Transcription
What's up guys? In today's video, we're going to look at five exactimate hacks that you can use to write better water damage estimates and faster water damage estimates. Basically, if you own a Restoration company and you use Exactimate, you do not want to miss this video. Let's go.
All right guys, so as we get started, do me a favor. Hit the like and the subscribe button. And do me a favor, drop a comment. Tell me where you're tuning in from. And the first hack is this: learning how to use templates to write your water damage estimates. What are you talking about, Shane? So listen, here's some of the problems that I had in the early days. Number one, I would spend countless hours looking for random codes. Like, we would do something and I couldn't remember the code. We didn't use it that often. And so I'd catch myself looking for 10 or 15 minutes for one or two specific line items, and honestly, it was just a big waste of time. And the other situation was this: there were times where I would forget to put a piece of equipment on the estimate. Like, we always use dehumidifiers and fans, but I sometimes I would forget to put the air scrubber on there, or I'd forget to charge, charge for the negative air filter, or I'd forget to charge for like the injected dry-it. So here was my solution: create a macro and just put all of the equipment on one single estimate. And that's what I went up doing. Let me share my screen and I'll show you what we're talking about. This is the way that you're actually going to name these things. This is going to be the job name in Exactimate. So you'll create a customer name or a job name, and this will be the file name. Okay? It's going to be template, job type, amount, and description. Template, job type, amount, and description. And this is what we did for hours, okay? And so these are, this is what that means in practice. It would be template underscore water, job underscore how much it was worth, and then underscore description. And then that way, whenever I wanted to find a $7,000 clean cat one water job, I would type up template, and it would bring up all my templates. And then I would see this is a water job, and I would create one for Recon or for mold, as you can see here, right? So you want to create a handful of templated estimates. And if you guys want to know more about this and see how we exactly do it, you can go to workwithshane.com and book a call. We'll help you guys do this, okay? But this is what I'm saying, okay? You put the template, and then the job type, and all of this, and there's metadata in the customer information. This will save you and allow you to open up Exactimate and go straight to the estimate you're looking for, okay? So the way that it would work in practice is you go to the template water $7,000 two drying chamber, and you open it and you make a copy, okay? Or you duplicate it. And then it's going to be copy of that job. And then you're just going to change the name from template water 7K to drying chamber to Miss Karen Jones at 1444 Main Street, okay? So there's a hack. Now, another hack I'll tell you is when you name your jobs in Exactimate, or like we did in QuickBooks, I would always call it job type, customer name, and like unique identifier, some number. It could be the date in many cases. But this way, if you were to look at all your jobs in a spreadsheet, you would know what job type it was, who the customer was, and potentially when the date was, if you're using the date as part of that unique identifier, okay? What you want to do is you want to create several of these estimate templates. So here we've got like a $7,000 two drying chamber. There's an $11,000 shower pan for water, right? What's the difference? Because water's going to have a section of demolition that you won't normally have on just a regular $7,000 water job. Does that make sense? You're going to start making a lot of your water job estimates look very similar. The only difference is going to be this: there's going to be a line item or a few line items describing what you did unique at that job that you didn't do at the other job. Guys, you need to streamline your operations, and your estimating process needs to look very similar, okay? Again, if you want to know more, go to workwithshane.com. We've got a 308 program, we'll show you these things. That's the shower pan piece. Now, you'll notice that I've got mold 5K and mold 10K. The reason why I did that is this: sometimes a carrier will have a cap on mold, a $2,000 cap, a $5,000 cap, a $10,000 cap. What you want to do is to create an estimate where you're spending two grand, five grand, or 10 grand all on mold. Does that make sense? Here's a pro tip: if you've got an allocation for mold from the policy, it's five grand, let's say. So I've got mold 5K crawl space here. If there's mold in the crawl space and there's insulation, you want to make sure that you're putting only mold-related items on the mold estimate. Guys, if you don't do this, here's what's going to happen: you're going to have to pull the insulation out anyway to do your mold remediation cleaning. The insurance company will spend the mold money pulling the insulation out of the crawl space. Here's why that matters because, hey, I have a question for you: how would you like to fly to Nashville and let me train you directly for two days? Guys, we're having our water damage boot camp event this year, and we're opening it up to the public, and I would like for you to come as well. Guys, in this two-day event, I'm going to be teaching you the best things that I've learned launching and running my own Restoration company. Guys, this is a freaking awesome event, and I know that you will love it. You can go to waterdamagebootcamp.com and learn more about it. Once you go to waterdamagebootcamp.com, I'll share my screen, and it takes you to this page right here. You can scroll all around and read all the event details, including the dates that are going to be available. You click right here to grab your spot, and it'll just scroll down, and eventually, you'll have something where you can go pick your dates. This form will enter up, and you'll just go from there. Guys, the water damage boot camp is a wonderful event. It is transformational. I promise you this: if you want to grow a Restoration company, if you have a Restoration company, I have zero doubt you will make far more profit as a result of going to this. Go to waterdamagebootcamp.com. Thank you so much for your support. I love you guys. Hopefully, I'll see you in Nashville. Now let's get back to the video. The insurance company will spend the mold money pulling the insulation out of the crawl space. Here's why that matters because if you got a $5,000 allocation, it may cost three grand to pull all that insulation out of the crawl space and dispose of it. If you're not careful, the insurance company will apply that three grand to the mold and only leave you $2,000 to clean the mold. Okay? What you need to do is put all of that remove insulation on the water mitigation estimate, okay? And put only like the the HEPA vac, the mold-related items that you would do for scrubbing and cleaning the mold off of the framing. Does that make sense? If you don't understand, drop a comment and let me know, and I'll clear it up for you. But just here's what I'm saying: if you've been doing this for a long time, you got to know this. The insurance company will spend that money on the mold when it's really water. When you've got a mold allocation, make sure you're only spending mold cleaning items on the mold estimate. Everything else, like disposal or opening up the access, that needs to go on the water side, okay? So hopefully that makes sense for you guys. But anyway, just to kind of recap this, you would want several templates. You're going to want a $7,000 clean cat one. And I say seven grand because like with my clients, we help you guys get $7,000 job averages. How? Because we help you get the estimate and we start there, okay? That shows you how much equipment you'll be setting to get to that amount, okay? Now, you're not setting equipment you don't need. That's not what I'm saying. You get to set your own prices, dude. Okay? People tend to forget this. If you want to say your average job is 7 grand, that's fine, okay? You get to set your own prices. I will help you get to $7,000 if you go to workwithshane.com, okay? Here's what I want you guys to know: these need to be saved in Exactimate again as the customer name, so you can just type up template, and all of your templates will be there, and just open it, make a copy, change it to fit that job detail, and you're good to go.
Here's hack number two, and this one is using half-day billing. What is that, Shane? Great question. So let me tell you how I got this idea. If you've been doing this for a while, you will have probably had an adjuster tell you at some point that, "We don't pay for this or that," or "We only want to pay you for half of an air scrubber filter." Half of a filter? You can't buy half of a filter. Well, that would always piss me off, by the way. And if it makes you mad, drop a comment and say, "Yep, they've done that to me too." So I just kind of used it against them. Instead of just billing for three days or four days, I started using half-day roundup billing. So if it sat there for three days and a few hours, start charging 3.4 or 3.6, okay? So it's not just three days, it's 3.4, 3.6, 3.7, okay? And why do you do this? Because half the time they'll pay it. Half the time they'll pay it upfront. And I'm just telling you, if you guys do three, four water jobs a week, okay, this can equate to $30 or $40,000 a year, okay, as you add all of this up. So again, go ahead and add it to where you're getting 3.5 or 4.5 or whatever the thing is. Add half-day incremental billing on the backside of your fans and on your dehumidifiers and on your air scrubbers, all of it, okay? And if you like that one, drop a comment and let me know. Again, we're not saying overbill. Are they cutting your estimate down? Yes or no? Do you need to get your estimate back up? Yes or no? If so, do it. If you're making plenty of money and they're not trying to cut your estimate, by all means, don't do this. But I doubt that's the case.
Tip number three, and this is utilize alternative billing codes. What do I mean by that? Well, again, we're going back to the case where insurance companies like to say, "We don't pay for that." Right? A good example is emergency service call during business hours. And I think the code is EMS. I don't remember anymore because we got off of Exactimate a long time ago. We use our own thing, we use a muddy scope, using QuickBooks, but these are still tips that we did using Exactimate, okay? I just can't remember the code. But so let's say they don't pay for emergency service call during business hours. Here's what you can do: don't charge for it, right? Put something else of an equal service upfront, like using a thermal camera. Take a thermal camera and just look around on every single job, okay? Because you're going to put it on your estimate or on your invoice, and it's not like the customer's going to say, "No, he didn't do it." They might say, "It's standard, we're not paying for it." But like, tell them to go pay on Sand, you know what I'm saying? They always say that stuff. I'm just telling you this: you're going to take an item that they normally object to, like emergency service call during business hours, and just change it for like thermal camera and then charge the same amount of money, $180, $190. It doesn't really matter, okay? So utilize a different cost code for whatever amount of money you want, okay? And again, you're only doing it for the codes that they would normally argue. So here's another one: if you've got to do decontamination on your equipment, they don't like to pay for that. One of the things that we would do is you could do a miscellaneous code, mic, and charge a restock fee, okay, of $289, or charge lab restock and just say, "Hey, this is a restock fee. We're charging it at labor," and just put a unit of one and $289. Again, guys, they run off of flowcharts. They don't always know what to do when they say they're not going to pay for these things. And so you just need to put it on there every single time. Do you restock your equipment? Yes or no? You probably do. You don't leave it in the truck forever. You restock it. The difference is, bro, you ain't charging for it. You should charge for it. When you rent the equipment at Home Depot or United or Sunbelt, do you understand? They charge you a restock fee. They do, okay? So why can't we? We rent the same stuff, charge a restock fee, use a different cost code, same amount of money. So that's going to be tip number three. Use alternative codes.
All right, so now let's move on to tip number four. Whenever you're sending a crew out, a lot of you guys have truck mount carpet extractors, right? Aren't you billing for the actual truck hourly? Well, you should. Why? Because it's not a skateboard that they're on. They are in a truck mount unit. Or if you've got a truck mount unit or an extractor, charge them $289 or $189 an hour, okay? Now, even though they're only extracting for an hour, it still requires that truck for four hours, bro. Do you understand? Like, you forget this stuff. You've been brainwashed in the industry. If you've got a freaking truck mount unit out there for six hours, you should bill it for six hours straight up. Or you could just charge him for another trip, charge him for the delivery of the truck mount and then haul it off, and then charge for another truck to go out. Here's my point: you should be charging an extra $300 or $400 just for the hourly charge of the truck. And again, don't do this to defraud companies. You're doing this if you're actually doing it, okay? And you're trying to get more money on your estimate. This is what you do. Does that make sense? Charge for hourly for the truck mount unit.
And number five, this one sounds kind of simple, but hey, in the early days, guys, I would just go line item by line item and argue. Tip number five is this: offer a streamline discount. Every time they would call and they go to argue your estimate, just have them tally up their attempted reductions. And if it's over 10%, tell them this: "I would love to help you, evil adjuster, but I don't own the place, right? And I'm only authorized to approve a reduction of X percent." And we would typically do 10%. You can do five if you want, but like, I'm a nice guy, you know what I'm saying? I give him 10. Now, again, these other things that I'm talking about, you're going to charge more than you would have before watching this video. 10%, right? So that's the reason why I would have you do this. Guys, if you want to know more about this, I'm having a two-day event in Nashville. Go to waterdamagebootcamp.com because I'm going to be showing these tips and tricks plus way more stuff that I can't put on YouTube. It's not that it's bad, but I have adjusters that follow me, y'all. So I can't put everything out here because they will use what I say for evil, and we're not going to do that. But offer a 10% discount in exchange for immediate payment right now. So hopefully that's helpful for you guys. Again, if you want to know more how I can help you grow your company, go to workwithshane.com. If you want to come to Nashville for two days and let me train you and your team, go to waterdamagebootcamp.com. We'll see you in the next video.
Hey guys, if you enjoyed that video, I've got three things for you. Number one, if you haven't yet, click on my face below and be sure to subscribe to the channel, okay? We put out new content each and every week. Also, if you want me to help you grow your company, go to workwithshane.com. Workwithshane.com. Put in your information, we get on a call and see how we can help you grow your company. Lastly, there'll be some other videos right here. If you want to watch more content about growing your Restoration company, check out one of these videos. We'll see you guys on the next one.