 Hey, good afternoon everybody. Tom Stewart here, I'm with Let's Trotter. This is Smart Business Moves, and we're with Derek Christian today, sitting in the basement. Yep. Derek's been relegated to the basement. Well, that's no shocker. You like to be there as long as they got comic books or something down there for you, huh, Derek? It's quiet, it's dark, it's cold. This sounds about perfect. Good place for a mushroom. Yep. Basements are cool, though. I like basements. We don't have basements where we are. You dig a hole in the ground, it fills up full of water. Yeah, yeah. So your house in my world, you would like your mother-in-law apartment, that would be called a basement here, even though it's not under the ground. It's not buried, yeah. Yeah, it's not buried. But we have basements here. Not a lot of them, but we do have them. Hey, Denise. Good to see you. I talked to her just for a second earlier today. All right, good to see you. Did you see where Molly had a birthday party Friday? Yes. I saw it, yeah. Did you post on Facebook? He did. What happened? I think 2-2, it was nice. I can't talk right now, I'm not an idiot. Wait, can I talk? Do you have help? Liz, do you have a special, do you have a special one? Come say hi, real quick. Oh my. Yeah, this is Elsa. You see, she's got her little Elsa dress on. Yeah. Oh, she doesn't, she likes to think of Elsa as Anna, right? Oh yeah. Yeah, but it's not Anna, it's Elsa, but she's like, yeah, no. So yeah, we're working. Hey Dawn, hey Linda, hi guys. All right, I gotta get back to work. Tell Molly. I might need to tell you something. Tell me what? Can I, can I have a special day, can I have a treat, treat? Yes, it is a special day, yes, you can have a treat. Okay, it's a special day, can I have a treat, treat? Yeah, sure, go ahead, go. That's, my daughter is being lazy right now. She's probably in there reading a book, thinking, Mom, I'll take care, it'll be fine. Yeah, that's all good. That's kind of what these trips are supposed to be about, right? I mean, she does the heavy lifting every day, you're supposed to, yeah. Yeah, yeah, and I like it. So, but I'm like, hey y'all, it's one hour, come on now. All right, so any news? I heard a little bit, I was talking to somebody about Earned Income Tax Credit, Tom, and I heard that there were a few things to, that you had to know that. The Employee Retention Tax Credit? Yeah, what did I say? Earned Income, which is probably what your employees are using. Right. Like hopefully none of us are qualifying for that one. No, that wouldn't be good. Yeah, for the. Employee Retention Tax Credits. Thank you. All right, is there any kind of new news about that? I might have just been talking to somebody who's hiring a company. And so they were talking about the criteria that they have to meet. I don't know. I haven't heard anything recently. Yeah, I haven't heard anything recently. I mean, the last big change is they made it. So if you got your PPP loan, you could still get the tax credit. You just can't use the money for the same things, which is a bummer to me because I'd already applied for forgiveness. And if I would have known that at the time, my forgiveness would have been utilities and rent. But it was easier just to send in my payroll. But we didn't know it at the time. But for a lot of us, we're still able to get some. In fact, I was talking to someone today who just got $30,000 with their accountant. They got done with their taxes and discovered they'd be getting $30,000 back. She was like, it's like another PPP loan. Nice. There's no paperwork other than what her accountant did. Yeah. And I'm looking here in the news and I don't see anything within the last couple of weeks on that. But I know a lot of companies are working them. And there's a lot of details in terms of not overlapping. You can't, whatever your PPP forgiveness period is, you can't use those expenses to, those payroll expenses to qualify for ERTC. But there's a lot of fine print to the rules of how do you qualify for ERTC? I mean, the easiest way is 25% the decrease in revenue quarter over quarter. But there's also a lot of fine print about some type of government intervention, shutting stuff down, schools, things like that. It's very broadly worded. And I know there's a lot of companies out there who help companies fund tax credit. So they're kind of getting into the game and are finding all types of ERTC tax credits for companies. Yeah. So I guess I really wanted to bring it up to, let's, we'll see what Denny has to say in a second, but I wanted to bring it up to remind everybody that this is a significant amount of money, that you're not hearing a lot about this in the way that we heard about the PPP. So don't just blow it off. Don't just be thinking, oh, okay. Well, yeah, I've heard about that, but yeah, it sounds like a hassle, you know, you just- It's like 70% of payroll up to $7,000 an employee, I believe, for quarter. Right. So it is a lot of money. A lot of money. And that is one thing that changed. It was 5,000 and they raised it to seven. So yeah, we might want to see if we maybe can find someone who wants to come talk to us about it. That might not be a bad idea. Yeah. It'd be a good topic for next week if we can find one of those guys who chases down credits. I do know a couple of people. Tom, you have connection with somebody? I do. How did I know that? So that'd be great. That's a good idea. I'm pretty sure we use our service at Castle Keepers. We do. Yeah. You know, you give them power of attorney that way. If there's any, I mean, at the end of the day, I don't know how all this is going to shake down, but just having a third party intermediary use the subject matter expert saying that you qualify and whom I would argue with them. They're the experts, right? Yeah. Okay, what is, what is, didn't he talk about here? Applications. Come on, has ERC going? We're in the room and got stuff. So it's kind of tied to accountants. Well, your CPA is another way of doing it. A lot of CPAs don't get into the payroll processing part of it. You really, it gets into somebody who, a lot of your, your, your payroll processing companies, partner up, tax credit companies for, you know, WCT credits, which is another program that's been out there forever, but this employer retention tax credit has potentially been bought. And if your revenue is still down, it goes, this program goes all the way through 2021. So, you know, like first quarter 21 compared to first quarter 19, they don't even look at 20 because COVID was messing those numbers up. If your numbers are 25%, you know, the top line revenue 25% less than first quarter 21 compared to first quarter 19, you automatically qualify, assuming you're a small company like all of ours are. It could be a ton of money. And to the point, to the point where, you know, if you're within a few points of being below 25 or above 25, you'll have a lot more money in the bank by not working so hard these last couple of days. Yeah. So, yes, absolutely, Denit. There's no, that's what most people are working on right now. Yeah. And I think what you're running into, Denit, is the problem that to qualify your revenue has to be down, which is why, your gusto says, talk to your accountant. Make sure you meet the revenue requirements, but your accountant's like, we'll talk to your payroll provider for your report. So honestly, either a third party company or getting the two of them to talk to each other might help. And there's a lot of people out there that, you know, from a professional services standpoint, unless they're really making money off of it, they don't want to touch it because the rules are just so squishy that nobody really knows how this is going to turn out down the road. Well, why would they do it if they're not making money anyway? I mean, that makes no sense to me. Well, I'd like to know. Yeah, you pay them per hour, but they're not going to be making any more money if they find you tax credits or not. I mean, credit companies get a percentage. Tom made some predictions on this thing way back when, which I thought was crazy at the time, but at the rate they keep passing laws might not be. And I remember he said, I wouldn't be surprised if they don't eventually waive the idle loans until you don't have to pay those back either. And I wouldn't be surprised if that's not one of the future bills at this point. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised by anything at this point. Yeah. Everything is shocking. So, Denny, I think Derek's probably right. You probably just have to get those two people to talk to each other, find out what information your accountant wants from your payroll company to find out what your, probably your accountant needs information from your payroll company, like Derek said, and your payroll company needs to give you, give your account the information so that they have the numbers to be able to work with. Probably, it makes sense. All right, well, anything else around our financial stuff that we might want to talk about? Not right now. Not a whole lot going on there. Found an article today that maybe I'll share later this week. I haven't had a chance to dig into it. It's in the Atlantic, just so you know, it's a little political, but starting to talk about COVID-21 and how this whole thing is going to be evolving and it has some pretty interesting implications for people on work such as us, I mean, short story is COVID's not gonna be going away anytime soon and safety issues and, you know, some risks and some opportunities for us in the house cleaning world. Hey, Leslie. All right, yeah, I definitely want to hear about that, Tom. Absolutely. The more information, the better in my mind. We'll stop talking about COVID-19 and start talking about COVID-21. Yeah. So Derek, we want to talk about sales tonight. Yeah, we're gonna talk about sales, but before we do, what are you guys talking about on the next couple of days? Give people a quick preview and then I'll jump in. One point. But tomorrow we're gonna be talking about recurring revenue and have stock recurring revenue, why it's important, the math behind it and all the techniques that we can do with our business to set the expectation to both prospects as well as throughout the sales funnel. It's like, you know, any rational person would want their home cleaned on at least an every other week basis. And a lot of times we just, you know, I ask people, you know, you wanna one time clean a recurring service, they say one time and we take an order and we just kind of miss the opportunity. Well, we're gonna talk about how we can implement techniques to increase the probability of getting a lot more lifetime revenue out of those customers. Where'd you go, Liz? I went to shut the door so that my grandbaby couldn't keep coming in here. Okay. What are we gonna be doing next, parents? What are we gonna be doing Wednesday? I do not remember. It's gonna be awesome, Liz is gonna be doing it. Well, I can tell you in just a second. See, I went and put you on the spot, sorry. That's okay, I have it right here. And Wednesday is a pretty big day, pretty important day. A lot of things are gonna be going on Wednesday. Yeah, it's like one of the most important days of the year, I think. Wouldn't you, Tom, wouldn't you say that? It's right up, it's close, it's with them. Really close. All right, so yeah, my birthday, that's why. But Tom's only thinking it's close to the important day because it's his day, his next day. All right, so controlling your quality standards, that's what we're going to be talking about. And the reason why I wanted to talk about controlling quality standards, I mean, outside of the foundation thing, and of course, everybody knows that we're talking about foundations and trying to give you guys a sneak preview is because I have had so many contact communications with people over the past couple months about quality dropping. And it seems like, why is quality dropping? It doesn't seem like it should be. We've all had all of this time to invest in training and be able to pay people better and do all of these things. So why is quality dropping? So I'm going to be talking about, you know, when quality drops and it drops even in the best of times what you can do and how to manage that and how best, what are the best strategies for raising quality? So that's it. Cool. Well, today I'm talking about how sales is actually teachable skill and something I'm pretty passionate about because I see a lot of familiar names on the feed but a couple of people I don't know. I'm not exactly known for being Mr. Warm Fuzzy. I'm not real biggie to being hugged and you put me in a room full of strange people and I don't like to talk to them but my career was always in sales which for a lot of people doesn't seem to make a lot of sense because I'm not the outgoing, I'm kind of an introverted person. Yet I was in sales for many, many years at P&G and then ran sales at my own company till I got so big that it just didn't make sense to do it because despite what people think, sales isn't really about personality. Everyone seems to think that sales is that gregarious outgoing loud person. They meet one of those people and go, wow, that should be a sales person and believe it or not, those are actually normally your worst salespeople. There's kind of a stereotype of that kind of pushy loud salesperson and that's actually not what you're looking for. Sales is a skill that you can be taught. Real sales, I always tell people if you're a real sales person, you should love your job because your job is to give people solutions to their problems and you should be able to listen to what their problems are and let them know whether or not your company can help and if so explain it and that's really what sales comes down to is making sure you understand what their needs are and understanding your company to know enough to know whether or not you're a good match and then explain why you're a good match so that you're the logical choice. So sales is all about having a process in a system for people to follow and to make sure that they know a ton about your company and that you give them a process to follow. So for example, one of the things that I like to do with new salespeople is I actually make them talk about our company for 15 minutes without talking, without stopping which is painful. I've done it with Tom's people. It's entertaining to watch but the idea behind it is you really wanna force them to think about all the great things about your company because there are a lot of great things about your company. You've got great management, you've got your training program, you've got the product you use, you've got your quality assurance program, you've got the tenure of your employees. I mean, you can just go on and on and I would make them come up with all on their own when they would get stuck, I'd be okay, what about our training program? Okay, what about attendance? What happens if somebody's sick? How do we make sure quality stays on? So I would prompt them with the questions to make sure they come up with all this because your salesperson really should have an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the company because if they're gonna try to offer solutions they have to know what they're selling and they have to know it well which is what I find a lot of people make a mistake on is they think that sales isn't that important and there's this real trend toward using like virtual assistants and stuff where, hey, I'm gonna have somebody else sell for us, all they need to do is get a name, address, phone number and get people on the schedule but at that point, the only thing you're explaining about your company is your price. So don't be surprised if people pick off of price if the only thing you're talking about is price. What you wanna do is talk to the customer, find out what they need, pull it out of them and then at that point, I'll explain why your company is good. So that's why we always recommend you have a pretty detailed script and that's one of the things we do share at our foundations program is the script that we used and it varies, different people care about different things but I ask lots of questions that honestly aren't gonna affect the price of your house, do you have any kids or not? At the end of the day, that's not really part of my pricing formula, some people it is but it's not for me but I wanna know because that's starting to help me figure out what your problem areas are. If they have kids, I'll normally ask questions like, oh, that's so great, what ages are they? Cause A, I'm trying to make a little bit of a connection with them but as I learn about the ages of the kids, I can talk more about our service. If they've got young babies, I might wanna highlight things like our floor cleaning program and things like that. If they've got older children, I might wanna talk about things like clutter pickup. There's different services maybe make sense for different age groups and you just wanna kind of find out what those needs are and I've always been a big user of the rank your home on a scale of one to 10 question where I ask people on a scale of one to 10 with one being the most beautiful home in the world in a magazine and 10 being an episode of hoarders, how would you rank your own home? And that is how I phrase it, I try to make them laugh a little bit and then once they give me the rating, I ask them why they rate it that way because that really helps me get into the psychology of the person a little bit. There are people that'll say, you know, my house is a three, four, it's pretty clean. I cleaned the kitchen after we do meals and, you know, the maid service comes every other week and the next customer would say, yeah, it's a six, seven, you know, I can barely wipe down the counters and every now and again, I sweep the floors but I just can't stay on top of it like I used to. And that kind of lets you know what type of customer are you dealing with? That first person's definition of clean and standard of clean is not that high. That second person's definition of clean is much higher. They think wiping down the counters isn't cleaning, it's minimum necessary level. And so with that first person, I'm probably gonna talk about our convenience, how easy it is to pay with us, how friendly our people are, how easy we are to work with because at the end of the day, they're not your white glove person. They're just not. Where when that second person describes what I think is a pretty clean home but ranks at five or six, meaning me kind of dirty. I know this is somebody where I've got to be talking about our quality control systems or training programs because that's the type of stuff they're gonna care about. So a lot of those questions that you wanna build in there, not only do you wanna have the question that you wanna explain to your sales person, why is it in there? And what are we trying to learn from it? Like I said, on that dirt code question, it's not really just about how dirty is the house. Although it is, that helps us price the first cleaning but it's also how do they define clean? Because honestly, that's probably one of the toughest things about our business I've always thought is there's no single definition of clean. And when you're trying to sell something, it can be difficult if you don't know what clean is. So trying to define what clean is is important and understanding what the customer's definition of clean is and then also making sure they understand our definition of clean, which is also part of the selling process. Your sales person needs to be setting an appropriate expectation. It's easy to be a good sales person if you basically lie and to constantly tell everyone, oh yeah, we do that. No, we can do everything. You'll be so blown away by our cleaning service. It takes a real good sales person to explain why you don't do certain things. Yes, we don't vacuum under beds. Here are the reasons why that's good for both us and you. Here's what's included in the service. Here's what's excluded in the service. And here's why that may or may not be a good match. Sometimes a sales person should be talking people out of your service. There are times where a customer's just not a good match. And I always like to say it's like walking into McDonald's and trying to order a quarter pounder. You know, could they make both for you? They could, but it's never gonna be right. It's not what they do every single day. So if you're trying to design both a quarter pounder Okay, excuse me. What, which one's burger king? Burger king. Look, I get my burger spectrum. I was looking at Liz, Liz was looking. It's like McDonald's was doing it. So you go to Burger King and if you order a quarter pounder, they can probably make it, but they don't make them very often. They're not gonna make it. That's not what Burger King does. They make their burgers, they're different. Okay, the waffers. See, I don't need enough burgers. So the waffers is there. I should have said Burger King in order a Big Mac because I know Big Macs McDonald's. But the point is they could probably fake it. They could come up with something close, but it's never gonna be quite right. And you don't want your salesperson selling to people who just have the wrong expectation. And so I always use the burger analogy. And sometimes I'll also say you can get a burger at McDonald's, you can get a burger at Chili's, you can get a burger at a fine dining restaurant. They're all burgers, but you've got to understand what you're ordering and what you're getting. So making sure that those two things line up is always super important. And it's also why different companies have different prices. We don't all clean the same stuff. So it's really important that your salesperson explains what that scope of work is. There's a certain franchise who I always had to sell against in Cincinnati because they started in Cincinnati, which uses a rotational cleaning system where they don't clean everything every single time, where we cleaned everything every single time. So we wanted to make sure people understood the difference. Hey, when you call another company, they're gonna be a little bit cheaper. But the reason why is they're only gonna do your baseboards every third visit. We're gonna do your baseboards every single visit. And making sure that your customers understand those differences of scope of work and what is gonna be delivered so that the price makes sense. So we were just talking on a call today on one of the MMA calls and somebody was, you know, we're going back and forth about how you should price. Should you price for hourly or price by the job and how there are benefits to both. But either one, whichever one you're going to do, back to what you're saying, you've got to be able to sell what it is that you do in a way that it sounds better than whenever the other guy is doing. Yeah, I mean- And they're doing the same thing, yours has to sound better in some way. Like you said, I can sell both of those. I can sit here on hourly and say, hey, the great thing about hourly is the team is not motivated to rush. They're gonna take their time. They're gonna do a good job when your house is cleaner. You're not gonna pay as much. You know, those times when you're on vacation and the clean takes half as much time, you're gonna save money. The advantage of flat rate, you're never gonna get surprised. Don't you hate it sometimes when someone comes in and you get sticker shock at the end? That never happens with us. You will always have a set price. We'll make sure that you never get surprised. So for like every, you know, model, I guess, you could come up with a list of like pros and cons. So you speak to the pros of your model and you speak to the cons of your competition model. Right. I don't even think so. I think you just identify their cons and then speak to your pros, the pros of your company that address those cons. I think that's a more successful strategy than speaking directly to their cons. Because a lot of people think speaking directly to other people's cons is... Yeah, I mean, that makes you look bad too. I mean, I wouldn't recommend saying XYZ company does all these bad things, but you say in general, you might find some other companies that are doing certain stuff. If you keep it just very generic, these are some things that you wanna be aware of. Right. Like on the hourly, I wouldn't get into details. I'd say some companies charge hourly. We don't like to do it because you can get surprised on what the price is gonna be. We always charge a flat rate for that reason. You know, and if people start saying, well, why would it vary? Then you can start saying, well, what if they've got a new cleaner? Who's kinda slow? You know, you're getting penalized for that. And you get the idea. Not every company cleans everything every visit. Sometimes they'll clean your base. Or is that an example? You're not calling out XYZ franchise, but... Right, and I'm not even saying that's a bad model. It's just different. Honestly, I'd probably be better on a rotational model because I'm not a guy who inspects my baseboards. But my company cleans them every single time. So it's important the customers understand that. And that's the other point that we were talking about today, is when customers leave your company, it's almost always for one of two reasons. Everybody thinks it's because of price. And the customers will tell you price because it's easy. It's easy to say, right? But it's almost always, and we've done so many tests on this, almost always unmet expectations. They were expecting something that they didn't get. Or they didn't know how to get what they wanted. They didn't know how to say it, how to get it. Sorry about the screaming in the background, y'all. Yeah, I've always said, even when people cancel for financial reasons, to me, it's not really financial. They're saying there were other things I'd rather spend my money on. Even when people have financial trouble, they're still getting their Starbucks potentially. They're still spending money on some services. When it came time to cut something, you were on the list of services they could live without. Yeah. They could get somewhere else cheaper. Yeah. But they wanted they could get it cheaper. So unmet expectations, I think that's pretty clear. Not being able to explain what your expectations are, I guess there's a little bit of differentiation there, but they're still kind of the same thing. In their mind, they're looking, they want something that they're not getting. Yeah. Yeah, and you- Go ahead. Go ahead there. No, and I think that's part of your sales person's job is to do the initial expectation setting. Here's what's normally included in our cleaning and try to pull out if there's anything that the customer's looking for. Cause we will specifically ask, is there anything else you're looking for in your cleaning service? And we used to have a rule that we would do what I call two deviations, which is if you wanted two tweaks to our service, we would do, we would do a couple changes. But once you hit three deviations, that's when we said, you know what you're looking for is a little too different than what we do. And we knew enough about our competition that a lot of time we can say, what you're talking about is more like what so-and-so does. Why don't you call them? We took that from you, Derek and it worked out amazingly well for us. Yeah, that was, I thought that's a great, and it's really good for your salespeople to know that it's okay to use these two tweaks. But when you get to the third one, they're not going to be happy with our service and we're not gonna be happy with them as a customer. It's just too different. We're gonna drop the ball too many times. Yeah, we're getting too far away. Yeah, and over the course of time, they're not going to end up being happy. Because when you make an exception to your processes, it's a manual intervention. You're training your people to do something very specific and then you're including on a work order. For this one customer, do something manual interventions are when errors happen. And you've got to try to eliminate as many of those as you can. So when you get to the third deviation, do you just automatically go to, you know, that's the answer to stuff that we don't do, or do you? If it's something we don't offer, I mean, it could be, well, it sounds like what you really want is our deep cleaning. Let me talk to you about that package. So sometimes it is another service that we offer, but sometimes they just, they're getting too far away from what we do. They start asking for different cleaners. They start asking that we use their vacuum instead of ours. We just start moving too far away from what we do. And basically I'm telling my people, forget your training, do something special for this person. And that's when everything goes to pieces. Yeah. And a couple can hold in their heads and they can do, which makes sense. But once, and for us, it was three. So, you know, we do a lot around the magic of the number three, right? So you can do up to three for us, but once you get past that, nope, things are going back. And I guess kind of in the same discussion would be trying to get the prospect to try to drill down in terms of what is the outcome they're looking for? You know, a lot of times they're trying to be prescriptive telling you, this is how I want you to clean certain things. And you know, presumably we're the experts, we would know better than the prospect. But you know what? I love that you brought that point up, Tom, because I think that right there is one of the key things that sucks people in and messes up the business. Because the business owner just all of a sudden starts becoming the follower. Even if they were doing really well, leading the conversation, leading the sales process, as soon as the customer says, well, you know, I wanna make sure that they're gonna be doing my kitchen floor on their hands and knees. It's really easy for the business owner to go down that path of hands and knees. But that's really not what the customer's asking for, but it's easy to think they are. That what they want is they want to, they wanna look down on that person and like, I got a whip and shh, shh, shh. You're not on your hands and knees. That's not what they want, right? When people are asking for hands and knees, they're asking for a certain level of cleaning. And so that's what you gotta address. But I think business owners get stuck a lot of times that customer says, well, I really want you to use pine salt. All right, so why do they want you to use pine salt? Do they like the pine scent? Do they think it cleans better? Or do they think it's the only thing that works as a disinfectant? You know, what's their reasoning? And so finding that out is really critical on the sales process, which goes back to finding out instead of telling people what you do and all of that stuff, finding out what they need and then address that. And typically we'd recommend you ask a lot of questions like on Tom's example, where somebody brings up hands and knees, we'd say. So what I'm hearing is that floor, kitchen floor is really important to you. And then when they say, yes, okay. So what types of issues have you had with the kitchen floor in the past? And a lot of times at that point, we can talk about what our solution to it is. Whether it's our steam or our mops or our technique or the way we inspect it or, yeah. And that's how we address that problem. Yeah. And I do like to do a little bit of what you're gonna find at other companies and what we do that's a little bit different. So not what they do, it's bad, but what we do that's just a little bit different than that. And a lot of times also in the language, sorry, Derek, go ahead. Now I was gonna say what you just described is a variation of what's called feel felt found. Yeah. I understand why you feel that way. Others have felt that way too. What they found is when they used our service, here's why they didn't have that problem. So that's another really good example of how you can train for sales. So if y'all are taking notes here, that would be a really great note to write yourself, feel felt found. Mm-hmm, yeah. And you just did a variation of it, which when other people use other services, this has happened. Here's how that doesn't happen here. Yep, yep. This is what we do here to combat that. Yep. And so anything that you do that other companies don't do, you just wanna have a really good reason why. What is it that you're doing that, well, why do you do that thing and how is it better for me, the customer? That's what all the customers looking for is, oh, that does sound better. Oh, okay. Back in the day, this before COVID of course, but back in the day when customer would call and ask, you know, well, what do you guys do? How do you clean? We would say, well, one of the things that we do that's a little bit different is when you call around other cleaning companies, they'll tell you that they dust, they do all of the dusting and the high cobwebs in the bathroom. We don't do any dusting in the bathroom. We do only disinfecting in the bathroom. So all the surfaces that we touch, we disinfect. So you're not going to be seeing a lot of dusting in the bathroom. Now, of course, everybody says that everywhere, right? But back in the day, a lot of times that would send the deal right there. They're like, oh, yeah, I would rather have my bathroom disinfected. Of course, the other companies disinfecting the bathroom too. They're just calling it dusting. But that little tiny. Ain't the bathroom just got to be dusting? No, it's going to be disinfected. So of course not. Because the only way to disinfect it is if it doesn't get dusted away will disinfect. Yeah. And we don't say that we are not going to dust it. We say that instead of just dusting the bathroom, which is what they said they were doing, we're going to be disinfecting. Everything will be disinfected. And usually that would, right there would be, oh, yeah, I'd much rather have my stuff disinfected. Okay, yeah, I'll sign up. But I mean, I mentioned it kind of passing and now you've mentioned it. I'm surprised when I audit company's calls, because one of the things I do a lot of is audit company's calls. How many people don't tell people what's included in their cleaning service? I mean, part of your sales, at some point, your sales person, you say, great, now let me explain what's in our cleaning package. And it's funny, once you've done enough, you can have it memorized and be pasting the room while you say it, but, you know, and you can normally get it down to 30 seconds and you know both rooms so that people know what you're going to get. And I would say anything more than 30 seconds is working against doing a lot, unless you're dealing with certain behavioral style, right? If you're dealing with somebody who wants all the data from all the companies, all the time, then you might have to give more information. But most people that are calling, they just want a general idea of what you're doing and how you're different and what's gonna help. They want help making the decision. That's what they're looking for. I wanna find out why I should hire your company over that other one or why I should hire them over you. I just don't wanna have to call anybody else. I don't wanna have to look any longer. I just wanna be done. Give me a reason to stop trying to figure out who to go with. Because assuming you give them that reason, why are they gonna move on? That's why the, you know, carry strategy is so, so great. That's why it's such a no-brainer. With our company, you sign up for service, you're gonna get so much free stuff that why would you wanna call anybody? The irresistible deal. Yeah, the irresistible offer. Conn, how does fragrance fit into the discussion? And when we're talking about expectations, and I know that that might not be the thing that's gonna make a client fall in love with you and say I'm not calling anybody else, but, you know, expecting expectations. I mean, certainly, I guess as a salesperson, you need to be prepared to speak about that, because Liz mentioned earlier, you know, I want to use a pine saw. And what they really are saying is they want their bathroom to smell like a pine tray. Mm-hmm. No, I mean, fragrance is part of it. There are companies, I know, that specialize in fragrance marketing. When they're talking to the customers, they're like, we use this amazing mint basil product that when you come home, it's gonna smell fresh and wonderful. And other people really sell that we use products with very low scent, so that when you come home, you're not getting that nasty chemical scent. I've seen people sell both sides of that. Equally, but once again, it's part of setting the expectations. If you've been one of the people who's been using that company with the strong basil scented product and you're a scent neutral company and the customer shows up, they're going, did they even clean? Right? Smell anything? You gotta explain that. Right, they've been trained by the previous company for vice versa, if they've been using the scent neutral company and they come home and smell what they think is chemicals. If you didn't explain that you're using this wonderful natural basil extract product, they're thinking you're trying to kill them. Yeah, or you're trying to cover up dirt, right? Yeah. Because the company that is cleaning without any scent at all, usually their pitch is that clean has no smell. So if you're smelling something, that is not a good sign. That's a sign of some cover-up maybe going on there, right? So there's, you gotta know what you have and how to combat what the other people are saying. So you do have to know well, what is it that you offer and how does it combat what the other guy is offering? Well, and it's tough to sell clean without a scent. When I worked at Proctor Gamble, there was a famous case study where when Febreze first came out, it was a failure because people would use it and they didn't smell anything and they would say the product didn't work. And they're like, no, the smell is gone. You don't smell the bad scent anymore. It wasn't until they started putting good scent into Febreze that people actually started buying the product. People used to buy Febreze and go, this is a terrible product. I sprayed it and I don't smell anything. And they're like, that's the point. It's an odor eliminator. It's not an odor adder, but they had to put an odor in so that people would realize it became clean. Yeah, that makes sense. And people, you know, I think that a lot of this is shifting also, you know, it's always shifting, but I think COVID is changing a lot of this and there are no right answers right now. You know, it was easier. I still think scent is definitely a thing though because I hear people complain all the time about the hand sanitizers that are stinky and things like that. Man, that brewery hand sanitizer is terrible. And you're like, actually, that's actually pure sanitizer. It sounds like they were drinking on the job at my house. Wow, that's a little vodka we use for cleaning. That's fine. But yeah, so one of the things is making sure you understand the scope work. And like we said, you got to explain why you're different. So with us, what we do is we get through our quoting questions and then we give the customer an opportunity to ask questions. I go, great, before we move on, do you have any questions? That often gives you a chance to brag. A lot of times customers will ask you questions like, well, how are you different? I've looked at three other cleaning services. What do you do about this? What do you do about that? And then you don't seem salesy. You're just answering the question. So I normally say, so great, before we move on, do you have any questions? And about half the time, they give you a reason to brag. And that's like I said, where I like having myself, people have nearly encyclopedic knowledge of the company. So when people start bringing up stuff, they go, well, let me tell you about our training program and our training program. Here's what we do. Because they know and they sound authentic and they know the truth behind it. If for some reason, somebody says, no, I don't have any questions to lie. And I normally use this, well, great, while I'm figuring out your price, I'm going to give you a little background on the company. Now I use software that I press a button and I've got the price already. I probably have the price before I ask if you have any questions. But it gives me an opportunity to talk to the customer. And normally what I try to do is take that stuff we talked about earlier when I was having the conversation with the customer. Do they have dogs? Do they have kids? What special needs did they express? And make sure that what I'm explaining matches that. So that's where having that in-depth knowledge of the company helps. So you can do great. Well, you mentioned that you had kids and here's what we do to make sure that we don't wake up the kids when we come over. We can adjust around nap time or here's the product that we use on the floor so that your kids won't get those products in their mouth. Whatever those kind of touch pranks are for your company and it's going to vary for each customer. Yeah, absolutely. How long would you think this process should last? Ring, ring, hi. I'm interested in having my home cleaned. You know, I think there's a lot of different thoughts out there of, you know, you can't stay on the phone all day. But in order to do this, this is going to take some time, isn't it? Well, I always say in sales there's a battle for control. People are fighting for control over the discussion. And so I want to control the flow of the call, but I let the customer control the speed. There are people who convenience is the number one thing for them and you don't want to force them into a 10 minute spiel, you're going to tick them off. So if you can get what you need and tell them what they want and get them on the schedule quickly and efficiently, it's great. But then there's other customers that need to ask questions, need to spend time, feel like they trust you. And if you force those people off the phone, they're going to feel like you're corporate. So you control the process so that you don't want somebody who when you answer the phone goes, great, let me tell you about my house. You want to be able to go, all right, well, actually, I've got a series of questions that really helped me and I do this all day. So let me ask you some questions. It'll help me narrow it down a little bit. Where they let you control the questions and their order they're in, but if they want to delve in and talk more, let them. You know, if they want to ask more questions about products, if they want to tell you about their baby, you asked, you know, how many kids you have? Well, I've got a baby and if they want to go down that rabbit hole, they're that type of customer. So let them go down the rabbit hole if you try to cut it off, I'm going to kill you. Conversely, if they call up to say, hey, I'm really busy. I've got, you know, four-bed, three-bath house, 2,500 square feet, you know, how much is it going to cost? You would try to be a little faster about it, right? Yeah, I mean, I still got to tell them what's in the scope of work to make sure I'm selling what they want. I still want to tell them why we're different, but we can do that in under a minute and then get them on the schedule. I've booked customers in two, three minutes sometimes, but they're not all like that. Yeah, they're not. So I'm curious what you guys have as your, like sort of your magic questions, your questions that you asked that sort of like Derek, you gave an example of your dirt code question. That's a question that you like to ask to get a little bit different information than it sounds like you're asking. Curious what everybody else out here, Deni, Leslie, Shannon, Kelly, what do you guys, who, oh, Linda is up there too. Who's Facebook users? Is that you, Sarah, Robin or whoever? I'm curious what y'all's questions are. Do you have any kind of questions that get you some stuff to talk about? I have two questions that I really love. One is, so what is the one thing that you can't wait for us to do so that you never have to do it again? I love that question. They're like, floors. I can't wait to never do another floor. Awesome. So you know that if we come weekly and you have pets, you're probably still gonna have to do a little bit of floorwork, a little bit, but you're probably still gonna have to do some unless you have a stomach every day. So to be able to set up that expectation there. I ask, what is the main issue? All right, so why are you looking for a professional cleaner? Getting the question that is getting you that answer that is like, oh, yeah, all right. I just always ask if they've used a cleaning service before. Yeah. Yeah. I've never used a cleaning service before. Can you tell me about your experience? I wanna know what's going on with it. And they're gonna tell you the good and the bad. And if you get the answer to that question up front, that'll shape a lot of the discussion from that point forward. And that's also where I always felt like it helped knowing competitors too, because sometimes they'd mentioned certain companies and say they did a terrible job. And I'm like, actually, she runs a really good company. So if she didn't make you happy, that is not a good time. Yeah. And then there are other companies that I will not mention that if people would mention, I'd be thinking, yeah, yeah, they suck. That makes sense. Yeah. In certain areas, I ask about pets and explain we offer pets sitting. Ooh, awesome, Linda. That's great. It gives you a little chance to plug that other little service in there. They're a storm blowing in and we only had time to do one thing. What would that be? Ooh, that's good, Kelly. So you find out that thing that really matters to them that you can't ever miss, right? If they're like, my kitchen. My kitchen has to be done, especially if there's a storm. The storm might take your whole house away, but the kitchen will be clean. You don't care. Kitchen's gotta be clean. Yeah. Do you have, ask how much you paid the current cleaners? So I usually ask a version of that. I usually say, instead of asking if they've ever hired anybody else or used professional cleaning service, I ask, when was the last time you paid somebody else to clean your house? And so that, because sometimes I wanna know if they like paid the neighbor girl or, you know. And so I wanna find out that answer cause then I can find out how much they used to paying what they, ah, well, I lived in California. Soon as they say they lived in California, I'm ready for them to tell me they paid 10 bucks an hour and I paid, you know, $40 and she cleaned my 12,000 square foot house every week and it was awesome. Okay, good to know. Thank you. So I have no problem asking how much people have paid in the past. I'd like to know how much they paid. We normally didn't ask just because it feels like our price is negotiable if we ask. Now, I wanted to know if they've used one before because most cleaning services in our area do the same basic thing where there's a deep clean and then a maintenance clean. And I feel like if they understand that I don't have to get into the whole spiel of it. I don't need to bore them with that. Stealing seems to be the main answer to why they are looking for a new company. Oh, wow. That is so- Not our area, they didn't show up or they, the quality decreased over time. Yeah. That's usually what I ask is, when was the last time you paid somebody to do the cleaning for you? And if they give me anything that's like in the last year and what made you stop, right? Usually if it's anything longer ago than that they'll tell us like, well, when my kids were still at home, we did or whatever. But I like to know why they stopped using that cleaning service. And usually they'll give pretty good answers about what bothers them. Which what you just said, Derek is like one of the number, one of the top. If I get an answer like, you know, stealing I'm going to ask a couple of follow up questions. Did you have a bad experience? What was missing and how was it resolved? And kind of like if somebody says, well, they broke stuff every time they were here. Really? Well, let's talk about that a little bit. I mean, sometimes they can disqualify with themselves and after that, it's like, you know, we're probably not an awesome fit either because we break stuff all the time. Yeah, that's true. We, I like to tell people that. So if I'm asking them, you know, why they can't, why they stopped service. If they say, well, you know, they would say that they were going to be there between eight and 10, but they always got it up to our house closer to 10. Well, you know, you might not like our cleaning company either because we might say eight to 10. We might show closer to 10. We might even call you and tell you it's going to be closer to 11. I don't know how's that going to fly for you. So, but I am concerned like Shannon, if you're hearing a lot of people saying that they're looking for a new company because of stealing, like a lot of customers are saying that, that is the weirdest thing I've heard in a long time. You might want to find out who they were using, but what happened? And if former employees of that company want to work for you, take a second. Yeah, that's a scary one right there. Yeah, what didn't you like about your last cleaning service? Absolutely, that's a great one. One of the things that I do think you have to be careful of that I don't know gets enough conversation is people want to, they want to know what they're paying for, but only to a certain point. They don't want to know every tiniest detail of everything that they're paying for. And an example of that is if you say, well, our basic cleaning is whatever, $100. And then they ask, well, does that include, and then they ask questions after that. Like, well, how many pets do you have? Oh, okay, well, we charge $5 per pet. So that's going to be $110. And when you have two floors, we charge $3 for stairs, extra for stairs. Or, oh, you have grout, is it white grout or gray grout? Oh, well, we charge more for, you've got to be really careful when you start telling people all of the little things that you're paying for, because it can start to sound like you're penny-pinching them. Nickel and diming them, I think, is the term that is used. Especially as part of the sales process. Yes, that's what I was talking about for the sales process, yeah. Yeah, so you do have to be a little bit careful there, which is why I really love the strategy that we talked about last week, with just dropping that big number on them, all right? And how amazing this is. And if that's not good, backing off. Nick-picking, okay. That's actually also why I have always had three levels of service. Because three levels of service allow you to have flexibility, you can move. If you are cleaning somebody's house and they say the price is too much, you can always back them off the level of service. You tell them maybe they're looking for a different level of service. If they're saying they need a higher level of quality, oh, well, looks like we probably need you our higher level of service. Instead of three stars, put you on four or four or five. So I have always loved giving myself a way to move and maneuver in the sales process. I think it's interesting, like I said, you don't always want to get into the details. For example, I'm also involved in a window washing company. And on the window washing, we don't clean the screens, we don't clean the sales and we don't clean the tracks. Now, we've learned not to tell people that because when you tell them and your window cleaning $6 a plane, by the way, we aren't doing these three things, they get mad. But when we just go and clean the glass, they're happy. Oh, it's interesting. They never even thought about the sales, the tracks and the screens. Until we told them, we weren't going to do that. Yeah. Yeah, people don't want to hear what you don't do. Right. Somewhere in the hotels processes, they're in agreement that explains that, you know, this is what we do. And this is probably we do those other things for an additional fee, right? We do do it for an additional fee. But like I said, we used to make sure that, hey, just so you know, this isn't part of the window cleaning service. And we learned instead, we just talk about, hey, we're going to clean the glass. He goes, we're going to do to clean the glass. We talk about the glass and we leave the other things off. And if they care and they say, are you guys going to get the tracks? We go, oh, well, we can do that too. You know, how many sets of cracks do you want to get cleaned? Yeah, that's right. Because that's saying, yes, we do do that. Here's how much I got. But it's not the glass. We are a glass cleaning company. We're not going to clean the toilet either, but in your glass. Right, and what happened is we would get one to 2% of the customers who would complain. So we changed everything about our sales pitch because we didn't want to get that 1% complaint anymore. So we started because we got that once a month complaint about you didn't clean the tracks that we need to tell people on every call, by the way, we're not going to be cleaning your tracks. And it didn't work very well. So we've learned to just go back to it and just try to pick up warning signs or people are asking about. That is such golden advice. Never tell people what you don't do. Even if they ask you straight up, do you do blah, blah, blah, absolutely, we would love to do that. You haven't given them a bid yet. So just include it in the price. Absolutely, we love to include baseboards in our cleaning price. If they're asking you for something that you don't normally do, vacuum the furniture. Why can't you say yes? Yes, I'd love. Is there a reason why you are never going to vacuum the furniture? My guess is you will. They just have to pay for it. So yes, absolutely, I'd love to include furniture, vacuuming in your cleaning. Because people just want to hear what you are going to do. Every time you tell people what you're not going to do, you go, I love that you said this, Derek. You're reducing your value in the customer's mind, even if they never wanted those things done. Even if you are talking about things that they don't care about. Yeah, but you don't do as much as the other company because they do all of that stuff and you don't. And similarly, another thing is my salespeople are forbidden. In fact, every one of my companies forbidden from ever mentioning company policy. Nobody ever wants to hear about our policy. I say, if we have a policy and you don't know the reason why, ask me so I can teach you so that when people call in, you can say, here's why we do things this way. It's not, well, I'm sorry, ma'am. Our company policy doesn't let us do that. Now we sound like everyone's favorite institution, the bank in our insurance company. So the reason why we don't vacuum under beds is we've had a real problem in the past of sucking up iPad cords and things like that. We did it. Yeah. We've got just a few more minutes before we make it to the top of the hour. So what we're doing here really is covering some of the highlights of what we do in foundations. And that is an event that we're doing here the first week of October 3 through 10. 3rd through 10, yeah, 3rd through 10. It's so funny you said that, Tom, because my brain was automatically going to March. I'm ready for March. Yeah, October 3rd through 10. And the thing about foundations is, yeah, we're giving you just a real quick overview of some of the topics that we talk about. But how foundations works is you get a class and then you have an implementation period. So everybody takes the class together and then we all split apart and we implement big need in your company because everybody needs different things. So that's how we split apart. Throughout the week, you also have, this is something we don't talk a lot about you guys. Throughout the week, you also have one-on-one coaching with where you are and your big problems, where you're getting some conflicts or don't know how to implement something. So that happens all week long. Tom, you do, I know throughout the week, I'm coaching a lot around all of the financials, people's individual financials. And you do a lot of one-on-one coaching around people's individual sales processes and their marketing plans. And I do a lot of one-on-one coaching around building some of the problems and how to get some of those problems fixed in their individual companies. So I don't think we have spent enough time talking about that because when Tricia was talking about her experience at Foundations or Heather, they almost always talk about, yeah, I spent two hours on the beach just walking with Liz, talking about blah, blah, blah. Or I had a two-hour one-on-one with Tom talking about how messed up my P&L was. And I think it's a big deal for a lot of people. You know, we don't have any beach pictures of us either. Why does this look so big? It's so cute. We don't have pictures? There's no pictures of the beach. And I mean, this is kind of the back. And if you go that way, I don't know, just a short walk here. I mean, you can kind of see the ocean right there. That makes it look far away to me. Yeah. So yeah, the beach is how far, Tom? 100 yards? No, maybe 100 feet. Now I was gonna say it's out the back door. Yeah. Beach, meet you. Well, you're not the only one. You probably don't love the beach as much as Sarah, Sarah Mitchell. When Sarah Mitchell was not in class, she was at the beach. Every minute she was not in either classroom, Asian class. And I think she came to every single version because she was like, yeah, I need the beach. I need the beach. Well, we'll get some pictures of the beach. Time is up. Tomorrow, we're talking about what, Tom? We're gonna be talking about high frequency recurring revenue and how to make it happen. There's the beach. So here's like, you're standing on the back deck and here's the pool and there's the ocean. So I don't know. You can probably throw a rock from the back porch and get it out to the beach. Just don't fall off the boardwalk on the way to the beach. It's very painful. Only you can throw that, Derek. Only you. Laura fell off too. Oh, didn't she really? Well, she did not have a mark like you did. Yeah. Well, that was from walking into a bridge, another high hazard on the beach. Oh my gosh, y'all. Yeah, going to the- It really isn't that bad. I mean- I seem to have a problem walking and paying attention what I'm walking into or on. I don't think any of the rest of us got hurt. I was even in the water and I didn't get hurt as much as you did with surfboards and stuff. All right. Probably be sure it's in shorts in October. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's huge. It's awesome. Okay, guys. We got a balance. Back here tomorrow, five o'clock Eastern. Have a good day. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.