He Almost Underbid a $25K Land Clearing Job. Here's How He Fixed That

Speaker A: How specifically has clearpath been helpful?

Speaker B: It's been a game changer because the fact that I can talk to it and say, here's what I'm looking at and here's the scope of the job and here's the distance and then here's the terrain and the density and you put all those factors in, it helps me think through so much of the things I didn't think through because of all of the data you guys have fed it and no other AI I've messed with can do it at that level.

Speaker C: John has gotten some of the most best outputs and return on clearpath, but it's because him, he's using it, he's doing the things he's supposed to do.

Speaker B: Go for it and these guys are great. Honestly, if you try it, I don't think you'll ever want to stop it.

Speaker A: Welcome back to another episode of the Owner House podcast. We got a special surprise this morning. We're going to be bringing John on. You guys are going to get to meet John Tisnick from uh, up in Alaska, Tracks and trailers. And he's going to share a little bit about who he is, his background, business he operates. Uh, the last couple months of success he's, he's been having, uh, he's just a guy who shows up, takes action, executes the playbook week in, week out. Yeah, he's been doing a great job. He's also been using clearpath to help him on, on the back end problem solving some things. And so we'll talk a little bit about that. John, what's up?

Speaker B: Morning.

Speaker A: How are you?

Speaker B: Good, how about you?

Speaker A: We're doing fantastic. Welcome.

Speaker B: Thank you.

Speaker A: What's going on in Alaska up there?

Speaker B: We finally have warm weather. It's been in the 60s and low 70s and no rain.

Speaker A: John, what part of Alaska are you?

Speaker B: Palmer. It's part of the Mat Su Valley, if anyone knows where Anchorage is. If you go about 50 miles north of there, there's Palmer was the big Lake Houston and then that's kind of like little value they call for. All the farmland is. And then it all just turns into mountains after that.

Speaker A: Why that area when you and your wife decided to move up there?

Speaker B: Well, actually my wife is from this area, so she grew up here for most of her life because her parents were

Speaker A: getting a little delay. Guys,

Speaker C: dude. While he's popping back in, I just gotta say now completing the 16th media day, we pretty much, we've got it pretty dialed even since we were out there with you guys. Just sort of the setup I got this tripod. It's basically like a shooting tripod. So it's kind of heavy duty, but I can mount the iPad on the front rather than remember how I was holding it. And then mount the camera vertical right on top where it sticks out past the iPad a little bit. Dude, just ripping. And during that time got the other camera tripod getting B roll, time lapse, long foot long, you know, horizontal footage. Holy cannoli. It's been, it's been pretty good.

Speaker A: So for people who are just tuning in listening to this, tell us more about what that is.

Speaker C: Yeah, sorry. It's fresh on the mind. I just got back, but yeah, basically fly out for the day. And the goal is to get 12 months of AD content. We're not coming to film like a fancy commercial. And the reason I bring that up, I, I was just with Gary in Michigan and he had a film crew on site all day film from uh, like a JV partnership he had with a equipment, uh, dealer. And they were filming all day and he got like a 30 second clip commercial that they sent him. And it looks amazing. But I mean that, that's about it, right? And I'm not knocking it, but what we're doing is coming to get you content that we know specifically is going to convert into jobs for you. And so I've set out the goal to get at least 50 ads so that basically the goal is averaging out to one a week new ad for a year. And what we end up getting is closer to 100 every time, which is pretty awesome. And it's just kind of getting a little more efficient. And what I like about that is I can get the playbook done with you like before lunch and then after lunch. It's just a bunch of creative stuff, kind of changing it up, throwing in cool things, you know, more targeted, focused, or start working on visual hooks. Like we had uh, Gary's wife in a deer blind and she slid open the window and was like doing some good visual hooks. So really cool stuff.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's awesome. I want to talk about this. Let's just talk about the concept of. All right, you had this idea, you said, okay, I see that sometimes it's hard for guys to just take time out of their day and go film the content that we need. And so you as an entrepreneur, see it as a problem. You go put a solution together in your mind, you have a rough draft of like what you think this media day is going to do and you go out and you do it. But the concept that I think you and I both agree on is all right, if. If we as business owners need to go do something and get better at doing something, what would happen if we just put in the reps to do the thing? And so my question for you is, how much better were these last three on your end, just from an efficiency perspective with all the little details versus, like, the one, the first, second, and third one that you did?

Speaker C: Dude, huge. And if Andrew from a team is listening, sorry. And theirs went really good. We got really good ads. They got increased lead volume, increased lead quality. But, you know, I showed up, just gave them a lot of time to study the playbook. But they were G's, and they wrote all the scripts on these giant poster boards, and their family held it up for them. And so now we've advanced all the way till, you know, I've got it pretty dialed on the iPad. But, yeah, I mean, each one has gotten so much better, allowed me to get better at coaching them. And everybody reports that, you know, it's very valuable. They're glad to have this burden of trying to get content. Let me just say three things. So I set out to do this because content really started to change. Like, we realized Net new contents would allow people to win, especially on social media, especially with Facebook ads. And so we had to really transition our business, hire people, change how we onboard and coach to get guys to get the content that makes it better. Them successful took a lot of work, but still, like, not everybody was able to do it or jumped on. It was. It was hard friction. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna try to solve this problem the best way I can. So I offered for this tier of guys to come in person and do it. So a lot of guys saw the value in that and, uh, being able to have that burden off of them. And a lot of them, almost every one of them, actually landed jobs while we were there because this reason was pushing them to get in front of customers and get out there and work on the business rather than just in the business. But what I didn't see coming is that it's kind of like, teach a man to fish or give a man a fish. So in this scenario, I'm giving you the fish, but I'm also teaching you to fish. And everybody has come out of it saying, like, oh, this is not really as bad as I thought it was. Like, I could probably do this once a month, once a quarter or something. You know, I'll just get that little camera you have. I'll get A tripod. Y' all already send me the scripts. I could just do this, and then I could keep. So that's what I love. And it's a mindset with these guys, which is why, you know, I'm willing to go to these guys is they're not thinking, oh, I'm done. They're thinking, sweet. I've got a year of content now. How could I go get more, Man, I love that.

Speaker A: I love it, too. And it just comes back to the concept of, like, if something is not working, I believe it's our responsibility as entrepreneurs to go try a new solution. And so you mentioned something there. Hey, this stuff is changing quick. It evolves, and it moves fast. Right? And you guys are staying ahead of it. Hey, uh, what do we need to do? We need to create more net new content in order to get in front of people. So how do we do that? And how do you specifically help your clients go do that in an easy way? So you put the solution together. But what I love is how many have you have you done so far? Media days.

Speaker C: Uh, if you count local, 20, but flying out, 16.

Speaker A: Each one is a rep. It's like you put the first rep in. Okay, you learn some stuff. Second, get a little bit better. Third, you get a little bit better. And by the 20th, you're showing up on the live stream, you're like, dude, we got this dialed. This is how to move fast. And I think that concept can just be applied to so many areas of business. Hey, if we don't know how to run ads, what would happen if you just tried? What would happen if you just did the thing and stopped worrying about the perfection? I love, love, love the fact that you started this with the Jocko intro. Excuse me. Um, it was in regards to Bloom. Hey, they were just moving fast. They just tried things. They had one little. I call them learning lessons. If you don't learn from them, they're a mistake. But if you print 10,000 labels on a can once and you don't ever do it again, and you figured out why that happened and you fix the problem, that's a learning lesson. And I think that's all this game of business is.

Speaker C: 10 million, by the way.

Speaker A: 10 million.

Speaker C: Yeah. I would rather always just fall forward. And I think that's why a lot of people never make it or quit early because they're afraid to fail. And it's like, generally in my life, in my business and my career, I have advanced faster, farther, because I just failed faster and got back up and did it again, got back up, did it again, got back up, did it again. Because I wasn't afraid to look silly or dumb and found the right way, right? And you were talking about the, the days, you know, you think all 20 days, like, well these, like media wise, these are eight hour days, right? Of just pretty, pretty much constant. And so then you put the hours to that. That's not including all of the time. I sit there and I name all 400 files based on what they were so that the video editors can edit them quicker and more efficient. That's all the stuff on the back end, but just the hours there filming and coaching and giving feedback on how they said what they said. 20 times 8's what, 160. And that's not including the hours, you know, because I do the same thing. I practice what I preach. Like what I'm doing with them, I do with us, uh, in House Weekly. And so you're talking 160, 200 plus hours doing this exact skill. And that's what cracks me up everybody's. Because I'm like, okay, say it like this, hey, Central Kentucky landowners, you know, and they're like, it's like you've done this before. I'm like, yeah, dude. It's like you in the machine, like, yeah, you look like a boss doing it. You make it look easy because you put two, three, four, five hundred, a thousand hours on it. You're going to get good at it, but you're not going to get good at it in two hours or four hours.

Speaker A: That it's so true. It's like if you want to get it operating the machine, best thing you can do is go get the machine. If you've got your own property, get the machine, go put some hours in the seat. You will get better, naturally. Same thing with filming ads. You never filmed ads before. You're going to be way better on your hundredth ad than your first. Now you do have to look at what performs well and what doesn't perform well. And guess what? Not every single ad or piece of content that you film or that I film hits. In fact, most of them don't hit. But when you go study the data, when you understand, hey, here's what works and here's what didn't work, that's when you really start rapidly accelerating.

Speaker C: Well, when you figure out what the word hit means, like you're getting a hundred x return on your ad spend. It covers those hundred ads that fail 10 times over. But if you quit because those failed, you'll never get to the 100x1.

Speaker A: It's the same thing guys with, with sales. It's like if you're newer in the business and you don't have a sales background man, the best thing you can do is pick up the phone call the lead with the goal to book the site visit. And when you book the site visit, show up to the site visit with the goal to sell the job and collect the deposit. Now quick plug for clearpath like clearpath can help you do your inbound lead phone scripts. It can also do your on site visit checklists or scripts to run. So if you have zero background in how to do sales or how to conduct a uh, phone call to a new lead or how to book a site visit, then you can get the scripts. This was a big unlock for me whenever I really pushed into sales. Having a script and just reading the script first thing in the morning 10 times through and then on your first five to 10 site visits or sales calls, just reading the script word for word. Sure it's going to sound like you're reading a script, but you embed that into your brain of what to ask and when to ask it. And simply by doing that, you put in the reps. And if you do that 5, 10 times, 20 times, 30 times, 40 times, 50 times, all of a sudden you start to get better. And so this is what we talk about all the time over in the uh, in the training calls it's like how can we put in the reps to build more skills? When we build the skills we're able to add value to the business. I recently got back from launching a land clearing business down in Austin. And this last winter I launched a snow shoveling business alongside Bear Claw. And in both businesses I've implemented Jobber as a way for us to efficiently manage quoting job schedules and invoicing and even collecting online payment. Why? Because it's worked so well for us in Bearclaw and it saved us a ton of time and headache. So if you are looking for a software that can help you manage the back end of your business, look no further than Jobber. You can visit go.getjobber.com OwnerOps O W N R o P s

Speaker C: and dude, I just got a soapbox that one real quick because I already know so many people are not going to use a script. They're not going to make a script, they're not going to write it, they're not going to do it and then they're already making excuses. Sale. It's Weird, it's awkward. Uh, it sounds too salesy. And I think it's the exact opposite. I think a sleazy salesy salesman starts bull crap in you when they don't know what to say next and they just start rambling versus when you know exactly what to say, when to say it, how to say it. For every scenario, you sound like a, uh, professional. And when you've really learned it, you don't sound like a script. You can put inflection in the right places. You can truly care. And the script, the script is just the right things to say to help the customer in the shortest amount of time. That's it. The goal is to help the customer, but you have to do the weird stuff. Dude, I'm telling you. When I have role played with Tiffany in my living room for my previous businesses, for Tiffany's, my wife, for my previous businesses, I've role played selling services with Rise. I've role played selling with the team. With Tiffany, I can take it full circle. When I was, uh, going through paramedic school 10 years ago, I would role play how to do a patient assessment with Tiffany, same thing. And have her play back. And then we do the same thing at the time, same station. We've done the same thing with our sales team. The highest, most converting sales companies role play every single day with scripts. And I, I just know so many people won't do it and so many people have these weird excuses, but if you do it, you will make more money and you will give the customer a better experience. Flat out,

Speaker A: love it, love it. Scripts execute, practice, put in the rep.

Speaker C: Yep. It's going to help you be faster and make being on the phone actually worth it. And on that note, I just want to say I got to ride in the car for an hour with Gary from Motor City, who's doing multiple seven figures a year, gets 100 leads a month. And guess what he did. When I'm mid conversation, mid filming with him, when a lead came in, he goes, calls the lead immediately, uh, guess what? The guy booked an estimate for the next day. They went overpriced. General pricing ranges. He, he mentioned renting a machine. He handled that objection instantly because he's, he's got it down and he's going out there. That happened three times while I was with him that day. And you could argue, because I see this in the comments all the time, oh, if I was making $200,000 a month, I wouldn't even need this. And it's like, okay, but if you Want to have a real business that grows and has employees and supports you and gives you freedom and helps you support your family, community, employees, everything. You keep going, you got to keep going. And man, he's just a killer who takes the action.

Speaker A: And what's crazy is it's like once you experience that and once you experience how good it works and it doesn't work on every lead, some leads are just bad. In fact, I could say that most leads probably aren't going to answer the phone or call, call them back immediately. But some will. And when you understand it's just a simple math equation that it's like if I show up and, and if I just do this every single time the same way, then it will equate to like a layup happening. One, the layups will, will show up. But two, the jobs that you may not have received or gotten had you not called them fast, they show up in your lap as well. But what's crazy is he hasn't changed his execution strategy even at doing multiple seven figures.

Speaker C: Exactly. And I see so many guys with that lead volume like he's got a hundred, 100 leads a month. They're being very picky and choosy with who they even contact. And I love the idea of getting to the point where you cherry pick jobs. But you still have to contact every lead, maintain that reputation because if you just start throwing them to the wind, one, you're just feeding jobs to your competitor because this person's already wanting the work. And if you don't answer, they're going to find someone who'll answer. So you at least need to talk to them. But people fat finger this stuff all the time. They fill out the wrong thing. Something gets auto filled. Like you have to be calling and getting with every single lead that comes through. Unless you just like burning money. M.

Speaker A: No, I love it. And, and what I love even more is that mid conversation he just didn't even think twice. And I tell, I tell people on our team, I'm like, if you get a lead, there is nothing more important. I don't even care if we're in a team meeting. I don't care if, I don't care if you're meeting with me, like just, just jump off and take the lead. Because that is the most important thing. Now. The only time where I'm not going to do that if I'm in the sales role is if I'm meeting with the customer. Everybody else though, no chance just stopping and calling the lead, operating the equipment. I Hear this one a lot. Hey, what, what happens if I'm just operating the machine? I was like, dude, just stop the machine, turn it off and call the lead. And look, this is a big reason why I don't like selling hourly or day rates. Because the second that you're on the customer's watch, they're watching you and they're, hey, he stopped the machine for an hour or he left to go get it. It's like quote per project so that you can set your own expectations for delivering the service. And then when you get that lead, you just shut the machine off. And you haven't promised the customer that the machine's running for X amount of hours per day. If I'm booking that site visit and I'm 11, um, am in the machine, the lead comes in and they are ready for a site visit, I'm jumping out of that machine and I'm going straight to the site visit to book that next job. Because I know as an owner operator, there is no business if I don't go prioritize sales. And so this job over here, since I've quoted it per project, can wait. But if I don't go sell right now and take advantage of the opportunity while it's there, you might miss it. John, welcome back. Who are you? Where are you from? What business do you operate?

Speaker B: Name's John. I'm from Palmer, Alaska and I operate business called tracks and trailers up here doing forestry mulching, land clearing and phasing out the driveway, dirt work, Getting full time into land management.

Speaker A: How'd you get into the business?

Speaker B: I started by. Well, it's pretty interesting story. Quick sum up. I was driving semi up here and I hated it because it felt like a really dangerous thing to be doing with a brand new wife and baby on the way on icy roads. And so I thought, well, I know how to drive a skid steer, so I'll just go see if I can go grade someone's driveway here and there on the weekend. And started doing that and made some decent money. It's like, okay, this thing can work. And then I had people asking me if I could clear their brush and I did that a few times and had to haul it off to the landfill and realized there had to be a better way. And a friend of mine asked me if I had a forestry mulcher and I said, no, I'll go rent one. And I found out you can't rent them here in Alaska because of the terrain. So then I went and purchased one and a Brand new skid last fall. Started to get some work for it, and then, uh, figured out I had no idea how to market anything. So then I learned how to actually started following you guys and realized all you have to put videos out. So I made a video, but I didn't do the right way the first time. So I just posted a video of the machine working and my wife talking and boosted it as a post. And I started getting jobs coming in. I was like, oh, this thing actually works. And then I started following you guys like, hey, here's the game plan and how you actually do this the right way. And then it just started taking off from there.

Speaker A: Awesome. Well, it's been fun to watch you grow your business over the last couple months since jumping. Jumping into the accelerator. You want to share with the guys or with the listeners what July looked like for you? You had a pretty good month.

Speaker B: Yeah, July was remarkably good. It was about 60,000 and. Which blew my mind. And leads never stop coming in, and they still don't stop coming in. And so the amazing part is how if you just follow the playbook and you just put in the work and like you say, you call your leads fast, and which. That's a whole nother challenge in and of itself here in Alaska. But, uh, if you call the leads fast and talk to them and book a site visit, which actually is a big thing here, rather than giving a price over the phone, it's amazing how many people are like, yeah, I want the work done. How soon can you get here?

Speaker A: That's awesome. And, guys, what I love about John is, um, you heard him mention his phone challenge. When he jumped in, he said, man, I don't know how to get this solved right here. Like, what phone system do you guys use? And then he ran into another hiccup with the phone provider in Alaska, and then another hiccup with the phone provider in Alaska. And so he just kept pushing forward and kind of like what Jacob and I were talking about earlier. It's like in the beginning, you just find the problems, you put the solution there. And John has just consistently done that time after time here. And so he's figured out how to call leads fast, how to implement a phone system. He's executed the playbook. And I just got to say, hats off to you, man, because you're the one putting in the work. And, um, I believe the results speak for themselves. What were, uh, some of the things over the last couple months that you have focused on to lead to that growth?

Speaker B: Well, I would be Remiss to say if this was all on my own. So I'm going to give God full credit here for helping me out. But I think he allowed me to figure out that I can't just bemoan my lack of success without trying really hard. So the big thing that I figured out was having, uh, a system in place for how to handle leads. So the automation with Jobber Zapier and the phone system, which is finally working, and then the big one after that was just being honest and talking to people in, like, the scripts you say, but then just showing up when you say you're going to show up. Or like sometimes here weather is a factor, so you don't always show up when you can, but you're always communicating with the customer like, hey, I'm on the way, traffic's a problem. Or we are having wintertime, we're having a major snow problem. But you always communicate with the employee or, uh, the customer. But the big thing for me was just the fact that you just can't give up because it's hard. And I learned that through especially this past winter and spring when it just looked like I need to sell everything because I'm not getting the leads in. And that's when I just started listening to your podcast. Everything I could possibly gather up, even before I was on accelerator, like, okay, I gotta try this. And it started working before I jumped in. And then once I jumped in, I started using the playbook on how to do it all. And the consistency, you gotta be consistent whether you can't do it really well some days and then poorly other days. You just gotta do it every single day. Don't give up and just keep trying to hone it in and do better and better and better and you'll fail. I mean, I've definitely failed a few times like, like with the phone system I've had sometimes where people try to get ahold of me and they can't because of the cell phone service. Well, then I just try to reach out to them as soon as I can and I get the mess. Then you follow up with them and people understand that here. So you just have to not let yourself fall into the trap, like, oh, it's not working and everything's falling apart. You just got to keep going and going and going and then just keep trying to do your systems and keep. Follow your system too. Don't just give up on the system. It's that discipline of you got to stick with it. Once you get it going, you can't Just like, oh, it's working. I'm just going to let it fall apart. You just have to just keep going with it no matter what.

Speaker A: Yeah, I love the mindset. It's day in, day out. And guys, John somebody, for those of you who are listening, who are an accelerator, you know, you've seen him, he shows up every week, he fills out the scorecard, he submits the scorecard on time, every time he's on time to all the, all of the, uh, training calls. But like, that to me is doing the little things. And so I'm a firm believer that if we just do the little things, well, we call it blocking and tackling all the time. If we just block and tackle better than the other people, then we're going to increase our chances of creating a good business in our market. And a lot of the blocking and tackling is what most people skip over. And so John has been doing an incredible job with that. Uh, our goal here was just to, just to, uh, showcase John, uh, share with you who he is, his background and all that. We wanted you guys, uh, to start getting to know, uh, some of the members. So one thing we're going to start doing is, uh, for guys who are showing up, taking action in accelerator, uh, we are going to bring you guys on for these hot seats. And then same thing with Jacob. Jacob's mentioned this to some of his clients as well. And so we're excited to showcase, uh, some of you guys who are putting in the actions inside of this community. And we wanted to kick this off with John, um, just because he's been showing up doing the little things. Well, John, what's the goal for the rest of this year? What are, what is your monthly target moving forward?

Speaker B: My monthly target is at least 40,000amonth. And I know I hit more than that in July, but my goal is at least 40,000amonth up here. With my capacity and with the average job size I'm heading and a lot of it's smaller customers. So just based on the demographics, I'm, I pretty. I'm very confident I can get that.

Speaker A: Sweet. And you've been using clearpath. Where is your crew day pricing set? And then what is your average job size?

Speaker B: My crew day pricing is for Alaska, about 2350 is what Clearpath came up with when I put all my data in. So I just bumped it up to 2500. And because of the demographics and the economy right now, a lot of jobs are somewhere around 1800. So I've been. And lots of times I can stack two next to each other in a day. So, well, each job isn't exactly the full price because it's not even close to an 8 acre. It's just someone's backyard. But I'm willing to get the higher price for the job even though it's not the full crew day rate. And then once I just stack them together, it works out. As I've been finding, if I try to price the full crew day rate for a really small job, people just won't even do it. So if I jump bump it down a little and cram them together, and with the area up here, I can do that pretty easily that it's been working pretty well. Some jobs are well over the crew day rate and they're like three, four day jobs. And then that works fantastic. With the price of fuel though, I'm increasing that up to 2700 and even a little higher to try to help filter out a lot of the tire kickers that have been coming in that want, you know, two or three $500 jobs, which those don't even really pay to even drive to at this point.

Speaker A: How specifically has clearpath been helpful for you to reason through some of that?

Speaker B: It's been a game changer because before I was trying to figure out how do you think through all of these factors, and there's a lot of fast factors here in Alaska. So the fact that I can talk to it and say, here's what I'm looking at and here's the scope of the job and here's the distance and then here's the terrain and the density and you put all those factors in either through the estimator tool tab on clearpath or just talking to, uh, helps me think through so much of the things I didn't think through because of all of the data you guys have fed it and no other AI I've messed with can do it at that level. So for instance, I'm on a big job right now that's six acres. And I just started talking to Clearpath and telling it what all I'm looking at, the timeline, the density and all of the vegetation I had to clear and the equipment options. And it gave me a whole bunch of things to think about and then gave me a price. And I was actually bidding too low, even with my crew day rate. And Clearpath came along and said, hey, you're charging way too little, bump up the price. So I went back to the client and said, hey, I'm gonna have to raise the price, especially for the timeline you're giving me, and they're like, yeah, no problem, let's. And then they just signed the contract right away. So that alone has just been huge because otherwise I've been leaving money on the table and I would have had a more an unrealistic timeline without it. That's just one example.

Speaker A: Hey, if you're wondering what phone system you should use and you're already using Jobber, then look no further than Quo. Quo integrates directly with Jobber, and when you have conversations with your new leads or your customers, it will record the conversation, it will transcribe it, and it will automatically update the notes within Jobber. So this is a way that you can save time on the back office and focus more on growing your business. If you'd like to get 20% off your first three months of a phone number with Quo, then visit get.quo.com ownerops that's g e t.qu-u o.com ownr ops

Speaker C: let's get back to the episode.

Speaker A: For someone who has never used clearpath before, how would you recommend that they get the most out of leveraging the tool?

Speaker B: The best way to get the most out of that tool is, number one, you've got to feed it data. So you got to give it your pricing, your expenses, fill out all of the stuff that it asks you to fill out, number one, because otherwise you're going to not be getting accurate information on your crew day rate and then constantly stay on top of it so you update it.

Speaker A: Fantastic. Yeah, Jacob, and feel free to chime in here on the pricing, uh, and the quoting piece as well, because I know some of the guys over in Titans or clients have been using that as well. Correct.

Speaker C: Yeah, I just want to drive home what John just said, because you have to give it all the information, all the context, because any AI model is going to want to give you answers, and this one is going to give you answers based on our data as a whole, because it wants to give you an answer. But if it doesn't have the full context of your business, your campaigns, your CRM, what you have going on, then you're going to get an answer that's not as accurate as it needs to be for you. So you have to be giving it input for it to be really valuable. So I'm glad you said that, John. And John's definitely one of the best action takers in terms of using the features of clearpath, which is why he's also someone who's gotten the most out of it uh, we've been saying it from the beginning. We say it about everything, input to output. John has gotten some of the most best outputs and return on Clearpath. But it's because of him. He's using it, he's doing the things he's supposed to do. But the pricing is huge. If, if it didn't do all the other stuff it does, helping you market scripts, build out plans, follow up marketing help you actually quote. The one thing it is the absolute most valuable at is getting you to that crew day rate and then saving that for your conversations. And I have used it with every titan that I went and visited. And some of these guys are years in doing multiple seven figures and some of these guys are just a year or two in doing, you know, 500 000. Every single one of them gets surprised on what their actual break even is. It's just insane. And a lot just get out there. We get in the machines and get going. Right? And that's good, that's, I mean it's good to get bootstrapped and get going but you have to go back to the, back to the basics of business and make sure you're making money. And these guys who have been in business for a while, what, what happens is they're pricing really well on jobs over here and then they're not pricing well on jobs over here and so they're getting like 50 profit and then 5% profit. So then their whole profit comes, comes down. And when your profit's down in that like 10 range, a bad day can just eat it and you're broke, your bank account's low and you're working all the time. But when you actually use this tool to put in all of your expenses, all of your overhead, what you should be paid, what you should be paying, factoring in for insurance, taxes and all those little things that add up over time that you don't normally factor into a job cost because everybody just factors in um, my machine fuel and operator and it's like there's so much more than that. A lot of these dudes who are even doing well are charging 500 too low a day or they're charging, this is the most common one I see. They're great on one day jobs or one day rates. Uh, like John mentioned earlier, he's stacking two, two jobs with smaller tickets to hit his day rig. But then they get a five day job and their margins lower. You should not get lower margins on bigger jobs. It should be flat clipped but it's just because people don't understand the pricing, they don't understand what they need to be doing. And when you stop working for low margin or free, it's amazing what your business can do. And Clear Path helps with that.

Speaker A: Yeah, John actually sent me over an example of a larger ticket job that he used Clear Path to come up with the estimate for. And John, you mind to share how you used clearpath to come up with that, uh, estimate? If I remember correctly, it was like a 24, $25,000 job. The one I'm referencing that you mentioned. John, Sharon,

Speaker B: screen here. Here is the estimate on, um, the Burma job. That's what I call it. So if you see here, it's for this total of 6 acres. And then I use the density and then the slope and access, and I estimated about seven days, which definitely is right about right on point. And so this is on the estimator side of the tool, uh, which I use this a lot. It's been very useful. But if you go over here to the chat, I've been using that for just talking through all of the ideas of like, hey, how many hours? This is how much my rate has gone, this is how much. And then it's like, hey, you're about right on schedule. So with all of that, it's been very, very useful. And it tells you like, hey, here's your margins are okay, you're doing okay. And then your rate is good. And then it, as you logging it, you're telling like, hey, this system's working pretty well. But, you know, I've run into this snag or this snag, and it says like, okay, well, then based on how many days you've logged already, you've got about this many days left. Keep an eye on that. Keep an eye on your production rate. You know, keep an eye on your costs. So I use both the chat and the estimator to kind of keep track of things. And so it's about a $25,000 job, about halfway through it right now. So that's been, been very helpful.

Speaker C: Dude, this is next level usage right here. But it's. It's just next level business mind too. Like, a lot of guys get a big job, then they just get out there, and I'm like, all right, I'm gonna get after it. And this is just blowing my mind. I want to give John a hug right now. But if everyone did this, holy cow. Tracking where you're at in the job to make sure you're still profitable. Huge, dude. Imagine if we all did. It seems like it should be so basic, but no one, no one does this. It's huge, huge to be tracking that. And then the fact that you can use clearpath and I'm sure he's using uh, some sort of talk to text feature to sort of, you know, speed up that process, but really keeps an eye on what, what you have going on and helps you. Every job helps you quote the next job better and better. But I mean this, if you're talking even just one day because you noticed something along the way of a five, 10 day job, most guys that's three to $5,000, that could be your profit for that job. Man, that's amazing. Great job.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I want to jump in here because you mentioned something. Well, first, hats off John, great job using the system and getting the most out of it here. But Jacob, you mentioned something that does seem like we should all do at the basic core level of this business, which is tracking. Now what I want to mention is when you jump into Clearpath, the first thing that you have to do is set up your crew day pricing. Like we prompt you from start to finish with the exact expenses that you need to go pull from your bank statements, exact expenses that you need to go pull from your credit cards. How much are you paying people, how much does your equipment cost, what does your overhead look like and what profit do you want to hit? And when you set that pricing first, you've now trained the system on your specific company data. The first step of doing that, and then the second piece to that is to do what John's doing and track your production rates. And so in order to track your production rates, you have to start with a baseline. That's why we input the crude A pricing first when you do the estimating tool and when you put a price out there, let's say that you guys go do this the first time and you realize by working with Clearpath that uh, you were two days short on that job. Well, you may not be perfect on the first time, but I'm going to go back to where we started this live stream episode with. If you take that learning lesson and if you don't make that mistake moving forward and every single job that you would have quoted one or two days light on, if you add those one or two days into every single job moving forward, what if that was your profit on the job that you were missing out on? So yeah, you may miss on the first one, but, uh, what if that saves you from here on out? What would that do to your business. And so guys who are listening to this, if you're in the business and you're like, man, I feel like I'm busy all year long, but at the end of the year I look down and after I pay my taxes, I'm like, where the heck did the money go? It's one of two things. It's because you're either not pricing high enough to, to generate a profit, or two, you're not actually tracking your production rate to be realistic with yourself on how long the jobs are taking. And guys, I've said this before, this isn't roofing, this isn't concrete where we can just give a per square price or a per square foot price. I wish it was that easy. But guess what, maybe I'll take that statement back. It's not that easy. And that's why the best operators in this business get paid the most, because you have to do the hard things. And the hard things are to track the production. Now, I know Jacob's got a couple clients who have been doing this on spreadsheets, a couple OGs in this, in this industry, right? And it's no surprise that they are crushing it, making millions of a year because they track their production rates and they know how to assimilate the different pieces of equipment with the different crews to go generate profit on jobs, but they track it in detail on spreadsheets. Now, if tracking a spreadsheet sounds like your absolute hell on earth, then that's what clearpath is solving. Guys, we're trying to make this as easy as possible for you so that you can go actually generate profit in this business. And I hope that you can see John's example and just say, you know what, like, here's a guy right here, and you heard it from him, he's been blocking and tackling, doing the basics well. And then he's leveraging Clear Path, and then he's taken some learnings from early on and he's just gotten better and better and better with each replacement. And you heard it from him, he did over 60k in the month of July. So, John, hats off to you, man, for, for putting in the work. Thank you so much for jumping on to this hot seat this morning.

Speaker B: You're welcome. Thanks for having me. I guess the last thing I would say to anybody who's thinking about clearpath or the AI is I was a big skeptic myself, but coming from a family business where we had a really hard time finding somebody who could estimate well, and we were talking like seven figure landscape or business trying to find somebody who you could pay 60 plus thousand dollars a year that would track his numbers and keep an eye on the estimates and get back to customers, but then have somebody that actually updated the system continuously and then gave you good information back on the estimates that didn't lose money. We went through a whole slew of people that never seemed to be able to figure that out. And so Clearpath costs $300 a month for the basic plan, 500 for the main plan, $500 a month which is $6,000 a year for something that can give you accurate information if you do the work to put it in, give you accurate output to help you make money per job and then be an advisor in your back pocket on your cell phone you already have. I mean to me it's a no brainer. I, I don't know how else to say that. I mean I, I wouldn't be doing this business without it. And the fact that you guys have put so much work into dialing it in for specifically this business model for what you guys are doing has made it so valuable that I think in the future going forward, especially as an owner, operator and even once you get a, a crew, I think not having it, you're shooting yourself in both feet by not having it because it doesn't give you, it gives you so much output for the little amount you put into it that it's over 10x the value. So if you're on the fence, go for it. And these guys are great. If you don't like it, they'll give you your money back. But honestly, if you try it, I don't think you'll ever want to stop it.

Speaker A: Well, John, thanks so much for being on. Hats off to you for putting in the action, man. I'm um, excited to watch your growth. It's been so much fun and I can't wait to see where you take this business up in Alaska. Guys who are listening once again, John Tisnick from Tracks and Trailers up in Alaska. Hey, thanks so much for being on the hot seat of the Land Clearing live stream. John. Go out there and crush it this week. We'll see you tomorrow morning on the accelerator call and uh, listeners, if you want to go ahead and grab access to Clear Path, you can Visit land clearing IO plans. There's a pro plan, 4.99amonth. Like John mentioned, that one will store and save your memory. There's a basic plan option at 299amonth. Landclearing IO plans. Jacob thanks again for, uh, jumping on to another Friday morning listeners. Thanks again for tuning in to another episode every week. Friday morning, 7am Mountain time, 8am Central, 9am Eastern. We jump on, we talk land clearing, forestry mulching, growth. The goal is we love this business, we love this industry. And, uh, the goal is to just talk growth tips and help you guys grow your business here. So tune in weekly right here on this YouTube channel, YouTube.com@theownerop. And then guys, um, if you are interested in the accelerator, you can fill out an application there. That's@ownerops.com apply. Guys like John who are actually owning and operating the business, who already have machines already getting jobs. If you want to move faster, if you want to get around some other people who are moving and shaking, then fill out an application. If it looks like a good fit, we'll invite you in. If it doesn't, we'll keep pointing you to some free resources. OwnerOps.com apply. That's O W nrops.com apply. Thanks again, guys. Don't forget, work hard, do your best, never settle for less. See you next week.