 Hi, y'all. This is Liz today with Smart Business Moves. And I'm here with Matt Ricketts. Doesn't that sound weird? It's always Tom. Tom's always here, and he's introducing us. So hey, man, I'm so glad you were able to come today and help me out here. Let me see if I can figure out how to get some of my comments and stuff up. That's not it. All right, we'll see if I see everything as it comes in. Do you remember Matt over on the right hand side? You can see your comments. I can see them. You see it? OK. All right, so Matt, we talked to you guys yesterday. Hey, Leslie, we talked to you all yesterday that Matt was going to come on here today and talk about some unique perspectives about how he's managing money. You all know that Matt is well-known for managing his money well. And so he's going to bring us some fresh perspectives about, I think, PPP, Matt, and then also earned income tax credit, right? Sure, we can talk about that a little bit. And we can even talk a little bit about some of the strategies that I think about as far as income. I would almost say, I don't want to say what I consider my living income, but I basically believe I can live on 40% of what I pay myself, and the rest goes into savings. We can talk a little bit about that and about being able to carry forward some of these strategies so that you can weather good times and bad and not get too ahead of yourselves. Because I feel like early on in business, oftentimes, when we would start making more money, I would start, and I'd make the same mistakes everyone would, I'd be like, I'm going to start spending more money. So those are some strategies with all this money that might be available to us now. It can be a little bit confusing as to what to do with it, what to, how to spend it, and some things. So not that I'm going to tell you how to spend your money, but I'll talk a little bit about what we do and how we kind of are thinking through how this is, some of this money is going to be potentially a big boost and how we can potentially not overspend it and make any big mistakes with all this money coming in. Well, I think you're making a good point, too, that when you get a chunk of money like this, it can be seductive. You can feel like, wow, I've got all this money. I can spend it on whatever I want. I mean, it's a big joke about going out and buying a sports car, but people are actually doing things like moving their money around and making some big purchases. And the government is kind of pushing people in that way too, right? Got to keep the economy going. And that's where we're putting this money out there. So people are feeling a little bit like, yeah, I'm not hoping by spending all this money. Yeah. So I hope everyone by now has to determine whether they qualify for PPP. And so applications are kind of on a little bit of a hold right now. I guess if it, I can't remember if it was for companies with 20 employees or less. So some of the people watching today might kind of fall into this window where we're kind of in an exclusive application period for smaller businesses. So the whole thing ends at the end of the month, right? So if you, we had some people yesterday that hadn't applied yet and they were a little bit bigger. March 31st is the, into the first quarter is the application to apply for the second round of PPP. So 90 day window here to do it, they may extend it. There's a lot of money left over right now. So they may extend that out. I wouldn't anticipate a third round, though. I think this is probably, this is probably. What are your thoughts for the, oh, sorry, go ahead. What were you saying? This is probably one. This is probably the advantage of this if you can. And then we can talk about ERC in a little bit too about how that is coming into play. Well, I like to hear your perspective for the people that are thinking, well, I don't really need the money right now. Yes, I qualify, but I don't need it. So they're talking about maybe not taking the money. What are your thoughts there? I would take it. I would bonus your employees significantly. I just gave out 30,000 in bonuses to my employees based on longevity and performance. I know some other friends that gave out bigger bonuses that than that, almost 45,000 in bonuses out of their PPP money. So like 25, they took 20% to 25% of it and said, I'm going to use this towards retaining key employees. And you never know if that is going to pay off or not. But it's an investment in your people and saying thank you for this has been a tough year for them too. They've weathered some challenges. So that's one way you could take the money and really think about rewarding some of your people. You could think about raising your base pay to be more competitive and using that money to strategically allow you to make a couple of price increases before you can really jump up and afford what you're going to pay people. I think we're going to have to be closer to $15 or $16 an hour on pay nationwide if you're in larger cities before much longer, even without increases in minimum wage. You're seeing Costco raising its base pay to $16 an hour. Amazon oftentimes follows that. So you're not just going to end up pocketing this money. You're going to use it to make some strategic moves, right? Some smart business moves to put you in a position to get better employees, probably, so that you're worth more money in the marketplace. Those are things that I'm doing right now. So I'm getting ready to do a 5% price increase to all my clients. And I'm already fairly priced well. But I've identified 329 clients that are probably eligible and due for price increases out of our client lists. And so we're going to go through those and look at real data that we've pulled from Made Central of how many hours we're spending there. Are we on target? Are we over target? If we don't need to bill them anymore because we're consistently charging them more than we're actually spending in their home, I'm not going to go down on their price if they're happy. But I'm going to hold the line for them a little bit longer and not do a price increase. Or if I do one, I would just maybe do it for like 1%. Maybe just something just to let them know if there's something, maybe a dollar or something. Right, just to put something. Are you using the new normalizing functionality? Because I would have to get a refresher code on what that all means. I read a post about it and I've forgotten since what normalized average hours mean. So I don't remember. I guess it's kind of curious. I think the normalized average hours is like if you had your average employees on that property. So Mead Central has this really cool feature where you can basically pick out a time period. Anyone that hasn't had a price increase in a certain amount of time, so like 12 months, anyone that lives in certain areas, you can break it out all these different ways by zones, by how frequently they're clean. Let's say you don't want to raise your weekly prices, but you want to raise all your monthly prices. Let's say you're just like, you know what? Monthlies are underbid in general. So you could sort of like that. But what Liz was mentioning was there's this thing called normalized average hourly. So if you have an employee that's really fast on that house that is consistently under budget but still does a good job, well, it actually tells you, hey, this employee does it at 1.8 hours. But realistically, your average employee taking out all the data of all your employees, how long they take, would take 2.25 hours. So it's bid properly. It's not underbid. It's a pretty cool feature. Now, you kind of reminded me of what it all meant. But yeah, I have to look at those. No, that was a really good recap, Matt. That was super fast and super easy. I like what you said, because it just is saying your average employee would really take this amount of time. So it's probably not underbid. And I really think that's valuable because so many times you get those employees that are really fast. And you guys all know, Leslie, I know you. You've been in business forever. I'm guaranteeing you have some employees that are like that and they're super fast, do a really good job, always have really good scorecards. But you don't really want to be thinking that that's the average amount of time that it's going to take to clean that house, because just this Vascale over here does it that way. Yeah, I think it's a cool feature. So I do too. But yeah, looking at all that data, we're looking at all that and looking at strategically raising the prices by about 10%. So we need to get our prices from about $50 an hour to about $55 an hour. Sorry about that. Yeah, no worries. We need to get it. It rings on my computer sometimes when I don't pick it up on my phone. So we need to get our prices from about $50 to about $55 an hour. But one way that we did this right away was we raised, because we're just so booked, we raised deep clean prices from $50 to $65 for all like, wow. That's a big amount. For all one-time work, if they're just booking us for a one-time cleaning, we're charging them $65 now. And that way, our technicians are making, because we do a fee split, are making way more money. A split is percentage, right? The budget is not in the main central world. Yeah. It's percentage pay. So 24% of 37% of that goes to the technicians, or 38%, I'm sorry, goes to the technicians under our system. So it's about $24 per hour for a technician of cleaning time on deep clean. So now, instead of making like $18.50 on regular homes while they're cleaning your $19 an hour, they can make almost $25. Well, they're actually happy to do deep cleans, because there's a little bit of a differential. We're charging a little bit more. And so we will discount deep cleans if they sign up for weekly or alternating weekly service, but not monthly. So if somebody signs up for monthly service, they want a deep clean. They're paying the rack rate of $65 an hour. But we'll discount 20% off that to get it closer to $50 an hour. And then we'll just eat that by paying the employees more on the deep cleans, as if they're getting paid $25 an hour. The $6.50. Yeah, so we just take that. You're kind of two birds with one stone there, because your employees are getting charged more. You're also controlling the amount of work. You're keeping space available for your recurring cleans versus just piling on all the single work for your schedule. Sounds like when I never, ever would have thought, though, to raise from $50 to $65. That's big. So I wrote that down. We thought about going to $80, but we didn't think that we thought that would price us out of the market a little bit. But I mean, at $65, I'd have to pull up my numbers, but I looked at how many recurring sales we've had. So some of you guys use point systems. I know Derek created the system where a weekly counts for four points, or this buy with these two points, wherever. We've had basically the equivalent of 19 weekly jobs added since the beginning of February, which would be like 36 points or something like that. No, it would be like almost 80 points. 76 points? 19 weekly? Yes. Yeah, we haven't got 19 weeklys. But the way that made sense is it gives you a different amount of a week. Yeah, how many jobs a week? And you think about that. That's two employees we've needed to hire, basically. So I like thinking of it in terms of jobs per week that we've added, because 10 jobs per week tells me I need to hire one employee or be planning on hiring one employee, or else I realize that my availability of one-time things is going to continue to shrink. So we're booking at least two weeks out, even with that $65 an hour. So a lot of things are working for us in the sense that consumers have become more patient during this pandemic and waiting for things. I ordered a garage door six months ago, and I haven't gotten it yet. And I'm just going to wait. I'm not a freezer. What? I'm not a freezer right now. Like I still have it. Well, we got a couple of questions here, Matt. So then Danita has a question. PayPal submitted her. She submitted their app to the SBA. 10 days ago, and it hasn't heard anything. Do you think she should hit them up again? Or don't worry about it? Or what do you think? If there's a process to inquire where it is in the status, I don't think it would hurt to find out if it's been submitted to the SBA. And then the SBA would have. The steps would be that your bank would get it, they'd approve it, then they would submit to the SBA. The SBA would then review it and then approve it or deny it. So I guess if they've submitted it and you haven't got anything back, it's not a bad thing. It just could be the SBA's backed up. As long as you saw that it was submitted. You said that it was submitted to the SBA. Yeah, as long as you're sure that it was submitted, you saw something, PayPal, that you got something. You weren't just assuming that. It's probably beyond PayPal's control at this point. And they're probably just doing, SBA is just doing their due diligence. They're doing their thing. But mine was turned around fairly quickly from the point we submitted to the SBA. I mean, I think it was like three days. I was fast. It was very fast. I would not worry too much, but you could inquire with them if you haven't heard anything by Friday. I would hope that it would be, I hope that it would be pretty quick. And Denit's also in this two week window where they might've gotten a big influx, Denit, because they had, they opened up this window specifically for your size company. So maybe that's it, but I love Matt's advice. We haven't heard something by Friday. Maybe just double check in. And Denit has a, I'm sorry, go ahead, Matt. For us pricing recurring clings to need, I mean, we use kind of the made central formulas and basically it tells us how many minutes each room's gonna take for deep cleaning. We've kind of based that on our experience and base it on that. But basically, I think that we consider a deep clean roughly 2.5 times a maintenance clean is kind of our rule of thumb. But instead, and then again, instead of charging our rack rate of $50 an hour, we charge 65 per hour. So again, about 2.5 times, I think anywhere from two to 2.5 is gonna win you business if you double to two and a half times your recurring price on your deep cleans. Some people, and I know successfully sell them at four times their recurring clean prices. And I think that that's a strategy that works for some people, but I wanna make my deep clean something that is useful and it helps their house get ready, but also not price us out of winning that business regularly. We just set expectations of what's gonna happen usually. And that works pretty well for us. And we're rarely have any problems that we can't solve. And if we do, I'm usually willing to let it go because it's just such a small percentage of the overall business. Yeah. Well, that's what I was gonna say. It kind of depends on whether or not you're winning them. I know that Kerry Knight strategy is not to charge anything. She doesn't charge anything for those initials. She just charges the same recurring fee. And then she sort of rotates through all of the rooms to get everything deep cleaned over time because she wants to win every single bi-weekly. She doesn't wanna let even one of them go. So kind of depends on what your strategy is there, maybe how booked you are. Yeah, my thoughts are on this is that we allow people to come on without deep cleans and we will promise to catch up what we can over time, but we don't charge for that. But it's not like they're gonna get like, it's their house is not gonna be magically deep clean. It's gonna take, you know, maybe three, four, five months before we, you know, get the house where we would want it. And sometimes really never. And they're okay with that. They just, you know, they're just, they're very conscious of price. And it's very helpful for us to come in and do what we can. And they don't need a perfect house. Their house wasn't perfect to start with. They're not expecting like, you know, lick the clean floors, you know, for, for what they're gonna do. You know, it really depends on the psychology of the customer. If you can really tell that they have really high expectations, you're gonna really wanna start them with, with that deep clean. If it's a busy family with three kids and a dog, four kids and a dog, they're gonna, they're gonna probably be actually more just like happy to have the help. So I think some psychology like the customer, but what we always do is we allow them to book just recurring service. We, we, we recommend the deep clean and we sell probably half of our new customers on getting a deep clean to start with, but it's not required. And it, it works for us to go that, that direction. It's just psychology of it. Yeah. I, my favorite line for, for this is, to say, yeah, absolutely, we don't require it. But if you're wanting to come home on that first day and get the big wow, then you're going to want to pay for the deep clean. Otherwise you're gonna come home and yeah, your house is gonna be clean, but you're not gonna get that feeling of, oh, wow, this is so awesome. And 95% of the time they're like, eh, yeah, I want that. I want the big wow. All right, well the big wow is gonna cost you this much money. And people are like, Brad, do you think you're two and a half to four times somewhere in the- Two and a half. Well ours is exactly, yeah, two and a half. We go up to three, but we never hit the four. I mean, I'm not gonna say never. If someplace is, you know, completely trashed and an older place hasn't been cleaned in years. Yeah, you got a master shower that hasn't been cleaned in two, yeah, two years, it might take that long, but. I can think of two companies off top of my head that I know have very effectively, they won't start people without a deep clean. And they're like at like four X and they're selling them. Although I think their base pricing is lower, I think their hourly pricing is in like the 38 to $40. Oh well, that makes total sense then. Yeah, so I think that their markets are smaller markets where there's a little bit more competition on price on hourly rate. So that kind of comes into play a little bit too. So there's so many factors that kind of go into how that works. Well Robin is saying that she's charging 75 and Robin I think you're probably talking about 75 for your singles or your one-time cleans there. And for anybody that's wondering on here, especially smaller companies, I'm guessing that Robin is talking about $75 per labor hour per maid hour. So you got two people in house for one hour, that's $150. So a lot of times there's still some confusion around that. Yeah, so like for us, yeah, we won't go into a house for less than 260 now. So our minimum to even show up to do a deep for a one-time job is 260 bucks. Like we won't even, it's not even really worth it because there's just so much demand and we would just be missing other opportunities. So I like that. So whatever you can do in the market bears, I think that we thought that there was just gonna be this blood of employees that was gonna be raining down. Talk about being wrong about something, right? Oh my God. That prediction was way off. I mean, that was my initial thoughts. I was thinking in 2008, I never had a better staff. Yeah, us too. I was so excited about it. But who could have guessed that they were gonna be giving out $600 a week and then who would have guessed that they were going to extend it through forever and a day. I was gonna say one of the things that we do is we charge a premium $75 an hour for next day. So if you want like service tomorrow it's gonna be $75 an hour. But if you can put it off for a few days and I don't mind rolling a job from like tomorrow is booked but if you're gonna pay me $75 an hour, yeah, I'll roll one of my $55 an hour jobs to the next day and get you claim. It's always flexible and you could give them a little bonus. Yeah, people love to get the money, the extra money. They're like, whoo. Which I think we all know that those deep claims a lot of times are harder and they're not as fun to do maybe so. Yeah, I think that's a good strategy. I think it comes to mind of something me and Tom talk a lot about of like trying to solve with software but some of these things are just things you can solve with SOPs, right? Like by having, all right, well, when this comes up, do this. So these are things that like me and Tom have been talking about with software is like, all right, somebody wants to book next day and they want first thing in the day. Well, the software should add some 20% multiple for that if there's an availability because chances are somebody who wants next day will pay and probably will be a pain in the butt in other ways too. So you're taking on more risk. You need to average out that risk a little bit by charging more. Think about going to the airport and buying a ticket same day. What do they charge you? It's astronomical, right? It is crazy. Yeah, you're paying big money. The booked out six months ago that's flexible that the guy that walks up that day and wants to buy a ticket somewhere that guy's paying 50 to 100% more than everyone else on that plane. So that's just the way dynamic pricing works in the airlines, they've been doing it for years. I would love to solve that issue with software but you can certainly start solving it with just SOPs by like what Liz is talking about of the standard operating procedures of, hey, we're going to charge more for this. So, but this all kind of circles back to what to do with strategy wise what to do with your PPP money. I think investing in your people making some investments in them to try and a retain and attract better people and then in part of that strategy is raising your prices and not being scared to do so at this time because all of us are booking out two, three weeks. I mean, if you're booking slow down a little bit because you're a little high then you might dial it back 10% or something like that but you can experiment a little bit right now and try some new things with pricing and you might be surprised that people are willing to pay it because I mean, I've gotten a couple of calls in the last week of people wanting to go out of business and me to buy their book of business and we're adding so many customers right now and we added, so so far this month I'll have to, I think I have the spreadsheet open. Didn't you just say like 39 weeklies? Over the two months, 39 weekly spots have been filled. So far this month to date we've sold 21 new recurring customers last month like total recurring customers in the last months over 60 recurring customers basically I think is what we're looking at at this point. Wow, that's a lot. You're getting a map, what are your lead choices? A lot of Facebook marketing, I still use an ad agency for that. A lot of AdWords still, that's still doing well for us. Probably our top sources are Facebook, our long-term SEO strategy which right now is mostly trying to maintain position through just getting more reviews, directory listings but more people are becoming competitive so we're gonna try to start spending some money on that again. And AdWords- Everybody doesn't have employees. That's the thing that nobody has employees. So the reason why we can win jobs is other places are putting them on a wait list, the two, three weeks wait list. So- We're telling them that they can't take new customers at all. I mean, that's, I'm getting quite a bit but they're just not even, I mean, they would be smart to be taking wait lists but they're not even, they're just like, we're booked. We're not, we have no- And do it and don't have any room. Yeah, Robin is saying also, okay, yeah. It's taking more time than the first round. I have heard that from a few different people and asking for more information. So yeah, don't be surprised, you need. And Carol is saying, wow, 50 of our clients, not one person responded negatively, usually a few tried to negotiate. And I don't mind the negotiations either, but yeah, a lot of people are finding that there's nothing people are just like, oh, okay. And they're understanding, especially if you reference the, you know, the additional PPE, then people are like, oh, I get it. My dentist charges an additional $10 every visit for additional PPE, which really doesn't make sense to me because my dentist was already wearing masks. They were already wearing gloves. They were already doing all of these things. So, but I talked to my dentist and she says, now they change their masks in between each client, where before they would wear the same mask all day long. They change uniforms twice a day, which is like, wow, all right. And just because they're touching people and they're in everybody's space. So I was like, okay, that makes sense. But initially I was like, what, $10 every visit? I think if you really add up what all the extra costs are that we've incurred, it's probably $3 or $4 a clean, that you really have to think about that. And that all kind of gets into your bottom line eventually. It's not about greed. It's about long-term survivability and long-term basically having good financial, good financial fundamentals in this. Yeah. So I don't think raising prices. So normally I'd go 3%. We're gonna do 5% now and probably 5% again towards the end of the year, which will be effectively an 11% price increase in one year. We might do 5% and 4% later. So it's like an effective 10%. But either way, it's significant this year. We're planning it in two stages. We did 4%. So we do them every month. So we've been doing 4% and we're talking about raising it now to 5%. So same thing, get an effective 10% there. Robin, she doesn't wanna change subject. We'll come back to money. Don't worry Robin, you can change subject. Anybody staff getting vaccines yet? I have had two staff get vaccines but we can get them, ours opened up a little bit easier than some states. I know some states are having an easier time but I know like in Colorado, they're still in, I wanna say phase one, maybe to two, but you have to have two criteria to be able to get on the list right now in Colorado. Here it's kind of easy. It's moving a little faster. I've had a few employees, but I don't find one. I don't have any kind of policy that's encouraging it or anything at this time. I feel like more and more people are becoming receptive to it. I don't feel like it's not. I don't think it's anything that's gonna need to be pushed. If people wanna get it, they'll get it. The numbers are definitely trending the right way. Oh yeah. I feel like you could create a whole consumer index of what's the consumer confidence index, right? You can create one just based on how much they're spending on getting their house clean and how many new customers you're getting. So if there was a consumer confidence index based on that, I would say that's moving in the right direction. I'm talking about vaccinations. I feel like if you look at the statistics, the vaccine hesitancy is down to like probably 30, 40%. And there's probably 25% of people that are never gonna get it. They're just gonna take their chances. And so we're gonna get to herd immunity one way or another whether it's through enough people getting this or enough people getting the vaccine. And I feel like we're probably at about 50% now. And that's why you're seeing so the trends moving their attractions. The vaccine really accelerated, you know, I think it's about 18% of people have had at least one shot now. On top of that, probably 30% of people have already had COVID. So you're probably pushing 50% of the population has some type of immunity or antibody immunity of some kind. Yes, you're talking about the disease is gonna continue to decline. So I'm again, long answer here but the short answer would be I am seeing some employees doing it. I'm gonna continue to message that that I think it's important that they do, you know, that they're doing their part to help protect others. And that, you know, even if they're young and healthy it is an important step in getting our lives back to normal. And, you know, I think just messaging that out to your employees, being willing to get it yourself. If you're a vaccine hesitant, I think that that's gonna translate to your employees as well. I have friends that I don't think will get vaccinated anytime soon at least. So, you know, one already had COVID so she's probably not gonna be a spreader. But I have another one that I don't think will and again, I don't have any reason to push that down her throat but it would be nice if she would and I would hope she would set that example but she's not gonna, we've talked about not sharing any negative feelings about that with the staff. Well, look at Linda. She's saying that two thirds of her staff aren't planning on getting the vaccine. So that's a pretty big number there to plan on not getting the vaccine. That's interesting. Probably she's probably drawing more of her staff from rural areas or highly urban areas. So there was the statistic in Missouri that less than, or this is early on even like when there was a lot more people eligible but less than 3% of the African American population had been vaccinated at this early point when they were like a large portion was eligible and should have had it, a much higher proportion. And so there's some vaccine hesitancy in different communities for different reasons. So hopefully that declines over time and you might get that to 50% of your staff get vaccinated and I think that would be helpful. It's gonna be very hard to mandate that to people and some companies will be able to but I don't know about in our industry if that's gonna be something you're gonna be able to affect. Well, I was thinking about because I would like to be able to say that all our people are vaccinated just because I think it would be a boost for a lot of people similar to what Robin is saying that she's having people ask if her people are vaccinated. So I was thinking of offering some type of an incentive to get the vaccination. Don't really know what right now I've got PPP money. So give them four hours of pay you could do or give them paid time off to go get the shot. I was gonna give them an entire day off get a paid day off, get your shot on that day you get paid to do it and you get the whole day's pay. So those are things that you could do that would pay off and you're talking about that probably cost you about 140 bucks or something like that if your average in like 15 to 16 bucks an hour. Cause you're gonna have some taxes and stuff tacked on to that. But that's a nominal cost if you can get everyone in your workplace or nearly everyone vaccinated. I think that would be, it would be great. You know, a hundred percent would be ideal but I don't know that's gonna happen. I would love a hundred percent but really I take 80%. Who hasn't been impacted by this last minute, right? People are like, oh, I'm sick and I have to go and you know, take off for the next five days until I get the results of my test. Well, I don't have any time there's an exposure and you have to quarantine and all that stuff. So while that's going down, I still had three exposures in the last two weeks, you know, you know where we had people we couldn't have working because we wanted to make sure that we're again continuing to strictly follow the rules and two that were feeling sick and when got tested and tested negative. But still. Can I take a chance still? Yeah, I think it's just. Can I take a chance? So, but again, if they're vaccinated and they've got a little bit of a sniffle, okay, take the day off, feel better but you know, you don't have COVID at that point or it's very, very unlikely. Very unlikely, right, very unlikely. So it's less to worry about. Yeah, I think, yeah, it would be nice. So if you can drive that number down from two thirds to one third in the next, you know, the next few months and then people realize that there's not any more COVID pay for, that's going away, I think June 1st. So into the second quarter, all that extra pay that we've been given to, you know, those credits we've been given to give people for COVID exposure for taking care of kids for all that stuff, that's going away. So then it's just gonna be down to their sick pay and their PTO and. Or unemployment. Or whatever they're gonna do, but yeah. But it's gonna be, I don't know when they extended the federal unemployment till, I think it's till the end of June. So it's again, they extended that from, it was supposed to end. I think it was September. Oh God. I think you might be right. I think it was September, yeah. It was to end on midnight on this Sunday, the extra unemployment that's currently in effect. So that's, so they've extended that on for a while. That's a whole other issue, as far as there's a bit of a drag on incentive to come back to work and things like that, depending on how stringent your state kind of, you know, you know, follows those procedures. So yeah. Robin saying the same thing as me, that September, he heard the same thing. So, okay, so if COVID hasn't taught us by now that we cannot read the future, that we need to learn that lesson. We all really thought that we were going to have all of these employees. You know, we talked about that, which is why I really like your strategy, Matt, of going from $50 to $65 and sort of jumping in front of that problem. We're not going to be having more employees right now, at least we don't want to be counting on them. So that means we need to be maximizing the amount of money that we're making from the people that we currently have. And nobody else is going to have more employees either right now. So we need to be able to, or we can charge more and we have to charge more because we don't know how long it's going to be. So we're in a different position. One of the things that I've mentioned on this show before and talked about is just the investment in hiring people. So there was a time where I thought it was crazy when people had all this staff that had been with them for all these years. But now I think I'm close to out of about 29 technicians currently, I'd say, I know I have at least 18 that have been with us for a year or more. And I know that at least two more have anniversaries this month. So 20 out of 29 at least have been with us for a year or more. And obviously all of our management. So... That's a lot during COVID. Yeah, so again, it's a lot less expensive to hire when you only need to hire to grow. What's the old adage? You got to hire four to keep one basically in this industry. Yeah, yeah, 41. That's a tired statistic. And if you can find ways to cut that number down on the front end by doing better job hiring and get down to, let's say, 75% of everyone you hire makes it 30 days. If you can get that to that number, right? And let's say that 30 or 40% of everyone you hire lasts a year, right? That would be crazy. So I will tell you this. This was our lowest number of W-2s of our entire company history. So we had close to 15 employees when this all started. But we only had 75 W-2s this year. And we had like 159 a year before. So obviously COVID had some part in that. But a lot of it was we'd already started this process of really tightening up our hiring. And again, you can pay people more when you hire better people because they'll stay longer, they'll produce more. They'll do better work. They'll do better work and you can charge more for it. I think we've all been in this nightmare death spiral of like, oh, we can't pay more because people won't pay more. But honestly, I mean, you're talking about, you don't think someone will pay $20 more to not have someone that looks like they know what they're doing, they show up in uniform, they look professional, they act professional, they are consistent, they do the same job every time. You don't think someone will pay you $20 more for that versus I have a temp agency that works down the street for me that they strictly hire temps that are exxons and stuff like that. I mean, that's all that's gonna be left for the $11 an hour jobs for some of the commercial work. I had one of my commercial jobs that pays us like $10,000 a month, kind of putting some pressure on us about our hourly rate. And I was just like, I told him, I was like, look, you go out and you try and hire a $15 an hour employee right now and you come back and talk to me about this. I'm not that worried about losing you right now. I wanna keep your business, but I can easily tell you that the days of finding commercial jobs where someone comes in and bids this $11 an hour and you're happy with who shows up in the door, where they're paying their employees $11 an hour and undercutting us on wages. And we did this in a nicer way than that. We talked about the reality of what's going on in the marketplace. And I was like, look, I can probably put some cheaper people on here, but they're not gonna be as good. And I don't really- They're not gonna be happy. I don't wanna put my name on it, but I can't keep precious down here. I can't keep James down here. I can't keep all these great people that are down this property if that's the case because they've got to make more. They're too good to make that much money. They deserve more for what they're doing. So to be honest, I actually kind of wanna do move away. I do wanna move away from some of the commercial work we do because there's too much down and pressure on wages and I could find more work for those people making more money for the company longterm than some of the commercial work where we're only billing out at $27 an hour, which seems crazy to me. And even though you are so much more efficient in your time with commercial works, you can charge less, it still needs to be closer to like $35 to $40 an hour and they're not prepared. Most of those places are not prepared. Those big of jumps up. They would rather pay less and have, especially for your commercial and janitorial that's being done at night when no one's in the office, they're much less sensitive to how people look. I think that what they're gonna also have to really consider is bringing the work in house and managing the chaos of hiring and training on people. If they're gonna be very price conscious because they can control the cost more but they're gonna have to be able to turn over. But if they're willing to pay us $30 an hour, if that's what it would cost, then they can hire somebody at $22 an hour with taxes and everything else. And that would be a very attractive, I think that would be a very attractive pay. I just don't think that's where they wanna put their energy is in hiring and training and doing all that stuff. It would be a whole new business for them to get into and they typically don't want that piece of it. So- It's a different job done there. They're all of a sudden in a different business. Linda, answering your question, I personally would pay both sides. I would pay one and one and one on the other versus two day of and day after on the second one. Even though I understand that the second vaccination tends to cause people a little bit more trouble. Oh, Robin wants to know about ERTC updates, Matt. What's ERTC? Is that the tax credits? ERC, yeah, the employee retention credits. So ERC was expanded under the stimulus prior to this which allowed us that took PPP the first time to also take these credits if we were eligible. And the rules were, there were these financial tests and then there was these government order tests. So originally, you had to have a decline in business of 50%. Well, I meet that test for a quarter of two of whatever, but a lot of the time we had to do that. And then we had to do that. And then we had to do that for a quarter of two of whatever. But a lot of people are under the belief and a lot of the companies that I'm using for processing my tax credit is called Synergy. But there's a ton of these companies that do this. And you can see if your payroll provider has one that's tied in, where they'll take a portion of the fee to manage this for you to do all the... They'll actually take legal responsibility for the eligible. Now, you would have to give the money back if they're wrong, but they would have to pay the penalties, right? So they'll take on legal responsibility for determining your eligibility. And one of the things that is actually interesting is, is that even if you were never forced to close, government orders affected your business. They affected your business, your ability to hold meetings, to have in-person staffing. So you could no longer have more than... At one point, you could have no longer have more than five people in a building in my area. So we had to shift our model to the solo model, all these different things, the way to do. Your cars. School closures, well, school closures has been a big deal. If you're in a major metropolitan area, there's a good chance your schools are just getting back open now. Would that be accurate where you're at or have they been open for the... Nope, ours are, ours just opened two weeks ago. Yeah, so school closures. And they're not open full-time. Are they not open full-time yet? Yeah. So those are all considered government orders that could have affected your, for your business. And so, so Gusto does your payroll, Danit, or Danit. So I would ask Gusto if they're helping with last year to refile your 941s. So what you have to do is you have to first determine your eligibility through either government order test or through tests of declines in revenue. So government orders is actually easier to hit than declines in revenue for a lot of us. So a lot of us are actually eligible for the ERC credits and didn't really realize it. I didn't realize it at all. Yeah, so if you are forced to shut down for any period of time, that's a government order. That applies to a lot of us. If you had school closures or if there's limits on gatherings, if there's all these different things can qualify. So yeah, if you're in Iowa, where they didn't do any statewide orders, okay, look to your local orders. See if there's local orders that apply to you. If you're in some town where they didn't do any local orders, nothing ever changed, well then probably you're out of luck. But if there's any population density where you're at, typically there's some sort of government order that you would might want to look into. I'm a big fan of negotiating with these companies that are managing these things because they take on, they take, what is it called? The legal status that they take for you is a power of attorney, POA. So they take power of attorney to do this and with that power of attorney, they guarantee that you're in compliance. And so what I'm gonna do is, I've already got my numbers back for last year. It's significant. It's actually bigger than around the PPP for 2020. It is a significant amount of money. There's no restrictions on it, although it is taxable. So I'm gonna take the money, set aside 25 to 30% for taxes and then set the rest aside to do something with that is fairly low risk, which would be potentially hold it for a year or pay off my house or do something else with that money. But I can get it back if the government says, I lose you there. You're cutting it out just a little bit. Okay, so I was kind of saying, just doing something low risk. I wouldn't put it into anything you couldn't get back out or there might be some potential loss in case there's ever a clawback on this. But I feel like if you go through one of these companies and you're eligible, chances of that happening are very low. If you do it yourself and you're not clear, there is some complication to this. I mean, the packet that we put together, kind of proving our eligibility was fairly significant. And the calculations are tricky too because you wanna try and maximize your weeks of eligibility. So you wanna minimize the amount of weeks of PPP forgiveness you had in 2020. And when they changed the rules from either having to take an eight for a 24-week forgiveness period, I narrowed mine down to a shorter week as I, a shorter week, a forgiveness period, and got it down to 11 weeks. So that means that I had a lot more weeks eligible for ERC. Or ERC, right. For last year, that was about 5,000 per employee was what you could, is what you could get. And if you had a lot of turnover, that might have worked in your benefit because you didn't get a lot of turnover. Even better. Because you max out a lot of people at some point. So if you had a lot of turnover, it might have worked out in your benefit. Well, and I know that a lot of people did have a lot of turnover just because a lot of people in our industry have parents with kids. And all of a sudden the kids weren't in school and parents had to stay home. So I ran into that a lot. We did get a lot of them back after the monies kind of ran out, and especially that six hundred additional federal money per week. But it's still still a bit of a challenge. And even our daycare stayed closed for a really long time. So it's hard to get people back to work when they just don't have anybody to watch their kids. Yeah, I think, you know, I would be very conservative with this money when it comes in, and again, you know. You tend to be a more conservative person with your money anyway, Matt. You're not a flying high and loose. I'm not gonna buy a Tesla. I mean, you know, so we were buying a house last year and we were buying a house last year and we were approved for some obscene amount of money. And we ended up spending like under half of what they approved us for. Because just because the bank says you can get a mortgage for that just didn't make sense for us to go there. So yeah, very much so, don't really feel like you have to, you know, live, I don't know. I think there's some expectations of how much, you know, how much house you're supposed to have, like signs of success, different cars, things like that. The only person that matters to you and you know, all those things in the end, we wanna enjoy our lives, make enough money to be able to be successful. But, you know, my goal is to be able to have enough money in the bank that I'm generating a reasonable income in the next 10 years that I don't have to work if I don't want to. So you can't do that if you're spending every dollar that comes in. You know, that's my eventual goal. Yeah, so that's definitely how we have always looked at our money is we're comfortable, we don't really need more. So Tim and I have really never had like brand new cars. We almost always buy like at least a two-year-old car, a three-year-old car. They're like new to us when we get them. Now every once in a while, Tim does have a little bit of a, he's got a little bit of a car obsession. So sometimes, you know, he has had some very nice cars. Now I think everybody's heard about his Ferrari and he's got a six-gate Camaro and he's got, you know, so he does get a few nice cars here and yet. Those are already depreciated in the sense that they're, whatever if there was depreciation, that's already off them. And then now their collectability makes them more valuable in the sense, you know, that they're a rare commodity. So it's not like going out and buying a brand new Tesla and, you know, I could make a rationale for buying a Tesla and I may buy something like that like an electric car in the next couple of years, mostly because, you know, I am investing in solar in my house and in the next few years, electric cars plugged into your house could actually be the backup batteries. So when that situation happened in Texas, your car would power your house because the battery banks are so big on those things. Yeah. You could power your house. So the solar would charge your car during the day and then the batteries from your car would power your house at night. Or like a generator. It would, yeah. I mean, basically. So, yeah, I mean, I can make the, the, I think the leap is going to happen that we're going to be probably all buying cars similar to Teslas in the next few years. That's where the technology is going. My point is you don't have to have the highest brand name, fanciest things and still be enjoying things. So like, you know, we, we did, you know, but also I also never afraid to, you know, do some things that are a little, that are a little out there. If I think I can get a return on the purchase, if I buy an RV and, you know, want to enjoy it, I'll buy a 10 year old, you know, use, you know, class ARV and drive it for two years and then sell it for almost what I paid for it. You know, you're going to, you're going to spend some money on that, but, you know, buying stuff, it's just different choices. But I don't want to, you know, if somebody likes to buy new cars, buying new cars, if you're making the money with it, I just suggest having a strategy that's going to allow you to not have to work your whole life. And so that's my, that's my thinking on money, typically is, you know, nice nest egg, nice, you know, be prepared for rainy day. And just because you're making $300,000 this year does not mean you're going to make that forever. You could, you could decline by 50% and be able to be able to live on, on less than what you're making now, because as entrepreneurs, we don't have total control over all the things that have made us successful at this point, we like to think we do. Some of it's a make, being at the right place, the right time though too. It's, you know, we, we're not doing the most original thing here, we're cleaning houses. So some of it is, some of it is right time, right place. Some of it is we've built, we've built a better mouse trap. We've done it better than our competitors. It's not, I don't want to take away from anything from anyone. You guys are doing awesome, but the market could change. It has in years past. Well, and that's my point right now, just because the numbers are going down and most people are thinking, yay, COVID's behind us now. It's going to be something we don't have to worry about. We, we just don't know. We just, I mean, maybe, maybe you guys are really, really confident. I'm less confident because I've been wrong quite a few times throughout this past year about what I thought was going to happen. So I'm trying to be a little bit more conservative just because I don't have the confidence that I know exactly where things are going to be at the end of 2021. And I don't know what the government's going to do. I mean, they're pricking money like, like they, you know, how's that all going to play out? This is, like Tom likes to say, this is unprecedented. I think there's some, some things that are longterm potentially they're testing out like almost universal income with, with these child tax credits and things like that. But it's going to pump a lot of money back into the economy. The average family is going to have several thousand dollars more a year, a year. If they were to, if they were to extend the tax credit for $3,000 per child permanently, you know, average family has two and a half children, you know, for not every house as kids. I don't know how that works exactly, but you know, households that do have children under a certain age, I mean, that, that gives you the ability to, you know, to spend more on your kids, put them in activities, better education. It's going to pump a lot of money into the economy. Good or bad, I don't know if we can afford it, you know, tax wise, but I think we spend plenty of money on other things that I think you could, you could make the case that, that it pays, it pays for itself and it's good for the economy longterm, but it's definitely an experiment. We're going to see how this all plays out over the next couple of years as to how, how this money really does flow back into the economy. How it, if some of these investments they're making now really do help us recover quicker. If more, if more money in people's pockets does pay back in the, you know, into the economy, I think it will. And things go in cycles. So it looks like the cycle is coming again where only one person works outside of the home. We have been on a two person outside of the home cycle for a while. And it looks like we're getting back to, because if we have enough money coming into a household, why would you have both people working outside of the home? I still don't see that as likely. I think it takes about $67,000, what I've heard to live in most places to have a middle class lifestyle for a family minimum, that's minimal. So if nobody's working that, guess what happens? People get paid more. If only half of the amount of people are working right now, we're beginning to recognize that how fast are you having to raise wages? We're raising wages, raising wages, raising wages. And we are the lowest paid segment of the market. If we're having to raise, raise, raise, it's hard for me to believe that everybody isn't. No, I think you're right. I think that that's- You see those cycles. That's, there's some truth to that. I don't see that, I don't see us getting away from two income families for a while, but it could, it could- Yeah, I don't see it coming, like I don't see it in 2021. But the trend is definitely going that way. People are getting more used to being home. People don't want to go back to work. They've been at home. They're, it's a new thing. And then for sure, there are going to be fewer people that are outside of their home working. That's, that's new. That's not going back. As far as terms that I think our people, our companies, you know, need to look out for, I think is, is, you know, where do they fit into, where do they fit into that? As far as how do they, how do they service people when they're home more and how do we, you know, how do we work around people more that, you know, who's me? How do we work around? Oh, do I keep dropping lists? Sorry. I'm sure what's going on there. Well, just, just your visual. Your audio is, is staying pretty, pretty good. Just the thought being that, you know, we do have to continue to adapt our service for this new world that we're in and look at, you know, look at how we best service people. Okay. Now we only have one more minute and I do have a question that I wanted to ask you. Oh shoot, we're out of time. All right. We'll see if you can answer this really quick because I'm supposed to wrap it up. Right now, we thought that commercial properties were really going to open up. That was another thing that you're gonna be able to get commercial property really cheap, but it's not. What are you, what are you thinking about people having offices and moving away from offices, investing in an office? You got anything for us there? I never think commercial properties are good investments personally, but that's, that's my opinion. Unless you were to buy something, multiple tenants renting from you. It's, to me, I don't, I think it's a vanity purchase. You want to have your office exactly how you want it. And you're counting on appreciation versus cash flow. I like this, I like businesses that cash flow and pay for themselves. And I don't see commercial property as, as that kind of investment. You are, you are locking in and controlling your, your cost, but oftentimes at a much higher price than you can for rent right now. Did you buy your building at some point? Yeah. No, we don't. I do know two people that are right now looking at purchasing their buildings. That's why, and I told them that I would. If you can lock in your costs and you know, you know that, you know, you've got, you know, a long-term business you've been in for a while, it's, you know, it's good. I mean, I like, I worked in an industry in the airline industry where I worked for a subcontractor called Republic Airways, where we just, we, the short, I want to kind of keep this brief was, but I always kind of looked at it as like, if they just turned that, turned it all the airplanes tomorrow, cut their leases, no one would ever know they existed. It was like, it was all leased. It was like, and it's, and it's, and the reason I say that is, is that it's a lot easier to unwind your business if you have to, right? If you have a lot of commercial properties that you need to sell, everything that you have to sell at the end and all that stuff, that makes it more technical. Now, some people say having a, having a property makes the business easier to sell, things like that, a location. I don't know, that makes sense when you have like a retail business or something like that where location, location is so critical to customer flow and things like that. But for, for our businesses, it's hard to justify. Now, if you could buy a strip mall where you have multiple tenants in there and their location dependent and they get tied into that, like, you know, hey, this Mexican restaurant is this here and they have their clientele, it's in the neighborhood. That's great and they're in your strip mall. That makes sense to me. But if you buy like a standalone building for your business, I see that more of a, as I wanna have this place be ours and be customized. And potentially there might be some marketing at play if you can be on a busy corner, but I'm not a fan of standalone commercial businesses as far as investments. I don't think they- All right, I'm taking that, I'm taking that back to everybody. All right, we're running late, we're three minutes over. Sorry, Tom, we tried really hard. We had a lot to talk about today. Thanks you guys. Tomorrow we're going to have Paul Fried and Rachelle Wilkinson on talking about new markets and how you can leverage some new ideas. Talk to you guys later. Bye.