 Hi, my name is Time Stewart. I'm a cleaning business today. I'm also with councilkeepers of Charleston, we've been in the house cleaning business for for a number of years, but cleaning business today is going to be doing a series of Facebook lives over the next several days anyway, maybe several weeks it just depends on How how things developed with the with the virus they as it pertains to coronavirus What we want to do is share with you the best information that we have the things that that we get from our research and the things that we're getting from other cleaning business owners and Get it out there to you so it'll be useful and something that we'll be able to to use in your business I've got a PowerPoint deck here. I'm gonna share with you. This is Gonna be getting into a Little bit about what the coronavirus is what we need to know about it as as business owners and To kind of set the stage for the things that we need to be thinking about over the days and weeks ahead The coronavirus is I guess the the common name for for for this illness that that we currently are dealing with COVID-19 is I guess a more clinical term for the illness. It's caused by variation of the SARS virus and it's SARS Cove dash to There's a picture of it there. I'm sure you guys have seen those before it's a Viruses are are really small and this is an RNA wrapped virus and Basically what that means is they're fairly fragile that Just soap and water if it touches the the membrane when that virus often is enough to To permeate the outside of it and basically render the the virus harmless So that's kind of the the pathogen that we're dealing with There's a lot of discussion that we've been hearing about it. We're overreacting to this Yeah, as a society, obviously in some ways we have been you know running out buying truckloads of toilet paper and bottled water at Costco doesn't seem to be a Rational thing to do but but people are afraid You also hear a lot of people making an analogy to This virus really any different than just the flu a lot of people get the flu a lot of people die from the flu and this is true and What I have here is a graphic going back over the last ten years of the number of people who have contracted the flu the number of people that have been hospitalized and the number of people that have been died Have died rather so in any given year, you know, it could be 21 million and this is just the United States by the way So going all the way back to 2010 there was like 21 million 2011 it wasn't as bad about nine million 34 million 30 million 30 24 29 45 those are millions of people here in the United States the United States has a Little over 300 million people in it So, you know from a percentage standpoint it can be you know ten percent or more of the Population they get the flu every year and out of them, you know, it can be 37,000 43,000 just depending on the year Last year 61,000 people died from the flu. So if you do the math that's point point two percent of the population or about two out of every Thousand people died in the from the flu here in the United States last year This is coming from the center disease control Center disease control also has estimated what this flu year is going to look like they don't have great numbers But they're guessing anywhere from 34 to almost 50 million people will get the flu about 23 million 16 to 23 will Go see a doctor I guess bottom line is 20 to 52,000 pretty big range will die from The flu this year. So if you do the math, there's 327,000 excuse me 327 million people in the United States give or take Based on these numbers for this year anywhere from 10 to 15 percent of the US population will catch the flu this year and Roughly about one out of a thousand will die from the flu this year. So we're talking about making comparisons with Coronavirus and flu That's kind of what the flu picture looks like We don't have as clear a picture as what the coronavirus will look like goes quite frankly It's just getting started in this country and globally. It's it really hasn't Got in a good foothold yet, but there's this metric that I wanted to share with you It's called the or not value and what this measures is the number of people if one has a Particular pathogen the number of other people on average that they're going to infect with that and It's basically people spread germs. So how many other people for every person at sick How many other people will they make sick and some viruses are our pathogens rather are very Very contagious like the measles one sick person can get up to 12 to maybe 18 people sick It spreads like wildfire seasonal influenza This put in this study somewhere between two and three so when sick person might get two to three more people sick I've seen other studies that have that number down like it like here's the H1N1 virus in 2009, which was particularly Deadly it was like one and a half percent. I've seen other studies that says the flu was closer to one and a half percent So even between studies for diseases that we've known for a long time We really don't you know, you can kind of debate how infectious they are Based on best counts from the data that we've been able to collect from the corona virus We're guessing this is a pretty big range now anywhere from 1.4 to maybe a tad over four so Apples and apples You know, I would look at this and say it's not necessarily More contagious than the flu, but it's not necessarily less contagious in the flu So in terms of the chance of making somebody else sick with corona virus as opposed to the flu Maybe it's about the same. There's a couple of caveats that I want you to think about We have a vaccine for the flu It's not always perfect because the strange change and change from year to year and every once in a while We guess wrong in terms of what that needs to look like But there is a vaccine to prevent or reduce the chance of people, you know, getting the flu Plus we also have a lot of therapeutics medicines that we can give people like tamiflu And there's a number of them that will make them feel better if they get the flu Whereas we got nothing for corona virus. So even when you're looking at this are not value If you don't have a vaccine then you could argue that that makes a Large part of the population at risk The big thing to look at is the mortality rate and We really don't have a handle on this at all because a mortality rate is calculated by the number of people that died divided by the number of people that had the disease and I think that we are doing a pretty good job Globally of counting the people who are dying maybe not a hundred percent But I think that number is more accurate than the number of people that have the disease Testing isn't great testing isn't great in this country. We're struggling to do testing So if you know the people that died, but you don't know how many people had it It's kind of hard to get a mortality rate But some of the numbers if you do this got 4,000 deaths out 114 cases that's like 4% And again, I'm gonna go back to what we said with the flu, which is like one out of a thousand That's like four out of a hundred or 40 out of a thousand So that would be like 40 times as as as deadly no corona virus 40 times as deadly as As the flu do not think that's the case But to say that maybe the death rate is one out of a hundred once we get all of our data there's a lot of people on the medical for the medical community and who study the spread of Disease think that might be more plausible, which means it might be ten times as deadly as the flu so if you would buy into the the possibility since The flu and and corona virus are both viruses and If you know up to 50 million people in the US can get the flu Maybe that many people in the US could get corona virus But maybe ten times as many people or you know anywhere from 200 to a half a million may die from it and Who knows we don't know anything at this point But I guess I'm giving some perspective So if anybody challenges is this you know worth being concerned about is this worth planning for Is this worth getting prepared for I would say yes absolutely But we need to be rational about it. There's no point going out and buying a bunch of toilet paper and you know Oops You know don't don't hoard stuff Don't don't you know do stuff in a responsible way But at the same time let's let's go ahead and prepare Here's a chart that shows By age group people and this is data from China China has the most cases of this by far although that's starting to Change but we had up to 50. I guess that the population that had the most Instances of the infection is a group age group 50 to 59 and then it kind of tailed off after that It was like really young people aren't real susceptible to it Even better young people have a very low mortality rate unlike some other viruses that we've had in the past where young people seem to Be more at risk. This is more weighted towards an older population But you know I've seen some studies that say if you're 80 years or older and get this virus You maybe have like one out of five chance of Dying to or from it. So it's really important to protect You know the elderly to protect other people that are at risk Immune, you know having their immune system Suppressed you know cancer patients things like that people with respiratory issues COPD those populations are much more at risk So let's talk about this You know talking about risk. Let's talk about our businesses for a minute What what are the risks that we're dealing with from a from a business standpoint? Well from a business standpoint certainly we're at risk of losing clients. We might have clients who come to the conclusion that having people in their home is Creating chance of people bringing The the coronavirus into their home It's very real concern, especially if The company isn't taking you know reasonable precautions Another risk that that we're going to be dealing with is the possibility of supply chain problems and if any of you have tried to Precious hand sanitizer to make sure that your your staff is being protected You might find that's very difficult to do right now as we go forward It's not unreasonable to think that there's going to be a lot of supply chain disruption your ability to buy the stuff That you need for your business and it's a Confluence of a lot of things on the on the personal protection and equipment a lot of it's made in China and you know, they've been shut down and for the stuff that they are making they need themselves a lot of it was also made in Puerto Rico and They got wiped out by hurricane last year and haven't really been able to to get that going again So there's a lot of things working against us from from a supply chain issue right now And if a lot of people get sick in this country, then that would just compound the problem So now that could result in a loss of income for our companies as well as our Employees and we need to be thinking about that and planning for that We're going to be talking about that more in subsequent discussions But you know, we need to make sure that we're doing things that we need to do to maximize the chance that our company is going to survive But also be mindful that a lot of our employees are going to have a hard time You know taking care of their obligations if they wind up losing income as well So these are things that we need to consider and and come up with with our best ideas to manage um There's a possibility of bad PR through all of this if we don't manage the Cleaning professionals is cleaning business owners if we wind up sending somebody into a home that Has the virus or maybe into a home that somebody living in a home has the virus and then they That same technician goes out and cleans a bunch of other homes and winds up Making other people sick. I mean this could kind of spiral in a really bad way of local press Gets a hold of it and starts talking about it. So we need to be thinking a little bit about, you know, if there is negative Publicity negative PR, how would we manage that and kind of get a plan together? And we'll be talking about that in subsequent discussions as well. There's a possibility a real possibility of some legal liability and In several fronts and you know, I've got some information from some insurance companies There's that I'm going to be sharing There's some law firms out there that are specializing in writing contracts to support cleaning companies in terms of entering into certain arrangements to help manage The indoor environment infection control and doing it in a way that reduces their liability So we're going to be talking about all of that and in subsequent discussions Sounds pretty bleak, doesn't it? You talk about you know potential mortality rate number people can get it It's a pandemic people all over the world, you know or Catching this disease that looks like it's going to get worse before it gets better all those risks that we just talked about but There's a potential upside as well. If you could call it that Or opportunities let's just leave it like that You know if we do this right we have an opportunity to put cleaning procedures in place That are actually effective in reducing the chance of somebody catching You know a pathogen getting infected with with coronavirus or any other pathogen for that matter And we're going to be talking about Techniques to do that. We're also Later discussions going to be talking about how you can use this to position your business in the marketplace In recent years in my opinion, I've seen the industry go in a direction of commoditization where you just throw up a website throw some low prices on it and Just really focus on the marketing components of it without really focusing on the other parts of the business and In doing that, I mean the times are good. That's great. But when people are really concerned about cleaning for health and all of the You know aspects of and complexities that that that that creates and Which we need to do as a cleaning business in order to adequately address that and exploit that as an opportunity We have we can you know, you got to run your business in a more disciplined way in a more Professional way and this is an opportunity for companies who want to go down that path to You know, not only take advantage of the opportunity presented by this very unfortunate situation, but also You know make a greater contribution to The community Your you know employees and arguably society as a whole so We're gonna be be talking a lot about that There's a very real potential at the labor market might get a little more favorable. We've all been struggling to find help and It's you know, you can look at a lot of industries from you know hospitality to food and bath It's a lot of a lot of service businesses It's reasonable to think in the weeks and months ahead. They're going to be Reducing their workforce which would create opportunities for us some opportunity for for good PR. We talked about bad PR things go wrong. Well There's a lot of people in the local local press news People who are going to be Writing articles are going to be looking for for authoritative voices and export experts on corona virus and if you can Basically put together press releases and Bundle up your story in a way and get it out there to where people in the media know where you are It's a really good chance that that you can get a lot of interviews and all the good PR that goes along with that And all of this, you know adds up to the the the possibility if you do it, right? To be able to increase your income and get better margins better gross profit off the income that you're Generating We need to be thinking about a communication plan and I'm going to mention this to you because if you don't working on it We all need to be working on it now Maybe addressing questions that your stakeholders are going to be asking and your stakeholders primarily or your employees and your clients General community is also a stakeholder But we need to be able to explain what we're doing to keep our employees safe Your employees certainly want to know that but the community wants to know that too For a lot of reasons, you know, you need to be able to demonstrate that you're a responsible company that you're you're concerned about the community every person it gets sick is creating the statistically the The probability that anywhere from one to four more people are going to get sick Based on that are not value that we were looking at so we have an obligation to do What we can do to make sure that everybody stays sick for the benefit of Everybody that's not sorry The clients are definitely going to want to know what you're doing to keep them safe And we're going to be talking about ways that you can do that What are we doing to make their home safe for reducing the chance that they're going to catch? an infectious disease inside of their home basically you're talking about hygienic cleaning with you know sanitizing disinfecting using all the proper infection control techniques and In subsequent discussions, we're going to be getting more into that We want to know what should your employees do if they display symptoms need to make sure that's clearly understood I would suggest it would be a really bad thing if you have somebody who has a clinical case of Coronavirus and you're sending them into people's homes and they're cleaning That could create a lot of problems Likewise, if your client has symptoms that they might have this illness, what are you going to do? I would suggest that you want to talk to your clients and have an understanding with them if anybody in their household Believes they might have this virus that you would reschedule those jobs until everybody's feeling better We've got some examples of Some communications tools and some some documents that are useful and so on cleaning business today If you go to cleaning business today calm forward slash Corona virus virus dot downloads You can download we've got and this is some example stuff that we use we've developed the castle keepers It's just a general ladder explaining where we are as a company on These questions here. There's also a Q&A example You're free to use that to whatever extent it's applicable to your business if I would ask you just as a matter of professionalism if There's things in that letter that your business doesn't do that you don't claim that you do I mean make make sure you're being real with people Likewise, if there's things that you're doing that aren't any information that we're sharing with that link I would encourage you to add that. There's also a poster in there from The World Health Organization Actually, I guess it was developed by John Hopkins Quite frankly, I'm not sure you know copyrighted or not but I put it out there for you to download for your internal use anyway on the appropriate way to wash your hands to You know Maximize the the benefit of getting all the nasty stuff off your your your hands are reducing the chance of infection So I hope this information has been useful and if you want to You know know more about this and get more detail about the information that we talked about today and the various Things that you need to be doing inside of your business. There's a whole lot here and a whole lot more discussion to come We'll be back here tomorrow at five o'clock Eastern. It's Tuesday five o'clock Eastern. Please Join us and we'll we'll go then Thanks