Crm: hubspot
Instant quote software: Lawnbot by workwave (LIFESAVER: We give instant quotes using this and our standard pricing based on square footage and drawing out the property on a map means our service rep gives lightning fast quotes that people can get in minutes instead of showing up next day in person and a salesman having to give quotes all the time)
Lead gen: Primarily Facebook ads and AdWords (thanks to @Andy Black for the consulting call)
Forms: JotForm. Tons of great features.
Automations: make.com (you can use zapier but I prefer Make)
Customers fill out form online, they can get instant quote but regardless they show up first in our crm.
Phone system: RingCentral. High call quality and tons of ways to create rules like having pro phone trees that route to correct extension “press one for sales”, and then forwarding to answering service if sales rep is busy.
Voice actor for phone system: fiverr. So cheap.
Answering service: Voicenation. You can set them up with a web form you create so when customers call they take their info and type it in, automatically gets added into crm.
Customer app: built with Adalo and hosted on our site.
Mapping and scheduling software: Mapline. Makes it super easy to maximize efficiency and keeps scheduler from losing their mind. Total lifesaver.
Dispatching software: Housecall pro.
Billing: auto recurring payments with QuickBooks. They pay taxes for us and handle accounting reporting well.
All roads to us end with you in our hubspot contact list. Our rep doesn’t enter in people manually unless she’s on a call with them when they reached out to our sales extension. That way there’s full accountability, everyone is in the “lead” section of crm.
Hubspot setup: contacts view is setup like kanban board. Lifecycle stages: lead, quote, follow up, customer. All leads get called and are given quotes and lifecycle stage set to quote. All quotes are automatically assigned as follow up if they don’t signup for a day after getting quote. When customers sign their signup form they are automatically changed to customer. The automations with make.com allow this to be possible.
When a customer signs, their contract is automatically created with the form as a feature of JotForm, they get a welcome email, they are automatically added as a user for our lawn care app I built and sent login instructions.
JotForm submissions for signup are setup in a way to be an easy to follow on boarding checklist. Service rep adds them into housecall pro, Mapline (picks a visit date that is max efficiency), and QuickBooks. Those things don’t take long and are done in down time, can easily onboard tons of people quickly so it’s worth it to be done manually to make sure nothing gets missed.
Customers make requests, submit complaints, make inquiries and manage their account on the app or calling us, we don’t communicate over text or email back and forth with customers to make sure nothing ever gets missed. Calling satisfies the boomers and the app satisfies everyone else.
Scheduling takes minimal time, click click done, one person can handle the scheduling for hundreds of customers per day in less than an hour easily.
Rep has admin facing app built with Adalo and can send out bulk notices for anything by checking boxes by customer names in a filterable list by location and pressing a button.
JotForm forms embedded in our app and connecting it to Todoist with an automation means any requests get automatically input into Todoist and organized by location so service rep can take the notes and translate them to what the notes for the visit should be that day in the dispatching software. You don’t want customers rude requests or random messages being fed directly into the notes our employees see so that has to be done manually.
The secret to making this work is a handful of API’s and using url parameters, nothing you can’t learn from YouTube.
Entire system is based around the idea that we want a small amount of people in office handling large amounts of customers with providing seamless experience for customer while controlling the data. One rep should be able to handle a 2m/yr amount of customers easily including all sales, onboarding, scheduling, billing, etc.
Run ads, leads end up in hubspot, we send prefilled JotForm quotes and when they signup we follow onboarding checklist, customer uses app, scheduling and notes are done each day easily, money rolls in and we keep it going.
Central office handles all this. Local locations only have a rented outdoor storage space where employees park and get in the trucks and get to work. One person is a manager to handle in person interviews, training employees (easy), point of contact for workers, make sure equipment is all good, and rare in person sales (also easy). Managers can be shared among multiple locations since their job is so easy and it keeps costs down for individual locations.
We pull dispatching data and track visit time, compare it to pricing in an excel sheet and see who is unprofitable or profitable and adjust plans accordingly.
I’m just trying to do the top-level stuff fast as possible since almost all bottlenecks are removed.
We can get as many trucks as we need.
Workers are easy to come by since we pay well and work is easy.
Office can handle huge amount of customers.
It’s profitable.
Ads can be scaled up.
The only bottleneck is just getting things up quickly. Like the 9 companies I had to form. The business licenses. The contractor license required to run local service ad campaigns on google. The tax registration in multiple states. Dealing with AdWords suspensions and other BS. Gotta keep things simple so we can do it fast. Speed is the game, while still building on rock and not sand, because it needs to work at scale. It’s annoying because even though you can hire people for those things, that’s just another thing to do that would add even more work. Have to do some of this myself. Easy to feel overwhelmed but that’s going to happen if you’re trying to do it this way and move quickly.
But the path forward is so clear and looking optimistic. Now it’s just a race to see how soon we can get there.
Amazing breakdown of the tech stack and flow of operations. Absolutely awesome.
Do you quote virtually using satellite imagery/etc, or on site quoting?
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