 Hi, Tom Stewart here, Smart Business Moves. I'm with Liz Trotter. Hello, Liz. Hey, y'all. Hey, y'all. You say that like you're from South Carolina. Is that part of your working vocabulary? It is, isn't it? Where'd you get that? It is. OK. Probably from you. I have no idea. Yeah, I'm a bad influence. Be careful, Greg. Well, you're already living Texas, so you're allowed to, you know, that comes natural. Greg Shepard's with us today with Dallas Mades and Emily's Mades. And it's like, wow, two cleaning businesses. You've got that right. And you're going to learn some neat tricks here, not only in terms of how to diversify across two different brands and two different price points, but also how to use SEO and digital marketing techniques to make both of them be successful for you. Thank you for being with us today, Greg. Thank you, Beth, Tom. And thanks for having me on. Hey, we're super excited. Also, right before we get started, on the right-hand side of your screen, you see where it says private chat? So the right of that, it also says live comments. If you click on that, you'll be able to see what comes up. We don't have any yet, but we will get some. And people will be asking questions. You'll be able to see them. They'll almost put up on the screen, too. We've got people jumping on. They just haven't quite got their question-asking mode yet. So while we have a moment, do we want to take this to look at what we're going to be doing over the rest of the week? Yeah, yeah, it's good while people are popping on. So we got Greg today. That's obvious. Tomorrow, we have my daughter. Her name is Shara Redle. Shara runs with car, not with chair. So a lot of times, people call her Shara, it's Shara. She is a salesperson. She's the top salesperson over at the Electric Guard dog. And it is, I'm not sure if it's international, but for sure. Hey, Leslie. Hey, Maro. Oh, hey, Debbie. It is for sure a national company. And she routinely sells, get this, for those of you that haven't heard this number yet, over $40 million in sales each year. That's $40 million. How many zeroes is that? Yeah, $40 million. Over. You're not used to writing that one down when you're doing your bank deposit. Yeah, I know. I'm not either. That's so wacky. That's $70 million. Not all of us own Tesla stock, right? So we don't all know those big numbers. We can buy some Tesla stock for $40 million, though. Yeah, that's a good point. So anyway, Shara's going to share her top 10 sales strategies that she thinks will also work in our business, having grown up in this business. She knows a lot about the cleaning business as well. She's worked on the inside. And she's also helped me on the outside or on the back end. We have a secret guest this week. And we shared a little bit about her. The thing I'd like to share this week is that she runs a $1.4 million company. So if you want to have a little bit of an idea about what size she is, and start crafting your questions today. And she's going to be our guest for On The Spot. And most of you probably know, but if we have anybody new here on the spot, is our rapid-fire Q&A session, where Liz, myself, and our special guest, each get one minute or less, no more than a minute, because we get cut off right at a minute, right? Liz, no longer to answer your question. Unless you're gone. Well, unless you're running the clock, in which case, every once in a while, you go a second or two over. But who's counting? No, it's really fun. We get a bunch of questions in. And it's kind of the highlight of our week. So mark that on your calendar. And you want to see Sharra, too? My gosh, you can't imagine what we're going to learn here from somebody who's. Doesn't rhyme with Sharra, Tom. Rides with a car. Sharra. Takes your Sharra in a car. Sharra. Well, you know, I can't spell, and I can't read well. And I've got a lot of adversity I'm trying to overcome. But I'll get it right, by the way. And if not, you do not need my permission to correct me. Well, you know, she's heard it all, so she won't care at all. She won't even notice. She's been called everything under the sun. All right, so I know you guys are excited to hear. We have been talking a lot about Greg all week long, getting everybody ready to hear about all of the amazing things that you're doing, Greg. But first, can you sort of give everybody a quick update about who you are, how long you've been in business? What is the business to you? Yeah, sure. Well, in 2004, I left the world of IT to start a maid service. And my first business was called Dallas Mades. Yeah, it was the best decision I ever made. In 2004, I knew that internet was going to be the key. And so I was lucky I got the great domain name. I was able to rank my website. And in 70 years, got to that 1 million mark, which was awesome. Emily's Mades, which we'll be talking about here, was more recent. I started Emily's Mades in 2011. Got the idea after trying to help a fellow maid service owner. He was just starting out, needed the business. And I thought, why not give him the leads that thought Dallas Mades was too expensive? He went out of business, you got to charge what you were. And I thought, why not create a second maid service to capture those cost-conscious leads? And thus, Emily's Mades was born. Dang. So what is Emily's Mades? Greg, does it have a separate office? Does it run exactly the same as you do? How does it work? Good question. I created Emily's Mades with one goal in mind was to cut costs everywhere I could. For example, Dallas Mades, we have a office, a physical office, where we come to. Emily's Mades, no. Emily's Mades is to save on cost. There's no office, little overhead. And when you call Emily's Mades, you'll get Jill. And Jill sounds like the American girl next door. She's perfect at her job. But she doesn't live in the US. She was born and raised in Costa Rica. And so I'm able to save money through the talent of third-world countries or second-world countries. I originally had started Emily's Mades as a referral service. So I had ICs at first. But Texas decided that was no going. I had to change over to employee, which was fine. When I first started out, our pricing was a little bit lower. But it's kind of going up over time because you got to make a profit. And there was other things I had to add on to it. For example, when I first started out as a referral agency, we didn't have insurance. Because of course, insurance, you can't have insurance, well, at least in Texas, for the referral agency. So now we have insurance, a little bit higher pricing. And now I have two Mades services, which is great. If we get a customer now who calls Dallas Mades, and they say, your pricing is too high, my staff will say, hey, you got to check out Emily's Mades. And yeah, it's grown from there. So from a backroom standpoint, you've done some things to save money on Emily's Mades. Could you do the same thing on Dallas Mades? I mean, from? Yeah, absolutely I do. Well, first, one of the things about Emily's Mades was I didn't have to do marketing. Dallas Mades has brought in the customers that thought were too high. But I have a few things that I learned from Emily's with Dallas Mades. For example, our quality assurance manager, she's from the Philippines. And Norma, who also pretty much says it all for us, payroll, answering calls, you name it, she lives, she's from Mexico. So having folks leveraging labor from other countries not only cuts our costs, but also those who we hire get paid above average for their country, which is fantastic. Because not only is it cheaper for us, we're able to bring us wonderful talents. Wow, we could take a whole hour and just talk about the techniques of hiring talent in other parts of the world. Yeah, I really want to hear more about that too. I know we have to get to the questions here, but I definitely want to hear a little bit more about that. First, before we move on to Sarah's question, I see you have Sarah's question up there. Can you talk a little bit more, Greg, about the differences between Emily's Mades and Dallas Mades? And also, if you can do all of these things with Emily's Mades cheaper, you're doing everything cheaper, why aren't you doing them at Dallas Mades? If you could speak to that. And those are two different things, if I could expand just a little bit. The overhead part of it seems like you could keep that. Those advantages on both sides. But the forward-facing part, what your customers see. Do your customers are paying more for Dallas Mades? What more do your customers get from Dallas Mades that your customers don't get from Emily's? Good question. Actually, the prices between both are not that far great. So they're pretty similar. Emily's Mades is a little bit lower on the low side. Differences, like I said, Dallas Mades has a physical office. My office staff comes here, most of them. And it gives us a central place where we can have meetings, have a little get-togethers. We supply the supplies at Dallas Mades, so we have our supply room. Emily's Mades is different than that. The ladies are responsible with their own supplies, even if they're employees. But we compensate them for each job. That is, for each job, we give them $5 for supplies. That's actually made it a lot easier. And frankly, I wish I could do the same thing with Dallas Mades, too, because when you take the supplies out in the back here, it makes things so much more easier to run. But that's pretty much built into Dallas Mades now. So I don't plan on changing that out. I don't think the ladies would want that. But it was a nice little thing at Emily's Mades, making things much more simpler and cheaper for us. Other differences. Marketing, with Dallas Mades, I've worked much harder on our SEO, because that's our main source of business, secondary referrals. Emily's Mades, for the longest time, we didn't really work on the marketing aspect, because Dallas Mades was supplying all the leads. Until recently, about two years ago, I decided to start working on the SEO. I thought, why not? Because it would simply be more business. And as you saw earlier, Dallas Mades and Emily's Mades are now at the very top of the organic listings on Google. So we got the top two spots. We didn't pop those up on the call. That was before we went live. But we will pop them up so that you guys can see where the ranking is for these two companies. So go ahead, Greg. From a customer standpoint, if I had Emily's Mades clean my home one week and Dallas Mades clean it the next week, could I tell the difference? Different uniforms, of course. No, actually, I don't think you could. And don't get my Dallas Mades customers that, because they pay more. But the ladies do a great job. Nobody's watching us. It's just us. Come on, we're good. But both companies, the clean is great. You've got to hire the right people. Differences. Dallas Mades. Is the training the same? Sorry? Is the training the same, or is that another difference? That's a great question. Dallas Mades, we have a training program, the whole thing. Emily's Mades, no, we don't. We might have a lady shadow. We'll actually have a lady shadow, another lady, before we hire them to see how they clean. And actually, that's one of the best things that anybody can do. Before you hire, have an audition. Have them go one of your teams, paying them for the day as a contractor. But if your best teams see how the new person cleans, you know what you're about to hire. And we used to have two weeks of training, one or two weeks at Dallas Mades. Now it's around three days because of this. And it's really helped our quality. But training for Emily's, not so much. We try to find the best ones from the beginning. The audition is a huge thing. It's learning how well they will do before we hire them. But, yeah, strangely, they both do great work. Now, let's say we have somebody that doesn't really, is not performing as a five-star performer. For both Emily's Mades and Dallas Mades, our compensation is based on the performance. And we use Launchway 7. We love Launchway 7. One of the great things about Launchway 7, and even if you don't have Launchway 7, make sure you have something like this, is the feedback. Emails sent out to each customer after each clean. They rate your cleaner. And from that feedback, we're able to determine who our best cleaners are, who we need to provide the best jobs for, who deserves the performance bonuses, the raises. Each pay period, they get extra, well, they all start out with a bonus. When that bonus goes up, depends on how well they perform. And so, our whole system's designed on rewarding performers and kind of encouraging the performers, those are not performing, to kind of move out. But, fortunately, right now, everybody's performance. But I think that maybe the COVID-19 has something to do with that. Is Emily's Mades, are these solos? Sorry? Do you do solos or teams? Good question. We have, for Emily's Mades, we only do solos. We only do solos because it's much cheaper to operate that way. When you have one person going from job to job, you're actually saving time. You add another person in a team of two. You're losing time because you have two people now going from job to job traveling. And there's actually, you lose time that otherwise could have been spent on cleaning. We don't do teams of three or more because that's just crazy. No offense to those with three more teams. But with three more teams, it gets more costlier, not only with the drive time, but also, we tend to notice that there's more of a chance of somebody not pulling their weights. So we do teams of one and two for Dallas Mades and just solo for Emily's Mades. All right, so I got to go back to my original question. And my original question was, Emily's Mades is a much more skinned down program. It sounds like you're delivering the same service, but all of the costs are much less. Why don't you do the same thing at Dallas Mades? Why do you have the two different models if you have the same output? Like I said before, I actually brought in some things that I learned from Emily's Mades, Dallas Mades. I guess the big difference is having a physical office. I like that and it's a little bit more costly, but with teams of two, we got to have teams of two of Dallas Mades because a lot of our customers prefer teams of two. They want us in and out much quicker. So we wouldn't be able to go to solo jobs because we would not be able to provide our customers that want us, want two teams or sometimes two teams of two people in and out. But with Emily's Mades, the biggest thing is no overhead with the office, slightly lower pricing, the ladies taking care of their own supplies. Dallas Mades, as I mentioned earlier, we do provide all the supplies for our ladies, but that's something that we wouldn't want to take away. It might save us a little money list, but right now, everything's set. You don't want to rock the boat with too many changes. I gotcha. Yeah, anyway, supplies aren't much anyway. So we have been preaching for years that there are lots of different ways to run a successful company. And not only do you believe that, but you live that, lots of ways to run a successful company. So, okay, so I know that we did have a bunch of questions over here. I think we did we get most of the differences for Leslie, do you think? Do you think you hit most of the differences, Greg? Yeah, I believe so. slightly lower pricing, a lot of things that we provide for our customers and our ladies at Dallas Mates, we don't do so much at Emily's Mates to cut costs. I guess what more difference would be with Dallas Mates, pretty much just a premium service. And they will make sure the customer's happy, no matter what the cost. For example, a while ago, one of our teams that actually broke an aid, I think a $10 or $20 tea cup, very small thing, very cheap, but we spent over $400 to repair it because it was of sentimental value to the customer. We did that on our own. Of course, the customer would have been happy with just, I guess a free service or whatnot, but with Dallas Mates, we take that extra step with our customers. So you're saying if you would have broke that same cup at Emily's Mates, you would have just replaced the cup, 10 or 20 bucks, right? I don't think we would have paid that much money for the cup. We would have probably done a more traditional thing, like give them a discount. Nice, okay, that's awesome. I love that. Thank you. I think we had Sarah up. Yeah, Sarah wants to know about how much business does Dallas Mates refer to Emily's? That's a good question. And frankly, I don't know. That's okay, that's a legitimate answer. We appreciate that. Yeah, and the reason for that, Sarah, is that with any business, you want to work yourself out of the system. You want to have things run autopilot. You can do that and then you have the time to start a second business. So how much, I can find that figure out. I don't have it up top of my head, but there's a lot of things that are, with Dallas Mates and Emily's Mates that are day-to-day operations, I just don't know anymore because I'm not that much involved. Yeah. That makes sense. Let's see. Well, this is kind of in the same area code. Which one's bigger? Which one does more job? Oh, Dallas Mates. Dallas Mates for sure. If you had to guess, is it 60, 40, 30? Oh, good question. No, Dallas Mates, that's my million dollar company there. I would say about 80, 20, I'd say. But 20% revenue is like pure profit. I mean, if that was revenue that you wouldn't have realized, that extra 20% means a lot on the bottom line. Oh, I'm sorry. I was thinking about how much business, I'd say Dallas Mates has about 80% of the business that we have, Emily's Mates has about 20. Is that what the question? Yeah, that was the question. You say, well, 20% is not that much, but it's 20 additional. So I mean, that's like free money, right? Yeah, and that's exactly why I started Emily's Mates. I thought, why am I letting all these bleeds go because we're too high priced? Why not have a generic Mates service? Sarah wants to know about your bonus incentive program. You mentioned that with your survey cards and using that. How does that work? Yeah, I'd be glad. Okay, good question. Well, first, first we get the feedback from the customers and we incorporate that into their salary, every paycheck. The things that everybody should be doing is online reviews. We don't actively tell the customer this, maybe we should, but if any of our teams gets an online review of five stars and gets mentioned on Yelp or Google or wherever, they get a tip and we say it's a tip on behalf of the customer. So they get a tip each time they get mentioned online for five star reviews, of course. That's, he actually started implementing that so about two, three years ago, which has been fantastic because as you know, you want good reviews online. Oh, I should have got, our raises are, of course, also based on their performance and I don't have our sheet with us, but if there's somewhere I can share it, I'd be glad to share our performance reviews and how we determine raises with your audience. Yeah, I mean, if that's something that we could turn into like a download, we can put that on our resources page. Okay, yeah, if you like it. Do that. Good question, Sarah. Good job, Sarah. I can do that. Let me make a little note. I'll put it on our blog at Dallas Mades for you guys. Okay. That was awesome. Thanks, Ray. You bet. You heard what he just said there. He's like, he could have sent me a PDF, which is fun because it works out. We all get it, but he's getting a backlink to his website which gets into the SEO, which we haven't quite gotten to yet, but I didn't want that to be overlooked. Yeah, smart business, right there, right? He didn't say I'll send you a link. Yeah, I'll just go ahead and put a link to his blog. No, no, no, we're gonna put a link to his blog, which is awesome, well-deserved. Yeah, we love that. We love smart business moves, Greg. That's why that's the name of the show, right? We're always looking for those things that successful businesses are doing that other people just don't even think about or just kind of let go, but wow, that's so spot on. And getting a backlink from some websites that get more traffic's worth a lot more than getting a backlink from a website that doesn't get much traffic, you know, cleaning business today isn't the same as the New York Times. However, we do get more traffic than most websites, so that's a pretty good place to get a backlink from. And traffic also has an effect on SEO. I mean, I try to share good stuff on our blog for other maid service owners because if you have quality content in your website, hopefully it ups the traffic, ups the time that people are on your website and Google sees that. And so that helps with your rankings. We have a question here. Do the workers know they are being evaluated? Well, yeah, of course. I mean, of course, we're very open. We have, they know how they get their bonuses. They know how they get their raises. We have a big board in the hallway with each team where we can write down the compliments that the customers give and the complaints. But, and that's actually a pretty good motivator too because you do that, you might get a few complaints at first, lately see that as public. And before you know it, you're not getting any complaints. Well, I'm sorry, what was the question totally forgot? I was about, do they know they're being evaluated? Oh yeah, of course. You gotta be open with that. Yeah, here's a question from Leslie, one of our regulars. We had frequent flyer miles. Leslie would have a trip to Hawaii by now. So do you have any control over the supplies that Emily's mage uses? No, we don't. That's the lady's discretion. So how does that work with like SDS and stuff like that? Do you have to worry about safety data sheets or they're still employees, right? Yeah, oh, that is a good question. Them thinking of their own supplies was sort of a leftover when we had them as ICs originally and converted them to employees. You know, that might be something I need to look into. I didn't think about it because at Dallas mage we have an office, we have our supplies, we have all the sheets all in the public area, which you have to do. Emily's mage, no, we don't because the ladies choose their supplies. So thank you for bringing that up because that's something I need to check into. All right, no. But you do business in Texas and I mean, some states are more regulated and more red tape and I think Texas is probably one of the most employer-friendly states in the country. It is. Yeah, absolutely. Insurance requirements are much more relaxed. There's a lot of things that, I mean, Texas really makes it as easy as they can for people to create jobs. Yeah. What was it called? Workman Comp. Workman Compensation is not required in Texas, which saves a huge, huge expense. Well, you know, you were talking to me there and she's from California, the highest rates in the nation, right? So, and by a pretty steep margin too. So I'm sure she's like, oh, it's a kill for that. I think Leslie just said you could help pay some of her workers' comp insurance just so you don't miss out on all the fun. Well, we're all doing, Greg. Brian wants to know, will you find most of your employees? Okay, good question. Well, it depends. Well, first, I'll let you know what we do, but it really depends on your own markets. You have to experiment with as many meetings as you can and simply find out the best one. In Dallas, you know, we've done newspapers, we've done online. In Dallas, there's a Univision, which is a Hispanic TV station. And they do a great thing for their viewers. They provide each news hour, they'll have on the screen jobs that are available. And all you need to do is back in your job and they will put, you know, house cleaner needed, call blah, blah, blah, blah. And once we do it, we get hundreds of calls. And so that has been, yeah, that's been fantastic for us. We haven't really needed to hire lately or for a while. You want to keep your, you know, people, we have a crazy, lower turnover rate, but when we do need people, that's the best way. Also, Craigslist has worked for us here in Dallas and Facebook, host on Facebook. That's pretty effective too. So are the majority of your employees or your workforce, is it mostly Hispanic then? Yes. Yeah. And, you know, it wasn't my design, that's just how it happened. The best workers that we found tend to be Hispanic females with families. You know, well, are anybody that can clean? Period, but that's just how it worked out. Yeah. So that's your avatar for your professional house cleaner, right? That's good, I like it. Have you had any coaching in your house cleaning career, Greg? That is a good question. Do you have a business project? No, no, this is what I did when I first started Dallas Mades. I'd reached out to a lot of the other owners and a lot of them were fantastic. I mean, they were there to show me the best, you know, their systems. And I saw what they were doing and I just simply incorporated the best of what I saw there into Dallas Mades. And so my advice to anybody starting out who can't afford a coach is to get to know other owners because, I mean, they're not really your competition. There's plenty of business to go around and you'll find that other owners will be super helpful. Most of them are, you know, they feel privileged to be able to help others knowing where they were before. Usually the most successful owners tend to be those that are very giving and very open about helping other people. So that's why I would definitely recommend is get to know your other owners. No, I haven't done any coaching yet. I hadn't even participated in any conference until 2018 when I was invited to a Messemite group. But no, I just did my own thing. Yeah, that was crazy too. So I was at Greg's first conference and he was just, because he had never been hooked up with ARC-C, you guys. He had no idea about anything. He was like, I did not know any smart business owners around. I loved it. I was like, I know these people are crazy, right? And we spent a good chunk of time outside the women's restroom chatting about that, trying to figure out, you know, are we gonna move forward from that? But what you said, I wanna remind everybody, anybody that's on this call, that is one of the main things that people say they get from the membership in ARC-C. So when you're going back and forth with ARC-C, should I, shouldn't I, you know, what should I say? You know, you're hearing it from Greg again. You know, that networking with other business owners is some of the best education you've gotten is what you're saying, right, Greg? Yeah. Invalid, but when you're starting out, you know, being able to ask your friend who owns So-and-So-Made Service, how do you do this or do that? That was key to my success. Yeah. In some regards, that's kind of what we do here every day at five o'clock. This is a form of networking. And this is a good point, Tom. Yeah. We're all learning. Robbie wants to know about the tip for a five-star review. How much would that be? Right now it's too low. You know, we offer $10 for review. Frankly, it should be $20. We do have, if it's $10 for review, but if it has, you know, if the customer posts the picture, like a before or after picture, you know, we have that to $30. Why? Because, well, here's another secret. You want five-star reviews, but you want reviews with pictures because that actually helps your SEO and helps you rank in the free pack. So try to encourage customers to give you a review of the picture. It also helps, also in Yale. I've never asked for a picture. That's awesome. Thank you, Greg. Oh, you bet. No kidding. That is, that's an awesome suggestion. Yeah. I want to jump into a little bit of how Greg gets the volume of work that he gets. He's learned a lot of tricks and he's really at the best in class in terms of digital marketing and getting the most out of the internet. And we want to talk about SEO, but I'm going to go just a little bit different here before we get into SEO, because long before I met Greg, I stumbled across his YouTube channel. And I'm not sure, who is this young lady in these videos, Greg? She's actually an actress we hired for that series. She was fantastic at what she did, but well, you brought this up. Yeah, these are very corny videos, but actually more successful than I thought. We actually had people viewing them. If you want to, I don't know how many of you guys have your own YouTube channels. I mean, this is an investment of time. And I don't know if Greg would suggest that this is where you would start with your digital presence, but he's got almost 3,000 subscribers. And I don't know what percentage of YouTube channels have that many subscribers, but it's a small percentage, very small percentage. And look at some of the views that some of these videos have had, 12,000, 105,000 views for a video. I mean, that is some pretty rare stuff. What is that video? All right. What's the video? Cleaning tips and secrets from a real professional. Oh, nice. It's three minutes. I'd watch it, but we're a little short on time. But what I will do is I will copy this and I will paste it here. And we just go to YouTube and type in Dallas Mades and it'll pop right up. Everybody here, do you yourself a favor and poke around on this YouTube channel a little bit? There's something to be learned here. The crazy thing, Tom. I don't listen to it. We didn't even promote that. We didn't advertise that YouTube channel. Everything was based simply on the contents. That is, the videos were corny, but they had good content. And somehow we got a semi-successful YouTube channel. So actually that's actually a very good tip for those who want to work on your SEO, be genuine. Don't try to play Google, meaning that you don't want to do anything that Google might perceive as manipulating the results. So this channel, we just simply made these corny videos and it sort of took off. Same thing with our SEO too. You don't want to do anything that is blackout or even gray hat. You want to be genuine, real and simply provide good content. When I did, before we jumped on here, I typed in, I just Googled Dallas House Cleaning. And if you see, Dallas Mades is number one in the map pack. Emily's is number two in the map pack. A lot of people argue that from an SEO standpoint and getting the most out of Google, being here is worth a lot more than showing up down here in natural search because this is what people do on their phone and most people, I'm sure that over half the traffic you're getting is on a phone. I should look into it. I'm not really quite sure how much traffic we're getting on the phone. Most websites are 60% more phone at the moment, like in house cleaning. But if you know it, Dallas Mades is number one here in organic. And okay, Yelp, Mary Mades National Franchise, Care. I mean, it's kind of hard to beat those guys in natural search, although Dallas Mades did. But if I go down here a little bit, still in the front page, page one, Emily's Mades. It's hard as heck in a city as big as Dallas to rank up, I'd say, much less too, so. Yeah, that's the point I wanted to make. I mean, Dallas, you're ranking twice at the top in freaking Dallas. That's amazing. If you were in Festus, Missouri, it worked really hard. I imagine you can rank two websites. We had a guest earlier in the week at Lowe's in Festus, Missouri. It's a long story, but it's not a very big town. But Dallas is a huge city. I know. It's tough. It's tough to rank here. We just got lucky. Yeah, I think. Well, you say that a lot. Great, you say that you got lucky a lot. But I mean, it's not just luck, right? You're putting work into this. You're putting time and effort. And I get that some of it is timing, like with your YouTube channel, right? You are ahead of the curve on that. So what looks like luck is not really that it's so much lucky as that you started doing the things at the right time and you were there and you were ready and you were prepared, right? Yeah, I get up. What is your thing from when it's preparation? Preparation and preparation collide. That's where success comes from. Yeah, and that's kind of how I see you. A lot of what you do. Yeah, YouTube, I just, I did it for two things. One, because I thought it would be fun to have a little YouTube channel with videos until I wanted to see if it would help our SEO. I think it was a positive in both. But, yeah, you know, maybe it's not lucky with SEO. I know the basics. I think the thing that gives me the edge is that I don't do anything underhanded. I actually have good websites with good content and I don't try to play the system. I think Google's really good at knowing who is trying to manipulate the search results, which is, by the way, one reason why I would never hire SEO companies. I've just seen too many bad stories out there. They want to provide their clients with superficial results while there's no risk to them. It's just, I think it's just much better if you know the basics and you just work hard at it. It's a pretty good fee to be number one and number two in Dallas, but you don't need to hire, pay four or $5,000 a month for a SEO guru to do it. So, Greg, where did you, you talk about the basics, right? Just doing the basics and being consistent with that. Where did you learn about the basics? How do you know what the basics are? I don't know what they are. Oh, dear, you know what? I have a manual I had written for a SEO company. I was going to do a SEO company in 2015, but decided not to do it. I will give you the blog post where that is, so you can just read the basics. What you could do is just put it on your blog and send me a link and it'll be too backlinked. It's already in my blog. It's already in my blog. I'll give you that backlink there. Okay, here it is. So the basics are have your website, have your, gotta have the Google My Business page. You gotta have Facebook. And if you are active on any other social media, like Twitter, then that's good too, but you gotta be active. You want links from all those sites back to your website. You want links from your websites to all those important social platforms, especially Google My Business. Here's a step for Google My Business. In addition to getting those five-star reviews, post a few updates. Google My Business has updates where you can post specials or news or whatnot there. Do that, that helps with your SEO. One thing I do is if I write a blog post, we will put that blog post. I'll have it on our Facebook page or Google My Business page on Twitter. Again, all backlinks to that blog post. Yeah, that's pretty much it. Also backlinks of course too. Backlinks, all right, let me tell you a secret with your listeners on backlinks. Of course you want the regular backlinks from all the directories or whatnot, but you want backlinks, your competition can't copy. See, one thing that you can do is copy your competition backlinks. Everybody does that. You want backlinks, they can't copy. For example, if you have an alma mater, like a university, like I went to Baylor University, they have a magazine, they have an alumni directory, get backlinks from your alma mater, get rid of them in their alumni magazine, which they'll have an online version, and get backlinks from that. That EDU is a great way to get backlinks. Recently, we've been given away pretty clean for first responders for a couple months now. And we got a story on local news, Channel 4 News. And that was an amazing backlink to our website too. And also, it's great to have a video, put on your YouTube page or whatnot. These are backlinks people can't copy. And this is what will give your business edge. Wow. So use your local presence to get those backlinks that are specific to your own company. Yeah, use your local network. I remember Gary Gorenson, great guy. We lost a great coach when he passed away. Yes, indeed. I can't say enough good things about him. I had purchased his program in 2005, and we kept in touch, and I wrote him a great testimonial for his product because his product was great. And Gary had posted that on his website with a backlink to my website. Links like that, use your network, writing testimonials or getting the news. Those are links that bring quality juice to your website and your competition can't copy. So you shoot up to the top of the line. All right, that is good. I like that. Let's see, I thought there was another question up here. Let's see, where is it? Oh, I know what it was. Robin was just saying that because your supplies have labels on them, it probably hasn't been as much of a deal to be worrying about the SDS. Oh. I thought there was one more. Go ahead. I was still looking to it. Okay. What, Tom? We're getting close to the end of our time together here today. I wanted to take just a minute again to remind everybody tomorrow, Shara is going to be here. Did I say that right? Yeah, and it's gonna be an unprecedented event because my daughter has never been on a smart business move Facebook Live and especially not during COVID, but she's also working out of her home right now. And so that's how we are linking up that. Thank you. Got you, Tom. Thank you. You're welcome. You got my back. I got your back. That's right. And Friday and Friday, we've got on the spot. We made an announcement yesterday. We'll be hearing more about this in days ahead, but market calendar for next Wednesday, week from today. We're gonna be doing CBT deal day. We're gonna have 10 vendors with a four minute pitch and a deal that you're not gonna be able to get anywhere else. It's only gonna be good for maybe one to two days. It'll certainly be gone by the end of the week. And that's about all we need to talk about today. If you haven't subscribed to cleaning business today, you guys know where that is, right? Email for the same last thing. You've got our newsletter. You've got updates on our deal days. And here's our super secret back link that when you come back tomorrow, there's gonna be a couple of other links here going to Greg's blog. Giving him SEO, little SEO juice and giving you access to some valuable material that'll help you grow your business. Yeah. And we're gonna be able to see exactly how it happens. I mean, I know I'm going to be, as soon as I see those, I'm gonna go over there and I'm gonna look at how he sets up his blog, how he has everything going there so that his natural response to anybody asking for anything is, sure, I'll post it to my blog and I'll send you a link. That was his natural response. He didn't have to think about that. He was trying to figure out, hmm, how can I get that over to them? He knew how many times has he said that, you guys, that that answer just popped off and he's done, right? That's what he was always saying. I'm gonna read my hand here. Okay, I gotta do a shameless plug. So I'm gonna show another SEO company pretty soon. We're only taking just a few clients. We have a few spots left. So if anybody needs SEO services and these are results that will last and they won't go away if you fire me, just let me know. Should be email GregandDallasMates.com and we'll talk. I have a question for you real quick though. I'm first, Tom. Okay. Cause I want my question. All right, so Greg earlier said, hey, just do the basics. You don't need to hire a company for, I remember. Yeah, for such a whatever it is amount of money. So the best is that what you're saying is don't just be hiring a company like that. That's going to go and they're just gonna do whatever random stuff there is. But hiring you is, we're gonna get you Greg working on our SEO, doing your black hat activities for our SEO. Is that what I'm saying? Well, you don't want black hats, you know. White hat? No, yeah. White hat? You want a white hat. Yeah, so. White hat. The good guys. Not even off white or gray. No, you want white hat. Yeah, yeah. You know the, I don't do anything superficial or manipulating, you know, a lot of, you know, gurus professionals might, you know, have give you backlinks from their, you know, their own websites that they built just for that purpose. You know, the work that I would do would actually still be very effective. That is, if you decide not to use my services anymore, you will still be ranking very, very high. Yeah, so basically I will do it the right way. And if you're in a big market like Dallas, yeah, I can push you up to the top. I will only be taking one client per city because I don't want to have two clients. Oh, I'm sorry. Do I have to send you an email or can you just put me at the top of your list? Oh, you're at the top of my list. I'll send you the email if you want, but... Let me just add a couple of points. It's kind of funny. If you're looking for an SEO company and you Google SEO company, would you want to hire the one that shows up on the fifth page? Probably not, but Greg's showing you here that he knows what he's doing because it is hard, really hard to rank in a big city and he's doing it twice. And the other observation is, and this is just honest, most people who start SEO companies, when they start out with their first couple of customers, they really do a good job for them because they're not overwhelmed with a large volume and they're building a business. So they want to make sure at the very least, those first two customers are happy because that's how it's going to grow. So not to say that there aren't large SEO companies out there that aren't good, I know that they are, but Greg knows what he's doing. And if you're one of his first customers, he's got to make sure you get results. I'll make sure everybody gets results. It won't start with the first, but of course, you're right. There's a huge incentive for my first three or four customers to make sure that they're killing and dominating Google because yeah, I've proven to my own websites and my own companies, but you've got to prove it with somebody else too. And who knows? We still have a few slots left for next Wednesday's deal day. Maybe we can encourage Greg to come back for a deal day next Wednesday. I love that. I'm pitching a deal, but Greg, I wasn't kidding. You saw that my face was serious, right? I don't be top of that list. You got it. I'm not joking. Stop laughing. I'm nervous. Every time he laughs, I'm like, oh no, he thinks I'm joking. I'm not joking. Okay. Well, we'll have to talk later on. I need SEO. This isn't joking. So it is top of the hour here. And hey, Heather, wait a minute. Look, I missed Heather's here. And Don wants to know, how do we contact Greg? Greg at DallasMades.com, right, Greg? That's it. That's how you get hold of him, Don. Or anybody else. I want to be your client. Can you send me your email? No, Paula. He can't, but I'll tell you what it is. Maybe Tom will post it over here for us. It is Greg, g-r-e-g, at DallasMades.com. There he is. There you go. Take that little link there. Thank you. Yeah. And so, no, I have one last question real quick. I know Tom has something he's dying to say too. And I'm sorry, Tom, I keep cutting you off, but I'm so excited here. When we're talking about SEO, whenever we talk up to SEO companies, they always say, well, you can't really expect any results for a minimum of three months, and it could be six months, and you're just gonna have to trust me. Is that how it is? Do you agree with that? Absolutely. So let me draw a chart that, you know, we'll illustrate this. So a lot of people will think, there we are, it's a steady increase like this, which is not. Yeah. It's more like this, where you don't see any many results at first, but then it goes parabolic. And that usually takes about, yeah, around six months, give or take a month or two. You guys still around? You couldn't hear me, could you? No, I was just hiding myself so everybody could see your picture. It kind of shoots up like the COVID-19 cases in some cities, like probably Dallas, right? Pretty much. So yeah, you got to wait for the results, but yeah, they should appear within six months. If they haven't. I just want everybody to know that it's not a fast thing. It's not something that today you're here, and then next month you're here. It doesn't work like that. All right. Okay guys, tomorrow you're going to hear from a sales professional, and we talk about professionalism a lot here. That's what we're about. And a lot of people sell in some form or fashion, but it's a rare opportunity to actually be here, somebody that's at the top of their game. We're going to hear from Shara and she's going to be sharing with us how she gets $40 million a year in sales. That's right, $40 million. And she is Liz's daughter, so you know she's going to be awesome. You think, I love you Liz, but you think Liz is awesome? What made her daughter? Yeah, my daughter's awesome, I'm not so awesome. But yeah, she talks really fast, y'all. So you need to be ready for that because sometimes I'm like, wow, love it. You need to slow down. I can't even understand what you're saying. She's like, how am I going to get these sales in mama? I'm talking real slow. I've got to work, all right. Okay, but we're three minutes over. Sorry guys, we'll see you here tomorrow. Oh, I'm so sorry everybody. Five o'clock, okay. Thanks again Greg. Hey, thanks Greg. You rock. Thank you so much Greg. Yeah, you totally rock.