 Everybody Tom Stewart here with Liz Trotter in the middle and our guest today is Chris Willett, and this is smart business moves Chris in the middle so bang how about that hey right in the middle. Thanks guys That's better especially since I'm all pixelated You're a little bit you're coming back a little bit, you know it is It's you know, there's hope Maybe maybe there was somebody in your office, you know streaming Netflix or something. It's just me It's my house, so I don't know I don't know why I would had had that there was at my house Well told go tell Gavin to stop downloading stuff for Tim or whoever Your your grandmother. Yes Tell your grandmother off the internet It's just me Gavin has a lot of tears in years Tom Your mother-in-law No, she doesn't even have an internet So I don't know what to say Tom. You told me to buy two screens I bought two screens if you want me to do something you're gonna have to be more specific You need to send me your last Bill for internet service and I'm gonna call them up and see if I can negotiate a better arrangement Okay, it's coming your way Tom is Leslie Shepherd feels in the house We haven't seen Leslie in a long time Yeah Have you Leslie have you taken a break from smart business moves or were you just kind of hanging out and laying low or? You're doing something more fun and productive then Spending an hour in the afternoon with us two days away And we're only doing it two days a week. Oh Camping okay Leslie are you a glamping kind of a gal or a camping kind of a gal? I Couldn't handle camping if I didn't have some type of device that would get me on the internet Oh heading back tomorrow. Oh fun Yeah, that's a nice little camping trip right there So What's been going on in the world? This is one of those days that that I haven't been able to keep up with the news Oh something happened at Castle Keepers today, which is kind of interesting. I'll share in case Anybody else has experienced us. Okay, we have three cars over the weekend have a catalytic converter stolen in Charleston What do they want them for They have like precious metals in them that when commodity prices go up they can sell and make make some money I don't know how much not as much as new ones cost. I'm sure but Um It happened we had a bunch of them stolen Heck, I don't know maybe a half a dozen years or so ago and that was the only time that it happened and I guess palladium is one of the the metals and there might be other junk in there too But when the commodity prices go up they're they're worth some money Did you send the cars out anyway? No Linda says I sound weird Thanks, Linda I was gonna say if you if you send the cars out at least your clients will know when the maids show up, right? They told me it's like we've got three cars and you start them. They sound like mustangs I was like, yeah, okay. Well, if you look underneath of it, it's missing a little box about yay big that connects the manifold to the rest of the exhaust system and Anyway Now we didn't send them out. We we had to we had to go to plan B Tom aren't your cars like locked up behind behind a big fence It doesn't take a whole lot. You know what I need I need char to hook me up I need to do like electric guard dog electric fence because You know chain link fence. It's got like the razor wire along the top But all you need is a pair of snips and you can cut a haul and go in and Yeah, well, you're not cutting cutting through char's stuff. No Without getting electrocuted. Yeah, no I I don't know how much stuff you have stolen but I can hook her have her hook you up No, actually, I've looked at that equipment before and I know She's a very successful salesperson and I know that she generates a ton of revenue And I know one of the reasons why what she sells is very expensive It's definitely more for those big big companies, right? I think I know she's extremely talented and there's a whole lot that goes into it But when you're selling stuff, it's very expensive and you can get people to buy it You're going to generate a lot of revenue. It does make a big difference. I have to agree I think her last contract that she was talking about was like avis And she was talking about all the different it might have been a different hurts or somebody but one of the rental car agencies at all of the airports I was like, oh, that's a big contract right there Big big contract. Yeah, so zeros and contracts like that I have to see what the bill is for those Cadillac kind of illicit converters, right? See if it's worth it If there weren't so much that people are stealing them left and right Wow crazy though, I wouldn't have thought that three of them too in one weekend the last time it happened. I think they got like seven or eight. I mean it was was a ton Wow, wow. Yeah, that's a bummer. Especially since it takes out the the car Yeah, yeah, you know, I mean they they sound really loud when when they don't have that Probably isn't good for the engine either Another good But you know, you know, robin one of the reasons why we were able to handle it without a lot of consternation is we We have a few cars that we really don't need right now because we do more solos as part of the whole COVID and Yeah, you know the minimum wage starting at $15 an hour and having to become more efficient and At all it all kind of kind of plays in, you know, I you know Really want to get rid of a few cars and that'd be a few less cars that would have catalytic converters to steal, right? Yay, um, Leslie you're cracking me up over here. If you are a thief you totally Had put much thought into that Leslie I don't feel like I feel like there's better places like banks or something, right? Really thought I would say Well, it depends what you're taking I guess if you're in the market of stealing catalytic converters You know the other thing that they used to take all the time is compressors for air conditioners the outside unit of a split units Get the copper out of them I haven't had one of those stolen in a while. I'm kind of got me wondering now if I need to worry about that Okay, this is just Taking a bad turn This well it started out with with you being pixelated and then your color wasn't right this was For those of you who don't have the you know, we need to do outtakes Our chris was starting to tear up before we started I'm looking at everything in my video right now and check if you want to be going wrong. I think we're okay You sound fine. I sound fine. Tom sounds bad You and Tom both look good. I look bad. So really you're the only one looks good I'm gonna ask a question and mute myself a little bit Uh Do you guys want to kind of get into what we're going to be talking about today? Sure. No, was there any news tom over the weekend any kind of financial stuff? Is that what you why you were talking about the catalytic converters because you hadn't had a chance to check in on the news Right, right, you know, that was a financial hit to to my personal p&l but You know in a larger scale. I don't know. I'm seeing here inflation expectation surge um I know that The governor of the fed What's his face j pal drone pal supposed to be speaking to Congress later this week and a lot of people are going to watch that more and more people are beginning the question if this whole inflation thing is just going to be temporary if it's going to be a bigger deal and I don't know. We'll see I I I believe it's it's going to be around for a while and that's one of the reasons why we are increasing Our wages and I I think You know, I don't think that you want to be the last company in your market to figure out you need to be paying more Yeah Insurance No Leslie unfortunately Not really it's going to cost about a thousand bucks Maybe a little bit more for each car to get them fixed and we have a thousand dollar deductible and it's on per car basis so Whatever a little bit that we would get for insurance would would hurt our lost one So we're not even going to tell the insurance company. We filed a police report They found a they found a baseball cap underneath one of the cars one of the one of the bandits hats fell off and I guess In the darkness and whatever so they have a piece of evidence. Maybe they can get some d and a off I'm just kidding. It's hopeless So at least you can make it go away You got a free hat Well, actually the police took the hat Maybe you can get it back And you don't find the perpetrators. Can I have the hat back? Why do we even take the hat? I mean, you know, they're not doing any kind of DNA testing What what do they want? Hey, is this your hat? We got you buddy I don't want it as a trophy. I'd just keep it in my office. You know, hey, let's take out a hat Yeah You know, I'm wondering if they like go through the old police files mug shots Do they like they find somebody wearing that hat if that would be Oh, yeah, I'm sure that's what's gonna happen dumb. Uh, yeah It's important. I with the same hat. This is terrified. They pulled into the police station All right, so what what exactly is our oh no leads no leads don't expect any Do you actually think it is um Somebody like getting multiple businesses. Um, it seems like it would have to be Yeah, I mean it it happens whenever The the metal inside of those things becomes valuable enough And I understand it it's happening a lot because we called around to several repair shops to you know And they said oh, yeah, we got a backlog of those. So we're not we're not a nice lady case Gosh, I think I would be nervous then because a lot of cars and they know it's easy to steal from them There we got three Okay, enough of love for my woes, uh, what what's our matter of business today? What what are you sharing with us Chris? So we're talking about scheduling efficiency today um Yeah, Tom you just brought up inflation wages need to go up And and that's what we're trying to accomplish right now and Scheduling efficiencies are going to create big cost savings for us And so we're all about it right now anything that we can do to increase billable time Is is what i'm really shooting for in my business right now. Um, I just started tracking this I haven't tracked it in a long time But just last week we hit 95 percent Billable time so 95 of the time when my whole staff is clocked in Was actually we're actually billing clients for all of that time and we're we're shooting for 100 percent You know when we were a team company, I think we were somewhere in uh, we're like 75 80 percent Which means of all the time that my my crew is out there in the field Driving around on the clock that kind of what we have to pay them for We're only collecting money 75 80 percent of that time from clients With a lot of a lot of changes we've made in the company recently We're up to 95 percent of the time now Which which i'm really happy with you know that creates a lot of extra money for wages for our staff But but chris, how would you be 100? I mean don't they have to drive? they do but If they're finishing jobs early if They're not coming to the office Um, we could potentially hit 100 percent. I'm not totally sure that that's a goal that I want to go for yet Uh, because like you said, you know, they do have to drive and and there's a little bit of Is it fair to the client? If we're if we're billing them for drive time Something i'm kind of struggling with but um And what about breaks? Do you guys have to provide breaks? Or anything we have to provide breaks here Yeah, we do Typically it's just between homes if they're on a large home Let's say it's a five hour or a logger home They clock out far away through that house Go out grab a burger come back finish the job and we prepare clients for that Those don't come around too often though. It's that's something we maybe run into once a week And chris, I don't know if if I properly introduced you chris willow with alpine maids and Denver colorado. Yeah, that's that's me so The laws in denver, I guess are definitely different than they are in in washington state Of course you guys smoked oak in both places. So there's some similarities too, but There's a lot of similarities, you know, I used to watch washington state and wonder Man, liz, how do you operate there? There's so much regulation. There's so many laws And now I think liz you're looking at me like chris. How do you operate in denver? You guys are It's the cables are are turning here. It's it's uh, it's interesting interesting time but this whole concept of of efficiency where You know, if you're going to be paying somebody The more that time they're actually generating revenue a lot more, you know profitable you're going to be I'm assuming the only downtime you have is driving between the first home and the second home if they're they're cleaning You know two homes Yeah, that's that's right. I think like I think you you said the right word is is Kevin excited. Yeah But we're we're trying to increase billable time we we want to make sure that if our techs are clocked in That we're billing somebody for that time that there's money coming in to pay them And and the more of our time that's billable Yeah, the more the more we have to pay them I think we're What's our minimum wage right now? It's going up to 15 78. I think next year. I'm just calling it 16 It's it's basically 16 an hour next year, right? And and 16 an hour is not even going to be that competitive in our market because I mean those You're gonna have to be 17 18 plus I think to even be competitive, you know walmarts are already starting at 16 here. So That doesn't do a lot So high Right. Oh, um, what are some of the other things that you're doing chris other than um, just raising rates You know, I'm I'm kind of really taken on the role of CFO and in the company, right and we're we're having to scrutinize All the financials and All of our clients all of the cleaning and all the activities that we do in the company and make sure that they're returning for us We are in the process of auditing all of our cleans and making sure that there are no clients that are underbooked Um What do you mean by that chris tell us about this auditing process? Yeah, so Um, I actually got the idea from from a video you made tom So we're going through every day and checking Every clean that happened that day if we went over in the clean We then take a dive into that customer's profile. Is this something that's happening often? Are we going over our estimated time in this home on a regular basis? If so, we need to adjust that client and and they need to pay more So that we're not offering them free services because that's that's what we're doing at the end of the day If we're not auditing these cleans and we're going over estimate in these homes And that adds up fast When you're when you're auditing these cleans and you're getting back You know, maybe you get three dollars a month Um, but when you get three dollars a month over 200 clients adds up yeah, I I made a video about that So it just I mean doesn't surprise me. It sounds boring I thought it was you I think it was a made central. Um Is an email as a video it came from made central somewhere It's something we've been doing forever, but truly though Good management You know my old business coach was like good management is boring Don't expect, you know a lot a lot of what goes into good management is boring, but Having the discipline to do that every day It becomes real money and you don't have to clean any more homes But you have more money in the bank to show for it. Yeah Yeah, every day is important too, right tracking this Tallying KPI is making sure that you're on track on a daily basis I find myself doing a lot more spreadsheet work this year than I have in a long time and it is boring um Chris one of the things I like is you said that you're auditing these jobs every single day. Hey lis um, and you know, I think that a lot of people audit their jobs kind of on a monthly basis or Even worse. This is I've fallen into this job so many times when we're doing price increases Right. Yeah time to do price increases. Let's check all of the jobs over the last six months and how well have we been doing? so So that's a good point Chris tell us the magic of doing it on a daily basis because it truly makes a huge difference What's the what's the big benefit of that? Yeah, you know And I'll tell you the way I figured that out was by not doing it every day and realizing not only The benefit of doing it every day, but the pitfalls of not doing it, right? You do it every quarter and you raise 100 clients prices And 10 of them leave, you know, that's that's a big loss that that you just had all at once You put a lot of resources into that you might overwhelm somebody who's working in in your office Or yourself if you're dealing with these phone calls When you have 100 clients calling you asking you why is my price going up? What's going on in my house? Tell me about this it creates a lot of work and and doing it every single day really spreads that workload out It gives you more time to look into each clean and and you get in a habit you get in a cycle It becomes a lot easier when you're doing something, you know Repetitively every single day you get used to dealing with the the clients that have issues with it, which is not many um one out of Maybe 10 clients really takes an issue to it and usually they just want to know why and If if we're doing it often we can just ask the cleaners what's going on in their house They give us the reason we really relay it to the client They make make the decision if they want to stay or increase their price And when you see a price that you know, you're under billing a job We call those non-conforming issues You do an investigation and from a forensics standpoint the evidence is really fresh if you're talking about a job You did yesterday You might go back and say do you remember we cleaned mrs. Jones's house last may And we lost a lot of money there. Do you remember what happened at miss it? I mean nobody, you know Oh But you're right. Yeah, it's it's current right this happened yesterday So it's so easy to to talk to the tech and say hey What went on there? Yeah, if we goes by it's like, well god, I've cleaned a lot of homes I they all kind of look the same after a while. No, I don't remember anything. Yeah. Yeah, exactly All right So another thing that you just said chris that I hadn't considered So you said you're auditing the jobs every day, but you're not calling the customers every day. Are you? No, um, so we audit we shoot an email And that's it and what what is the email saying? The email says hey over the past however many cleans we've been auditing Or rather we've been auditing the past couple of cleans And your tech is worried that we don't have enough time to complete the job up to your standards Which is on all of these cleans completely true Um Couple options that we give them either a Raise your price We could look at a rotational clean something like hey Do you have a 4 000 square foot home with a basement? We can leave that basement out every every other clean um, we can leave out unused rooms and um A lot of the options that we give to these clients are geared towards larger homes, you know Maybe 1800 16 17 1800 plus square foot homes And I think once you're going over about 23 2400 square feet most people have an unused room and that gives us a little bit of Wiggle room like hey do you have an extra bedroom? Do you have a part of your home that you don't use something that we can remove from the clean to save you? On on cost and and most clients are perfectly happy to do that. Yeah, I have You know my kids I went to college. I have two rooms that never get used. Why am I paying to get them cleaned? Okay, so this is what I just heard chris. Tell me if I'm right So you audit every day. So let's say you're auditing 30 jobs today. Mrs. Johnson. Mrs. Smith. Mrs whoever stewart and If you see that mrs. Johnson you went over Yesterday because you cleaned her yesterday Um, does that make you look at like the last three months last six months? What do you look at then? Yeah, that's right. So we look at we want to average the time that it's taken us over the last six months Okay, because it could be a one-time event, right? Maybe they do a party Maybe they had guests over and you know happens as long as we're not Losing money on the long run. We're okay I do you consider how fast your cleaning professionals are when you're figuring out if it's price right or not Yeah, absolutely, right? So if you have a really fast tech cleaning cleaning a house But they're getting out, you know, if my fastest tech is getting out just on time in a home That home's underbooked because if I have to send my normal speed tech to that house, there's no way they're going They won't get out on time, right? They might go an hour over My fastest tech is fast Like really fast So yeah, we use the rate control and made central to to do this Um But you could do it in any software, right? You could do it with a spreadsheet Just I guess the the the point is if you got a home, it's underpriced Don't think that you're fixing the problem by signing your fastest tech to it It may make your number look better, but you're still leaving the same amount of money on the table And I've done that and and it's it's not fun when your fastest tech isn't there one day, right? When they're on vacation and you have to send someone else It's rough and you're hiding the real problem. The real problem is you're not charging enough Right and really you're doing a disservice to your fastest tech So a lot of times what happens is in a lot of companies that I work with Is they'll burn out their best people because they give All of the worst jobs to their best people and so their best people are like Man I do a great job for this company and I get all the garbage jobs because well, yeah, you can do Nobody else can but it doesn't make sense to just burn out your best people That's not a great plan Not saying I haven't done it We're we're you know, we've we've learned a few things over the years and we're we don't we don't do it anymore Yeah, we try we try harder anyway. All right. So all right. Let's go back to chris What you do so every day you are Running all of the jobs from yesterday. You're checking So it sounds like you're checking two things. What were the times on the job? Who did we what jobs did we go over on and who cleaned who cleaned for those different jobs, right? So those two things and then if you find a job that you were over on You average it over the last six months If it's over just a little bit Do you do anything if you're your average over the last six months is a little bit over Do you do anything? And that's that's where there's some room for interpretation. So we we have various clients at various rates I have some clients at 45 an hour and I have some clients at 65 an hour And so let's say this client is at 65 an hour and we're going over five minutes I'm probably just gonna just gonna wash it and extend their time a little bit and now they're going to be at $64 an hour, you know and Makes it easy Talking made our two right labor hour. Sorry. That's right. So labor labor hour Um, and your your target uh revenue per hour is what? Uh 50 56 is is what we want to be at Okay, so in that case you might eat it and come in at 53 or whatever and say that's close enough Sure Of course And just thinking out loud does it you don't want to give somebody a you know 50 cent, you know increase, you know Or you know, whatever, you know a dollar 25 But does it make sense to give them a you know a respectable increase 10 bucks or so and say well Maybe I can get 63 dollars an hour for this home. They won't complain because No I'm just wondering Because I do the same thing as close enough. Let's not worry about it. Yeah, but you know, maybe i'm lazy Maybe what we should be doing is let's look at this as an opportunity to get more than than what our par value is Yeah, and You know the one thing I try to avoid is I just don't want to look petty to a client So if we're talking about a one dollar increase I don't want to send them this big email about like, you know giving them options and You know, it's it's two paragraphs long And I wouldn't be petty. I would never give somebody a dollar increase. That's what I'm saying So why don't you go for you know a respectable increase and say? You know, I'm going to make more than what my par revenue per hour Never thought of that before I'm I'm like running that through my head right now like Yeah, I think we need to I need to create some sort of criteria For this that's as you know, if If it's an under five dollar increase Do x and if the clients below our target hourly rate Give them the increase and a price adjustment or you know Create a set of rules around this so that we can really systemize it and and make sure that we do the right thing every time I'm kind of really liking what tom is saying now and to to your point with the system if you are if we are charging between 50s or five cents And five dollars less than we should be Automatically we send out a letter for an eight dollar increase. Sure. So we are Making sure that we are getting ourselves in alignment for that next price increase or Or I guess it would be an eight dollar price adjustment, right? And then Then we're getting them into alignment for our price increases. It'd be another way to get us up to that that Um goal that we're trying to get to because a lot of times we're we're our overall is below our goal I mean you rarely see anybody who's Whose overall price per hour is the same as their target And if you remember how we started the show talking about the prospects or are growing that inflation's a real thing and Chris you're sharing that the minimum wage in your state is going up to effectively 16 dollars an hour um Whatever whatever you think your your your your par value is now you very well might be lower than what it should be So it doesn't really hurt it Have jobs on the on the schedule that you're getting more than than what your target is It's a good point and uh, usually you know the way I've thought about this in the past is We need to get everybody up to par Now and then in the future we deal with it by a rate increases as needed But if we can get ahead of that goal and get more money now and we have a lot more wiggle room, so yeah So chris one of the reasons why I want to bring you on the show For this topic is you've been doing this before most people ever started I you you've been doing this for a few years now where you're Always looking for how you can make more money and be able to pay your people more Three years ago. We were having the same conversation long before kovat ever came around. Yeah. Yeah different There's always a way right? I mean this what we're talking about now is one way The other thing we've done is is routing and you know if we're driving less We're billing more if we're billing more we're making more So Yeah, so routing is another really big thing too. Oh, we got a bunch of stuff on here. I am way I am so far in the whole long questions and stuff. Do we want to back a few of these out? Oh wait, let's go all the way out Leslie making our biggest price increase today from 48 to 55. You're missing one. Andrea was before before that Oh, evidently she sends out rate increases and They don't get a response. What do we what do we do next? I have an idea, but you guys what what what do you guys do? What do you do chris nothing? You just raise their price and because you're building their credit card right chris sure. Yeah, so um Andrea fork and chris's situation. He's billing their card. So He's not really asking for approval. He's just letting them know. Hey starting this date This is how much is your charge is going to be getting billed and it's it's yeah I just I look at it like, you know what every other company does to me Which is if if the price of netflix increases, you know, they might send an email Yeah, and netflix doesn't I love that netflix is a great example because netflix doesn't send you a letter saying hey I'm sorry. All of these expenses are going up. Is it okay with you if we start charging you an extra 50 cents an hour? They don't say that they just say If they send you anything It's going to be something that says price increase goes into effect on such and such date. That's it You'll get nothing and you'll like it And nothing news come in we're not giving you better service. Nothing's coming. Guess what price But you know what the common thread to all of this is and andre this is something to think about too I don't know if you're you're taking checks or or whatnot but credit cards give you a ton more leverage on rate increases and It doesn't even seem it seems like the whole psychology behind it when you're charging somebody's credit card it just just goes easier And you know we've got some legacy customers And we've we've acquired some some accounts from other places that they were doing checks as well And a lot of times you ask them for a credit card and they go. Thank god I just you know, I was writing checks because I thought that was the way that I had to pay you More times than not. I think it's a rare situation in 2021 that anybody says, you know I really don't want to give you a credit card. I I would rather write a check All right, so this is one of the things when we're talking about credit cards I'm going to bring up this separate issue This is something that I see a lot In some of the facebook groups like the professional house cleaners group. I'm never charging credit cards. Are you kidding me? They charge so much. I end up having to pay 2.5 plus 3 blah blah blah blah blah. Well, what do you what do you guys think about that? I mean, I know that we all We all I would would argue that you're going to have more money in the bank at the end of the month by paying whatever Your your your your merchant account fees are you get paid? You don't have to chase money A lot of times on if it's on a credit card customers aren't even thinking about it You know, it's like I mean the look at their they just pay their they pay their credit card bill Every month without even reconciling it I you know, I I firmly believe that you're going to make more money by paying The you know 3% or whatever it is In the long run so at the end of every day So this I think is one of those examples where you have to look at the big picture So yes on this exact ticket you might make less money So it might seem like no, I don't make as much because I have to pay This this fee but overall you're going to end up making more money because of all of these other things So there might be a tipping point where if you're a small company very small And you're literally going to all of the jobs and you can collect the money and you can handle it And you're managing it might make sense for you to be collecting in cash or by check or whatever But at a certain point it it makes more sense to be Taking credit cards because it's going to make you more money Yeah, I couldn't even imagine dealing with it administratively I mean that's that's a lot to keep track of the loss Right, you're going to lose checks if you have fraud if somebody loses a check somebody gets that number You get involved in that that's going to take a lot of your time Especially the the 95 efficiency factor you're talking about is a business model where People live leave their home every day. They go clean a home or two and then they go home every day So how do you even collect that money? You're not you might You're going to lose you're going to lose checks and we clean faster when people are gone And then I feel like people who are paying by credit card and don't need to leave a check behind or not going to be home as often hopefully I think there's some customers if you're not taking credit cards, then they're going to do business with you sure Yeah, and you do have a different image if you're If your company takes credit cards or if they don't but again That that depends on who you are what you're trying to be what you're what you want your company to be so back um Back to the you know, what do we do if we don't get a response question though? I I should put out expectations up front And and liz or tom I think one of you gave me this idea too Which was to set the expectation that on our third clean we will adjust the rate And so our clients are they know to look out for this So usually when we have a rate adjustment going out, we've already adjusted it on the third clean So these aren't going to be massive increases. You know, these are these usually stem from a change in the home Maybe that's okay for american made liz. You've been doing that for a while. Haven't you? That's long time Yeah, and so by setting those expectations up front, you don't have to deal with with any sort of uncertainty or hit them with Well, it might be a surprise right if we were like really misquoted this house and and we have to give them, you know A 50 increase but at least they knew on the third clean to to look for this And so if we if we adjust them to third clean Maybe they have baby Maybe they get two puppies down the line and and something changes and again Now it's really easy to explain and and something they they might be expecting so I do feel like It does make a big difference We're always talking about setting expectations, right? You got to you got to set the expectations and you got to meet the expectations If you're lucky you exceed them periodically Often enough that your customers are like wow, that's an amazing company But you at least have to meet those expectations So setting expectations up front that you can meet awesome And chris you just had a brand new baby And so yeah, so congrats awesome But if if chris you were to get an increase from your cleaning company You got a new baby and we've got new expensive We got new stuff that we're doing over there. You would understand that too, right? It would make more sense Yeah Oh, yeah, and I Especially with the new baby. They could send me pretty much any increase they want, right? So you flip that around and do like rate increases across the board. It's like, you know, I just had a new baby Things are expensive. So we're raising our rates Yeah, that's good chris. I like that. I want to see your new price increase leather All right, so tom we got a bunch of stuff going on Yeah, you know leslie is increasing her hourly rate from 48 to 55 Minimum wage, I guess 19 bucks an hour. No one times or monthly clients Sounds like supply and demand to me and it sounds like at the band is out stripping the supply. So Yeah, but as they say if you've got more business, you know what to do with you're not charging enough And if you don't have enough help, you're not paying enough. It's not always that simple, but Leslie, I think it's you're you're going in the right direction And that is a big increase right there leslie I will bet that that was not a decision that you came up with easily And so for all of the companies out there that are thinking. Oh, I could never charge that in my area Maybe you can if someone else in your area is charging more than you are Chances are good. You could charge that too That you you don't need to be as afraid As you feel like you need to be and that it's not going to happen leslie. Where are you located? I know she's in southern california, but I can't think of where I think she's in northern california Okay But she's in california that pretty much sums it up But if you don't think that you can do it in your area Pick a handful of customers and try it And just see what happens and if you're right then don't do it with all the rest of them I mean you can still recover. I mean this is a whole another discussion, but it's just a negotiation, right? They still want you to clean their home that is you might have to back off of that increase a little bit or You know worst case say, you know Okay, that's the last time i'm drinking and sending out rate increases. I'm sorry. Just forget the whole thing um, I'm kidding, but Oh, come on, I thought I'd get a laugh out of that I like drinking and you know texting or tweeting or something. Yeah, anyway, um Don't drink and do rate increases. That's my advice. Um, but no testing on a small group of people One one thing to what you said tom you you said something. I think is really important do a handful Don't just do one or two clients because if you get pushed back on one or two clients You your tendency will be to think that nobody will pay this it could have just been that one or two clients So do more than that Right, you're looking for you know what you know what pick them at random Don't pick. Well, I got three customers that are underpaying a lot They're paying in the ass and I really we don't care if I'll lose them or not anyway because that's not a fair sample Auburn, Auburn, california I don't usually I think every three months we call all of our competition and get quotes from them And and that always makes me feel a little bit better Or worse sometimes it makes me feel worse, right when they're charging a lot less How come I'm not charging that much? It makes me feel better right because there is always one or two charging more Oh, Amy is saying I know we're all crazy with the Comments all over the place, but Amy Smith is saying she locks her rate in on the third Visit until um a rate increase. So Amy, do you lock it in on the third visit? I love that you lock it in that third visit. I just love that people are paying attention to You know how much they're charging for those three visits just like chris checking them every day. I love that idea I love that that that thinking But if you lock it in Until your next great increase on you've got it in parentheses So I'm guessing that you're still open to an adjustment if they get brand new hardwood flooring or if they get a new Baby or something like that. Is that is that correct? Is that? Oh In Tahoe hey, Tom get a new dog over there. We're gonna start charging you more for all that pet Actually, that's uh part of the new security team over at castle keepers Nice are you at work or are you at home? I'm at home. I I I thought I should like lock them up in the uh back Back area at night. No No, you shouldn't You can see molly like putting the fear of god and be of all good in you. No No, no, I can't actually So many questions here, I just don't know where to go. I just Real real quick uh Chris did you focus on clients when you went from teams to solos to focus on your clients? As in focus on the benefit to Oh, sure. This was um, I think that was Robin's question. Wasn't it? Did you refocus on your friend? Robin's question Did you really focus on your clients when you went from teams to solos? Yeah, I think it provides a better service It provides a more detailed clean to our clients in my experience um However, we did see how far we could push clients We did a lot of testing and and we did hit a point where I think we pushed too far We made too many changes too quickly and and had to Had to let off. We didn't have to backtrack. We didn't have to do anything. Just let off a little bit um, we went solo we changed our dates and times um Your days you changed some people's days some people who's cleaning Yeah, and and then we started these rate adjustments immediately after that too, right And I think the thought was well, we're providing you a better service now Um, we're providing you a more consistent service now that we have you scheduled correctly So now we can charge you more and for a lot of clients that work as long as we communicated that properly And and it was the change that they're looking for You know the issues that we ran into are the people who hired a A team company because they wanted us out of their home quickly And now that's not that's that's not something that we can do So, you know that that was an unfortunate side effect of this is that those clients we we can't deliver for Yeah, we ran into that problem too. That was you know, and it was unanticipated how I mean I I personally should have been able to figure that out We had a lot more clients that were in the home when we when we were You know Doing it initially it didn't matter to the clients whether it was team or solo Because they weren't home, but during covet everybody was home and it did make a really big difference That's yeah, yeah I think now is is kind of when we're seeing that too It was like during the pandemic everybody understood and said yeah, I get it You don't send a bunch of people at my house Now people are you know relaxing and That's that's kind of when it's coming out. Are you guys going back to two people? Can you send two people back and We're seeing the answer about the delta variant. Have you gotten your booster shot yet? Milk this thing for as long as you can Chris Leslie wants to know if you're charging by the job Yes, yeah, we charge by the job Charging by the job, but also breaking it down for how much you're actually making per hour so every week At the end of the day internally. We're we're looking at hourly rates, right? Trust the board, but we are selling by the job Um, Liz you're saying that you're running between 50 75 an hour depending on the job the client and the tasks So I've heard of between the job and the client. What are the tasks that you might charge more or less for? I'm curious about that. I haven't heard that in a while unless it's maybe something to do with Um, a different, you know, like carpet cleaning or something. Let us let us know about that fill us in a little bit Composure that email is critical True true story right there Leslie communication if it's not worded correctly boy, you can turn people off That's very real Recharged by the job not the hour and hour minimum. Yep. Same thing Hey Linda, I didn't even see you on there just now seeing you. I'm trying to catch up with all of the stuff Why can't I see the questions trying to catch up? Amy my guess is you can't see all the questions because they're come into us from a lot of different groups So you can only see the questions that are actually posted in the group you're in. That's right, right Tom That is correct because we stream this on like a half a dozen different pages and youtube But not so you're only going to see the questions that are on the particular page that that you're watching Oh, Andrea asking for approval. There you go a good little tip right there, right? I like that too, especially if you're Credit cards It's harder if you're taking checks because you actually have to get their approval in one way or another Either write the check for a larger quantity or they respond something but yeah, if you're taking checks It's much more difficult to raise rates This is an interesting observation from from Leslie about the sense of ownership of solos as opposed to You know two people teams or more. Have you found that to be the case chris? Yes, yeah, definitely Trying to think back to teams and I feel like sometimes I'd almost fight over the ownership Oh, yeah, I agree and they would be a little bit Backed by me snarky about it, right? They they do as well Yep All right, let's see what else we have on here. I don't like it walk there Our customers that will pay that fee and be happy. Yeah, that's true right now It is the case where people are paying a lot more money for their cleaning than they have in the past Leslie saying very few choices and movie platform lots of choices for cleaning Yes, I would Um I would agree with that a lot more choices for cleaning But in the category that you're looking for there. Hopefully there are fewer Which is the same thing with Movie choices, right in the specific like there are a lot of places to get your movies the little apps that pop up when you're Open up your tv screen. There's so many of them But hulu is different than netflix is different than pbs is did they're all different So having finding a way to Um, what's the word I want? Differentiate. Yeah, differentiate. Thanks Tom finding a way to differentiate yourself from those other cleaning companies Is going to be important just like the the movie companies. I think Passing on a few to come. Yeah careful you guys also um I saw somebody is saying that they add the credit card fees on to the customer It's okay to have your customers pay your credit card fees, but it's not allowed. It's not Well, I don't know if this has changed a year ago It was not legal to charge somebody the actual the credit card fees so Um to to say that i'm i'm charging you these credit card fees Um, I know that in my area taco time got into some really big trouble around that for doing that So if you are going to do that then be careful how you go about doing that Um, let's see. What else do we got on here? We got more questions. We are running out of time quick Um, I know Leslie where you located? Okay Oh, here we go Leslie's got her her letter on here It's too big to put in the box there isn't it does it fit? oops I think that was me sharing that I was trying to get it be able to see if I could get the whole thing I'm seeing letters like this all over town in in denver, you know posted on on the front door of a restaurant You know another thing we have everywhere is auto gratuity Every restaurant I walk into has a 20 tip added and you don't have an option It's 20 percent or you know, maybe 25 percent Wow, really? I don't know if we have that here. Do you have that in south carolina tom? Oh tom's muted. We can't hear tom. It seems to be scaling back a little bit now I was looking up your credit card fee question I've got a really awesome answer to it, but I missed what you guys were doing. So what did I miss? All right. No, that's okay So chris was saying I can't wait to hear your credit card fee thing But chris was saying that where he is There are he's seen a lot of this type of stuff on doors, etc But one of the things he's running into is like at restaurants. There's an auto Gratuity added on 20 percent maybe even 25 percent automatic gratuity because people can't You know companies can't keep employees and they need to get them paid more So they're making sure that that Are you finding that aware of that around here? But then again, I don't get out much either So if it was happening, I wouldn't be one of the first people to know about it Yeah, and I'll say that was maybe that was three months ago because for the past three months I haven't been getting out either. So Because you got a new baby Don't worry. You're gonna start getting back out again. Don't have to worry Um, oh wow, it's hot. Okay. Yeah where liz is. You want to hear about the credit card fees before we go? Yeah, that'd be awesome I As with a lot of this stuff a lot of it depends You know, you've got credit card fees. You've got Convenience fees. You've got surcharges minimum purchase requirements A lot of it depends on on on how you word it the purpose behind it You have to know what your if it's a debit card or prepaid card You can't do surcharges for instance If you want to do convenience fees That isn't so much a legal thing as it is an agreement you have with the merchant account provider and each credit card Kind of has different roles. So you really kind of have to look at which credit cards are you're going on. So it's it's complicated Well, look below tom. There's 10 states that you can't Prohibit credit card surcharges Colorado Or convenience fees Texas Hey, look, I'm I'm good now Which is you see texas in oklahoma Kind of weird that you see colorado california texas Those don't go together No No, i'm gonna i'll take this link and i'll drop it in Yeah, I guess I guess the the the the real answer is Don't automatically assume you can but don't automatically assume you can you don't want to do a local research maybe um Your cpa your local attorney one of your trust professional advisors to get a little more guidance as to how it's done What you don't want to just go on facebook and see what's posted there Or you can post something in a facebook group and ask there No, we we highly recommend that you don't use Being sarcastic Yes All right, well chris, do you have any last minute advice for us? We got one last second one last minute here anything that you think that people should really focus on to be able to um Do better One thing I mean that that's what I try as hard as I can to just focus on one Thing at a time in my in my business and and right now it's increasing that efficiency So that's a goal and all of the activities that that we're doing over here are focused and centered around that and We're making it happen Nice. Yeah That's great. That's that's my advice All right Hey, linda. Yep. Glad you like the topic today. Hopefully you could hear us through all our craziness and me being all a lot The uh castle keeper security team, you know getting a bit rowdy It is top of the hour chris. This is good stuff and it was it was you know We do this a lot and sometimes we get good stuff. Sometimes we get good stuff and it's actually fun too And I think that we had a little bit of both of those today, so Tom what's coming up on wednesday? We're going to be here and we've got a couple of just I'm just gonna pop it up and I forgot and I was looking at that earlier and Aja holiday and chad henley are going to be here Nice. All right, so Are aja and chad going to be talking about katie's topic? I don't know Hopefully you put you think about I don't know how this is gonna work because you put chad and aja together in a discussion Listen Yeah, I can't wait to see how that goes. All right. Well, aja is newly back from vacation So she's probably going to be more laid back and chill than than normal. We'll see But that's the plan. So we'll be here wednesday Five years turn it'll be fine. We'll see what happens until then take care. See you wednesday. Bye. Bye. Thanks y'all