We've gotten to the size where I don't remember these people anymore.
When building systems, pretend you have 10-100x more customers than you do, what would you do then? What would you do if the names were just customer ID numbers? How would you operate then? When you can't remember who lives where and who wants what and who requested what, etc.
So we finally started implementing some systems of scale.
When I give quotes, I take better notes so it goes into their customer profile. The notes are turned into tags in their dispatching software, so I can press a button and filter and sort customers that want certain services.
I also exported the recurring payment list into an excel sheet, filtered for unique names against our dispatching software and deleted the unique names meaning that there's only current, paying customers in our dispatching software. I had let every single person we've ever had as a customer since 2018 just sit there and rot and it needed some cleaning up.
Then, I took our per crew monthly revenue goal, did some basic math to figure out how much time each property should take based on their price, given that revenue goal, and assigned a total time goal (driving plus work) for each property in a spreadsheet. For a 13k revenue goal, we figure a biweekly (every other week) customer should be getting 41 minutes of our day (includes driving) if they are paying $150 a month.
I uploaded that to mapline, which is some pretty cool mapping software.
Now, I can see all of the customers on a map, filter different things, and make a schedule for each crew that is dense, and set up to add up to an equal time goal for each day for each crew, which I can put in the dispatching software and the guys will know how long they should be spending at each place. They'll know if so and so's place is worth a 25 minute visit, or an hour.
Did all this with hundreds of customers in a very short period of time.
Our dispatching software lets us set up recurring visits and it repeats as long as we want it to. The problem before was I wasn't sure how well I would build a schedule when we have a shit ton of customers I can't remember many things about. And it would only get worse as we got bigger. So this solves that problem. I can signup a customer, they get put into the system and get recurring visits set up, we can adjust the notes for the future visits today, so they are getting the premium services they requested without me setting reminders, I can assign a time value to them so it fits into a crew's schedule without the crew getting swamped because they got too many expensive, tough customers in an unfair way compared to another crew, and each time they're there, they know about how long a normal visit should take, and we can easily click a button and filter tags for a customer to see a list of who should be getting which services.
That was all just this afternoon after a couple of problems came up with our scheduling system and I saw how it would turn into a shit show if we were much bigger, better to do it now.
It only adds a couple of small steps to our onboarding process but lowers our daily scheduling time and I imagine it's going to cut our complaints in half. Ounce of prevention, pound of cure type of thing.
We've been doing about 7 quotes a day right now. I've got the secretary working double time. We've got our 4th truck on the way. Our goal this year is 50k/mo revenue and to have VERY scalable systems that are very concrete and don't break down when you throw a ton of customers at it.
When building systems, pretend you have 10-100x more customers than you do, what would you do then? What would you do if the names were just customer ID numbers? How would you operate then? When you can't remember who lives where and who wants what and who requested what, etc.
So we finally started implementing some systems of scale.
When I give quotes, I take better notes so it goes into their customer profile. The notes are turned into tags in their dispatching software, so I can press a button and filter and sort customers that want certain services.
I also exported the recurring payment list into an excel sheet, filtered for unique names against our dispatching software and deleted the unique names meaning that there's only current, paying customers in our dispatching software. I had let every single person we've ever had as a customer since 2018 just sit there and rot and it needed some cleaning up.
Then, I took our per crew monthly revenue goal, did some basic math to figure out how much time each property should take based on their price, given that revenue goal, and assigned a total time goal (driving plus work) for each property in a spreadsheet. For a 13k revenue goal, we figure a biweekly (every other week) customer should be getting 41 minutes of our day (includes driving) if they are paying $150 a month.
I uploaded that to mapline, which is some pretty cool mapping software.
Now, I can see all of the customers on a map, filter different things, and make a schedule for each crew that is dense, and set up to add up to an equal time goal for each day for each crew, which I can put in the dispatching software and the guys will know how long they should be spending at each place. They'll know if so and so's place is worth a 25 minute visit, or an hour.
Did all this with hundreds of customers in a very short period of time.
Our dispatching software lets us set up recurring visits and it repeats as long as we want it to. The problem before was I wasn't sure how well I would build a schedule when we have a shit ton of customers I can't remember many things about. And it would only get worse as we got bigger. So this solves that problem. I can signup a customer, they get put into the system and get recurring visits set up, we can adjust the notes for the future visits today, so they are getting the premium services they requested without me setting reminders, I can assign a time value to them so it fits into a crew's schedule without the crew getting swamped because they got too many expensive, tough customers in an unfair way compared to another crew, and each time they're there, they know about how long a normal visit should take, and we can easily click a button and filter tags for a customer to see a list of who should be getting which services.
That was all just this afternoon after a couple of problems came up with our scheduling system and I saw how it would turn into a shit show if we were much bigger, better to do it now.
It only adds a couple of small steps to our onboarding process but lowers our daily scheduling time and I imagine it's going to cut our complaints in half. Ounce of prevention, pound of cure type of thing.
We've been doing about 7 quotes a day right now. I've got the secretary working double time. We've got our 4th truck on the way. Our goal this year is 50k/mo revenue and to have VERY scalable systems that are very concrete and don't break down when you throw a ton of customers at it.
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