking pain in the ass? That, yeah, it worked for this second right now, but it doesn’t make any sense as we get bigger. And and that’s really, really where we got into what got us into service autopilot. So there was the reporting, there was the scheduling and the holy grail at the time, Jobber could not – I couldn’t charge hundreds of people at the same time, like we had Stripe and we were able to charge one at a time, but that’s a nightmare. That’s not scalable. I need to be able to charge everybody at once. If there’s a 400 mow clients, I need to be able to check, look through, charge them all in several clicks and in Service Autopilot, I was able to highlight all, look down the list and then click to open the box. Second, quick hit charge cards and it was done. So I was looking for all the scalability and things that made my business smoother. Along with communication between office people and things like that. So that’s when we got into Service Autopilot. And that’s really, you know, I’ve leaned and pushed and grew in this system. We’ve used a lot of this system. We’ve adopted everything in this system you can adopt and tweak. We’ve played with different things and we’ve continued to grow and grow and grow and scale with the system. [00:07:04][203.4]
Nicholle: [00:07:05] And it hasn’t been without work arounds and problems. And I know there are a lot of frustrations people may have with limitations or things that maybe don’t work for their business inside Service Autopilot. But for us, we found that it was the answer for scalability and it did. It got us through until – well, actually in 2021, you start exploring other options and I’d really like to hear what was making you invest more time into looking into the next thing. [00:07:33][27.7]
Jacob: [00:07:33] So, so yeah, in 2021, really the issue that I mean Service Autopilot knows this and everybody knows this or uses Service Autopilot knows that it just lacks a little bit in the landscape tracking side. And maybe I just wasn’t making workarounds the right way before, and I know some big companies that use LMN. You know, I know a company that did eight million in 2010 that uses LMN and Service Autopilot side by side and uses LMN for their landscape side. So basically, I was looking for better tools to help with landscaping. He originally looked at Aspire, started talking to them briefly, and it just looked so bad on communication and other things. I was trying to find some things that were trying to find an all in one deal. And I was just, like, immediately turned off by what it had to offer. And so then it became cool. Well, I’ll try running LMN alongisde Service Autopilot and just run it for the project teams. I’ll test it in Florida. And you know, how much time do you think I put into setting up what I wanted to set up inside? [00:08:46][73.0]
Nicholle: [00:08:47] I have no idea. [00:08:47][0.3]
Jacob: [00:08:48] I mean, I don’t know had to be a it was a big investment, you know, to still check this out and and look for this. But you know, I want to kind of tell the story of LMN that that was my next. That was my next thing was go to LMN, look at running that side by side. And I set that up to do estimates. I set it up to run the landscape teams. And yes, it was good, but it I had to keep circling back in business and I need to keep reminding me the whole KISS principle. Keep it simple, stupid, you know, like it was just duplicating things. And but what’s really cool? Just out of all failures using LMN was a failure. I spent 40, 50, 60 hours setting it up, and then I realized it wasn’t great. It wasn’t. It wasn’t. It wasn’t good enough to justify duplicating. [00:09:34][46.0]
Nicholle: [00:09:35] Well, in none of these things are like digs at the software themselves, not LMN or Service Autopilot themselves. But like for especially if you already have an existing company, it’s like you require so many specific things. So it is. It’s interesting to look at it from the established side – [00:09:50][14.8]
Jacob: [00:09:50] And I already I already know where we’re at with Service Autopilot and I create more work arounds in there and I just offer certain things that we have to have. And but so I failed with the LMN attempt, but I won with the LMN attempt because in setting up LMN, I taught myself a lot of things that I was like, Wow, OK, cool. So I can set up Service Autopilot to mimic this. And here’s the workaround there. And here’s the work around with this. And here’s the job costing change on this. And now we have a system where we’re still doing it all in-house with Service Autopilot. It’s came full circle and there’s things that I wish were better and things that I wish were changed and cleaned up a little bit. But they’re going to continue to make progress. I know they know they’ve got this weak spot and. And now we’re ready to truck into 2022. [00:10:39][48.9]
Nicholle: [00:10:40] So then when people ask us, like, what was CRM, do you use, what’s the best CRM? So many people want that cut and dry answer. Like, I guess we’ve used Service Autopilot you know, over half a decade, and we have no immediate plans to obviously switch from them. And that would be a huge hurdle in itself to step completely away from a CRM and move to another where we’re at right now. But it’s like, that’s the thing. There is no one size fits all. You just really explained how so many different scenarios are great in of themselves. But like, what are you building? What do you want to build? What do you need? You really need to look at at what you require and like for us. Communication is huge. Maybe for other people, they’re not going to put the emphasis on communication. And so there’s so many different pieces of puzzles, and I think people probably are like when they ask you, you know, what CRM do you use? What CRM should I use? It’s probably funny that you can’t really give a straight answer because it’s like, Well, this is, you know, what we use and I don’t know what’s right for you, truly. [00:11:43][62.7]
Jacob: [00:11:44] Yeah. And back to the the old CRM saying is what’s the best CRM? The best CRM is just the one you’re going to use. Exactly. You know, I just found out that for me, Service Autopilot checks the the the largest amount of boxes and the ones that doesn’t. I could work around a little bit. And you know, from all this, I was using a lot of Google Sheets and Excel and workarounds, and I believe I have a plan to where there’s literally no more of that other than like final data collection, you know, which is is really exciting moving into 2022 because we were doing other things that I just, I don’t think were necessary. [00:12:20][36.2]
Nicholle: [00:12:21] Well, in addition to our CRM, I mean, we heavily rely on things like Google Drive. Like you said, Google Sheets, Slack, Grasshopper is what we make all of our calls around. Like it’s not like Service autopilot is the be all end all for our company. Mean, just as a big bulk of things, but we still utilize, you know, other things. So I think if people are looking for that one thing that they’ll never have to use anything else that could be challenging, whereas you were always looking at it like what can do the most of what? You know what I need? And now I think it has been really cool to watch you do that whole element venture and wonder kind of how that was going to play out and then see that it’s sort of closed a chapter of wondering, are we doing the right thing? Because now we can plow forward because you took action. You spent a lot of time exploring, you know, the options acting towards figuring out if it was right, but you didn’t spend a lot of thinking about it. You really did like you found like, Oh, this could be cool, I’m going to dove in, set it up, like you dove in. I thought that was cool. [00:13:18][57.5]
Jacob: [00:13:18] So yeah, I mean, so many people and I mean, you’ve heard me get on this with like techs and stuff like the decision making thing like, I don’t I don’t want to waste time on making a decision. I, you know, you see a lot of people do that and I just I want to I want to try these things. I would rather try and learn as fast possible. [00:13:35][17.2]
Nicholle: [00:13:36] And that kind of leads into other common questions. I think people have not just in GROW Comm, but just general, like you get these messages all the time, these comments on stuff or we just see it, you know, from other industry people. And it’s these questions are not stupid. These questions are great to be asking. What I notice a lot with these questions, a few of these common ones we’re going to talk about is that people ask, collect the answers and then still don’t make a decision. They spend a lot of time still thinking. And then how many months go by, whether it’s about a CRM or about whatever, about changing your business cards or starting a website. If you let six months go by before you finally act on hiring someone to do your website, then you still have probably six more months ahead of you before you start ranking. Well, like, it’s if you’re trying to grow truly every second counts. So other things that I feel like you’re common, which we all to spend a lot of time on these, but like brands of equipment and brands of trucks. Now you don’t know, save the trucks. Let’s just talk about like brands of equipments. What do you say when people are asking you, like, what’s the best blower? What’s the best mower? Because I I love your response and I want you to kind of say it here. [00:14:46][70.1]
Jacob: [00:14:47] Yeah, I mean, like, they all are great. They’re all great. They’re all whatever. Sure, some things are better here and better there, and everybody’s got their preference. But to me, it’s like, what? Where do you get the best service with your stuff, you know, and that becomes less important. The bigger the equipment gets, the more important that is. The smaller the equipment, the less important that is. You know, you’re talking about a blower. It’s kind of a throw away deal. You know, it’s if it’s one hundred thirty bucks like it’s a it’s a throwaway tool compared to. 1890, $100000, a piece of machinery that like if that thing’s not running, you can’t just go buy one and get back out, Roland. You know, so like when we look at our skid stores and our excavator stuff like it has to be, it has to be operating. And we’re losing money if it’s not for projects, and that’s where the service counts. [00:15:34][47.0]
Nicholle: [00:15:36] I totally agree, and I see so many people spend so much time. Again, it’s not the problem that I see and asking the question. It’s then sitting on the answers that you receive, like sitting on buying something. And research is great and you should do your due diligence when you’re making decisions. But I think the big thing here, like you just said, it’s like act because they all are going to do the same thing. Yeah, it’s what is the most efficient thing for your business when something does go wrong? Because again, you’re the decision maker, you are the problem solver, you’re the firefighter, you are everything as you as the business owner. So that’s a great way to look at it – what’s the fastest resolve when something does go wrong with whatever piece of equipment? OK, let’s talk trucks. And let’s not just talk brands, because that’s this news fast. But we were just asked a really cool question in GROW Comm. And when you kind of like explained to me that that was a position you’ve been in before, too, that was really cool. And so I know it’s not just isolated to you and him like, I would love to hear it. Can you like spell out this question and kind of explain the problem? Yeah. [00:16:41][65.5]
Jacob: [00:16:41] Quick synopsis. That’s right. Yeah. Okay. The question would be someone who is working towards moving out of the field eventually still has a little bit of involvement in the field and wondering what truck to get now, not truck like Ford Chevy truck, like a half ton or three quarter ton. And then in this question, there was a couple of caveats like he was going to still be pulling around equipment, he was still going to be plowing snow. And so this questions are really quality question to me where where I hate it, it’s not knocking it, but when it’s brand related, like they’re all great. Can you get a truck? Yeah, if you need a truck by truck, is Dodge available? Is Ford available? What the answer is, what’s available like right now, like I want to go get a second. I went to go get a dodge. I wanted a three quarter ton truck and I was going to go right back to dodge and buy another one. [00:17:32][50.7]
Nicholle: [00:17:32] Not available for that is really what I’ve seen that people are saying that it’s going to be like a year. I might be totally off base, but is it like they’re out of stock for like a year or so with some [00:17:43][11.0]
Jacob: [00:17:44] supplies, some things, certain things? I don’t know. I’m not looking forward to it because I’m backed by a third truck for Florida and I don’t know what it’s going to be. It’s going to be what’s available. I don’t give a shit if it’s a Chevy, if it’s a Ford, if it’s a dodge. If Toyota made it have two or three quarter ton, I would care if it was a Toyota. You know, it’s totally it’s irrelevant to me. But with with that being said, like his question was specific on half ton, three quarter ton and it was a quality question because I lived through that. I was transitioning out of the field in the first truck I ended up getting before I knew it was going to be a necessity and my business was a three quarter ton truck. And what I’ve realized to just go to the nitty gritty of this is as my business grew, I realized three quarter ton trucks were a commodity that we just didn’t really have enough of. We had a lot of half tons for smaller stuff. And if you’re going to be landscaping, if you’re going to be pulling equipment ever, if you’re going to be, you’re going to be plowing snow, I think you should just have three quarter tread tons. They’re built to do more. They’re bigger trucks, they’re they’re heavier duty. A lot of them, you know, like plowing snow like there are so many pieces, this is getting in depth to the mechanical side, but there are so many pieces in an independent front end. That’s why if you want to get brand specific, I don’t like that Chevy’s big trucks have that Fords and Dodges have a solid front axle, so for plowing snow, I feel like that’s a much more solid setup. Plus, they’re meant to pull more so pushing, you know, they’re going to do better pushing. They’re meant to be doing heavier duty stuff. And there’s this other little thing that is important. Some rental places won’t let you what pull away. Like, if you’re delivering stuff to your guys, they won’t even let you pull away a piece of equipment unless you’ve got a three quarter ton truck are bigger. So I think half tons or you have tons are good for pulling them. Trailer pulling some really light stuff and doing run around delivery work. But if you’re going to be stepping into plowing snow hauling equipment, you need a three quarter time. [00:19:45][121.1]
Nicholle: [00:19:45] And then once you are totally leased and then when you are totally out of the field, you switched to a straight up car. [00:19:51][5.5]
Jacob: [00:19:52] Yeah, I kind of tapered away like, so I got the three quarter ton. Then about a half ton. And then I was like, I don’t want to be – at some point in your business, you realize like being liable to bring stuff to people all the time and you being a delivery person is not your best purpose. And then I got the car because I was like, I don’t want to be the guy that is liable for taking all this because the jobs are slowing down my sales and slowed down my focuses that I really need to be working on. [00:20:21][29.0]
Nicholle: [00:20:23] You know, the whole thing about you, and obviously you can see it in the way that we’ve grown is you are straight action like you. Not only do you at a personal level, do everything that you say, like that’s that’s who you are. If you know you say what you mean, you do what you say, all the things like you get the full package you present as exactly what you will be. But that has so trickled into our company where you act and it’s hard. I can imagine it’s hard as someone who is like just starting out who’s never had to make these decisions, never had to make these decisions at the rate of speed that it may require. If you’re trying to grow fast and then if you’re not making those decisions quickly, then you are experiencing slower growth, which could be enough to frustrate someone to be like, Why am I not seeing these results? I want to see it could truly be in things like your rate of, you know, action and and just running with whatever you choose following your gut, doing your due diligence, but taking action and moving forward like you had. We did our goals episode of this podcast and I talked about how I think by our third month here in Florida, you had already hired a full time executive assistant and then like, very quickly after that, we hired an office manager. We were in a, you know, new office like like, you’ve taken action before. It’s comfortable. And I think that’s another thing to talk about is like these decisions are not always comfortable and like you spending 60 hours, let’s say, acting and trying to figure out if LMN was going to be the right choice like that was probably pretty frustrating. Then to get to the end of that and realize that maybe that you had felt like you wasted time. I don’t know if that’s how you feel. [00:22:06][102.6]
Jacob: [00:22:06] So what’s really cool? And I mean, honestly, that’s why I get mad when people get frustrated about stuff like, I don’t usually it takes. I don’t know, would you say I’m frustrated a lot about things [00:22:18][12.2]
Nicholle: [00:22:19] I don’t know. [00:22:20][0.3]
Jacob: [00:22:22] I get frustrated when people move really slow, and I don’t think that they respond quick enough. That’s of like my main form of frustration because any time I’m Muslim and I’m frustrating, it’s because like I or anybody, it’s just because I feel like the answer should be different and it should be quicker. And even if it isn’t supposed to be different [00:22:38][16.3]
Nicholle: [00:22:39] and some people think a little differently than that, they kind of consider [00:22:41][2.4]
Jacob: [00:22:42] like, it’s just that. That’s my thing. That’s probably my biggest frustration thing. But like what we’re talking about the LMN deal, which would maybe piss some people off. I was actually like, I’m glad. I’m so happy I did it. I learned from it. And like almost everything in business, failure wise, it’s like, I look, I look at I’m like, there’s the gold nuggets in that. So that’s what I’m trying to do is find the good pieces that helped me kick ass. And and I did that with LMN. We have structured something that’s fucking bad ass, all because of LMN and some of the things I learned from it. [00:23:15][33.4]
Nicholle: [00:23:17] I love that. That’s how you look at it, because we hadn’t actually talked about it. So that’s cool that you that that’s your takeaway. Let’s pick something I want to kind of touch on is like my my specialty, which is marketing like, so let’s say you’re starting your business, you’re, you know, a few years into your business, even you’re making all these decisions and you’re starting to feel really comfortable with making those decisions that are like the trucks and the equipment and the the things that you’re more comfortable in with the field, but like you’re not comfortable making marketing decisions like you still can’t really justify a website. You don’t really understand what SEO even means. You don’t know why you would need to be on a Google map. You don’t know why you should push reviews like all those little tiny pieces of marketing that build up to be like a full fledged strategy like you even posted on social on Facebook since 2018, and you don’t know why you should, but then you post one time and then tell everybody that Facebook doesn’t work things like that where you truly just don’t maybe like, understand. So it’s harder for you to take action because it’s hard for you to even, like, give attention to it enough to learn it. That can be really detrimental, I think, to people, and it’s something that I see. I don’t see a lot of lawn and landscape professionals hiring marketing staff in-house marketing stuff until they’re. Very established, like, I mean, I don’t know of many people top of our head actually that have like full marketing teams in house. It’s easier to outsource, first of all. But like, like we were talking about, it’s like all in if you want to get well known, if you want to be known, you’ve got to get out there, you’ve got to be known, you’ve got to invest in marketing, you’ve got to be pushing that side. You can’t ignore that side because you’re so busy making decisions about the trucks. And if you’re going to own it or at least, then what you do with it. So what’s your advice for people when you’re making decisions that are outside your comfort zone? Because you before we before you answer that like you learn every single thing about something and then you move on to the next thing and you do that very, very quickly and you do that with all things in life, you are fully immersed and obsessed with something. And I don’t think everybody has that time, energy or willingness to like, master every little thing. So like, what do you have for the people who don’t want to learn marketing? They know it’s important, but they don’t even know how to make those decisions or marketing as an example. [00:25:33][135.8]
Jacob: [00:25:35] Yeah. The busiest times were as entrenched in marketing before I could afford to have somebody. And I mean you, we were sharing ideas about how to do the best thing, like even though I wasn’t the copywriter, I was like, I had ideas like, We need to do this or we need to act. We need I need like before you even got really found out you did. Marketing was I was like, We have to have a website. Mm-Hmm. That was before you like how I [00:25:59][24.2]