 Hey, good afternoon everybody, Tom Stewart here Liz Trotter's Efforting to join us and we've got Matt Ricketts as our special guest here today. This is smart business moves How are you doing Matt? I'm good. It's been a party a busy week, and it's Monday Yeah, I feel like I feel like I've been at this longer than just one day I don't know why you know, maybe I eat too much for Easter dinner You know too many chocolate eggs. I don't know so I'll tell you a funny story So when I was in the airlines the you know the day that has the most call-out many day of the year It's not what you think. It's not Christmas it's not it's the day after Super Bowl and it's these weekends where we're trying to jam all this stuff Into into the weekend, and then we're like like Monday comes and we're just like not ready for work I think that's kind of part of it It's like you know a little bit of a hangover of the holiday like you know just you know My kids were out playing till nine o'clock with neighbors last night and Let them all sleep in but I'm tired from it all like it's like it was a lot had you know family over you know until six or seven and And the kids all played with all the neighbors and stuff till late. So yeah a little bit of that You know a lot of things keep up in there too, you know and we've been busy Dealing off a lot of things on a lot of fronts made central's been keeping us busy trying to clean a few alms and Fit smart business moves in here every day the day goes by fast It made central's been fun. It's You know it doesn't know that's just kind of watching the show I sort of I joined Tom on the main central team about Quite three weeks and it'll be three weeks on Wednesday or Thursday of this week, you know So it felt like it's longer seems longer, doesn't it? Yeah, we've we've accomplished a lot in that period of time like we've done and we're working on a lot of big projects that are Coming all together and I'm trying to get up to speed on all the things. They're already doing So it's it's pretty it's pretty exciting time for the software. I think Some really huge features work. We're kind of what would you want to call it? Can we say made central 2.0's Horizon that's what it is made central 2.0 is about to launch in the next, you know Little bit what we've got it in beta mode for users to just start playing around with and we're Just, you know, you know tying everything together so it all works seamlessly with art would already exist But we're overlaying a huge new piece of functionality that is going to be Changing is thrown around a lot. I mean there's movies called game changers But it's it's gonna allow us to continue to build the framework for made central for the future for things that Tom has talked about like You know Tom uses some big words, but I like to bring it down a little bit Like, you know, you go to get your haircut and the lady that's the most expensive has the most experience the most certifications And you and you want to get on her schedule on Friday at five you pay more for that It's you know, it's variable pricing Tom talks about that a lot with you know, you know Somebody wants Friday at five with your best cleaner. We want to say yes to those things So we're building all the code to build that in for the future. It's it's We're building code for variable pricing and for some really exciting things to allow you to again increased profits Say yes to customers and then deliver on those promises. It's really, you know It's one thing to be able to say you can do those things It's a whole nother thing to be able to execute and have the tools to do that and to like deliver those promises So made central is all about delivering on that and that's what's exciting. It's it's it's common It's it's right around the corner for this Yeah, and you know a lot of it is built around the idea of Collecting the data you need in order to produce the the views and the reports that you need in order to You know make the decisions that you need to make within your business to get get the desirable outcomes you know, you don't want to be Successful just by being lucky you want to be able to do it in a predictable way And if you have the numbers you can do that and that's what we're doing and you know The world is kind of changing too and that's just kind of tied into what we're going to be talking about today And Liz is bouncing in and out. I hope she's able to make it. Hey, Danique. Good to see you today We're going to be talking about you know kind of ticks trips been a long day Tricks and tips on work force development and there's a lot of different dimensions that I but I think most of us in the house Cleaning world. Hey Stephanie. How are you doing today? I haven't seen you in a while We're we're we're we're supply constraint. We have labor issues. We just you know, I don't know I don't know anybody that's telling me that they've got all the labor that they need qualified work force to you Matt No, we're starting to see we're starting to see it kind of rebalance a little bit like we I mean We had four or five good applicants show up for interviews today via zoom or for we's Google meet for interviews So, um You know it's starting to kind of turn the tide. I felt like they're for like a couple weeks there Nobody was showing up for interviews like But I have a very stable workforce, but I definitely wish I had more people You know, I wish I had five or ten more people than I have right now because I could sell that work for sure You've got you've got on that demand. Yeah, I think everybody does or mostly everybody So what are the techniques, you know, what do we do about that? I mean, you know part of it's you know financial and you know how we price and part of it is You know what type of employer are we and the whole everything from recruiting to you know building a culture Where where you reduce turnover? There's so many different moving parts to this but It's all about, you know having the information you need to make the good decisions to deal Deal within a changing marketplace and the competitive forces within the industry Are changing and and we're gonna have to change with it. No nobody's really really happy with the labor market And it's uh, you know, it's not gonna go back to the way it was I think it's a simple thing. So we're gonna have to adapt as business owners to to Take that change and turn it into an opportunity Yeah, and I I definitely see, you know Some costs of direct labor going up and you know, I dug into made central and was looking at my numbers And I'm at forty two point six with my manager. So mine's pretty well under control and direct labor is just you know before taxes before any benefits just like You know hourly plus any bonuses plus any Pto or things like that. So that's just like that's what I consider direct labor Like is that basically what you would would call it would be just the cost before taxes insurance and any other In any other variable cost of delivering the service is what I call direct labor. Yeah minus staying You know nice with management at about forty two point six And I'm really happy with that with with that and I I've raised prices recently And because it was almost at forty four percent and I went ahead and raised prices and that really helped get that in line With what I wanted to be I think you just have to again You have to manage top-line revenue and really, you know looking at making sure that your pricing structure is right in this environment We just had a weekly customer come back who was pre-covid was 150 per week And he re-signed up on our website for weekly service How much more do you think he was willing to pay? He used to pay 150 150 weekly He was 175 and he self-managed the booking himself Litten bad and I and came back at you know, $25 extra per cleaning visit an extra hundred dollars a month I mean, that's you know, that's a significant price increase Yeah, but there's a ton of money floating around out there And I think the marketplace is becoming accustomed to the fact that we're going to see inflation and wage inflation especially for hourly hire tape workers type of stuff that we do type of people we hire I think most Most consumers kind of get that and You know you you go out to a restaurant you just you know go to a fast-food place You're starting to see prices go up pretty sharp play Yeah, I definitely agree and one other one other key metric that I really keep track of is what my You know what my average wage is because we pay a bit of a we have a guarantee But we also we also bump their pay wage up with the difference mission So just imagine that we're commission pay and then also what their tips via credit card average out to so the last few weeks my My my average technicians making 1861 per hour with with tips You know, so I'm able to speak to the fact that we're very competitive with wages and things like that But you're right. It's gonna have to again. I think we'll probably see one more five or six percent bump this year I plan on raising my my base pay. It's a 15 by June. So You know, I'm just getting up the prices of new new customers to support that and I've already even though my clients Just had a price increase. I've already kind of put it in their head that probably this fall We'll probably anticipate another But you know 5% price increase. Yeah, the idea doing more than one price increase a year I guess really needs to be on the table So if you're considering doing a price increase now if you have it now is a really good time to do it And you might want to take it as an opportunity to explain What's happening in the labor market and you're doing everything that you can to control costs? But this might not be the only one you have this year No, I've already basically I've already basically put it on the table that there will be a second price increase Around around September, so that's a really busy time for us. So I'll feel very confident Putting another this is always a very busy time for us and then September is gonna be another very busy time for us So those are two periods that Historically have been busy You know, I'm not alone in this but we've we added like we sold like over 55 recurring customers And we netted like 37 recurring customers last month and Of those recurring customers. I like to look at how many weeks those filled We filled about 16 weekly slots, which means we needed to hire You know two people just to manage to just to manage that growth And this is all kind of based on KPI models that I learned, you know Long time ago and then we're reinforced by things that you teach with your foundation's model and things like that This is all You know, this is all but but my forecasting my projections are is that I need to be hiring and netting to two new employees For the rest of the year to just you know just to manage what we have and and to grow so I need to net two people For the rest of the year So Denise asking a question. I'm gonna ask her to elaborate. She wants to know how you do that with current clients I presume she's talking about Two rate increases in a year, but if you could expand on that a little bit while she's responding Susan wants to know Do you pay staff hourly? So Susan I'll start with yours because it's the easiest and yet it's a little more complicated. So I pay my staff hourly and yet we also track commission. So we track commission at about 38% so Our software which has made central tracks both and what we do is is if they have if they made more with commission we pay the difference as a bonus and we call it job share and It can be very significant for people and and so That's so that's how we look at look at their pay We basically look at you can't go lower We guarantee your your hourly minimum and we pay you that from the time you clock in to the time you clock out We guarantee that so if somebody's one of us for a while their their minimum guarantee might be $16-$17-$18 an hour and that's what they get for vacation time and things like that But that's but that's all they get they don't get their job share for their paid time off and all So a little bit complicated, but it's kind of a mix between hourly and commission and I like it because If somebody It's it's a lever that I can control that says look if you're not hitting your quality goals I'm not going to pay you your commission. I'm gonna you're gonna just get your hourly And it also makes sure that I always hit Labor standards and things like that for hourly, you know, none of us are gonna be anywhere near minimum wage unless that jumps up a lot here in the future, you know in the near term, but it's just It's a little bit overly complicated, but we can figure it out really quickly with our software software or Tom software that I use made central, which I'm now part of the team People software is a long list of people help us You know bad years and make it better But the main central the main central solution is that it basically it's tracking all those things and it pulls it into a report And then you can you can pay your people via job ticket via hourly via However, you want to get to the answer of how you want to pay people and I use a couple of those answers to get me there and then To me what I know about how you do rate increases like twice in a year Yeah, so this is another thing about made central is is that since you're tracking all of this data You know which clients are taking you too long to clean which clients are You know, and we you know what here's what I'm gonna do I'm gonna set up a demo day in it if you have if you're not using the software I'm gonna do a group demo at some point next week and we can kind of look over some of these big features So you can visualize it but just imagine this and in what probably takes you hours and hours And if you're a really big company, you know, maybe hundreds of hours of office hours to do We can run a report and tells us if we're hitting our target hours If there's a variance from that and then it normalizes it for, you know Your technicians that are fast and are slow and what I mean by normalizes it is Let's say you have a client that you know your schedule three hours, but it's taking everybody for well Normally how we solve that in this industry is we send super fast Susie to that house and she gets it done in three hours And so while our problem solved we we're cleaning the house in three hours and hitting our budget However super fast Susie is making less money than she deserves because she's working harder doing, you know Doing all the crappiest houses that you have Please Because you're not normalizing your cleaning hours so so made central helps figure out those those jobs that aren't normalized and it Plays that in this report. Anyway, you can go through it and you know Check a few check a few boxes and then within within a few clicks You can apply a 5% or 10% rate increase or or you can set it on a certain number of labor hour Or a labor hour number. This is all overly complicated for just talking through What this mad at the beginning of the year we went through we kind of did a deep dive into KPIs and We built a workbook over over I don't know six weeks or so maybe longer that One of the things that we built was how to normalize time So if you have to capture you everybody's work day the time work times and job times you can do that for all your technicians and for all your recurring service sites and You know you just use the term game changer me and I you know, I don't know but you can definitely Use that to do rate increases really easy and with confidence And so yeah, and so you can and you can identify people that have like what I usually do is I sort out the people have big variants this first And if you have a big variance Those are what I really look at first and make sure there's a problem And then Stephanie. Yeah, we could we could do a demo at some point But as far as comparison to make central service has great reports It's just what do you do with that? Like there's tons of data like right service autopilot gives you tons of data points But it doesn't it's not built for industry. It's not putting them out in a fashion that That's very actionable. So the thought process behind made central is is creating dashboards Right now and tools that you can make really quick decisions But the future is in town You can tell me if I'm you know speaking to this correctly is that we're going to create forecasting tools that they use all that data and again one click one click actions that can you know help you make more money with just you know looking at your KPIs and Action on them to help you, you know fix problems or or Fill gaps in your schedule or wherever, you know, wherever there's an issue You know, there's a difference between what they call field service Software which is scheduling software or CRM for a broad array of home services You can use it for house cleaning, but you can also use it for carpet cleaning or window cleaning or you know land mow and blow landscaping and The logistical requirements the business requirements between those various industries are unique and different especially when it comes to house cleaning You know your house cleaning clients care what day you show up. They care what time you show out They care who comes and you know actually performs the work You need a lot of detailed information about inside of the home. You have the key to the home, you know Most of those other services It's just a generic service as long as you show long as long as your grass is cut You know how all that happens you're kind of it's kind of transparent So there's a lot of unique things about the house cleaning industry So a software platform that's built for that unique vertical offers a lot of advantages And you know talking about the rate increases like like like we're discussing here a lot of that logic really doesn't even apply to some of these Other industries no she and then her she elaborates. She's talking about accuracy too And yes, if you're using the software properly to record jobs as they happen So this is a this is a compliance and you know training thing with your staff But if you are using the software properly, right like your technicians are clocking in for the for the day Start the day and you're getting all of their clock in and clock out time for the day That's accurate because they use the proper and you can adjust it and make corrections But even more importantly is when they go to a house and they check in and they start at that house And they check out is all that number accurate And then there's also GPS data that if you really you know want to dive in even deeper You can you can turn that on and Double-check that accuracy of that data Reporting I mean, I think it's really funny and this isn't really on topic for what we want to talk today But a lot of reporting in other softwares can't even tell you how many customers you have or how many service sets you have Because they're they're counting it in a different way than what we count it for maid service And so it's not that it's it's not that easy to count what a what a customer is inmates in mazes Me and Tom went around on this for like a day and like tried to determine. What's the maids? What's a customer right? What's a recurring customer? And it was there was a little bit of nuance to determining that and that's why there's often time simple as you would say there's a lot of Different definitions for what a customer is Yeah Like what if they're only have three recurring costs like three recurrences on your schedule and they drop off? Should they be counted as a recurring customer at that point? yeah, there was a lot of nuance that went into the discussion of how we count a recurring service set and So yeah, I feel like we saw a few years ago when we really deep-dived into it and like and You know we a lot there was a lot of us involved in that room that we're talking about what's a service that what's important You know stuff. He's talking about a new pay plan is struggling with accurate info And again, this gets to the work measurement You know if you have a software package that's capturing the work day and then How many homes are being cleaned in the actual time out of that work day spent cleaning the home versus? Looking out of a windshield or in a meeting or something You've got the data you need to develop a pay plan You know you have to do some market research and figure out what your target hourly rate is And if you want to do like job ticket hour or if you want to do commission then, you know This is metric we use that we call efficiency Which is the amount of time in the day on average that spent cleaning homes actually generating revenue divided by the amount of time On the clock which includes drive time and and any time spent at the office and If you want somebody to be making, you know $15 an hour and you want to pay job ticket hour And if you know your efficiency is 75 percent then you take $15 an hour and divide it by point seven five And I don't know what that number is I should but it's been a long day That would be what you be paying per hour while they're in the home for instance But you need to know what that efficiency number is and You know this you know, hopefully you've got software that gives you that yeah, let me Let me kind of share for a second And then I think Stephanie would probably benefit from the demo of made central so we can talk on some other topics But I'm going to share my screen for just a second if Tom can You've got control of that you should have something in the tray there that All right, so go ahead and put it. Do you see it now? You see my shirt. No, you're not up yet. Okay here. Go ahead and Okay, so Stephanie like if you are tracking everything correctly Do you see the report that I'm on here? I'm on a this is a payroll. We can see it Okay, let's go to last week because this is still pending still pending job. Let's go back a couple weeks We might not even have this week closed out yet But at least we'll have a pretty good this this will be data. We're going to be using to Get ready to do our payroll, but there's so there's a lot of information on this report So like total total job hours Versus a loud hours, right? This is just this is just cleaning hours and then this is non-productive time, right? So if you pay your people differently for Non-productive time like drive time at office time that's being tracked that's being tracked accurately, right? Total clock hours commission Additional pay which would be tips I believe or is that gonna be another There might be a field for here we go tips so tips that came in via credit card We track our sick and overtime through here So it just I mean a ton of data is being tracked in our system But what I really love is to be at the end of the day be able to go to the bottom of the week and be like What is my average technician making per week? about $18 and 77 cents per hour and You know, this is That's a big number to be able to say versus if we were to say without the tips adds quite a bit And that's credit card tips. I don't know what they're getting in cash tips But you know, this is this is a big number, you know, I I can say that I'm paying my people a living wage I don't You know get defensive if anyone ever asks what my people make I'm like now They average up, you know about 18 70 an hour is what we average up and I can pull that data and back it up in the You know the beat of a you know, just really quickly pull that data So this is what's measured when you're when you're using oh go ahead and kill that share. I'll stop sharing When you're when you're measuring all that so Stephanie I think Probably would be beneficial at some point. You can just go to made central and schedule a demo When we keep my go through that in a little bit more detail and see if there's a fit there for you Right, yeah I guess we're calling audible on that but we love talking about me central anybody wants to talk about it Well, well into doing. Yeah, no, but it all goes into what we're talking about Which is basically how do you how do you get the most out of you know out of your your employees right now to get to get To get what you need from your customers So it really and this is all related right if you pay your employees more You're gonna have happier customers stay with you longer that are worth more money to your customer but you can charge probably charge more for and And they're gonna make more money for you in other ways because they stay longer Which means you can spend more money on advertising because there's less turnover, you know of customers and this is where it's going I mean, this is kind of the part that a year from now We're talking about some things that are gonna be better that are happening. It's been happening a year from now It's gonna be obvious because it's been happening for a long time But we're gonna have to pay more and people are talking about minimum wage minimum wages are relevant We're gonna have to even if it's $15 an hour I mean, it's gonna be different some some parts of the country But for a lot of parts of the country, even if it's you know, 725 an hour We're gonna have to be paying twice that in order to be competitive Yeah, I don't think the status quo of 12 or $13 an hour even that looked good men 12 13 bucks an hour I could hire people all day long two three years ago Even 14 is a little tough right now is in our advertiser. That's you know, but you know, it really doesn't You can afford to pay more if your people are worth more and your people are worth more It's a combination of things. It's not just logistics. It's not just scheduling I mean the numbers are necessary, but it's not sufficient. You still have to you know I have a good hiring and onboarding process You have to you know invest in the proper training and have the right culture and environment So, you know, people want to work for your business But you know, certainly good logistics as part of it because you know People want to be spending their day being productive and actually making money as opposed to driving around and you've got the ability to Have the tools in place to get your customers behave You need the way you need them to and then your employees to do what you need them to do that You got the same people going back to the same homes all the time and that makes everybody happy We have we have a friend that that's the primary measurement of how he measures scheduling success is how Often the exact same thing happens over again like scheduling predictability scheduling reliability And and so any schedule changes or any any changes in people's schedules he notes that as a negative because it's a negative for both the customer and the employee I I'll tell you this man our employees love predictability as much as the customers do and so when we can give them the same customer base And I see that over and over again That I know there are companies that believe in rotating and all that stuff, but From my own experience, I believe as well that actually the employees actually benefit when they have the same customers And see the same people more often wouldn't you argue? I mean, it's no argument It's a fact that you know, they got local knowledge at that point when they're familiar with the home I'm familiar with the customer and They're more productive which means they're generating more revenue per hour So the presumption and a lot of this is that you have some type of Pay-for-performance system commission or job ticket hour in which case, you know all stakeholders win by helping your Workforce your cleaning professionals journey more revenue per hour This is a book that I've shared in the past But I think I'll share it again because it's worth thinking about the whole premise of it is you can pay people more if you help them be worth more and There's a lot that we can do to make that happen and There was a time when it was an option and if you you know chose to go that path then, you know Maybe it was a competitive advantage, but I don't think it's an option anymore I think it's a necessity and if we don't make better jobs that we can pay better So we're just not going to be competitive because there's too many other people competing for that same workforce that they're gonna be paying more Yeah, so It's kind of a it's kind of a mindset too So I posted something that made central group and I'd love if you guys would all comment on that post and tell me about If you feel like if you know have a scarcity my mindset about About you know if you spend money on people like you're afraid you're gonna get that money back and in return investment Or you have an abundance mindset where it's like, you know what I know I can pay my people more I know I can charge more, you know, I struggle with scarcity mindset myself sometimes about like, you know, if I you know Tom Tom thinks I'm crazy with how much I save and like He's like, you know, I'm very dead ever, you know a verse He's like you could be putting that money that you you know, you have sitting around to more work You know make some investments So I sometimes I think maybe I have a scarcity mindset with investing and things like that where I'm Very very risk averse and some things but with my own business Because I know that those dollars that I put out to better employees I mean, I have the numbers that show me that that those investments pay off. So Yeah, I think a lot of us have a scarcity mindset with with spending money sometimes and we're afraid, you know If we pay somebody we just can't afford to pay them that but the truth is if you can't afford to and then your competitor does Right You're in trouble that that's you know, it was good talent to you know, the person down the road doing the same thing as you Who figured out how to pay him more? Yeah, but You know at the end of the day, you know, we're going in a direction where it's a virtuous circle, you know We have to charge more Because we have to pay more but it's not as simple as that we need to make sure that you know The labor hours that we're paying for being as productive as they can be Which gets into logistics Your customers are going to be happier and it's not about I mean within balance of reasonability The market is right for for rate increases because people are paying more for gasoline They're paying more for building supplies. They're paying more for for food You know for people haven't dined out and for a lot of people, you know Dining out has been a rare occurrence, but when they start stepping back out there They're going to see that the prices are quite a bit different I'm thinking about an eye over over higher rates for for what it is that we're doing so you're building a better Business at the same time. So all three stakeholders when Yeah, I look at it What what can you even charge 40 or $50 for a labor hour in at this point? I mean, there's nothing you hire anyone to do any kind of labor for you at this point and You hire a plumber through a professional company. That's a hundred fifty dollars a labor hour That's a three times better return on human capital than we're able to get On one person's hour and that's one example, right? So I don't think it's that far off in the foreseeable future that we bridge that gap to like $75 an hour and even get even to the hundred dollar an hour range in the next five years But that we really need to be there to I'm not saying you're gonna be able to do that tomorrow because there's enough people pushing that down that That's not happening tomorrow, but I don't think it's that far off for that unreasonable You know so the whole thing return on human capital and you're hard pressed to find an industry that Generates less per, you know hour than the house cleaning industry any any other home service pick your flavor You know, they're billing out, you know 1.5 2.5 3 times or more per labor hour than house cleaning And don't you think the paradigm to from a consumer standpoint just the whole political wins and everything else, you know, we're It's almost like an awakening in some regards that you know We got to do better as a country and produce, you know better jobs and sustainable wages And I mean there's a lot of different views on that But there's a growing segment of the marketplace that that wants us to pay more and is willing to pay more to Give us the ability to do that Yeah, I agree I mean, I think there was a time when you know, it was fashionable to be at the country club and talk about how little you paid your help. I Don't think that's very fashionable anymore at all. I think that would probably Be something that would look be looked down upon so I mean I can I can tell I remember conversations that my parents had with their friends at cocktail parties and things like that Where they were talking about the people that were helping them in their homes and You know, I definitely like I definitely would be embarrassed to ever have a conversation like that now I'm just thinking back about that time was different, you know And but it wasn't even that long ago that it was kind of a funny conversation But I don't want to say the whole woke thing and all that but I mean people are thinking about it differently They're thinking about they want to hire companies that have Responsible labor practices. They don't want to have they don't want to have employees They feel like aren't being paid well or being paid, you know below market wages and you know They would hire somebody else if that's the case and if it costs $10 more or $20 more cleaning I'm actually thinking there's a whole market of people that actually would feel better about that At least I feel like that's how it works for my company. Um, we've always marketed we even put it out on our website About what we what we've researched to be the The living wage in our region And um, you know our goal has been for a long time for our employees to make about $22 an hour Which would be the living wage in st. Louis, which has been hard to get to For a family now for an individual it's lower than that but for a family a living wage is closer to $22 you remember This goes back A number of years barbara erinwright wrote the book nickled and dined about Her personal experiences as a house cleaner and what a lousy job and how she was treated and the pay and everything else I think that's a paradigm that The demand for our service is as strong as it ever has been but but I don't think consumers Will I to feel like it? You know, they're contributing to to that paradigm. I think more and more consumers don't anyway I'll have to look at that book. I have not I've not read it Yeah, it doesn't I mean it doesn't speak well. It's not purely about the health cleaning industry. It's about a lot of you know, I don't really pay type jobs, but She uh, basically took jobs in these various roles and she worked for a franchise brand and clean homes for for A number of weeks and it's not very flattering for for our industry. That's an older book It looks like it was updated in 2011 the original one. I think was it was definitely older than that but it certainly Kind of explains where you know, I think that was old school and it's not It's it's not where where the market's going and I'm gonna get you what you need, which is more staff more, you know Um, really like I said, we're labor constrained. I think it's going to be like that probably for the next years if if this ever changes All things right it doesn't it doesn't always You know, it's not always going to be You know, you know roller coaster up But in the meantime, this is a great opportunity to look at increasing wages look at increasing You know what you charge your customers And in really getting to know you're you know getting to know what you can afford to to charge your customers I mean a lot of this is a lot of fear around what to charge customers Is because people are doing it in very formulaic ways. They don't really know um They don't really know what they're trying to achieve right like um, which is obviously to be able to pay themselves a certain amount at the end of the month, but um, I think I think they often try and they come up with a number and then hope it all works out Because they don't have enough good data, right? So so Stephanie was asking about you know, can you access this really accurate data? Yeah, if you have that then you can make better decisions about this stuff, which I think is a big big issue Yeah, I mean you don't want to you don't want to count on luck when you don't have to okay And we were having a discussion earlier today matt, you know, like publicly traded companies They have all the data and they know what to do with it They're professionally managed and they can predict from one quarter to the next You know how much revenue they're going to generate and what their profit's going to be And they're pretty good at it. You know every once in a while they miss If they miss more times than not it's because they Generate more revenue and more profit than they thought they would and the market rewards them by their stock going up Occasionally they miss on the low side in which case their stock goes down The important matter is, you know They've got the information they need to make that make the good decisions of the manager of business to get what they call predictable outcomes Yeah, I think that that's a big part of a big part of it And I use there's some there's some really great forecasting and and you know tools within within made central and others and other software has this too But I think you should every quarter I think for every upcoming quarter you should you should kind of get some basic numbers together that you want to hit like Obviously top line revenue is a big one, right? I've talked about efficiency. I think that's a big one Productivity would be would be another one that I like to to look at How close is my target labor hours to my actual like my target cleaning hours to my actual cleaning hours, right? I like to know how close I am and I actually like to be above. So if I'm not a not a hundred percent or above on productivity I actually start to Going on a few others do you have any I mean I can keep going You know we got spot like dashboard, which basically is a quarter over quarter You know metric where you set goals and then track your progress Throughout the quarter and compared to last quarter and look at what you're doing next quarter and the whole point is You don't have to count on luck. I mean Some things are probabilistic. You can't Control the labor market for instance You can't control the economy is a lot of things you can't control But if you've got good information you can make business decisions to get the best outcomes Given the competitive forces, sure Yeah, you know I'm measuring things like what my survey response scores are what my My survey average, you know, ag you know aggregate in aggregate is I mean all kinds of things on that on that dashboard That does help me predict pretty accurately. So so my goal I mean pre-covid my quarterly goal was closer to closer to five And right now I'm at I think I'm I think my quarterly goal is 450 right now So I'm looking to hit 450 which is you know still down 10 percent Um, you know from covet but but I I actually expect to hit that within A few thousand dollars one side or that of the other But you know we were talking earlier about your your your your payroll to revenue So, you know at that number you're like at 1.8 annually 1.8 million 1 percent's like 18,000 Dollars, so I mean that's not trivial amounts of money I want to share one other thing. I mean we'll talk about several things but before the hour gets away from us in all in the spirit of You know improving the return off your human capital arcs. He's doing something Unique unprecedented during this Continued period of time of unprecedented events and we're not done. I'm unprecedented. There'll be more ahead here in the weeks and months ahead they um Have wanted basically implemented the new uh promotional program for a limited time to make it easier for Cleaning businesses to train all their cleaning technicians at a really wacky affordable price They're beginning This month here purchase the program by april 30th and you can get four months of Training, excuse me four months to train all your your cleaning technicians So if you sign up in the month of april for pac And pay a flat rate of 500 dollars Then you will have the next four months to sign up all your cleaning technicians Once they're signed up they have a year to actually complete the course after that It doesn't take that long. They can do it in a day to take the phc program to be certified and recognized by the industry trade association as a certified cleaning professional and I mean matt you helped us put this program together. So You know, it's it's about professionalism. It's non prescriptive and it's all of the stuff that a cleaning professional needs in order to look at their job as a profession as opposed to a job and it all means That you know They're going to look at their job as being more meaningful that it that it matters and it looks like it would Make a big contribution towards returning where excuse me reducing turnover, which I put all my people through this You know, so Every one of my employees gets this plus additional Four hours of training that we have in our lms. So I mean before they even start cleaning homes. They've had 12 hours of video and online training and then That's before they even get an additional week of training with with the home trainer And then and then they get switched up to another trainer for another week I mean we put a lot of money into our people before they really are producing us Producing us and if you don't do that, you're going to put a lot of money In recruiting and training people who are just going to be going out the back door So you can spend the money this way or you can spend the money Hiring a dozen people to fill that one open position. Yeah, so I mean, this is an interesting. This is an interesting thing, right? Like The huge piece of that has it has a lot of costs to your business that are hard to hard to calculate But but I mean just imagine industry average I've heard I've heard anywhere from 180 to 250 percent is the industry average for turnover Let's say if you have a company with You know 50 employees that mean that might mean that you have 150 w2s would be what would that be 300 turnover? Would that be? I mean, I know companies that do that like, you know That that's easily that their that their turnover is 100 is you know is 200 percent 300 percent Oh, yeah If you if you can get your turnover down to 100 percent, right? So if you're a 50 employee company and you had 100 w2s for the year you're doing pretty good in our industry And so mine was 70 percent. I was a little embarrassed about that Last year but covid and all that stuff You know like really drove that up a little bit, but we've gotten that down to as low as 55 percent You know turnover in the last few years and and I never thought that was possible But part of it's paying better part of it's better training part of it's You know better feedback tools part of it is you know Part of it is made central where they can really see their schedule You know control their work day a little bit better You know it's software solutions. It's human interface solutions. It's pay It's it's hr. There's a lot. There's so much that goes into it But training you cannot underestimate the value of of spending more time on the front end with your people To reduce that back end number Yeah, I mean it's like a recipe. You know, there's a number of ingredients to get the get the desired outcome but You know the right type of of training to set the tone that You know, this is a profession. We're doing something important here and you're an important part of it rather than Here just you know Jump in there and start cleaning and do the best you can without even really understanding why or the value you're creating You're setting the stage to get less than than that than optimal outcomes and moving forward with The the the salary, you know requirements that we're going to have to meet in the future in order to be competitive to build the Workforce that we're going to need in order to take advantage of the demand that we're going to have Requires this is a necessary ingredient And and in the recipe Just like the logistics that matt was showing you inside of Made central whatever means that you're doing it You need to be measuring your outcomes and making sure that you're generating as much revenue off of every cleaning technician As you can every day Yeah Yeah, I mean i'm looking at everything at this point I'm looking at commercial jobs that I thought for years were great, but when I really look at them I mean I can't pay those people as well as like I can for you know the residential side of things so Do I free those people up and like put them on where all the demand is right now and just Ties with some of these commercial jobs if they can't if they can't afford to pay more I mean I just Commercial jobs, and I'm actually kind of I'm testing it out. I kind of drop us that would free three people up um And you know basically would free up about $10,000 a month of of what they're doing now to make about $15,000 a month Just because we're just turning away so much business Yeah So I mean that's kind of the day of the game, you know if we've that's probably part of the solution for for some of us We we are going to have more work then we're going to have cleaning professionals to service So we aren't charging enough. We need to figure out You know which jobs do we take that's going to maximize the return off of the labor that we have Yeah And you know raise your rates basically raise your rates and some people are going to say no and that's fine You'd rather lose those then lose the ones that are paying more because You're having to roll their jobs and you're not you know Meeting meeting meeting their needs because you're trying to do more work than than the way you've got people to handle Yeah, I think that's really important to think about right like You have to have a number in mind like so businesses when they do price increases of their products They have a they have a break even point where it's like. Yeah, we're gonna lose some customers when we do this And that's okay because we've freed up I mean, I so I just said that price increase I talked about I talked about that price increase tool We increased prices by about 47,000 47 thousand dollars for like half of our client list We didn't do it for everybody, but it was you know, there was a specific set we did And that was all within a few moments and I was like well if we lose 15 customers I break even on this And then if we do that frees us up for more jobs that are more profitable, you know I mean we do the calculation It's like for this rate increase that you're getting ready to do for these customers Your annual revenue will go up by this amount At that point, you know what your average revenue per recurring client is you can do the math real quick and Say well, you know I can afford to lose this particular number of recurring clients. I'm still making more money And yeah, you know with that report and made central is like I can identify clients that have huge variances and Make bigger price increases to them especially And if I lose them, it's really less of a problem because I mean, I'm not playing their home for free per se, but I'm certainly not making any money in my pocket like I'm paying my employees and other expenses And yeah, we're still we're still making gross profit But you know, it's cutting into my it's cutting into my net because it's just it's just too It's just too much It's just too much overhead on that job and it's It's kind of like your vanity metrics We spend too much time talking about how many customers we have or how many employees we have and it's not about How many homes you clean it's how much money you're making off of the homes that you do claim And that's another paradigm too, you know as The wages the wage pressures, you know hit us and we're having to fight harder to find people to clean And we're having to be more efficient and get a better return off the technicians. We have we're gonna have to pay more Bottom line is we're gonna have to know which homes we're making the most money off of and for the ones that we are You know, we need to make adjustments or you know, I mean those are not good customers at some point even, you know It's really gonna be tough sometimes because we always do look at those like how many customers we have metrics, but You know, there's companies that are smaller than me that make more but that make as much revenue as I do Um, they have you know, let's say I let's say I have 550 customers and they've got 400 They do 2 million dollars a year in sales and I do 2 million dollars a year in sales They're they're making more per customer because they focused more on their weekly and bi-weekly customers And I have all these monthly's and you know, even it can be things like shifting your mindset of selling more towards, you know higher Frequency as well as per job But there's there's a lot of ways to to look at that, you know as far as What can you do to serve us less customers and still make just as much money? Because that's actually that's actually an improvement as well because that's less personalities You have to manage less can go wrong, you know, you can you can have a company by by terms of metrics that we always like to measure And still make more money than other people If you build a graph with with all your customers on it and you start on one side with your most profitable customers And you just go across and you add the revenue up The graph the graph goes up pretty steep and then it gets flattened at the end it tips down a little bit And there's a handful of customers Hopefully just a handful that most of us have that we would actually have more money in the bank if we didn't even have them As customers and it doesn't mean that you fire them But it means that you go back and you either Adjust their bill rate or lower their scope of work or get them to change their schedule Do something to get them in a way where they're contributing to profit as well Yeah, I think you have to I don't think there's I don't think it's even a choice anymore those customers have to Play in a different sandbox as well like they can't have it what they had before It's you can still be in the business of saying yes But if they want friday at noon or friday at 8 30 with sally the business is saying yes is going to cost more than it did you know over the years there's been a lot of changes in the industry and You know, there's a time when everybody was doing estimates in house and you couldn't even do a quote over the phone That was just kind of a foreign idea and you know now we're booking, you know online and Marketing was getting a big yellow page ad and the internet wasn't even really a thing Um, well we're going through another sea change now with what's happening in the workforce and just the whole culture thing and the expectations of You know what good jobs are And you know, it's really an opportunity if we take it as such but We're gonna have to manage our companies different and the idea of defining successes How many how many customers we have or how many homes we claim? Isn't going to cut it I agree We're we're kind of getting to the top of the hour and I know that we've had some people here that have expressed You know an interest in you sharing some some more about made central if they want to get a hold of you matt Uh, you want to maybe show them on the website how they can go to your calendar? And put the time to talk to you. Yeah, let's just do a quick share again real quick and then we'll kind of wrap up here But uh, if you want to um, let me hit Share again here. Um, let's just go to made central.com here and uh It's central.com and we are working on a new website. So that's what I'm on here right now But so the current website I put some new tools here. So, um, you know I really quickly you can either get to me via chat or schedule demo either one of these will take you Uh through a process of getting onto my getting onto my calendar So you you put in your name company your email Comedy cleaning professionals you currently have it submit and that'll take you to a page where you can Schedule right onto my right on my calendar with available Available time and I will uh walk you through a demo and then if you're not really, you know ready for a You know one on one demo you're just still kind of looking you're not sure it's for you. Um, I'll probably Schedule a group A larger group demo Next week It's about an hour just to get through all the stuff that made central can do And sometimes if you have a lot of good questions you can take a little longer So I give you a lot of time on this if you're if you're really looking for for software Um, but you know at least an hour and then if you've got a lot of great questions We can go a little bit longer if you know, we're leading to a place where we're trying to You know solve something for you and get you into A place where you really understand what what made central can do for you Um I'm going to go ahead and just drop a link in the chat if if anybody wants to uh sign up So they could talk to you. Yeah, I do have a question here in the chat and And the answer is no We started getting questions taking us in other directions and the hour got away from us About sba incentives. I mean typically I mean what were we talking about is ppp2 and the um employee retention tax credit um Those programs I guess are pretty much Where they today the same places they they were uh, I guess at the beginning of the year right matt I will say this the erc Is something if you don't hit the financial Targets for I would still explore if if government orders Do potentially apply to you like if schools were closed in your area that actually is a government In order that actually affected you so even even those of you in iowa that didn't really get shut down or whatever But schools closed that's a government order that actually potentially affected your business your ability to do business There were there were size of gathering orders in st. Louis or wherever you're at So look into it a little deeper and maybe even look at some of these trading companies like synergy Or or profit tech or i'm sorry pay tech And a few other companies that do the screening for you higher tech. I'm sorry higher tech and Those would be some places I would maybe do some exploration because Those those years those erc credits are actually going to be more available Than I initially thought I think more people are going to be able to take advantage of those But I don't think we really have time for that today. We're at the last minute here No, I'm just wondering how would I find somebody? You mentioned synergy Yeah sy in ergi You have funny spelling synergy partners. They're they're one company that processes these And it's all negotiable people don't don't sign the first contract. They send you This is it's this is a service It's not like standard So be you know be prepared to negotiate a little bit like you know, it's never it's never bad to ask and maybe they say they've got So many customers right now. They don't they don't need to negotiate but um, you know, it's at least worth looking at Um I go ahead and drop their their link in the chat just know for starters. I mean this is one company that We do have some familiarity with Yeah, they're doing they're doing mine and and i'm getting I will say this more than ppp of these credits Just as a number or whatever your ppp is This has potential to be just as beneficial to your company and they do castle keepers as well Wow, we're at the top of the hour Matt thank you for for helping here today. I know wiz was efforting. She was having some Technical difficulties, but she'll be back tomorrow and we'll be here with smart business mode So you guys take care. We'll see you tomorrow at five. Thanks. Bye. Bye. I guess