 Hi, this is Tom Stewart with Cleaning Business Today. This is another of our continuing series that we're doing every day at 5 o'clock Eastern on our Cleaning Business Today page. Talking about the coronavirus and how we as responsible cleaning business owners should be adapting to this and seeing where opportunities are and leveraging our businesses to create maximum value for all stakeholders because we are in a unique position in a very unique time that This is unprecedented. We have a level of concern in this country that For a lot of us we've never never experienced in our lifetime. It's affecting the stock markets It's a putting a potential strain on our healthcare system We're seeing things in other parts of the world that maybe we've never ever seen before so we don't know what tomorrow holds, but there are some things that we do know and some things that we can probably anticipate or at least plan for and Because we are cleaning professionals in an industry that is going inside of people's homes It's a lot of it's a mixed bag of what all that means, but if we make the right decisions and do the hard stuff now we can create a lot of value for ourselves and Like our, you know clients like all of the stakeholders really this is this is a unique time So I'm going to jump into a deck I have here and I'm going to Briefly go over some of the opportunities that we discussed yesterday that we as house cleaning Businesses have in these unique times You know, we are You know hygienic house cleaning rather where we're not just cleaning for appearance, but we're cleaning for health We have an opportunity to do that And we do we all do that to various degrees, but wherever we are with that We have an opportunity to really focus on finer techniques of how infections spread and Areas in the home that are being touched a lot and what the products we use and how we go about Providing service to our clients to where we could be minimizing the chance of infections being Shared in their home and for a lot of people they're going to see that was a tremendous value If they've got a choice between just having their home cleaned for somebody's pushing a vacuum and taking up the trash or having their Home hygienically cleaned where they know high-tech areas are are being sanitized and disinfected and all the proper protocols are being taken to Reduce the chance of their pathogens in that home. Then that's a that's a that's a heck of a differentiator Which kind of gets into the second point of being able to decommodiatize our businesses a lot of consumers just go to you know the internet they go to Google they See whoever has a bunch of reviews and whoever pops up pops up first and just order service without really thinking a lot more About you know the health aspect of it and typically the people who are really really great at marketing or getting a lot of that business Maybe they're using hygienic cleaning and in cleaning for health. Maybe they aren't But if you can adopt practices where you can explain to perspective clients how you can reduce the chance of them Getting any pathogen including a coronavirus. There's gonna be a lot of people out there They're gonna be really really interested in hearing that story and using a service like that Another opportunity a lot of us are struggling really hard to find qualified labor right now It's reasonable to think based aboard You know, what's happening with? hospitality and travel and like all the major you know events conventions and so forth that are being cancelled and the airlines pulling back and You know retails being affected. There's a lot of things that's being affected that would Stand to figure that there's gonna be More available labor on the market that will be qualified to work in our industry So that's a real opportunity as well We've got some challenges that we're gonna have to deal with but some of the challenges that we've been dealing with for a long time Might be reduced if not go away There's some really good public relations opportunities out of all of this too If you've got a cleaning business that is is is doing this in a responsible way and has an action plan to Clean homes in a hygienic way to reduce the chance of pathogens being Shared in that home and you're training your people and doing all the right stuff. You got a story to tell and You need to take your communications that you're you're sharing with your your your clients and share it with all the local news Outlets as well because guess what the local news wants to talk about coronavirus right now They're looking for anybody that They can call a subject matter expert that they can put on TV or do a radio Interview or quote in some type of article that they're writing and if you do that you're basically differentiating your business again in a very competitive space and putting yourself out there though that for consumers that are worried about the coronavirus would be interested in your business and You stand to figure if we're creating more value by adding Hygienic cleaning and reducing the chance of infection Contracted in the home that you can get a higher price point at the labor market. It's more favorable Maybe get some some some better margins there as well Let's talk about smart business moves and each one of these bullet items has Whole lot into it and we're going to be talking about each one of these and in the days ahead But I just wanted to lay some of this out here to get you thinking about it Just to begin with you as a cleaning business have a major role to play in How society is going to be dealing with the coronavirus? as a cleaning business and cleaning is the first line of defense in the infection control and What we do plays a big part in terms of you know, what pathogens are left on surface Surfaces and the chances of people picking up You know germs and touching their face and making them so sick I mean in a simple way, so if we clean in a way that reduces Those those pathogens on surfaces We're making for safer environment and that's our job and if we start approaching our business that way We I mean if we expand how we're doing that in our businesses That's a big part of how we can contribute towards fighting Coronavirus and creating value for for clients. We need a plan once we figure out what our role is And understand that how are we going to do it? You know, how are we going to change our cleaning procedures? What new products might we need to introduce? new equipment new techniques Do we need additional personal protection equipment all of that's a big part of it How are we going to communicate all of this is huge and I'm going to have another slide you're talking about communication Just a minute is stirred down on the list But it also needs to be at the top of the list because we need to be communicating now Because your community is scared your clients are scared your employees are scared They want to hear from the people at the top of of your business You know what's going on and what are we doing to deal with with with these threats? And if you get out in front of it, you're creating a sense of Trust a sense of comfort you're you're you're you're putting yourself in a position where? the marketplace and I mean all your stakeholders are going to have trusting you and what you're doing and That's what it's going to allow you to be successful and these These new times training is going to be really important You're going to want to make sure that you train all your cleaning technicians and all the proper techniques to Break the chain of infection in a home and how they do that in a responsible way where they're Protecting themselves and we'll talk more about that in later discussions public relations We talked about that just a moment ago contingency planning this goes in a lot of different directions if you find yourself in a situation where You've got employees that are sick and they can't come to work What you know, what do you need to do to make sure that you know? They're being taken care of if you find yourself in a situation where your Your income might be taking ahead you might lose some business for a while. I mean it's possible if you do this Right, I think that you can actually get more business But if you did lose some business, you know, how would you manage your business? What what expenses would you cut what what additional cash might you need? to deal with that Doing all of these things. This is a Fastly developing story. We're learning was a lot Golly day the stuff that we don't know goes on forever. We're learning more every day So so the point is out of everything that we just talked about here we need to be looking at it and asking ourselves, what did we learn today and implement make changes And to you know our plan and how we're communicating and how we're training and the PR all of that needs to be changing You know arguably on a daily basis. So that's what I mean by repeat do all of that and just start all over again And we're going to be talking about each one of these points more in detail and in subsequent Discussions, but I want to just take just a minute and talk about the communications plan We touched upon this yesterday But if you don't have one you need one you need it now and we'll figure all of this other stuff out in more detail And as we do we can modify our communication plan, but you need to say something Give answers to these basic questions. Give it your best answer at the moment You know, how do we keep our employees safe? How do we keep our clients safe? How do we keep our clients home safe? What are we? What are we doing to to contribute to that? You know, what do we do if we have a employee who we think might be sick? What do we want our clients to do if they think that they might be sick bottom line is sick employees Don't need becoming work and we don't need to be cleaning for for sick clients There's a link here in cleaning business today We have a page for a corona virus downloads if you've never been to cleaning business today It's cleaning business a day comm landing page looks like this There's a really cool article here that we posted last week on the corona virus that gets into a whole lot of detail I'm going to show you here on the right. There's a way to subscribe and we have a newsletter that goes out We're going to be pushing more information out there as well If you haven't subscribed to our newsletter, please do that that helps us help you I'll show you this this article here real quick. It gets into some some Underlying science behind things that we need to know some of it's a little bit techy But it talks about the chain of infection and what that means and what we need to do is as cleaning business is to break the chain of infection It gives a lot of good information if you haven't read that I would encourage you to do it and The link that I was showing you before is Corona virus dash downloads That'll take you to this page I've got some example letters for the communication that we were talking about that we use in castle keepers There's a really cool handout here For proper hand washing techniques, which is really important one of the most important things We can encourage everybody to do is wash their hands frequently and wash them in a manner That is removing as much soil as possible. Um, we've got a word document That's in a generic letter that's kind of modeled after the letter that we did in castle keepers But you can download that and change it and use it, you know in your own business I've also got a link here to a couple other resources In the article I was showing you we were talking about the chain of infection There's a whole lot of science that goes in behind this and you don't need to know all of that day one But as you get into this especially You know as customers start asking questions and your employees start asking questions You need to establish trust and a huge part of establishing trust is is demonstrating that that you have the knowledge And the more that know you can expand your vocabulary to talk about things like infection control and pathogens and Talk about you know the the the virus that causes SARS as a RNA wrapped virus We get what we're going to coach you on all of this stuff as we get into this But the more you can speak that language the more confident you're going to be the more Comforted your clients are going to be and the more confident your employees are going to have in you this professional house cleaning technicians manual Basically a lot of what you we had in that article came out of that book Myself my wife Janice and a handful of other really Pete you know people more talented than I am actually help write that and It's blinked there if you want to want to buy that you certainly can and We also have a PR Example where Bruce Vance one of the authors of the professional house cleaning manual Did a radio interview in his local market in Raleigh just to kind of give you an example what that looks like So that's plenty enough for today. We'll be back Tomorrow at this time. I hope you found this helpful and useful You guys can can can hit us up Through Facebook or send us an email either one. We'll be glad to help however we can thanks See you tomorrow