 Hey, good afternoon, everybody. Tom Stewart here. I'm with Liz Trotter. Our guest today is Mike Callahan. This is Smart Business Modes. How are you? How are you? Doing good. How are you doing guys? It's a crazy Wednesday. Yes. Aren't they all? Yeah. We were just talking about that earlier. I was like, so Tom, you know, when you have those days where everything is really urgent and you just don't know that you have time to get to the urgent things. He's like, yeah, life. Like some days, I guess. Oh, but Tom, go ahead. So Tom was saying something really amazing right before we went live. I was like, Tom, why are you saying this? Like, here's live. I can't remember. I'm so, so full. I know. I was talking to Mike. I mean, Mike truly has innovated, you know, the home service industry does a lot of work with house cleaning businesses and a few other verticals as well. But we were talking about, and I'm going to be rambling about this a lot over the over the next few months because it's kind of a big deal to me. We started cleaning business today back in April of 2013. And we wrote our anchor article for that. And this was back when we spent a lot of time doing this type of stuff. We interviewed a ton of people about the future of the residential cleaning industry. And a lot of the feedback we got was about how technology was going to change how we do business and automations and stuff like that. And that was like, like a concept that seemed like that was a ways out there. But Mike is really innovated and has basically taken that concept and made it come to life. And it's happening a heck of a lot faster than it used to. Like back 2015, I'm guessing, I might be wrong on the year, but we worked with RSC to do the disruptive innovation summit, a whole day workshop in Orlando, Florida, as part of the ISSA convention, just talking about how technology can change how we do business. And a lot of that was about stuff that was coming, but it wasn't quite here yet. And, you know, the automations are here. And it's, I mean, it's even broader than that. There's a lot of different ways that technology is changing how the competitive landscape, the companies that are embracing technology are growing. I mean, Liz, you coach a lot of cleaning businesses and you see some companies are having crazy growth. Absolutely. Yeah. You can even be able to do that 10 years ago, five years ago. No. The reason why you can get million-dollar companies, you know, in two and a half years, you remember, I mean, we all remember when the million-dollar company was like, wow. Now it's kind of funny, right? Now everybody's like, yeah. You get a bunch of cleaning business owners together and you can't swing a dead cat without hitting somebody who's got a million-dollar business, right? That's kind of table stakes at the moment. But Tom, stop swinging dead cats. That's right. You're a cat person. Yes. I mean, I guess I'm happier that they're dead. Well, I'm an animal lover. That's an old saying from the Hipples of Virginia. You could swing a wet sock instead. Okay. There you go. But yeah, you're right. The way it is now, everybody's, you know, it's so much easier to make money now with all the automation. And actually not just with what Mike's doing too, but like Made Central is along the same line, Tom. Right? It's a tech stack. It's about your technology stack. And there's, you know, a lot of really awesome tools out there. If you get the right ones and put them together, it's a significant competitive advantage. What are you saying, Mike? I mean, gee whiz, you're working with businesses. Yeah, there's, I mean, there's a lot of great stuff going on outside of what we're doing. I mean, there's, it's crazy because you're still looking at the stats to break a million dollars and actually do that. It's still only three to 5% of all businesses. But I think what's really going on here is the ecosystem that you guys have built. You may be able to swing that wet sock or dead cat and hit another million dollar business. But if you look at a national perspective, those stats really haven't changed that much. I think the ecosystem in the organizations that you guys are in right now, the ecosystem that you guys are teaching in are just a lot more educated contractors. And they're adopting these technologies. You've had Riley Petoshnik on. Riley's doing some great things of pushing SMS and some other things that he's doing with his websites and SEO. Libby with Woot Recruit. The ecosystem that you guys have brought in around smart business moves and made central and cleaning business profits, it's really something to be said. There's a very similar ecosystem going on in the lawn care industry as well right now. But there's something to be said that you have basically formed a group of early adopters that are actually, as Michael Gerber would say, that they're working on their business, not in the business. So I mean honestly, it feels like that endless amount of tasks we're talking about as a business owner that you're never going to get there. I've kind of got to give some kudos to the people watching here live or recorded. The people that are actually following this are actually taking the time to get out of their business and work on and implement these things. So I think that's the difference. I don't think the ecosystem is the whole entire country has changed. It's just the influence that you guys have had in this industry has brought a lot of people to top and you've got a bunch of powerhouse business owners. Yeah, it's funny. I'm kind of glad you said that because I never, I'm not so much sure that we had the influence, but we just, we've all heard that you are, you know, a product of the closest, your closest people that you're around the most. And I think that is what's happening. We tend to be around people that are moving, growing, looking for the next thing that are forward thinking. And so to us, it just looks normal. That's what we're seeing. The pictures, I was unfortunately able to make it to Chicago this year for the conference this year, but literally starting right out the gate with Gosha showing her office over there and helping hands and the amount of influencers in that building in the new office, the pictures there right down to the trade room floor, the amount of really successful business owners, even from the outside looking in and just from the Facebook posts, it was star studded. And I think you guys have really done one hell with the top of the top people in the industry. There's still a lot of businesses that really could benefit from this, but I think that the ecosystem that's following you guys and it's part of that tight group there is just next level and they're taking action. And they are adopting to this technology and not to sound self-serving, but automations and some of the stuff we're talking about is not new. I was doing this almost 10 years ago in my lawn care company, not to date myself. And it wasn't even bleeding at that point. It was probably more cutting edge. But the group that you've got around yourselves and the group that we've got in home cleaning as well as lawn care, they're kind of, they're drinking the Kool-Aid, they're buying in and they're winning. You were doing it 10 years ago and it was available 10 years ago to the companies that had, I mean, not everybody's capable of going into some of these CRM products and developing campaigns and doing the stuff that you did then that you even do better now. I believe it's been democratized now. It's available to anybody who really wants to do it now, which was just kind of the cool thing that, you know, 10 years ago it was like, well, yeah, Mike can do it, but, you know, he's got special powers and I could never figure that out. Well, it's not the case today. It's a matter of, you know, part of its choice and part of it's just getting stuff done, the implementation part of it. Putting the work in and yeah, it's been there and it's not too late because it's still in the service industry's cutting edge, but I think the cool thing is is we're impending this potential recession that everybody's talking about. We could potentially be a little more agile and cut some workforce, but really I'm kind of talking about let's not cut the workforce. Let's bring them from the lower jobs that they're doing to get them into the $100 an hour and I think I feel that this inner circle that's watching this Facebook live or the recorded is the companies that are going to win right now and a lot of the competition in the service industry is starting to you can feel and they're starting to retract and like I said probably age myself again, but in 2008 that was one of the biggest years in our company. I think we almost tripled in size but we didn't sit on the sidelines we took the extra cash that we had in the war chest and doubled and tripled down and man, the $70,000 $80,000 of advertising we did in April and part of May look 10 times is great because no one else was even out there. So if we're looking and talking about technology and automations and some of the stuff we're probably going to talk around SMS is really big right now text messaging and that instant communication if you're watching this this is potentially the next shift for you that I took advantage of 10 years ago this potential pullback in the finances recession is going to give you that opportunity to actually go out and dominate that market locally. So Mike tell us what exactly it is that you're doing because yes we know it's automations we know it's tech, but for people that don't know you they might not know exactly what it is that we're talking about what what automations what tech. Yeah so if we're talking about that magical $1,000,000 market beyond there's really there's five stages of business and what we've kind of figured out is along each one of those stages of business there's a growth hurdle and you can manually do it and you can actually you know you can overcome it but really by using automations we make sure what should happen happens each and every time so that stage one business if you're a cleaner I like to call it stage one A and B stage one A you've got a full time job and your biggest hurdle is time you don't have time to build that cleaning business. Stage one B is like you know the heck with the man I'm starting my business and I'm going to make some money but now the biggest pain point is leads how do I get enough leads it's not just like your friends and family you've got to get enough leads to survive to actually feed your family put food on the table and then when you go into that stage two business that's about a hundred thousand to three hundred thousand a year that's going to be your sales process and Michael Gerber kind of puts it best we're all technicians on entrepreneurial major nobody really wants to be the sales person but in order to get past that stage someone literally has to come in Monday morning to Friday and their full-time job is sales and when they come in at the end of the week if they made their sales quota they did their job but what we all find at least in my business in the early days is we sell a lot of work then we do all the work and then we're run out of work we better start selling some more work and we got to do more work so based on the leads in the sales process we can break it down but we automate those processes but the next stage is when you go into stage four is marketing and systems what's that skip three oh I'm sorry so stage three is going to be so we've got stage one is your you've got your leads or time it leads the next one is going to be going in and creating the sales systems stage three I'm not sure smart people talk I could actually pull up I could actually pull up a slide deck here for you but stage three is going to be your marketing and services so we need to actually figure out how to go out in stage three and market these services whether it's that Dan Kennedy long text style or whatever it is door hangers but we've got to be able to create enough traction to be different to drive that business that sales funnel and then in addition we've got to figure out how do we build a team to actually go out and service those accounts to get the work done so at this point the business owners going out and hiring people they don't know to do the work so that's another bottleneck how do we create process and systems to get that work done and then your stage four is going to be literally that million dollar mark and as we get to that million dollar mark none of these things go away they continue to be there so when all the automations come in we start to automate your leads your sales your marketing and service and then stage four is going to be your people and systems and actually go in and build a team get the work done any of the repetitive tasks you're doing and then your stage five is going to be out of three to ten million dollar company that's leadership and culture and that's literally becoming you a better leader because the company you're leading in a million dollars your leadership skills aren't going to be the same that's why I build this culture that mission values, vision, the purpose some mission goals and as you become a better leader how do you make many leaders to kind of take those three things we talked about before the call as a leader at this point you're setting the vision you're building the team and hopefully number three most important you're not running out of Monday but if you're looking at stage literally one B all the way to stage three so your lead sales marketing and service and people and systems those can all be automated for your business you're going to automate first thing is your sales and those are going to tackle your sales and marketing systems and then your employee recruiting training onboarding and the last thing is a repetitive task on the daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly things you do and that's how we built the automations not on purpose in our business but as that business grew to a million and beyond those are the bottlenecks I need to plug to actually get pulled back out of the business and I have to work 100 hours a week okay so I'll go ahead Tom sorry it's interesting though because the stuff that you're defining especially like three, four and five once you start getting to those points those are points of differentiation those separate you know your cleaning company from you know the independent working out of the trunk of their car or some of your competitors and that's part of the whole scaling process that I think that we're seeing as well that you know there was a time that we were all wringing our hands over how do we compete with with independence and you know the people who don't have the overhead cost and so forth are running a legitimate business I think that's changed I think that's changing and I think that we're seeing that if you can provide a differentiated product and the technology is part of that the repetitive tasks not only does it save you cost as an operator it gets done better if it's set up where it's automated and you have a busy day and somebody doesn't come to work no sweat because those things are still happening so that means we're happier customers more lifetime value out of customers but I think it's that sales the marketing and how to actually service that once you figure out how to sell and market that's going to get you past a million and then it's the peoples and systems but that technology the automations is what is pushing a lot of these people that you're seeing right now through that million dollar mark and now okay now we need to buckle down and get the people and systems and leadership and the culture dialed in but that's where it comes in and like I said it never goes away but you can put your head down and you know grind through it that big you know hustle, hustle, hustle like the Gary Vee thing grind, grind, grind that's not sustainable so we've got to figure out how can we actually utilize a software platform like Made Central with some automations to really buy that time back and then start working on the people and systems a little before we get to that million dollar mark so we hit that jump we already got a head start all right so this is what I just heard you say and I know this is not what you meant so this is so and I know other people that especially smaller businesses are hearing this so I have no hope to grow to a million dollar business unless I buy your product and then I also can't for Made Central like there's just no hope for me then right that's absolutely true no absolutely not like so we did this all originally we broke a million you know pretty much before automations was the thing in our business like you can do it and I mean everybody's heard this story I mean my business caused a divorce I mean you can do it I was working 80 to 100 hours a week 7 days a week you can definitely do it I'm telling you there's a better way to do it yourself the technology is getting easier but it would take a full-time person 35 hours in the week to do for 250 300 bucks a month a software can do it better and it doesn't call in sick and it's predictable and it connects into everything else and it gives you that clarity you need so I don't care if you're using me or you know Tom's going to care if you use him but use something because this is like this is it pulls back that sanity it allows you to actually work on those people things the software is not going to allow you to do it's not going to help you with the people it's not going to help with your leadership it's not going to help with your culture and you're still going to be focusing on the other things after you break a million and that's what's going to bottleneck you to get to the 2, 3 to 10 million so it just gives you that time to be that leader you need to be and build the team around you okay so small businesses struggle in this area and we have this thing that we do every month in the different circles called FORA and the person brings like the core issue the thing that they just can't get past and it's making them crazy and this person's issue was sales and she's saying that she doesn't want to have to spend $1500 a month to get an SEO guy that's then going to revamp her website and then is going to also make her pay even more money for AdWords I just don't feel like there's any other option out there that's it that's the only thing that I have to do and I just don't want to there's got to be a better way what do you think about that Mike? I think at some point and I guess it all comes down to your client acquisition cost and knowing the numbers not emotionally and I don't think there is a way around it nowadays you need a website, you need SEO you're going to need organic and paid traffic and that's not even talking about automations or anything I do you need that lead generation to hit your website or call your office and I think that's the scary thing in most service businesses cleaning as well as lawn care that we work with a lot is a lot of the business owners are not looking at the statistics of the cost of doing business and if that Riley's father Jonathan Petotian he kind of put it fast he gave a great analogy imagine we have a coke machine in the back here behind me and all your ideal clients are sitting in there and every $100 you stuck in there your ideal client popped out and you knew they were worth say $10,000 client lifetime value well it's the same kind of analogy with SEO if you're paying $1,500 but it's consistently kicking out $125 acquisition cost it's a no brainer but I think we're looking at the big ticket we're actually not looking at okay I'm spending $125 to get $10,000 client lifetime value now that's a whole different equation in my mind and I don't know if that makes any sense Liz but that's I think the perspective needs to change and the companies that are winning have a different perspective it's not $1,500 a month you would jam every dollar you had in that machine or to get you know customers out at that rate assuming that you've got the work force to you know service them and so forth which isn't always a safe assumption either so you need tools, you need data to manage all of this but if you've got the numbers you can look at SEO and you know add words and other types of paid advertising as an investment rather than an expense and when the flywheel's spinning and you're jamming that $100 in you're getting a customer out you're jamming as many as you can I mean it sounds ludicrous but in the condensed sale season for the lawn care season between April and the middle of May 70 to 85,000 on average and it was a clockwork we knew if we stuck it in across three or four different platforms of advertising statistically it came out every year now the crazy thing is when we first started doing that it was all direct mail and it was literally if you had a snowstorm when you actually had all of its setting at the post office we had one year where it literally flopped we had a foot of snow when they all went out we couldn't control it so the cool thing is with a lot of this digital marketing now not necessarily for home cleaning but in different verticals where it's really seasonality if the sun's not out they're not thinking about that service they need on the outside that's the scary thing but now with the technology you can actually kind of trigger when it goes out and it doesn't go out so that's cool but I mean that's you know $80,000 in a month and a half a lot of money but it was people thought we were nuts but back in 2008 like that's how we grew so much because nobody was spending the money and we just doubled down so you know Tim the question you know somebody said well I don't want to invest I don't even think you said invest spend I don't want to spend the money and it's like well don't spend it but you've got to invest it I mean we've worked with business owners who don't want to return an email or answer their phone either I mean there's a lot of things that we don't want to do in our business but we need to do in order to be successful investing you know properly in your business that's just part of it and technology is the same way you know I don't want to spend money on software and things that and the support that goes around it well you can choose not to but the companies that are being most successful are making those investments alright well here's the here's the next little piece her response to that was this yeah but like investing in SEO and that kind of stuff or spending spending money on SEO etc that's like radio advertising you don't know if you're actually I don't know enough about it to even do it how do I know if I'm actually getting anything from this money that I'm spending so what about with the automations Mike if people are investing money into automations is there a way for them to see a connection between what I'm spending and what I'm making you know and this goes directly to these companies that are going from I've done all the work myself I've never done any advertising than any marketing and I got here just by doing all of these things why do I need to do something else because what got you there is not going to get you where you want to go right off the bat but yeah if you're looking at it in there's I mean truth be told there's not a lot of companies doing what we do but there's three areas if I'm going to look at an automations company that I'm looking at for ROI or if I'm doing it myself I want to look at for sure the first one is once we've got that lead acquisition from the website and they get into the software the CRM we want to look at your close ratio so what is your average close ratio for your estimates the biggest return on investment right off the bat is the estimate follow up if you're not following up at least five times across different communication channels you're probably losing 80% of the work in your market so we'll see closing ratios on estimates if they've never followed up automated double sometimes triple so you should see a massive surge in the first 60 days right there the next thing I'm looking at is upsells so one time to recurring if we're doing a special upsell around the holidays for a deep clean the stats I was just looking at today and a couple of the lawn care companies I don't have this handy for cleaning today off top of my head but realistically if you're a lawn care company using us for an upsell if you're not getting 60 to 80 estimate requests for an upsell expansion play in the first 48 hours something's wrong so like the system will pay for itself literally or pay for your own time right off the bat and then the other area I'm looking at is your long-term nurture so we're providing free value and educating the consumer and that's going to go to your leads your clients and your canceled clients so canceled clients that are crazy don't want back obviously want to kind of mark them off do not market we don't want those guys coming back trust me we've made that mistake Tammy and Christina was literally lynched me in the office when they all came back but after we segmented the crazies out we see on average in the cleaning is about two to two and a half percent high level three of your canceled clients coming back so those are like three areas that you could pretty not emotionally look at and even if you don't know your numbers you could see a significant increase now those note the numbers for canceled clients post covid I don't want to inflate them for facebook live but they are a bit higher now because a lot of people that discontinued the services especially in home cleaning right now you know there's some pride in the game they couldn't afford it it was uncertainty now they're coming back to find a cleaner they need that but they're too embarrassed to call you back but now you're nurturing you got a relationship and you're proactively reaching out hey can we update that quote so if you're not getting at least two and a half three percent of your canceled clients coming back you know that's an issue but that's low hanging fruit I mean that's literally all you're doing is sending out quotes everything else happens automatically we're not talking about the welcome and nurture process so another big one would be most companies don't have time to follow up and over to invoices so we had a gentleman that reached out a couple months ago that signed up for the automations and part of the automations on the platform we automated on allowed us to tie into their financials we picked up an extra thirty five thirty six thousand dollars of overdue invoices that he just didn't have time to follow up on so that's another metric of hey how are my overdue invoices and you know is there an increase on that now I'm recommended if you're doing residential you're running that card right after the service and they're not going too far but this guy had some commercial clients as well and it was it was low hanging fruit and it wasn't that they weren't going to pay him that he just never really followed up and the office was asking to be paid exactly so I mean those are like those are low hanging fruit that I would say that's a return on investment nice so there are some real metrics that people can look at even small businesses that are thinking I can't afford it I've always done it why should I invest there's some metrics so you can look at them and see listen you're now making more money because of the system and you were before as long as you're tracking yeah and it's crazy because you can get very big and we without mentioning the company we just took about a thirty point one million dollar company from QuickBooks and Excel sheets and literally just put them into a serum for scheduling billing and and doing all that and it was like in the first week or two they realized that they had missed in one week ten to fifteen thousand dollars of work it was on their Excel sheet schedules that literally just got missed but when the software swept through and highlighted them in red and said hey these guys are supposed to be done by the end of last week they're like oh crap like maybe we're looking about this all wrong or Excel sheets and our QuickBooks are really inexpensive and they're really easy to use but there was no built-in systems of processes to actually track and hold things accountable so we've dealt with it we've had a couple home cleaning companies that were literally doing three piece carbon copy estimates and scanning them into the software and that's how they were tracking it and then once we kind of eased them into it it was probably a six to twelve month process but once they actually had set pricing matrices and job costs and reports and the automations to follow up they're like how did we live without this but I guess it's kind of seeing where you're at and I kind of use the analogy about like the kind of like the mountain behind me on the on the piece of paper like Everest though like a lot of times as practitioners of technology we're at the summit we're up top here but a lot of people are down here and we're trying to prescribe everything up top but we really need to come down and meet them where they're at in the stage of business and say okay if your biggest issue is sales or leads or marketing or how to actually build a process to provide the service we need to meet them where they're at and we gradually walk up that model we're not throwing it at them and that's the biggest issue when I first started automating and doing the job costing and all the all the stuff that you're on the counting is as an entrepreneur I'm like next shiny object let's do this all at once but once we we backed it down and we did each little piece and it added up over six to seven years man that was was dynamite okay so I really love that because I do feel like that's a big thing small companies many times they just can't see the bigger picture they can only see where they are today right and all the work and the whirlwind that they're in so it's not big things are like now problems it's like how do I make payroll on Friday and today's Thursday and well if we make these investments we'll be able to grow our business where those won't be worries yeah but I gotta make payroll tomorrow and we've all been there it's a real thing I'm not making that up from somebody else's experience I mean yeah it's says easy does hard but if you can at least squeak out a little bit of time that's the other part of it as well I mean I know people in the residential cleaning business are spending 5 figures a month hefty numbers on AdWords and things like that they have all their data and this is investments and flywheel spending and they're growing their business but depending on where you are I mean you can do things in a lot more modest way to make progress so you know you don't have to go crazy and you don't have to you don't want to do things that you know a 5 million dollar a year cleaning business is doing if you're at 500,000 you don't want to do what they're doing certainly try to do it on their scale but start taking the steps to get the flywheel spending to get you know the sales going and there's profit in the margins all the stuff that Mike's telling you is there's customers out there that will sign up for your service there's more revenue that you can have without really burning a lot more calories or even making any type of meaningful investment it's not a for some of these simple automations you can get your money back real quick and even if you're not on me like something simple is like a business card we'd like refer a friend leave it behind on the counter there's a lot of little things that you can do if you're in a fluid neighborhood and that's your ideal client literally when you leave the house drop literally door hangers on the three houses on both sides of the house and the three across the street you're starting to build some density you're building brand awareness hopefully your cars wrapped every time you're in the neighborhood now if you're in two or three driveways instead of one it's just a compounding of facts it's not one silver bullet but it's brand awareness and bringing it together and when you're ready to automate it then you just started the pain point based on that stage of business is what we kind of prescribed so what if somebody is trying to they're thinking okay I need to jumpstart my sales and they're thinking okay I need a full-time sales person now do they is there a way that they can hire somebody they don't need a full-time sales person maybe they can use automations to be able to augment somebody that's working less or any thoughts there there's a couple things speed wins right now so if we can all possible avoid it in-house estimates should or think of the past far as I'm concerned we can worst-case scenario we can do it hourly with a minimum or we can do a high-low price range but we should be using a product from an MLS database like Zillow and asking some qualifying questions based on how many people are living there pets things like that based on how how clean that house probably is and we should be instantly quoting over the phone and trying to close and if we're not a basic estimate follow-up automation should be in play but that doesn't even have to be state-side you get a virtual assistant to do that or there's online booking forms like Made Central has where it's an automatic quote but the speed is going to win right now and that that's where I would start so you don't need a full-time sales person but you need to have a full-time sales system right I like that it ties into the automation I mean we see year over year a larger portion of traffic to your websites coming in on a mobile device and we're seeing a larger portion of sales happening through online booking people don't want to talk to people I mean every year a larger portion of our potential market for clients in the house cleaning industry have a preference not to have to pick up the phone and deal with people and Tom I got a great example of that today I was officially releasing it but we actually just acquired another company it's going to be under the simple growth umbrella but it's actually under separate LLC with separate insurance and I literally went on signed up for QuickBooks today and within about 10 minutes I've got a $3 million liability policy but I didn't have to talk to anybody clicked a few buttons, entered in some data and literally had an email within 5 minutes and it got a $2 million plus another $1 million aggregate liability umbrella but I didn't want to call anybody and they made it so stupid easy that they're like okay now your QuickBooks account set up what else do you need do you need payroll, do you need Berkman's comp, do you need this which would have taken me if I called somebody locally to do that would have taken 3 days of back and forth and it was instant and I had it and I probably got a better price on it and the customer service was phenomenal there was no customer service because there was nobody to have to talk to but it was I mean you couldn't have done that pre-COVID you could not have done that I remember going to get the insurance for Simple Growth and for the lawn care company I had to go down to the guy at the corner it was a great experience but it took forever I don't have time for that and I don't want to do it anymore so if you can have that experience in your cleaning company that's like you've won absolutely okay I just had a very similar experience I had to rent a car back in the day not that long ago I want to say 6 months ago when I rented a car I had to sign initial like 10 pages and my I mean give them my license and my credit card not a debit card had to be a credit card and you know it was a whole huge thing and after waiting in this huge line get up there 10, 15 minutes with them go outside walk around the car make all these notes on the car then they give me a key I have to go find the car it's a great thing when you bring the car back huge process this time I didn't have to wait in the line I walked up to the window they asked me my name they told me they gave me a little card that had I don't know what was on it I don't even know what was on the card something and they said go to whatever lane pick a car any car you want the keys are in it and just put this car on your dashboard so that you can leave I was like I don't understand I don't even know how to do it but that's it companies that are going to adopt are going to win and if you have the choice between using rental car agency A which puts you through the routine rental car agency B which makes it eliminating friction has a more frictionless process you know you're going to use B and you'll be willing to pay more for that I don't really care how much it costs I didn't really ask I don't guess what that's who I'm using next time I don't know what it paid don't care what it paid as long as it's not going to be like there's a day where were all the questions about the gas and who's going to pay for the gas and how much I was going to pay where were those questions I don't even know how gas got in the car I don't care when I came back they didn't do anything they just pull up take your stuff and go I don't understand how they did that how did that happen you feel like you cheated it's supposed to be harder than that way harder I just walked out the whole process their portion of it was no more than seven minutes that is where introducing systems and technology are going to win whether you do it yourself you pay somebody to do it that's a whole different story but a lot of the technology is simple enough where you can get the basic stuff yourself and I love that idea of I really care how much more I'm going to have to pay it's worth it so I'm thinking that your system is exactly the same it's creating such a ease for people that why would I want to continue shopping this is just so easy the reality of it is if it's hard there's a reasonable chance you're not going to do it if you're trying to do it yourself and you find out it's like a lot of things it's like doing rate increases we all should be doing rate increases at the appropriate times and more frequently now with inflation a lot of people don't because it's just hard yeah so it doesn't have to be hard might can make a lot of this stuff really easy if you're not calling me you got to just look at the little pieces of the business and start to chunk away at them the movement is already shifted you got to get ahead of that big difference if we do hit this recession people are talking about it's going to be a huge benefit for you buying that time back to work on the higher level things is going to set you up for success to break that million dollar mark and if you've already broken it and you're just grinding through it it just makes things so much easier a lot of it will give you that non-emotional data that I love running a business because now it clears up your SEO questions why should I spend it? I'm not spending I'm making investment for every 1500 I get in I get 30,000 that makes sense why wouldn't you yeah so Mike can you tell us a little bit about or tell the audience just a little bit about what are some of the things that you can make so easy specifically what can be really easy for our customers which make them want to spend more money with us or what can be so easy for us that we can just go on and do something else yeah I mean if you're doing it yourself there's going to be some time investment you're looking at thousands of hours we put into these Navy Split Testim the way we actually provide our service it's a done for you turnkey system complete with marketing copy for emails texts and call scripts it's not award winning writing but it's pretty good and you can go in and customize and make the documents yourself I mean but literally from the website lead capture if you're using Made Central we're going to recommend you use online booking forms that gets right in we recently just did an integration with Tom over Made Central and we've automated castle keepers as well as Matt's company over there so and we've got probably I don't know close to 20 people ballpark now in the last two months that have joined on with good results but it's a turnkey solution Made Central partners yeah we've got well several hundred and cleaning across all the platforms that's our latest integration with Made Central but it's a turnkey solution so everything's done for you you go through maybe two hours of onboarding calls one to intake the information and then the second one to train you how to actually use the automation really where to go and edit the documents because all you got to do is submit the estimate everything just happens but you get full complete life cycle marketing when you say everything just happens for people that have never used an automation they don't know what that means what is everything so they would hit the online booking form yeah we automatically send us some short-term education to educate them how to do the cleaning themselves so we're going to be talking about the difference between a one-time deep clean versus reoccurring clean so you're deep clean we're going to educate them what the process is how we're really doing the full clean of the house how the reoccurring clean is different what's included in it any sales or price objections so I know you guys have seen Marca shared in a few times at the ISSA events Marca has a book called they ask you answer Marca was doing the same thing in his pool company that I was doing eight or ten years ago in my lawn care company but we're addressing the questions that people are asking that are slowing down the sales process so do I need to be home to have the home clean if something breaks how are you going to handle it whatever those questions are let's face it people don't trust themselves to hire a contractor they definitely traditionally don't hire us trust us as a contractor to do the work now through this they'll trust us so like and trust us so we're going to educate them around the service create a higher perceived value we shorten that sales cycle through education that's all automated based on the specific service they're interested in then once we submit that estimate so that happens automatically once we submit the estimate it follows up five or more times we automate email text and phone calls and we're going to create some scarcity the routes are filling up some urgency hey do we have permission to close out your estimate around day 20 and a call to action click here to sign up or click here maybe I got some questions I need answered that happens automatically once they become a new client we welcome and acclimate them so literally the first email goes out says hey welcome to our cleaning company if we require a credit card on file that PCI compliant credit card form can be on there so that's tackled and then we're going to follow up so if it's a reoccurring clean 30 60 90 days if it's a one-time clean we're only follow up once so we know exactly based on the type of service they had but the key is it's personalized it doesn't look automated so it looks like somebody from your office is typed in hey how's the service going and you may just get the response back the cleaners doing a great job but occasionally they're not wiping down the master the tiles in the master bath that could become a cancellation issue we've tackled it and we adjusted it then we go in and we nurture them through happy holidays all your major us or Canadian holidays our monthly newsletters we're talking about what they should be doing in their home or around the home at proper times as we're going to have a holiday season maybe proper techniques for stove clean out fridge clean out and we're providing just valuable education around that we're not selling them anything but that's going to your leads your clients and those cancel clients who want to nurture and bring back so we're going to get them in there and we can run some specials as well and there's well then we're going into a process that's already built into made central but we we call be there been there but basically it's a pre and post notification text or email when the cleaners coming and leaving and then depending on the software we tie into the financials so credit card expiration and then overdue invoice process although we have to signing a task or to do for somebody to send them to collections and then potentially in some situations whether it's commercial cleaning or residential there may be ability through a mobile or a website form to for the cleaner to actually say hey part of the contract is not stripping and waxing the floors in this building it looks like it needs it so we can upsell property specific issues the cleaner seeing and then in addition we go to five to eight upsells after that they're timed out with the seasonality and especially in cleaning one time to reoccurring so somebody signed up for a moving clean they don't have a reoccurring clean five to seven days that system nicely goes out and does that because usually we're too busy to do that so you say what happens and it just happens all that literally happens when somebody requests an estimate and you give them the estimate literally turnkey nothing you don't get set it and forget it literally all you have to do is update your documents and we give you a full slate already pre-built out with content and I don't even want to say it's generic it's pretty good stuff most people don't change it but if you want to go crazy and revamp it those documents are yours you go in and you go crazy with them but I do recommend if you're looking at it and there is no logo and it looks like it's sent from the estimators iPhone number two that email closes at 20% don't touch it because there's a reason why so it's not because we just stuck it there because we thought it was cool there's actually data behind these so day number two email if you're doing it yourself make it look like it's sent from your iPhone and literally on average 20% of the people that open that up will actually buy without you ever talking to them that totally makes sense that's genius I love that so you did a really great job running through like the specifics of the different things and I think that hopefully that makes it a little bit more clear for people like all the different pieces like one person trying to do all of those things for one client is a lot but in fact it's not humanly realistic for somebody to do half of those things it's about yeah 750 or above in sales what we find from the research we did 30 to 35 hours a week of mundane repetitive tasks are pulled off the office staff and I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole but that's just the first piece of it obviously down the line maybe we integrate the rest of it but we've got basically employee recruiting training and onboarding complete with video training for the software and the field staff and then in addition the repetitive tasks of all the things now you've got 30 or 40 solo cleaners or subcontractors and if you don't tell them what to do every day every month it doesn't happen now we take the power of the software and assign a tasker to do and it's a glorified checklist of what they've got to do each day and if it doesn't happen it alerts them and then it alerts the business owner manager so we leverage that power of automations to actually run what should happen and enforce it to happen so it doesn't necessarily have to be an automated email or text message but it can be automations of accountability and that's where the next shift is coming with the employee part in the asset management or the repetitive task of the employee between an applicant I think this is huge even before that piece comes alright so that let's say that part never comes well it's already there it's just yeah before before it's okay so whether we have it built let's put it that way whether you start using that part currently one of the main things that people are concerned about with their managers right is one of the main reasons why they put them into the manager circle is because they keep dropping balls it's like they have all of these things to do but they notice that this person over here she didn't get this customer over here she didn't get the information about when we do deep claims this customer over here we didn't get her key how the heck why don't we have her key or how we're going to get into the house so we got to make a phone call for that this customer over here she didn't know that we only clean baseboards and whatever would work on the first cleaning of the month how did that drop ball get dropped but it sounds like this just eliminates that yeah it would encompass it all and it's it's crazy I was working with one of our clients in our mastermind group and they were letting someone go and it was a huge surprise to the employee that they were getting let go and I was like well Dave like it should really never be a surprise if someone is going to like be let go they got so busy that they weren't doing their one at once and there wasn't an accountability cadence I'm like but everybody should know where they're at every day they walk into this business and it should be really easy and we've got big three accountability and either you're doing it or not let's coach up eventually coach out but that was that kind of that repetitive automation that would hold that manager to that that ability to treat that transparency and actually have that conversation with the employees so it's hard because I feel like a lot of our employees will walk in and they don't know where they stand each day and really that's our fault but we're not taking the time and holding ourselves accountable to do it and part of that repetitive automation even if you're doing it for yourself one of the areas we automate is around the owner and the manager hey you just people are right there my people are like what well I mean hey if you've got if you've got quarterly taxes doing you're the one responsible you better have something in there holding you accountable and that's part of the stuff you would if you're building those that's the stuff you want to tuck in there or if you've got an admin file in it like hey I want to make sure Tammy and my team is filing the taxes monthly now every month not just the months she remembers exactly exactly and she was with me at the lawn care company so she remembers a few months we did probably did miss him in the early years in the $1,500-$1,800 whack on the wrist we got so that it happens yeah it totally happened we were just talking about that yeah so funny that you said that and most of the time when that is happening it is because things get dropped just because it's you know people get busy Tom you and I remember the person at Foundations that had how many leads in her email yeah very much and it's like she just and she doesn't return them she doesn't isn't doing anything with them but felt that she needed to spend more money on marketing business it's interesting I'm actually getting back on stage next week and part of my talk is about the five stages of business but we're really going to be talking about the six areas where basically you've got garbage cans like you're literally throwing money away and that's one of the six areas so like if you're driving money with that SEO list you're like I don't know if that money is really worth it well if there's something not on your website called a lead magnet we're giving something of value away for the first name last name and at least an email and hopefully a phone number lost it but now we could take that lead and nurture them and when they're ready to buy they're going to be thinking about you so there are some key areas and there's about six five to six areas in your sales pipeline if you're if you don't have them plug and we've talked a lot about them through the automations because they plug them that's a big one so it's not enough just to be driving to your website but what if they're not ready to buy like we need to capture them and work them I mean that that individual has got a ton of cash sitting in there but how about all the estimates you lose and you're like crumple them up figuratively they're in the trash like not like why not nourishing we already paid for that lead even if even like if it was similar to the cancer that's actually higher but only if two and a half percent of those came back like that would be huge well that same person that we were just talking about she would at the end of the month she'd be so overwhelmed because there were so many leads that she would just empty send them all the trash just all right just mark everything as red and just not even deal so oh so hard right so hard but there's a monetary there's a monetary value associated with each one of those that's what I hear you saying Mike so don't throw them away they might not be putting money in the bank today but some of them will be putting money in the bank in the future and you'll miss that if you aren't capturing them and nurturing them yeah depending on your market it's probably seven to ten thousand dollars client lifetime value so you can cherry pick a couple of those three a year that's thirty grand in your pocket we're not talking small numbers here yeah no and half of that would be profit in your pocket so if you look at it cost the SEO or the software or the automations really those aren't the numbers that you should be concerned about it's the money that you're literally throwing out every day because you're dumping your leads out of your email inbox yeah yeah just dump without even contact I'm just cringing because we probably used to do that in the back of the day too I'm sure but like oh like don't do it just don't do it people are just so busy and that's that's where I really feel like this can really help especially small businesses they're just like really are so busy but they could turn this over to somebody it sounds like it's completely reasonable what did you say that they could be looking to spend Mike all in like in the high end 300 bucks a month like totally turn to that includes the automation software in the automation with us and that's on the high end I'm like what the heck yeah that's the high end so it's crazy but this info Tom I'm going to give it to everybody in the circles yeah and those those automations too I guess if you're looking at the big franchise of the five to ten million dollar anomalies in your market it levels the playing field a small solo or entrepreneur with two or three solo cleaners or contractors now compete with the big players because you come up as professional not more professional they haven't invested into it yeah and you're there when it counts and that's that's the key and that's it's pretty crazy that we now small business to compete with bigger business and actually they can beat them because they don't have the red tape we can pivot a lot quicker so we have a couple minutes left Mike I've got your website here I dropped the link to your website and chats everybody can have it is there anything in particular that we should point out if they want to know more about your service I see a button here where you can click to I guess schedule up schedule a call to learn more about it yeah they can book that in addition we also did a webinar with the made central members we did have a it's a URL it's called automate made central dot com and I'm happy to do that because there's ability to obviously sign up and watch the reprew recorded webinar and it talks about our automations and made central but it the idea there is that it we offer it about a 45 minute free book book a caller and one of our seven figure business experts that does work with cleaning companies will actually give you a free analysis on your business and tell you where the things you need to be working on not just automations but is it employee systems is a job costing whatever that is and it actually come out with a after the 45 minute call they email you a really nice pdf and it shows you the couple things you need to be working on going into 2023 so as an added benefit to provide some value I'm happy to do it there's no sales pitch but if you hit book a call you can actually book that analysis right there and the webinar that Tom and I did the replay is there as well you know what that sounds like Mike what's that sound like sounds like a lead magnet it's close actually it's really there's no hook but I will take that as lead magnet sure that's good right because it is something the whole point of a lead magnet as you provide something of value right it's not okay to just throw something out there and not and not provide value but yeah it's something that's actually going to make a difference for people if not anything else the webinar is worth the look because I literally lift the hood and give you the exact blueprint to do it yourself so if you are one of those people that are going to do it yourself and tinker around you're probably not a good fit for us but I did give you the blueprint and this is a print website is that right Tom it's forwards it's called automate made central dot com I dropped that link actually I'll paste it in there it's in the chat add in there too yeah even if you think that you don't want to make the investment right now you certainly owe it to yourself to watch the video and just educate yourself learn more about it because the day will come where you'll want to yeah and what I'll do too I know we offered it to the made central folks there but if people do actually want to go all in and they have made central there's about a thousand dollar discount on the set of fee if they went like all in top top level if they're a larger company and needed everything so we'll honor that as well if they take a look and they're like well we want to do it because it's already on there so little more value there but no need but watch the video and that's I know it sounds like a ton of really good stuff plus I love that they will get that little chart telling them what they need to work on and not just that what they need you to do but what they need to work on period yeah and Dylan and Josh and a couple other people Virginia on the team we've got I think eight now nine business owners not all scaled at least seven figure if not multi seven figure businesses that are all past clients of simple growth that have sold their business that are actually working on our team now so we get both sides of the equation the I'm collecting seven figure business owners so a couple in the company but they're really good honest people and they're not going to sell you something if you're not ready for automations and you're summit of Everest and you're down here and you're like you just need something to get you to the next growth hurdle they're going to tell you what it is and it's not so if you want to sell your business for seven figures and get an awesome job working for Mike the first step is to click on the link yeah we're always looking so we're up to twenty five twenty six full time people on the team and probably bad know the four or five this year so if you are a business owner that wants to help people let us know all right I do have to say real quick I know we're way over time here I'm sorry Tom but I do have to say just personally I've known Mike for quite a few years now and I know that he's a man of integrity and he's like the kind of person that you want to do business with so just he didn't know I was going to say that mom we didn't talk about that but absolutely if you're looking and you're scared and you don't know who to trust get a hold of them because this is the company you can trust do your research too I really appreciate that Liz we're not hiding anything the social reviews and people out there you'll you'll recognize them from Facebook and your inner circles and Liz thank God I'm not filing you as the opening keynote next week so we're good you're silly Mike you're silly we we worked with Mike and I've known Mike for a good while and he's got an awesome team I mean I've worked with some number of folks on Mike's team so I mean it's a good organization and if you aren't doing automations at least take a look at it because it's not a matter if it's a matter of when I mean companies in the future if they're going to be competitive they're going to have to be using these tools so if you aren't okay maybe we're not going to do it this month but one day if you're going to continue to do this you will you're going to have to okay so we we are in overtime so we're going to go ahead and call it a wrap for today Mike thank you for for joining us as always it's fun an hour goes by pretty fast doesn't that it does so good thing my wife picked the kids up because they'd be in trouble so we're going to go home get some dinner and I really appreciate hanging out with you guys and I can't wait to see you guys again in person it's been too long so it's been awesome but I appreciate having me on and everything you guys are doing for the service and you're specifically in the cleaning really really I think you guys are having a huge influence that you don't give yourself credit for of the the seven figure businesses around you guys there's a direct correlation so awesome awesome work for giving back to the industry we will thank you Mike we're going to be back next 5 o'clock eastern for another smart business move so then take care and we'll see you next week bye bye