Lee Godbold is the co-founder of Junk Doctors and built it to a $2 Million a year business by the end of year 5. He has no co-founded the Junk Removal Authority and looks to help you do the same with your junk removal business. In this video Lee talks about a free feature to allow your early stage junk removal business to accept online bookings-an absolute must for any serious player in the junk removal industry. www.junkremovalauthority.com www.junkdrs.com Subscribe to this channel for all the best junk removal industry info Like and follow us on Facebook at Junk Removal Authority
Okay guys, what’s going on. It’s about ten o’clock on a Monday evening. One of the things I want to cover today, or this evening is something that I think is very important to be on a website; and that is an online booking feature. Now the one that Junk Doctors has is pretty involved, and fancy, and it’s not cheap. This is important for us, because we have three separate locations – we have Raleigh, Greensboro, and Charlotte – and we do so many jobs, and have so many trucks that routing is important. We try and keep most of our trucks in a geographical area that’s fairly close by. We don’t want trucks going from one side of our service area to the other and back. Going from north to east to west, back north to south to west, and so forth. What this does is it allows us to book in four or five separate zones depending on what we have going on. This is a much more involved book online system than you’d likely need when you’re first starting. What we used until late 2016 was something called youcanbook.me. Youcanbook.me is either free, or it’s like 16 dollars a month. The only difference for the most part is if you pay 16 a month you can have multiple calendars, and those multiple calendars would be if you have multiple locations, but most of you that just have one location, you can get by for free. The other thing that you have is there is an advertisement on the bottom of your calendar that will say “Book online system provided by youcanbook.me”. Unless you just want to get rid of that, you can just roll with the free version and do just fine.
Now, youcanbook.me actually syncs with Google Calendar, which is what makes this really cool. We’ll log in to our old youcanbook.me account, but you can use your Google account to log in. I was just in a minute ago, so let’s see if it pulls up the correct one. These are multiple calendars that we had. They have a pretty good help section to help you get set up, but what you’ll do is you’ll come in and just work through each of these sections up top. Here are all your times, so your normal operating times where you would do jobs. In our case, what you’ll do is you’ll do it by you start time. Even though it’s a two-hour arrival window, what you have in your confirmation e-mail is you actually have to specify that it’s a two-hour arrival window that it sends out, because the way the system works is it just works in hour windows. 8:00 to 10:00 is our first arrival window and our last one is a 5:00 to 7:00 arrival time. You go into your booking form here, so these are all the different questions that you can ask people. If you go down the bottom this is how it actually appears. Once they’ve selected a time, then they’ll just fill in this information. You can require some information, and it’ll let them just volunteer some such as their business name. If you come all the way down you can see how you can also select multiple choice questions such as “How did you hear about us”.
There are some more advanced features like services teams, vouchers, stuff like that, some of those will not be available on the free version. Most of this actually must be available in the free version now, because we’re no longer paying for this and don’t use this function anymore, unless it’s because we at one point had the advanced version and they are letting us slide into their archives that we had. If you go to afterwards, this is a confirmation e-mail, this is a completely free feature. Every time a customer books, you can have a booking form sent to you, and then you also have one sent to the usual. This is just kind of the standard form to let you know that somebody booked and also, you’ll set a minimum time that it allows it to book online for example: same day bookings where you might not want allow booking with it like an hour or two hours or something like that. That is a feature that you could just. This is what the confirmation e-mail to the user would be and, you designate in your booking form using these brackets. You actually designate a link or hyperlink on any other communication that’s dealt with the customer. For example: this is for the first name, you need a bracket and you say first, and then whatever the customer inputted in that first name field will appear in this. It’s pretty cool. Then you’ll just type in the entire confirmation e-mail, anything you want to get sent to your customer will be included in this.
You can you can put this on your website so you can set it up where it either goes to a separate URL web page, or you can actually stick this on your site and we’ll show you how to do that in just a minute. This is how it appears. They will get a “Book online” page on your website, this is what’s going to look like, this is what they’re going to be seeing. This is the text that you can place, this is customizable. We always want to specify the two-hour window, because if you look down here it’s not clear. That’s just a limitation of the system, and most of our customers schedule 1-hour blocks instead of two. As you can see, we no longer use this calendar, so it shows everything is completely open because we’re no longer using it.
How does it work with Google Calendar? What you’ll do is you’ll find the calendar, and then you’ll go to embed, you’ll click embed, and if you want to embed this calendar on your website you would click copy to clipboard – that’s going to copy all that text -, and then you’re going to need to go in the back end like your WordPress to that particular page you want to go to, and then you’re just going to paste that information in there. That’s how you hook it up on your own website. This is what it looks like on Google calendar. What you’re looking at here is our Charlotte location back in 2016. We’ve been open for a couple of months at this point. We were running two trucks from time to time. The way you set this up is you would have any of your openings, any of these white slots that is an available time slot where somebody can schedule. Let’s go to January 17 where we are no longer using this system. This is what a blank calendar would look like. This is how you’re going to set it up. Any time that you do not want to schedule you can have marked as unavailable. For example: we’d like 8 to 10 arrival windows, 10 to 12, 1 to 3, 3 to 5, or 5 to 7. To put these, all you do is you just create an event for unavailable. Now the key is to make sure that it is marked as busy. If it’s marked as busy, then youcanbook.me will not show it as being available. When youcanbook.me schedules one of the jobs, then it will appear with booked, and this little bit of information here. Now what you’ll notice is if you click booked, this is now marked as busy. Let’s say you’re running two trucks for a particular day, so this books up, but you can still book another time slot to that particular window because you have two trucks running. Right like right here, you see how there’s two bookings on that slot, that’s what we’re talking about. All you’ve got to do is if you want to make this 8 to 10 slots on the 26th available is get a bullet, and then you would just come to where it says busy. Select free, click save, and youcanbook.me is going to consider that spot still available.
This is really just a great system when you’re first getting going. As you get more sophisticated, I would encourage you to look to move to a system like Junk Removal Authority offers, but when you’re first starting, youcanbook.me works great. You really need an online booking feature on your website. I think this is best last one that’s available for free, and there’s many several other versions of different types of software out there, but youcanbook.me is the best the, most professional appearing, and the best functioning out of any of the free ones available.
As always, Junk Removal Authority is here to help you. One of the things that we feel we have been talking about a lot recently is our AdWords management that we offer. It’s very unique to be able to hook up with a company that specializes in junk removal. Remember, we built Junk Doctors to a $2,000,000 a year business off of AdWords. That was our primary source of new jobs, and new revenue. We felt we were doing a great job while we were self-managing it. I studied a lot, thought I was doing excellent, and it turned out after we partnered up with the group we work with now that we’ve developed kind of the best Junk Removal AdWords campaign available. There’s actually $300,000 of mistakes that have been made over a five-year period. That has since been corrected. You can hook up with us, and you take it. You don’t have to spend that $300,000. I’ve spent that money for you on your behalf. We’ve really built this up and do a great campaign that’s going to bring you a lot of business, and the business that brings you will be profitable on average.
You can call us at 919-466-9322 or email me at [email protected]