I've built our customer portal app. It has one database but has a desktop app and a native mobile app that will be on the app store and google play store soon, so anyone including our old customers will be able to access it and login and manage their account.
We are taking away SMS and email support, and going exclusively to phone calls or our app.
On our website, it conditionally shows you our "sign in" button based on browser width so if you are on a phone it links you to the app store to get our app, if you are on a desktop it links you to our desktop login page.
All users are automatically created when they fill out our signup form. I had to build all of this with api, webhooks, etc.
It supports multiple property accounts so even a user with 30 accounts with us would still easily be able to use our app. When they submit a request it sends their account info through so all they need to manually fill in is the request specific form. When the request form is submitted it automatically gets uploaded and formatted in the proper folder for which location they belong to so our customer service can keep requests organized, photos are uploaded to their request if they included any in their submission.
Our instant quote
system works really well too. It's all automated.
Our pricing is formulaic finally. Our office will be able to give many quotes over the phone using our instant quote
system. Our in person sales appointments will be able to do it too but can still do it manually if there's no data in the area or something.
Our CRM and all of our systems together are working like clockwork. Once I activate our answering service for the spring, you'll be able to call in 24/7. You'll either get our in house rep, or the answering service if she's not available. Either way you'll be automatically input as a lead. If you do our instant quote online the same thing happens. Our rep's job will be to call all leads and ask if they want an in person quote or an instant quote. Once you fill out the signup form it automatically updates you as a customer in our
system.
The goal of everything is a pleasing, easy experience. You can talk to a person right away. You get a call back quickly if you aren't immediately chatting with our rep. You can get an instant quote and complete the signup process right away if you prefer. Services are scheduled, you receive notifications, you can use a nice looking customer portal or call if you prefer. The services are done by our trained employees, not contractors. Payments are automated. A single customer service rep could handle a thousand customers easily. All of this will be handled in our headquarters. We will only need one office to handle the entire country.
We opened up some locations this year with "partners" who are like franchisees. We will be signing official franchise docs soon and making it official, using our new entities and new brand. They will be official franchisees at that point.
The attractive point of our franchise is that the owner manages nothing unless they want to be employed as the manager and receive a salary as well. They can say "I want to open up in portland" and we can do that, they would never have to meet the employees. One of our partners has never met the employees at his location. He has never spoken to them, and they don't know who he is either. Because of that unique setup, instead of taking a franchise fee, or taking a royalty, we are split owners with each location and get a share of profits. We handle everything, it makes for a uniform, standardized, repeatable system and the franchisee doesn't have to focus on all of the annoying parts of running a business.
Again, "make everything easy" is the idea.
We've got about 4 more people who are interested in opening a location up. They are waiting to see the numbers on how we perform with our initial partners.
For the last couple months I've been grinding all of this stuff out from morning to night. It doesn't feel like work, so each day has been around 12+ hours of this stuff 6-7 days a week.
My closest friend moved in to a house across the lake, so we've been lifting at 630am and going to MMA at 6pm and working a lot. I've been in a great rhythm lately, very productive, lots of energy.
I've been creating some systems for how we'll manage a ton of locations when it comes to fleet management, taxes, entities, banking, onboarding franchisees, training managers, etc.
I've never been an organized man. I always said that I was too creative to be organized, but when I realized I would be responsible for handling things at scale, I changed that. You have to put your life in order if you want to grow something. You have to clean everything up and learn how to handle life's maintenance in a new way. I used to just throw papers on my desk, now everything is in a proper folder, important docs are scanned and organized. My calendar is used religiously. I use notion for a lot of stuff. All the way down to things like cleaning your room. Everything has a place. I understand that the gap between where I am now and having national locations and many millions a year in profit is how organized I can become. Lots of cleaning, throwing away, categorizing, drawing things out, etc. It's a constant fight between complexity and simplicity. A new system for something is adding complexity in a way, so it better be as simple as humanly possible to keep it lean.
A great asset is that I like what I do (working ON the business) and I set it up in a way that lets me spend 100% of my time doing that instead of working IN the business. I get up, hit the gym have my coffee, and sit down to work...girlfriend brings me lunch, and I keep working until dinner or MMA, then work until 1am when my eyes get heavy. Then I do it again the next day. It's all just part of a season. It's a good time to be doing this stuff, I won't have to do it twice. There'll be a season where I don't work at all for months, but that is not now.
Down the road I'll show some more detail about our systems and how to create some robust automations and app building.
I owe a big thanks to
@ZCP for convincing me earlier this year to take the jump and think differently about how to grow. I owe him some sort of deal for being on my side and seeing potential in this.