 Hey, good afternoon everybody. Tom Stewart here on the Liz Trotter. Our guest today is Chris Willett and this is Smart Business Moves. Woo-hoo! Hey, Chris! Hey guys, thanks for having me. Yeah, thank you. You know you're one of my very favorite business owners. Tom, did you get a new ring? This, yeah, this is actually an aura ring. Are you familiar with them? I've heard of it, but I'm not familiar with it. It gives us all kinds of like metrics of what your body is doing and there's an app on your phone and... Yeah. How are you liking it so far? I'm still figuring it out. I don't know. It's supposed to be what I'm supposed to be doing. It's supposed to be good for me and it's supposed to give me information that can be useful. So we'll say, yeah, kind of like a mood ring. Thank you, Robin. I used to have a number of those. That was like in the 70s one, wasn't it? I totally remember them. Hey, Robin. You learned anything cool yet? About, well, actually it tracks your sleep. And yeah, I'm figuring out a few things about that and certain things that you can do during the day or like before you go to bed that can affect how you sleep. And I still drink a lot of coffee and it's weird. You can have a few beers before you go to bed and the numbers get kind of crazy too. Well, like, what are you noticing? Do you sleep all the way through the night or do you like in and out? What are you... Well, it's different levels of sleep and what your heart's doing and temperature and it's really complicated. I'll explain it, but it's a lot of math and we only have an hour. So we get brought. Yeah, I'm not feeling like you're doing a good job of explaining it, but it sounds like something my son-in-law would like. He likes things that are really complicated. If he likes nerdy stuff. And what you do is, and this is the drill, that's kind of hard to sneak in like surprise gift because the first part of it is they send you a kit to figure out what your finger size is. I can get Sharra to measure his finger when he's asleep. No? Well, say Sharra the cat. And I don't know, it's supposed to rip, I don't know, three, 400 bucks, something like that. All right, I need to know, is it like for a, hey, I love you, you're a great son-in-law gift or is it, hey, it's your birthday and here's your big gift? I've never met your son-in-law, but Sharra's awesome and I'm sure that he is as well. So he would be well-deserving. I know he'd appreciate it. All right, he's amazing. He's a nuclear engineer and he loves nerdy, difficult, complicated things. The more complicated things, yes, love it. I'd like to see what he could do with all that data. Yeah, he would do stuff. I promise he would, he would enjoy it. He would have blasts. Well, we're gonna be talking about data today too, aren't we? I think. Yeah, we're moving down the process flow chart and today we're gonna be talking about how to measure, use data from the dispatch process, the dispatching process to get good outcomes in your business. And I've seen some of the really cool stuff that Chris does in his business and he shared some of it with us in the past and he really stays on top of the day of activity. Just to explain, scheduling is what you do, days in advance of the cleaning day. Dispatch is like day of stuff, it's game day, like the jobs that you're cleaning today, that's a dispatch activity and Chris has some tools and there's some cleanup the day after that goes along with dispatch that I suspect he'll be talking about as well. Before we get going though, and we should coordinate this a little bit better, you've got I guess a project of special interests that you wanted to share, is there a link that you could share with us? Thanks Tom. Yeah, let's see. How would I post a link? There's a private chat if you look over in the right and if you can drop it in there. This is a fundraiser we're doing, Allie is a client or a client, she's a tech of ours. We woke up Monday morning, went to the office, went to dispatch and woke up to a message that her house burned down. She lost her apartment actually, lost everything she had. Pretty terrible way to start the week, right? I had to actually woke up that morning, I checked the news first thing I lay in bed for like 20 minutes or so and look at the news before I have to get up and go about my day and saw there was an apartment fire on there. Oh, that's terrible, whatever, went to work and come to find out, it's one of our techs. So that image right there, those are her cats. The worst part of that day was they got out of an apartment, her boyfriend, her two dogs but they literally woke up to firefighters and they're saying, get out right now, kicked them out, left their cats behind. So those are their cats. Paris and Miley firefighters came out a couple of hours later with them. So I have to tell you, Chris, that this image and your story kind of, I think, worked against you a little bit because what happened was when I read this, I was so happy, I felt so good. No, I'm not even kidding. I felt so good. I'm like, oh, and the firefighters are smiling. I'm like, yay, I clicked out and then I realized, Liz, you didn't donate. And I had to go back. I had to remind myself to go back and go. That's a good point. Yeah. We could, yeah. Oh, God. It felt good to put that picture in there, right? Yeah. There were some other pictures of it burning down and maybe that would be a better coverage. Maybe if I wanted somewhere, a link to go look at this nice picture and get the good stuff. Yeah, that's good, Paul. But I felt, I was crazy. I was like, Liz, you did not donate right there. You actually beat me to donating, too. You got it right after I created it. So thank you, Liz. That's going to help her a ton. And there's cats. And you're probably up the ante because there were cats, right, Liz? No, I didn't actually. You know what? The cats are safe. And I love me some cats. It's true, but the cats are safe and happy. I can't even imagine. It's hard enough, like business owners, as business owners, when these traumatic things happen, like as a, I don't know, as a technician, I feel like it's so much harder. You just don't have the resources to get your life back on track. I know that everybody says that money doesn't, what is it, the saying, that money doesn't make happiness or whatever it is. But the lack of money definitely does make things a lot more stressful and a lot harder. And I just think as a technician, it's so, I feel so bad. Yeah, you know, she moved here from Louisiana and doesn't have family. And they're in a hotel right now, so that's good. But yeah, I have business owner friends who unfortunately lost their houses a couple of weeks ago on the wildfires that we had here. Did a lot better, right? They're able to rent new homes, they had connections, they're getting their houses remediated or looking for a new house, it's a little easier, right? And it's more like a bummer. It's like, ah, this sucks, this is a bummer, it's a hassle, it's frustrating, it's irritating, it's not devastating. And you have very little, it's devastating, it's like, I don't even know. So yeah, well, I was super, I love that you did that for them, Chris, you know, I'm kind of a, I don't know, some people say we overuse, go fund me or whatever, but I've used it a few with my, I had a person die and I had another child die, I'm like, these people need help. Yeah, I got it from you, right? I mean, we're business owners, we can use this to do a lot of good. I mean, I feel like that's what our company does overall. It's great, so rewarding. So I hope we can get her some help. So, Maddie doesn't fix all your problems, but can certainly make you more comfortable, especially in a situation like this. So, we'll share this link again at the show as well. Thanks. What's going on in your world, Chris? We haven't seen you in a while. I got it, Tom. Oh man. Been spending a lot of time with my baby, Jack. That's pretty much my life right now. He's seven months old, so it's day and night and middle of the night and all those times. I haven't seen a picture of him lately, Chris. I feel like you're slacking in the dad's department. We really need to see more pictures. You sound like my whole family. I'll get him out there. All right, yeah, that's the last hook I needed. Yeah, I mean, break out somewhere. Actually, just grab him and bring him on the show. So yeah, I was supposed to bring him on today. Alyssa ended up being able to grab him. It was gonna be so tough. I'm on this kitchen. You can see our hard floors back here. He'd be slamming his head on everything, so. Poor little guy. He's slamming his head on stuff. He's getting mobile, so he's exploring the world. Soft things, mostly, fortunately, but sometimes hard things, right? Yeah, oh, they got to learn somehow, Chris. Exactly. Bash, what was that? No. I try to shield him a little bit. Not all the time. He does have to learn, but most of the time. Well, and also you wouldn't be paying very close attention if you're on the shelf. I just don't think so. On the floor in the back room. We wouldn't get too far. Yeah, not good. All right, so is there anything else going on out there? You guys, anything COVID-related right now or how's the market doing, Tom? Any kind of rebounding there? It's been all over the place the last few days. Been really crazy. Fed made some announcements today that interest rates are gonna have to go up because of inflation and all of that and markets pulled back a little bit. They call it volatility and it's supposed to be very volatile here for the foreseeable future. And I think, as long as there's no underlying issues, right? As long as it's fundamentally sound, we could just see volatility, but like 2008, there's a bunch of money out there that just wasn't backed at all, right? And that's why everything dissolved. But as long as everything's sound, then it could just be a correction, could be volatility, right? If it's sound. Yeah, I mean, but there's a lot of weird stuff going on all over the world too, but you know, Russia, Iran, China, North Korea takes one. We've gone through some unprecedented events here over the last couple of years. Hopefully everybody behaves themselves in other parts of the world because that can mess things up for us too. Yeah, Omnicron hit us pretty hard. I don't know about you guys, but we took a big loss in January. We did too, us too, yeah. So January is for us, it's historically a slow, slow month, but it's hard, hard this year. A lot of people, you know that in groups, Chris. Everybody's bemoaning in January, right? Nobody is happy right now, it's been January. Yeah, I feel a little solidarity there, right? It's not just me, so we're all going through this, so. But it is interesting. Tell me how many of you see this as much? You do talk to a lot of different business owners, but maybe not as closely as Chris and I do. We've kind of watched it go across the country, you know, kind of started in the East Coast. They had this like bad problems with the employee situation first, and then it started moving across the country. And, you know, it's just barely hitting the West Coast maybe like a week, two weeks ago, the really severe can't find employee thing that everybody has been dealing with for a really long time. So it's interesting that it's traveling like that. Yeah, these coasts, the numbers have been dropping pretty sharply. I understand there's some other parts of the country that are going to be dealing with this for another few weeks. I guess the good news is people aren't getting as sick off of this very analysis as they did the other ones. It's more of an inconvenience and it is a life-threatening thing for most people. I have it right now, so. But you said you're asymptomatic too, so you're feeling great, right? I am, I am. I know that you call that asymptomatic, but then you're like, except pain in my heart. It's kind of fun for me to introduce it that way, right? It makes me seem tough. My heart hurts really bad, but I'm fine. That's all. Just a little separation there between my heart and the fluid around it. I can kind of gut through it though. This is one of my more favorite websites of tracking. What's going on with codes because you can kind of see it from state to state. And you can see the numbers are kind of dropping here. These are the number of cases per 100,000s of people and I don't know, thick of state, I'd say. Check it out. Go back up to Colorado. Oh, and it looks like Kentucky's kind of having what we're having too. You see that table? Yeah. So I was watching that and I was so excited, right? Okay, we're going back down. Hopefully we're going to follow New York and then shot rack up. Yeah, but it's, well, it was really low in December. You're talking about Kentucky, but it's coming down and it's coming out, coming down where you guys are too. You know, you were up in November and that probably wasn't even Omicron. That was probably Delta. Okay, I misread the charts. And then it came down in a shorter time period. Then it peaked, I guess, from the eighth. And it drops like a rock when it drops. Ours didn't. It dropped really fast, but then it leveled out at about the midpoint. It was a little strange. This is kind of cool because you can take this slider and drop back and see where it gets hot and where it does it. And if it's all the way down here, this blue color, that's where it's the worst. So if I go here like today, like South Carolina used to be this color here, that color blue, but now it's turning back to yellow again and that's the difference between like having 1,000 cases per 100,000 per day to like 200 cases per 100,000 per day. So it's getting a lot better where we are. Colorado's got some data missing for some reason. Don't know about that. That's Utah. It's terrible. Oh, okay. Nobody ever knows where we are. That's Colorado. Is this you guys? Okay. You're looking better. If I go back a little bit, you see how much lighter it gets. So you guys are getting better. Same up here in Washington. Oh, I know we're getting better. That's cool. It's all good. It's all good. Yeah, but look at the Northeast. Gosh, it's still. No, actually these dark numbers are awesome because you down here have a lot of numbers. Yeah. If I go back a little bit, you see how it gets blue? That's when it's worse, when it gets these darker areas. Well, the colors keep saying blue, but I'm not seeing any blue. So now I understand you're, the blue is on my screen is kind of a green in color. Well, whatever this color is for my cursor is. So the light color is worse. Yeah. The dark color is a guy. So like when you go, it's like the lighter color right now, go back a little bit. But it's not, like yellow is a lighter color too. Yeah. Yellow is like 200 per 100,000 versus a thousand per 100,000. You're much better off being yellow than you are this light blue color. I think we can color it now. Yeah, you don't want to be that color. Yeah. Okay. That's interesting that, it seems like the graph is backwards. Like you think of darker as being more intense. Right? It's a darker color. Yeah. Well, we'll have to, I'll send them a note or something. Thank you. If you could, I would really appreciate that. Love that you always have my back that way too. All right, we should actually get to work. I just realized- Let's talk about dispatching. So Chris, you can take the ball or run with it wherever you want to. Cool. I'm trying to think of where to start. And I think for us, it's the day after. So if I'm looking at yesterday's cleans, I want to go through all of our cleans and see what were they timed for? What did we quote them for? And how long did it take us to clean these houses? And did those align? Do we have any clients? Do we have any odd balls? Are they really high? Are we getting out super, super early? Or are we getting out way too late? It's easy to think, well, it kind of evens out, right? End of the day, who cares? We get out of the sum early and some late. And as long as everything needs in the middle, it's okay. But it causes some issues, right? I mean, if I have a client paying us $300 a clean and we're going out there and spending an hour and a half, they're probably not going to be too happy. And that happens, or it has happened. We're taking a lot of steps to make sure that it doesn't happen anymore. And I feel bad for those clients too. I mean, they're paying us for five, six hours and we're getting out of there an hour and a half, two hours. Like something got lost along the way between quoting and the actual cleaning. And then on the flip side of those clients, and I think this is what most people are more concerned with, because this is where you're losing money, that they're spending too long in their home. Maybe you got the wrong info, they're misquoted, maybe they added a couple pets, got an Alaskan Husky, had some kids, and now you're taking a lot longer in the house than you used to. It's also a good pulse for the whole company, right? So if I start saying, hey, on a given day, we're going over and, you know, three or four houses, those are things we can correct and look at on an individual basis. But if that starts ticking up, like now it's five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 houses, maybe I have a company-wide issue. It's just a really good pulse on what's going on. And when you're looking at it every single day, I've just found that I'm getting super in tune with the company overall. You know, if we have a bad day, yesterday it snowed like six inches and we went over on a lot of these homes and just due to tracking stuff into the house, unloading our supplies, getting into the door, all that kind of stuff takes longer. Driving slower. Yeah, driving's a lot slower, slips, trips, falls, so our guys aren't moving too fast. And so it kind of results in, you know, not a great day or same thing if we have a lot of call outs, you know, it's really great that I can go back to my team at the end of the week and say, hey, what happened Wednesday, you know, was there some sort of like event? And they say, oh yeah, you know, this happened to us a couple of weeks ago. We had a lot of techs out sick with Omicron and that was the day that it really, really hit us and I was able to see it the next day in our dispatch KPIs because we're going over on a lot of houses. So the reason I say that the day after is kind of the start is because I can glean a lot from that data. So one thing that we do is look at all the homes that we went over on. We open up their profile in our system or in Made Central and we can go back in history, see how long that we're taking in those homes on average. Made Central gives us a lot of powerful data that we can use to properly rate, adjust that client. So if we're constantly going over and, you know, Mr. Jones's house and, you know, here's something that happens. We have one tech going over a nut house for the past five queens. And so it looks like there's a really big problem. We need to rate adjust this guy. But then when I go look at things, I just realized that that's a really slow cleaner and it's not Mr. Jones's fault, right? That we're going over in his home, we're just sending somebody slow and they need some retraining, some help, something to improve their speed. So it just kind of opens you up to all of these little micro issues within your company. On the flip side, if they were going over and it's an average speed cleaner, then Mr. Jones needs a rate adjustment. We need to make sure that we're charging our clients for the amount of work that we're putting into their homes. And it's usually pretty easy. All of our clients have been super receptive to this. Hey, it's taking us longer than we expected. You know, here's your new rate. Here's exactly what's happening. You did get a husky. And so now it's taking us a little bit longer to clean your house. I will note that we set that expectation up front. So when we book clients, we always let them know we audit their first three cleans and make sure that the quote that we delivered them is accurate. We adjust down too. We go the other way. Let's say we're getting out of someone's house extremely early, we'll give them a call and ask them, you know, are we cleaning everything that we quoted? And a lot of times they'll say, oh, actually I've just been telling them not to do my basement. You guys don't have to clean it. And we shouldn't be charging them for that, right? That's not fair either. I have a couple questions. Yeah. So first question is, are you using like normalized hours in May central crystal? Like for the three cleans, how are you determining that? Because what if you have a slow cleaner or a fast cleaner? Does it matter in those first cleans? How are you managing that? Yeah, so it doesn't really matter what speed cleaner because like you said, we do normalize that data and made central. So if I send my fastest cleaner and then I send my slowest cleaner together, it's about an average cleaner, right? So my fastest cleaner will get out an hour early. My slowest cleaner will get out an hour late. That place is booked correctly. Or let's say that I am sending a slow cleaner and actually let's go on the flip side. Let's say I'm sending a really fast cleaner and they get out on time, both times, right? But I sent the fastest cleaner in the company. Well, if I send it another tech, right? Two weeks later, there's no way they're getting out of that home on time. My fastest cleaner, I don't know how she does it. I'm actually going out in the field next week to look at her because I need to figure this out. I need to systemize this into the company. That's a whole new story. You need to change that language there, Chris. You're not going out in the field to look at her. I think you're going out in the field. Yeah, I'm going out in the field to learn from her. That's awesome. It's okay, get her as a side activity. I like that, that's good. All right, so you are using normalized hours. So I was, because I know that a lot of people push back on this idea of adjusting rates after the third clean, but you don't have to worry about that if you're using a normalized hour. And it's for the exact reason that you just said. Or if you send like a fast cleaner out there, I don't want to change anything based on what a fast cleaner does. And I also don't want to change anything because I've got slow cleaners, right? I'm worried that I'm going to change your rate and then I'm going to lose money all over the place. So, all right, so you do do that. And then my next question is, so walk us through. So I heard you say two things. One, does everybody know what normalized hours is? Or are you getting to that? I kind of assumed you all's viewers knew. Actually, you know what? Sometimes you get so used to talking about stuff that you just feel like everybody knows it. So obvious, but maybe we should. Tom, can you maybe pull up Made Central? That might be easier to explain it. And for anybody that doesn't use Made Central, are you going to be able to pull it up, Tom? Well, I'll just explain it because I don't want to. I mean, you guys twist my arm, I'll do that all day. But I'll give you an explanation of what normalized hours is and you guys let me know if you want more detail. You know, some people are faster, clean technicians are faster than others. And normalizing the hours is a way of measuring on a cleaner by cleaner basis, how long it takes them to clean homes versus the allowed time to clean homes, the job ticket hour and in some other lexicons. If they're typically faster than the allowed time, they'll have a productivity of a greater than 100%. If they're typically slower, they'll have a productivity that's less than 100%. So when you normalize your times, you're basically adjusting the actual time that's taken to clean a home based on the productivity of the people cleaning it. So, you know, if I have a productivity of 120% and I cleaned a home in four hours, we take that four and divide it by 120% in the normalized time would be something less than four hours. It would be 3.3 hours. So 3.3 hours would be how long you would expect it to take for your normal cleaner, your normal technician, a technician working at 100%. So you don't have those guessing games of, well, gee, I don't know if I need to raise the rate because I had a slow person cleaning it. It takes all that confusion out of it. I mean, how much time, I'm trying to think of how much time I used to spend when we'd have a fast cleaner in a home and then we'd send somebody who's not as fast as them and they would come back and say, who's been cleaning this house? There's no way we can get out on time. You know, we need to do something about this. And you can always find something. Everybody can always find something that the other team is not doing. Fast cleaner. Oh, sure. Yeah, of course. And they want to make a point of telling you. That's right. I'm going to tell you. All right, so FYI, Tom, moving forward, your explanation about normalized hours would be way easier with a visual. So next time we are going to pop, I know we want to talk about KPIs and Chris has a lot of really good information to share. So maybe not today, but absolutely next time, do not argue. You need to pop up the visual. Just do math really easily, but other people do not. So like 120% divided by what again? I don't actually, ah. So it's just. I will get you a visual. All right. All right, so while you're doing that, Tom, I did another question for you though, Chris. So you said two things. I think I got a little off track. You said that you look at it every day or the day after, right? For all the information. But then I also heard you say that you talk to the people about it at the end of the week. So on the day after, do you do anything other than just look at it? Or do you decide on the, what you're going to do? Do you guys have a meeting at the end of the week? Can you walk us through a little bit? Your process? Yeah. So the day after we look at it and then we just do a quick dive into any home that we went way over or way under on. We just look for outliers, right? Yeah. So when we're talking about over, if we went over at all, we look at it. And what we're trying to figure out is, is this an ongoing problem? We have a lot of new techs right now. And so we're going over on a lot more houses than usual. The good thing about looking at it every day is I know the reason. I know it's because we have a lot of new techs. Because we didn't have this problem, right? Before we had all the new techs. So that kind of tells me, okay, it's not a quoting problem. It's a, maybe it's our training. Maybe it's just kind of, is what it is. It'll get better in about a month, right? When everybody gets up to speed. We open up every house that we went over on. We look if it's been an ongoing problem. If it is, if they truly need a rate adjustment, we adjust their price and we do that daily. By doing that daily, we're making sure that we're fairly charging all of our clients. And because we pay on job ticket hour, similar to commission, it's the only way, right? We have to make sure that we're charging the right price or else we're gonna be underpaying our techs. And I'm not gonna feel good about that, right? I'd be upset if I have a job that was under-bidding and that affected my pay. It helps us so much with tech pay, with retention. Our average tech pay is like insane since we've started doing this. Obviously, there's a lot more that goes into that. But I'd say this probably accounts for like 20% of our raises that we gave our tax last year. Oh, wow. It's bringing in a ton of revenue so that we can be the highest paying maid service in town. That's gonna get us the best tax. At least it's gonna be a big part of it, right? You're definitely gonna have better luck at hiring people if you're paying more than if you're paying less. Yeah, it'll get more people in the door. Period. Yeah. Whether or not you keep them, that's not necessarily about paying, but... It's certainly not. You know I've learned that the hard way. Yeah. But you gotta get them in there. You gotta get them in the door, right? They gotta apply. All right. All right, so I get it. So you're checking the data every day and then making adjustments based on what you see and what you're finding historically. Is this an outlier? Is it a one-time thing? Do you have any sort of parameters? Like if we're over by 10 minutes, are you making an adjustment for 10 minutes? We're always over 10 minutes. Yeah, we'll definitely adjust that client. Or if we're exactly on time, right? One thing that we found is no matter what we say or do, if the home is underbooked, we want our text to stay the full amount of time that it's gonna take to properly clean this house, right? Because we owe the customer what we've promised them, which is queeting to our checklist, all of the things that we clean in their house. And if it's under-timed, they inevitably will just leave a little bit early, right? And so when you see those houses that are exactly perfect, that kind of signals to me that they got up right on time, probably need a little bit more time. So we might add like 10 minutes to those houses case-by-case basis. Interesting. Yeah, I don't think I've ever heard anybody say that before. And the cool part about this is a lot of times we look at averages. We'll say for the day or the month or whatever, our revenue per labor hour is the number that we are looking for. And we think that everything's good. What we're missing is that that average could be a whole lot higher if you do what Chris is talking about and attacking the ones that are taking too long. There's so much money to be made there. Yeah. I have an example, Liz, if you wanted me to do the normalize thing. Sure. Take me a couple of minutes, but we'll jump into it. Okay. I need to define what productivity is. And productivity basically is how fast somebody is compared to the average cleaner. So if Tom is cleaning Mrs. Jones house and he starts at nine o'clock and he finishes two and he takes five hours to do it. But if the allowed time, the job ticket hour time is four hours, then Tom's productivity is the allowed hours divided by the actual hours or four divided by five or 80%. That means Tom is slower than average. With me so far, is that good? Yep. I got it. I know Chris does it. Now, if Liz cleans the same house, but Liz is fast and she cleans it in three hours, four divided by three is 133%. So Liz's productivity is 133%. So if Tom and Liz are cleaning the same house, Mrs. Jones, Mrs. Smith, whatever, you're gonna expect Liz to get finished before Tom, right? Because Liz is faster than Tom. So that's kind of what the normalized time thing is all about. And so we got Mrs. Simpson's house and that has three allowed hours. And Tom, with the productivity of 80%, you'd expect him to take 3.75 hours where if Liz was cleaning the exact same home, you'd expect her to do it in 2.25 hours. Yep. So there's all kinds of examples here. We're not gonna take the whole thing, but the bottom line is just because somebody's missing the number you need to figure out is it because that the house isn't priced right or is it just because you've got somebody that's slow cleaning it? And it works both ways too. Here's an example of, you know, you think that you need to raise the rate, but not really because Tom is slow. If you figure out that Tom is cleaning the house, the job is priced right. Sometimes it goes in the opposite direction though where you got a house that you think you're making a ton of money on, if you take into consideration the fact, the productivity of the person cleaning it, maybe you should even be charging more than you are. Yeah, that was Chris's example, right? You've got a house with three allowed hours and you send Liz there and she gets it done in three hours, that job's under price because she should be able to get out of there quicker than that and she shouldn't be spending three hours in a three hour house. That's a problem job. So I do love this idea of normalized hours, but I have this question. I mean, it makes sense to me if you have made central, obviously it makes sense. But what about people that don't have made central Tom? How, you know, you hear all the time, I'm gonna go back to Rohan about this real quick. He has always long blind. He has always made a really strong point that don't look at every tiniest little data point, that you want to look at the big swipes and the averages, things are gonna make a big difference. Would you say that this could make a big difference? Because I think a lot of people are like, as long as the average is okay, we're good. I'm gonna argue that there was a time where if you didn't have the data and if you were having to do all of this by hand and building spreadsheets and spending every waking minute of your own time and calories doing the math yourself, yeah, you just don't have the time to do it. You can't afford to do it. But in 2022, when you can click a button and have the detail, there's money to be made there. Yeah, I'd give you a, I mean, I came from launch 27 and I'm trying to look at a report right now to see. I don't think I can get a summary of how much money we've gotten in revenue just from adjustments. I think we've just parsing this real quick. I think we're probably somewhere around $70,000 a year, just from doing this every day, right? So our company brings in an extra $70,000 a year that we weren't bringing in last year. And you're not going to go an extra home. That's just free money. Yeah, exactly, right? And there's no burden for it. It's amazing. I did this at launch 27. So we used to do this with launch. We used to do it in spreadsheets, but it wasn't every day. It was, I don't know, once every, it was when there was a problem, right? Yeah, I started noticing. Yeah, so. All right. You hold the clock back a few years. It was about sales and getting jobs in the funnel and booking jobs and just cleaning a bunch of stuff. We have technology now with smart phones and, you know, SaaS based software and we're able to capture data where we're able to squeeze a lot more money out of the homes that we clean today than what we could five years ago. Especially, you know, talking about market volatility and the pandemic and different variants running around. I mean, having more profit margin, it's going to be a good thing to have, right? It's good safety. We're all going to keep the focus there. All right. So the point that I want to make was if you're on, if you're watching smart business moves today, and I know we have a wide group of people that watch. So if you're watching and you don't have made central, don't spend your time here. Don't spend your time doing this. Tom is saying it's actually not worth the additional burden, the labor burden that it's going to take, put your time somewhere else. But if you do have made central, it absolutely makes sense to be doing this on a regular daily basis. Like Chris said, oh, it's only 70 grand. I'll take that. All right. All right. So what else, Chris? What else do you look at? What's important for us to pay attention to? Yeah, this takes, I'd say this takes me about five to 10 minutes a day. So that's that. All right. That's awesome. But it also brought out the issue that we weren't quoting accurately, right? We had way too many homes that we were going over on. So two big issues that it brought about, and I'll throw out that it hurt to look at this when I first started doing it, right? I pull up this report and then made central if you're going over it's in red. And it was just the sea of red, right? We were talking about colors earlier. We all know red is bad. So... Not on that chart. Not on the COVID-estim chart. But yeah, we had issues of quoting. We weren't quoting as accurately as we could. And we also had issues with training. We weren't cleaning as efficiently as we could. We didn't have to because we didn't know there was an issue. So we have some systems going into place stemming from taking a look at this. We're looking at new ways to quote so that we can get better info using things like number of pets and rooms and just really nailing down how we're quoting houses. Those are both on the list of things to do in our company in the next couple of months. And I think by doing that, we're gonna get a lot better client retention. We're gonna get a lot more happier cleaners because everything's going to flow a lot more smoothly. My office staff is going to be happier because they don't have to spend all of their time chasing down clients that we misquoted or chasing problem texts. We're just, it's helping our company overall. Arguing with the texts that it's not fair, right? I mean, that's the truth. I mean, that's part of smart business moves is when we do try and tell it like it is and- That's a good point, Liz. When you're not paying attention to those numbers, you are, you're arguing with your texts. This isn't fair, I'm not getting paid right, and none of us want to do that. We haven't had that argument. Man, I'm not the one to ask, I wouldn't be there, but I don't think that's happened for a year, which is so nice. You know, it helps with retention, both on the cleaning professional side, as well as the customer side. Yeah, it just helps my peace of mind. Nobody likes to argue, right? And your office staff. I mean, we all know that it's hard to replace a cleaning professional, absolutely, but how much more devastating is it to lose a general manager? Liz and I like to argue a little bit. It makes this show more interesting. We do. I like to argue too, you guys. Yeah, I've seen that, yeah. You know, a little bit of argument is for growth, right? So like pushing the boundaries and pushing your own thinking so that you're not just being stubborn and, you know, I think a little bit of that is good. Now, if you're just arguing for argument's sake, well, maybe not so much, maybe not so much. So, which I don't want to do with my, I don't want to do with my cleaning professionals. And I don't want to argue with them just because I'm like, oh, yeah, but I don't want to look at the problem. I don't want to fix whatever. That's not a good plan at all. All right, what else do we, how other KPI should we be looking at, Chris? So back to this, looking at it day of we're looking for, you know, do we have any one-time cleans? Do we have any move-out cleans? What were our scorecards on the last clean? Just getting yourself prepared and ready for the day. It's the first thing that Riley looks at. She does dispatch for us in the office when she comes in in the morning. And it's just getting ahead of issues, right? We have a quick meeting every single morning before we dispatch all of our, sorry, right after we dispatch everybody. Just, hey, anything to look out for? You know, do we have any failing reviews from last time that we need to make sure our texts are aware of? Any outlier issues? And that helps a ton too, right? If we can get ahead of issues, make our clients happy, keep our reputation good, get some referrals out there. I mean, do what we promise to do, clean their house really well. That's what it helps with. So. All right, I want to throw out this idea. I think this is a good place for it too, that one of the things that, Chris, you're making the point that getting in front of it, right? So one of the things that our industry is notorious for is waiting until there's a problem and then going in and fixing it, right? And so looking at the stuff in advance and working to not have a problem is such a smart business mode right there. And a lot of times people are confused by what I mean with that. And so I just want to give an example real quick. On the day of, let's say you have a customer that has not had any problems at all. Their scorecards have been all-force, right? If you use May Central, four is high. So you've had all-force with this customer for the last however many cleanings. The tendency for most companies is to do nothing. Just do absolutely nothing, not change anything. I'm not saying that you shouldn't do that. I'm not saying that that's bad, but it's a great opportunity for you just to do the tiniest thing to wow them so that that four becomes in their mind a poor exclamation point. And not every time, right? You're not like every single time trying to do some big thing, but it is an opportunity to give the little, wow, so that you're kind of, I hate to use this word, immunizing yourself from any kind of taste. Right? I'm definitely not here. Is it like you're punching your vaccination card? Is that it? Is it like a booster? Is that what you're? I say nothing here, I'm not going there. I am not going there. I used immunized on purpose, right? All right, so I do like that day of looking at where everybody is and also getting everybody prepped for the day. You said we all get together. Who's we all? Chris, who all gets together for that quick daily meeting? Thanks, yeah. That's just office staff and myself. And so they should get everybody on the same page. Yeah, exactly. What do you have on the plate today? Where are you on your task and your things that you're working on to further the company? But also, where are you today? What do we have on the docket? What's on deck? Any issues, anything we need to be aware of? And just get ahead of little things. I really like what you said about making sure that we're treating our best clients really well. They should get something special, right? For being so easygoing. Yeah. That's where our energy probably should be going. We do have some little things. We have a VIP list, but I think we've been doing a lot more. Even a little bit. I mean, your happy customers don't really take a lot of, that's why I like to work on my happy customers. They don't take a lot. It's so much harder to have to bring up somebody with a two-score card than it is to just hold that for, hold that for. And they'll go promote for you, right? I mean, you can get some clients. So another thing that we gleaned from this report was we started increasing our efficiency overall, meaning more of our time that we had text clocked in was billable to our clients. And so I think ours is really good, but we could make it even better. And one way to do that would be to condense our service area. Because where I live in Denver, we have a lot of people in our service area. So we're driving really far some days and we do have some really happy clients and they do promote for us. But if we can get our service area just a little closer and a little closer and let's say I move into a neighborhood and I go next door and they say, hey, I use Alpine Maids and I go down the street and they use Alpine Maids too. We're gonna take over those neighborhoods really fast, right? So once we started focusing on productivity, it's been a game changer. And I guess the other metric that goes along with that is efficiency. That's what I meant. Yeah. The efficiency is that windshield time. So, you know, it's keeping that to a minimum. How much time are actually being versus driving type thing? When you take the hours, the job hours, the hours spent cleaning and dividing it by the total clock time, which includes your drive time, you want that number to be as close to one as it can be. You wanna, I mean, 100% is perfect and that's hard to get if you're, you know, you're doing multiple homes a day. But the higher that number is, the more profitable you're gonna be and the happier your cleaning technicians are gonna be. Yeah. Efficiency is a tricky number. So it's really, oh, I'm like, why did you pop her off so fast, Tom? I did, I was, I just didn't. You were popping her out. I was trying to bring it up, it was already there. Hey, Sarah, good to see you. Yeah, you know, because smart guy. Chris, did you by any chance see the smart business moves we did on Monday with Joe Walsh? No, but I wanna go check it out. I wanted to watch it because what he does, combined with what you do, you are going to, because you're already doing so much more than everybody else. I think you add on this additional little layer. I'm not kidding, you know, you know you talk to a lot of people and you add on the little extra layer of the shift that Joe does and you can fast forward through the get to it. I'll fast forward, yeah. Yeah, you'll love it. Yeah, he's, you know, smart guy. He's always got new ways of looking at things too. And so, I'm a big fan of stacking a little, something good and a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more. So you don't have to like make this one huge gigantic change, make a whole bunch of little changes if you can. Works too. Oh, any other KPIs that you think that are really helpful for people to look at, Chris? It's like, I know you have a ton of them. I've seen your- I'm trying to think of for dispatch and that regard. I mean, I look at my PPR every week, right? That tells me payroll percent revenue, right? How much, that's a number one expense in the company. Most of our money goes to payroll. So that's what we need to focus on. And I think everything we talked about today and all of these reports really influences that number. Try to look through my KPIs real quick. I'm clicking off-screen here to see if we have anything kind of cool, kind of different. Revenue per cleaner is kind of cool. That tells you a lot about, you know, how efficient are you and in general, how are your cleaners moving through homes? Do you have an average? I get asked this question a lot, Chris. Do you have an average of what your technicians bring in per day, per week, per year? Yeah. Let's see. Well, people love benchmarks. Oh man, that's a dangerous game, those benchmarks. Yeah, so true. But if you have no idea, especially if you're newer in business, you don't even know, am I doing okay or not? And a lot of times you can't figure out why there's problems. So having an idea of which number to look at first is really helpful for people a lot of times. This is pretty cool. As I, I'm looking through some of last year's data, revenue per cleaner. It looks like at the beginning of last year, we were kind of around 270 a week, or sorry, a day, not a week. So a cleaner would bring in like $270 a day and toward the end of the year, we were up to more like 3.305 a day. Wow, that's really nice, Chris. 25 a day per cleaners is significant. Yeah. Yeah, that's great money. And Tom, you're always harping on this. We need to get more money from each labor hour that is out there. We need to be bringing in more revenue. So you must have just been salivating there, hearing that. Yeah, I mean, from an industry perspective, for an industry perspective, we're competing against all these other industries who get more of a return. I call it return on human capital. They generate more revenue per labor hour than house cleaning companies. So we really need to focus on that as a metric because the more we can generate per hour, the more successful we're gonna be. The better jobs we're making. I mean, it's a win all the way around. On average, they're working an hour less a day too when they made that extra $25 an hour because more tax don't wanna work eight hours a day. They wanna work six hours a day. And we're hearing that everywhere now, right? There is, you guys have both heard me say for at least the last year, it will not be long before the overtime rate kicks in at 35 hours or if not 32 hours because people don't think 40 hour weeks are reasonable anymore. That's not a saying. I'm seeing it. Yeah. We are approaching the top of the hour. Chris, you wanna take a moment and explain who Allie is again. So folks who joined us halfway through this can have an opportunity to help Allie as well. Yeah, thanks, Tom. Allie is a tech of ours. Awesome, awesome tech. She lives in Colorado. She's from Louisiana. She doesn't have any family out here. Her apartment burned at the ground Monday morning. She lost everything. Those are two cats. The firefighters fortunately rescued them but they woke up Monday morning 2 a.m. to firefighters literally in their unit with fire forcing them out. So they're in a hotel right now as they're looking for a new place to live. Allie is not at work. I think she'll probably be back next Monday. So she's losing income and needs to replace all of her belongings, get into a new apartment. So five bucks, two bucks. If it's small, it doesn't matter. Anything helps her. We're just really trying to help her get into a new place, get settled, get back to work. And you forget about that losing. It's bad enough that you lost everything but then you're not working. So you're going further behind every single day. But who can blame somebody for not being able to get back to work the day after your house burns down? Right? I'm like, wow. You need some time to figure out just to contact all the different agencies that you have to contact to live well. So we dropped the link to this GoFundMe page in the chat again. So take a look and encourage you to help Allie out to whatever level you can. And also, you know what? It's very, very helpful to just share the link because getting that link out there for more people, anybody that's ever had a fire, they are going to want to help. They might have five bucks that they're gonna throw at every single fire that they see because they've been there, they've done that, they know about it. So just sharing is a huge help. Yeah. Well, we are at the top of the hour. Chris, thank you. Thanks a lot Chris. You're doing a lot of good things in your business and gave really good examples of how the dispatch activity which is probably one of the most underrated, unappreciated processes within our companies, within our cleaning businesses, there's a lot of money to be made there and appreciate you sharing that. We're done for the week. We are done for the week. We're gonna be back Monday though for our last KPI show of January for a while anyway. Guess who the guest is gonna be on Monday, Liz. How fast can I pull up the spreadsheet to find the answer? Yeah, fast, I know. Wow, thank you, Tom. I am the guest on Monday. I'm gonna close it down and we're gonna be talking about profitability and we're gonna talk about how we can tie everything together that we've heard here for the entire month with that to work for you. So you can have more value. You can create out of everything that you do in your company. So that's what we're gonna do Monday. In the end, should we take care? Also, I wanna just real quick. On Tuesday, you guys will see posts coming out from me over the course of the next week and that will be www.ld.live. If you wanna join me in a Zoom meeting, what will Liz do? And bring me your issues. I have a few issues that I'm going to talk about. You'll see them coming out in the next couple of days. But if you wanna join me on that, www.ld.live.live, yeah, that's it. And that will be next Tuesday at the same time, smart business moves time, all right? See you next Monday. Thanks guys. Thanks guys. Hi to Melissa. Thank you, Chris. I will.