 smart business moves, dealing with the coronavirus. We've been saying for the last several days that it's a very fast-moving, fast-evolving situation. And that's proven to be more and more true every day. I mean, I guess since we last spoke, which was 24 hours ago, a lot of major sporting events have been canceled. Leagues have been canceling all of their games. The NBA, the NHL, the NCAA Tournament. Earlier today, the governor in the state of Ohio has canceled school for the entire state for the next three weeks. Thinking spring break was next week, and people are going to be traveling all over the place. And he wanted them to get back home for a couple of weeks just to see if anybody picked up any coronavirus that may take up to two weeks for it to manifest symptoms. So with all of that being said, it's a lot of scary stuff going on out there, a lot of business challenges that we're going to have, but at the same time, a lot of real business opportunities we're going to have as well. And we have been talking every day about the opportunities that we have in terms of creating more value with the customers. And some people are going to be scared to have a cleaning company at home, but others are going to see it as an opportunity to make their home safer. The labor market should be getting better, a lot of good PR opportunities. We added nontraditional revenue opportunities. There's going to be a lot of businesses out there going to be looking for people to just sanitize and disinfect and clean some common areas. And I've got a guest on our call today. I've asked Matt Ricketts to join us. And I'm excited that he's got the opportunity to do that. Yeah. Hey, thanks for having me, Tom. And again, this is Matt Ricketts with Better Life Made. So we've met probably over the years at some point. And I'm always open in the book. And I feel like collaboration always helps all of us. So feel free to use anything you learned today from me and put it into place. And if you have ideas, feel free to share them back. I want to hear what you're doing. So let's get rolling, Tom. I've known Matt for a long time. And Matt, I mean, he's a really great business. He's strong in a lot of areas. But one area in particular is marketing and branding and being able to tell a story and get his clients and prospective clients to understand what his business is really about. And he's doing some pretty rocking things right now in the face of all this adversity, basically making an opportunity out of it. So that's why Matt has been one of the many reasons that we're fortunate to have Matt here today. You want to share a little bit about some of the things you're doing? Sure. So a couple of weeks back, I started messaging my employees and such, just letting them know we were going to be making some process changes. We started, you know, what's crazy is my brand is Better Life Mades. We're built off the Better Life products, but I had to move away from them. So we had to retrain my staff on some hydrogen peroxide based cleaners, which are green and safe, but are not our brand. So, you know, got off our own brand because we wanted to get ahead of this. So is that a change that you made because of the coronavirus? Absolutely, because they have EPA sanitizer and virus side claims. And then we also added a disinfectant. So that's something totally new. We've never thought that a disinfectant was necessary. But we found some disinfectants that we liked that are non-bleach alternatives, non-quad alternatives, but that are also very safe and effective. So we've implemented some new processes as well, where we actually have only one set of tools for each house now. We've implemented processes for how to clean and sanitize tools between houses, like vacuums and things like that, that are important to give clients trust. We started stocking up on things. So I don't want to be part of the mask problem, but we do have a supply of gloves and masks. April, do you have that? Come on, fuzz off. I'm not saying. But we have enough, if our customers demand trust to wear masks, that we can comfortably do that for a while. I don't have as many shoe covers as you, though. I'm a little behind the shoe cover game. Hand sanitizer, we were buying that stuff up weeks ago. And I feel like I won the lottery in one way, but I've spent a lot of money getting prepared for this. And I wish I was wrong. I wish I had been wrong a couple weeks ago when I started preparing for this and messaging for it. And so last week, I sent out a message to my customers. And this is the blog post version of the, let me go to my blog here. So this is one that I actually put out today. Let's go to the one that I sent out. I sent out one called Protective Measures Against the New Coronavirus. I sent this out last week, once we were all prepared for this, talking about what we're doing. And you can go to our website. I'm not going to read this word for you. But we talked about the protocols we're doing to increase things. Some things you guys might not even be thinking about is we're moving our model. We were moving towards some singles. But I went from 10 singles to about 19 singles in a couple of weeks because we were trying to get ahead of this. So that's about half my staff as single. So I feel like we're doing that for social distancing and to decentralize our business. We also made it so that our staff don't come in our building in the morning anymore. They go right, the ones that are using cars go right to their cars and they load up in them. And that way that they're only around one other team member, the reason we're doing that is so that if there is any exposure to coronavirus, we can limit those people and basically go to tracing that will show that we have limited exposure to as few people as possible. And then we're limiting the number of employees that are in the building at any one time to one team at a time. And they're only on the operation side of the building. And they have some specific tasks they do at the end of their day, load up their car. And they're disinfecting their cars at the end of the day. They're disinfecting all their tools and they're loading them back up at the end of the day. So all these processes, we started getting ahead of this a couple of weeks ago. We started really being diligent on reading everything we could about this and seeing if it's one part paranoia, it's one part paranoia, one part good sense in my book to kind of get ahead of it. So we did a lot of communication. So this was a blog post that we did kind of getting ahead of it. And then I put out one today that went out to an email. This one I sent out to not only our current customers, I called it cleaning for health, kind of inspired by Tom's. I think Janice talks a lot about cleaning for health. If you don't know Janice, that's Tom's wife. And she talks a lot about cleaning for health and hygiene and things like that. So I use that term, but then we spun it our way. So talking about the fact that we're using these EPA sanitizers disinfectants, that our vacuums are certified to get particles smaller than coronavirus. So the point was I sent this out to every person that's ever contacted us in the last two years and let them know, hey, we're getting a lot of people interested in cleaning right now and why they're interested in cleaning. So again, we were down to about $6,500 a day in revenue for next week. And with this email and with this post, let me just quickly share a report. I was gonna pull up Made Central real quick. I think I have this revenue production report pulled up and if it'll come up for me. So next week we're looking at, you know, we added another $1,200 for Monday. We were down about 6,500. We didn't do a lot yet on Tuesday, but we bumped Wednesday all the way up to 9,000 and Thursday to 8,700. And after that to about 8,000. So we'll still get some cancellations and lose some revenue, but we're in a better position to not be sliding too far backwards. Good communication is how we stayed on top of that. How much new business, Matt, did you get from sending your cleaning protocol and the precautions you're taking to old clients? Did you ever come back and say, well, it was also leads, it was also leads. Yeah, we did have some come back, but you know, the phones have been quiet the last few days until we did this and they were busy, we were busy today. So I would say we added roughly, I'm not sure how much this is recurring. I'm just looking at it day by day. I didn't actually look at how many new recurring sales that we got. I know we got a lot of one-time cleans and such, but I'm thinking we added about $6,000, $7,000, maybe the next week, looking at the numbers. So, I mean, it's not an insubstantial amount of money. That's gonna keep some people busy and keep some people with good full paychecks and not least of all me. So, I've already been stocking, I've been stocking money away for a while. I'm a business and have as much stability as maybe Tom and I do. So, if you don't have that, you need to be able to express expertise to your leads, prospects, current customers, employees so that they're confident in your ability to do a good job and they stay on your schedule and that they book with you to do more business. So, staying on top of the communication plan, so that first email actually got me an interview on News Channel Four, which I was hoping that I would get a digital link from that. They didn't actually put it on digitally. It just ended up being like a one and a half minute fluff piece, but other opportunities to get interviewed are gonna come up. So, I'm gonna take those and then on today, I discussed with my marketing agency writing a white paper about concrete steps we're taking and using that to reach influencers, I'm not influencers, decision makers in businesses and homes. So, I'm gonna use Facebook and LinkedIn. I'm gonna try LinkedIn for the first time to reach decision makers in facilities and things like that. Like based on some title searching and things like that, facility management. I'm gonna dig deep into that a little bit and into LinkedIn marketing. I don't know much about it yet, but I'm gonna try and reach decision makers with that white paper and show expertise as questions you should be asking your cleaning service provider during this period. My agency is gonna help me with the copy on that a little bit, so don't hold me to that title. But the idea is that's gonna go on. And then I'm gonna do a long form video of that, of what we're doing, if they wanna dig deeper into those processes and we're doing that. And then also, I mean, we're constantly communicating with our staff as well, trying to give them some confidence in what's going on. So, this is an email that I sent out from Made Central today. This is long form. For some reason, it turned it all into one big block, but just I'm gonna read the first paragraph and then go from there. But first off, I wanna express how proud of all of you I am right now. I know that you're in unprecedented times. A lot of us can cause a lot of anxiety and stress. So, I'm acknowledging them, right? That they're a part of this too. The role with the punches and showing the world the real value of what Better Life Made Test offer and why cleaning for health is more important than ever. Hopefully we can turn this current crisis into an opportunity and show the world just how valuable cleaning professionals are and leverage this to our advantage. I want you to know that we're looking out for you and have your back during these unprecedented times. So, we're talking about things like, we wanna get this together. We're giving them comfort that they should have sick bank in there if they haven't used their sick bank through the year yet and wasted all of it. We're only into March. They should have sick time. We load up sick time at the beginning of each year five days. So, they shouldn't have burnt through that already. But we also pay out PTO too. So, they should have time off and be paid if they need it. And we're also really slackening our attendance policy. We're communicating this to our staff too. We're also talking about extra steps that have been proven to reduce risk. And then, my number one goal over the next few weeks is keeping them healthy and focused. Healthy means you're not stressed out about all this and fearful about your job, family, et cetera. Take a break from thinking about it from time to time, hang out with your family, relax in your days off and rest assured we're doing everything possible to keep you healthy and safe. I gave them my number, call me directly and those are just steps with the staff. And I'll show you some training videos. Tom, you had a question? No, we're just saying that we want everybody to be mindful of the situation and to stay sharp. But at the same time, we need to keep our composure and not overreact. So, you're finding that balance there. Yeah, and I think you're having to have different messages to different people. But man, you cannot brush this under the rug at this point. I know a lot of people last week were just trying to ignore it and hoped it went away. I know that I've been hearing from friends of mine and saying, oh, this isn't gonna be by May 1st. This is all gonna be over, it's like the flu. And I was kind of thinking that at first a little bit too. But it's pretty hot in Iran right now and they're having a pretty big outbreak. The logic being like, oh, the flu goes away in the summer and Tom made that comment to me, he's like, Matt. He's like, it's pretty hot in Iran, isn't it? I was like, oh yeah, you're right. It's not just disappearing, right? So, we're thinking on that. The other thing that we're communicating with our employees is how to do all these new things that we're doing. So let me see if these videos will pop up. But we're creating just simple videos, sharing with them processes, sanitizing vacuums between homes. I don't know if I can make this picture a little bigger. I don't wanna play the video in the middle of playing another video. That would be very meta to try and do that. But the videos that we're creating are just short little clips on new processes for tools, how to sanitize vacuums between homes. I just shot one a minute ago about the fact that we're giving all of our customers their keys back, right? Why are we doing that? Because we wanna provide more social distancing. We don't want our employees to have to come into the office. We're also gonna stop taking cash and checks. At least collecting checks at the cleaning. Clients can still mail us checks and we'll let them know that distinction. But no more handling cash or checks, mostly due to the fact that we wanna run a distributed workforce. And that means they have to come in and deliver those things to us. All right, Tom, go ahead, I'm sorry. No, you're good. I'm showing your YouTube channel. If somebody wants to watch some of these videos, I guess you just go to YouTube. There'd have to, I have them hidden at the moment. So I can share the links, I'm gonna keep posting them. So I can share the links with you and you can post them. Yeah, I can put them on our resource page on cleaning business today. Yeah, so I've got more videos I just shot today. Some of, so I shot some client facing ones. I've got another email going out to customers. I feel like I'm emailing the customers like pretty regularly a couple of times a week, but this one tomorrow is gonna be about the fact that we're gonna be bringing their keys back. And actually, I think I have it right here. Oh, I put it away. Nope, here it is. I don't know if you can see it, but Lockbox just kind of going over a video of how that's gonna work, where we're gonna place them. And I did a video for the staff on where to place them, things like that, how they're coded through Made Central through our software and such. So it's just an ongoing process. I kind of used to joke that I felt like I was kind of retired from this business, but it still needs me. I'm back. Very good. Well, thank you, Matt. We're running up to the end of our time here, but I think this is really cool, useful information and inspiring for it's a scary time and it's like, what do I do? And a lot of it's just taking action and communication is so important. It's not even so much about what I, it's just doing it and getting out there, making sure that your customers know you're there and you're aware of the situation and your planning and your employees wanna hear from you because that invokes confidence and everybody's a little bit afraid and looking for an answer. I mean, you got clients and you got employees and all of them want you to be successful. They want us as business owners to be successful. They're rooting for us. So we just need to get out there and show it. And one of the two things is gonna happen. It's either not gonna be nearly as bad as what some people are afraid in which cases was a good exercise for planning and we're gonna be fine and life will go on. We'll have a lot of gloves on hand. Yeah. You know, at least you can ask it, maybe you don't know what to do with it. But if it gets worse, then that's gonna change the value proposition and there's gonna be a whole lot of other people out there that are gonna be looking for help that you're in a position to provide it and for years down the road, maybe for the rest of our lifetimes and beyond, the world is gonna look at cleaning in a different light and that's gonna be a good thing for us. That's the thing I'm most excited about, Tom, is I actually do believe long-term the companies that can really show leadership here and show the value in what they're doing are not gonna have trouble reaching higher price points that are more profitable and can afford to pay their staff better in the long run because they're adding that value into the process and giving that confidence to their customers. So honestly, I think the long-term value, if this is just a blip on the radar, the long-term value is you've showed leadership, you showed intelligence, you showed the ability to adapt and you showed them how you're gonna keep them safe and the value you provide them. So if nothing else, take this opportunity to strengthen the professionalism of your business and of our industry as a whole, that I think is the greatest opportunity that is available here and I just wanna reiterate that with just what you said there. Well, thank you, Matt. I'm gonna bounce over here real quick and just show everybody our, where are we? Actually, I didn't need to do that and getting too much Brady Bunch going on here. Cleaning business today is, you know, our publication. Oops, I really blew it. Sorry. We got kind of an anchor piece here that we wrote on the coronavirus. We got other pieces that we're working on. Matt's blog is a heck of a resource as well in some of his videos and we have this resource page. If you go to cleaning business today, coronavirus downloads, you've got a number of items that we've posted here and we'll continue to post more and we'll put some of Matt's stuff up here tomorrow. If you haven't subscribed to cleaning business today, if you would just go to landing page over here on the right and please do that. We're gonna be doing more frequent newsletters, email blasts as we learn things and come up with materials and you certainly want to stay in the loop on that. So with that being said, we'll see you here tomorrow at five o'clock and we'll five o'clock Eastern and we'll do it again. Appreciate everybody's time. Matt, thank you so much for your help. All right. I really appreciate you saying that. We'll talk to you soon. See you tomorrow. Bye-bye.