 Hi, Tom Stewart here with Clean Business Today. Got my partner, Liz Trotter. Hi, everybody's doing well today. This is Wednesday, 325. Kind of feel like what we need to get into. This is day X of the coronavirus smart business. We need the big calendar. We need to go back and start getting a tally and we'll start keeping up with that. Like we've said before, there's a lot that's happening and it seems like a week's worth of information, if not a month's worth of information kind of comes at us in a 24-hour cycle. A lot of times there's so much information we have a hard time kind of sorting out what's real and what's happened and what we think's happened but maybe hasn't quite happened yet. I've seen a lot of information flying around out there on the presumption that a law has passed and the president has signed. Tell it like it is. Okay, let me tell it like it is, Liz. Let me tell it like it is, Tom. Tell it like it is. There has not been a $2 trillion stimulus package signed into law yet. As of a few minutes ago, the Senate hasn't even signed off on it yet. Even though Mitch McConnell, the- I was waving at Bridget, sorry, Tom. About 1.30 this morning, Mitch McConnell told the president they had a handshake deal in the Senate. Now stop and think about that for a minute. During this time of social distancing and elbow bumps and six feet, they have a handshake deal. This was 1.30 this morning on a bill that they agreed on to the Senate that was supposed to have been approved by now. They're still kind of wrangling with it a little bit and everybody is like, we know it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen today but it hasn't yet. Once the Senate signs off on it, that bill has to go back to the House of Representatives where they have to approve it. But there's Steny Horrier, the majority leader in the House made it clear that there's a 24 hour waiting period that everybody in the House hasn't even seen the text of this bill yet. So they need to get the text and they've got 24 hours to read it before they vote on it. So the earliest that's gonna happen is tomorrow afternoon going into evening and that's presuming that the Senate can get their stuff together today. So is it gonna happen? Wall Street thinks it is because on the stock market, went up again today by a material amount, first two day gains back to back in a long, long time. So investors think it's still solid but the devil's in the details on some of this. So it's hard to speak about a lot of the details because they're still haggling over what those details are. And even after it's signed into law presuming that it is, you still have a rather thin document that it's not until all the people that work in the bureaucracy write all the regulations that take a document that's maybe a dozen pages long and turn it into several thousand pages long while we know what's going on. One interesting piece of information though that the Federal Reserve is talking a little bit more about the money is that they're gonna be making available a small business and bullard the governor out of St. Louis. A lot of details, we don't need the weeds on all that but they're gonna be working through banks basically because they wanna get this money out quickly. And there's a lot of money coming and that's good stuff for us. There's probably a lot of regulation that's gonna be coming at us as employers that we're gonna need to know as well. And some things are changing. And yesterday we were talking about some of the changes in FMLA, Family Medical Leave Act. And next week we're going to be in an era where we have to pay people for that FMLA before we'd have to give people to take time off, unpaid and basically offer, make sure they would get their job back. And that was if you employed 50 or more people if you're below that you didn't even have to participate in that but now because it's our understanding regardless of how big you are, you have to participate in it unless you're able to get some exemption and we don't even really understand what those rules might look like at the moment. And we told you yesterday that it went into effect April 2nd. There's some information that came out today that says actually it's gonna be April 1st. So if you're making some decisions on, you know as an employer do am I gonna be laying people off so I wouldn't have to fall under that and possibly have to pay this FMLA and paid sick time too for that matter. That's another variation of all of that. It looks like you need to do that before April 1st, not April 2nd. And again, it's rapidly moving but I'm telling you like it is that's what we know now. Thanks Tom, I appreciate that. Also, what I heard you say is we do need to make sure that we have decided what we're going to do by the end of March. So by the end of Tuesday, right? Because Wednesday is April 1st. That's the best information we have. But it's changing day to day but I would go with that until we learn something different. Okay, sounds good. We got a few people on live over here without Bridget. As always, hi Bridget. And we've got Ruth, Natasha, let's see. Ruth says FYI, I am in New York where we end ISSA. Not exactly sure what you meant to write there, Ruth but maybe if I read just a little bit more, I'll find out. Natasha says hi from Northern Virginia and hi Natasha. And let's see, Ruth also says, believe residential cleaning is an essential business. Just got a call from Attorney General who is telling us we are in violation of the pause plan. Okay, and so that's interesting. We probably need a little bit more information about that. What that means, how that's impacted you and what it exactly means for you. Yeah, I can share some information on that. Tell me, it's just a second to find it. Hi, Krista. And Natasha, I won't miss your question. Don't worry about the FMLA less than 50. Look that in a sec. Yeah, this doesn't necessarily mean everybody and our government is going to agree with this but this is a document that ISSA put together based on their research and their legal interpretation of what's essential. They go through every state and tell you is there an executive order defining what's essential or not and if it is, what industries they deem to be essential, the way they read the regulation. And if I make it to New York, it's their assessment that it is an essential service. An essential service. I'm gonna take the link to this document that I'm sharing here because it's really on the ISSA's website. I just posted it in the comments. I don't know if that would be helpful or not but you could take that and print it out or send it in an email or whatever to whatever authorities you're having this discussion with and saying you're not making this up. You're in this trade association and their attorneys and their lobbyists are telling you that you are an essential service. I don't know if that's helpful or not Ruth but not worth a try for sure. Of course, I'm gonna go back to this for a second. For whatever it's worth for every state that has an executive order, they're saying yes across the board for every state. There's not a no on this. I came to the conclusion the other day that it's really hard for us to be objective, to be unbiased in whatever our opinions are on such matters because we have a vested interest in that answer being yes so it doesn't mean that it's not yes. It very well, it should be or could be but it's kind of like betting against your favorite football team. You might know or have a good reason to believe that they're not the best team but they're still your favorite football team. So our businesses are still our favorite team so to speak and regardless it's gonna be hard to bet against them. You know Tom, I was thinking about that. You said that earlier on another call and I was thinking about that and there are some businesses that were really hoping to be listed as non-essential because they thought that then they would have to close down and that everybody would be closing down and that that would be better for everyone. So I'm not sure that I'm agreeing with your approach there that we kind of have our thumb there. I mean, we might have it there but not necessarily always toward the yes. No, I think it could be either way. When that by me again, why would I want to be non-essential? So a couple of businesses that I know of were waiting for their governors to come on and say, hey, it's locked down and you're not essential because then they would be able to shut their businesses down without having to for a couple of weeks without having as many repercussions or feeling like they were the bad guys that they could look like they were following in order or really they felt like they needed to shut down. So it would be easier for them if the decision were made for them. Yeah, yeah. So I'm not sure that I'm buying your thumb on the scale thing, right? I mean, I think it kind of goes both ways there. But we do have a bunch of stuff over here and I already missed one. Let me see if I can scroll up. I said I wouldn't miss this one. Natasha said, what was it? I didn't forget your Natasha. All right, here we go. We don't have to pay our employees if we have less than 50, correct? I'm guessing you don't mean that. Yes, you do have to pay them no matter how many you have. I'm guessing that you met FMLA, that it doesn't apply to you. So I believe that what we said yesterday, I'm gonna say it, Tommy, you correct me. I believe that what I heard yesterday was everybody is still, it's including everybody from two to 500, but you can probably get an exemption if you are less than 25 employees. Is that accurate, Tommy? Am I close? You just told it like it is. It's unclear, it very clearly states. And again, the regulations that actually define all the fine print hasn't been written yet, hasn't been shared. So we really don't know exactly, but in the law, which is just the general concept, it says that there are provisions for waivers and companies can apply for waivers. But what the criteria is and how you do that and how you get a waiver and therefore you're entitled to one or not, that hasn't even been written yet. So we don't know exactly what it is, but there are people that are speculating that if you're under 25, it shouldn't be that hard to get one. Again, FMLA now, you don't qualify for that. You have to be over 50. So, maybe it'll be 50 when it's over. We just don't know at the moment. This is another one of those areas where there just is not a cut and dried answer. We would all really like to hear yes or no. And this is another one of those where it's just not there yet. We're just not cut and dried. Hey, Lisa. Hey, Natasha. Erin, how do we advise our employees who are scared to work? So that's a pretty big question. You wanna hit it first time? Because I can talk forever on this one. Yeah. I guess the only thing that I would share is you don't have to ask yourself, was this the job that they signed up for? I was on a discussion yesterday and Don Finn, a friend of mine, he's an attorney that does a lot of work with small businesses, made the point that if you're a first responder, if you work in the healthcare field, this is part of your job description. You're sick people. You have to be there and you have to do it. And if you aren't, then basically you're abandoning your job. It's in subordination in some ways. But if you're a residential cleaner, putting yourself at risk to do work for people that there's some concern that there might be some infectious disease that could be fatal, that's not part of your job description. And it was his assessment of somebody says, I don't feel that safe that we should accept that and not require them to do the work. For that being said, that doesn't specifically answer the question of what would you tell them, Liz? Okay, so first off, I have a little different situation and I'm talking about specifically for America Made in Olympia. When we hire someone, we do kind of scare them a little bit. We tell them that you're going to be going into homes and people will potentially, you can guarantee that you will be going into some homes where there are germs and pathogens out there. You don't know what they are and some of these things could be dangerous. Just bottom line, we don't know. But I promise you, you are going to encounter the flu virus and cold viruses and everything else. So we do tell people upfront that they are going to be encountering things that are dangerous, but that we think we have good processes in place to protect them for that. All right, so how I would advise employees outside of that, how I would advise employees who are scared to work is by listening really, really well to what they're afraid about and making them believe that I'm paying really, really close attention and listening. So I would actually really listen without interrupting, without telling them that any of their fears are wrong or bad, especially if they're saying things that are just not accurate and listening. And then afterwards telling them, asking them if they'd like to hear another side and then another position. And then I would maybe tell them another position of how it's reasonable to have fear, right? This is a scary time. There's scary stuff going on, but they are in a unique position to be in a safer job by far. And they're also in a position to be able to help the masses. That is, if you're cleaning, if you're not cleaning, then I probably wouldn't say that. But if you're going out and cleaning that how they have a unique opportunity to be part of the solution and that sometimes when we're afraid, it's smart to don't get away from whatever we're afraid of. And sometimes when we're afraid, it's smart to push past the fear and that I don't really know which one might be right for them in this situation, but that I'm happy to support them in whatever their decision was. That would be my message. I don't know that that'll work for you, but that's what I would probably say. All right, let's see, moving on here. Ruth says that's the state order to cease operations if not essential, yep. Yeah, Tom, any numbers yet on how many states have a, either a stay at home or, I mean, I guess they have all sorts of terminology for some version of quarantining. Any idea about states, how many? That's a good question. I'll go back to this document here that ISSA has on their website. Again, I put the link here in the comments, but if you look at this first column here, they refer to it as an executive order. And every executive order is a little bit different in terms of essential business and this is non-essential businesses, but wrapped up in that is some form or fashion of just telling people, if you don't need to leave your home, don't leave your home. And I haven't counted it, but the ones with the yeses here are states that have. So, I don't know, I'm sorry. And Oklahoma, this is as of yesterday, that's the date. And I know that Oklahoma now has one in place. I just don't know. Roughly half of them I guess, maybe a little more, just eyeballing it. And I'm guessing more than that because I know that Oklahoma is and didn't they just do something in Texas? I think I heard something about Texas. And I know local municipalities are as well, like the state of South Carolina has not, but the local mayors here in the Charleston area, there's several municipalities, cities all jammed up together here and they have separate mayors. They've all gotten together and they've basically issued their own decree encouraging people to, not essential businesses to curtail operation if we're people to stay at home. So we don't have an answer on that because again, just like who says this, Ruth. Yeah, the wording is ambiguous. There are some states where the wording is more clear. In Washington state, we actually have the term residential cleaning. Doesn't get much clearer than that. So, or actually it might be residential service, but within the cleaning context. And so it doesn't really get a lot clearer than that, but not all of them are like that. They're not clearly on the essential or not essential list. So you're gonna have to make your own call for sure on some of these. You can call people, you can ask. What I've also found is when you call the government to get some answers to these questions, that you're getting mixed answers. I know of two different answers that were given in the state of Colorado. So not really sure exactly how that whole thing is gonna play out either. I think that you are going to have some plausible deniability in some of these areas just because so many people are interpreting cleaning as essential services. So take that as you will or not, not an attorney over here. Just a little cleaning lady, just a little maid, that's all. All right, let's see what we have up here. I know we had a bunch of more questions that came in faster. If I understand correctly, if the state hasn't placed an executive order on us as essential or not, we should refer back to federal critical infrastructure list. That's my understanding. Is it yours, Chutang? Yes, yes. And Natasha, yes, we got that right. Yes, less than 25, she has 12 employees. Okay, you do have to pay them unless you file for an exemption, right? So Denise is giving a little bit more clarity on that, trying to tell it like it is. So you do have to pay them unless, and my guess is until, not just unless, but until you file for that exemption. Robin, from the DOL, small businesses with fewer than 50 employees may qualify, this was what Derek was pointing out yesterday, may qualify for exemption from the requirement to provide leave due to school closings or childcare and availability if the leave requirements would jeopardize the viability of the business of the going concern. So that's also very subjective. And you know, my concern is, or my concern and belief is in some cases, we're not gonna know until we're there and we're filing for it and we're keeping our fingers crossed. And if we file for it and if we initially don't get it, what's the process for appeal? I mean, we just don't know what we don't know yet. Or we do know what we don't know. We know a lot about what we don't know. We know that we don't know, that's what we know. That's about the only thing we know. Stephanie asked a good question. If I'm under 25 after layoffs, does that count? How's that gonna play out? The presumption would be, yeah. I mean, assuming that being under 25 is a magic number to get an exemption because that's where you are at the time that piece of legislation becomes law. When it comes into effect. So it seems like, yes, there's a good answer there. Unless, I mean, I haven't read it. I mean, because a lot of these details are gonna work out. Sometimes they have some type of callback or retroactive and is your head count as of some past. So, I mean, that's been done. I've seen that. So who, sorry. And they were talking about doing that for something else. I can't remember what it was, but going back to the first. Okay. So Natasha wants to know my business is open and they choose to stay home. So how do I need to pay them? So if your business is open and you've required them to come to work and they don't, it sounds to me like they quit. Is that what you're saying? That's kind of what it sounds like is that they quit unless, do they have a reason to not come to work? Like if it's related to one of, what is it, three things, right, if they don't have daycare, if they're caring for a sick relative or just have to be a relative or just somebody who's sick. I'm not sure how far removed they can be in their household maybe, they're caring for- Something, somebody in their household, yeah. Again, I'm not really sure. We don't have, we're not attorneys. We don't know every single detail of every single thing. We just know the bigger, broader strokes of what we've been reading, except for Tom does have some very specific stuff that he knows really well. I don't have those things. So I would say, what was the third thing? If they're actually sick themselves. Yeah, if they're sick themselves and then they can't go to work. So in those cases, what do they do in those cases, Tom? She says, how do I know? If assuming that this is April 1st or after all things being equal, they're entitled for compensation under the rules of the new sick leave act or paid FMLA, unless you're able to get an exemption and we don't, we kind of noodle that one around already. We don't know what qualifies and doesn't qualify for an exemption. If they don't, if they don't meet any one of those three criteria and they aren't coming to work, do you have to pay them? That gets a little messy too. If they say they aren't coming to work because they are afraid of getting that they're being exposed into a dangerous environment. Based on my understanding, I don't know if they're necessarily entitled to pay, but there probably be a bad idea to take any punitive measures against them. It would be, well, if you don't want to work, that's fine. You change your mind, you know where we are. But, and again, this is kind of stuff that we'll know more a week from now than we know now, but that would be my best guess as to what that would look like. So Robin, I think is asking just a slight tweak on the same question. If they refuse to work when work is available and they don't report, like they don't report to work, I'm assuming is what he means, then they are terminating their position. Agree? So here's my thinking. Yes, they're terminating their position. They're forfeiting it, but the government might say that was perfectly a reasonable thing for them to do. Here's the part that's gonna be sticky. And we're in uncharted waters here. We've used the term unprecedented event in the past and we don't have anything in our lifetime that we can look back on and say, well, the last time this happened, this is the way it was handled. If somebody refused to do work and their justification for doing it is that, you know, hey, I'm a house cleaner and I've got a job description. And if my employer doesn't give me one, I can go to the Department of Labor website and pull a generic one. And there's nothing on there about having to, you know, provide service in an environment where I am at a higher risk of contracting some type of deadly pathogen. And you can argue some of the finer points on that, but there's a concern that the legal system might side with that. And you might not be justified in terminating somebody for that. Maybe you are, I mean, I'm not an attorney for goodness sakes when you really get down to some of these questions, you need to talk to your attorney in your state and say, this is my situation. And a good attorney is gonna walk you through that. A good attorney is gonna say, I don't know either, but let me give you a couple of scenarios, several possible scenarios that can play out. And one of them, I suspect will be the scenario I just played for you. And at that point, you know, you need to be talking about what are the risks and what are the rationale for taking some action and, you know, you're, we're in a time when a lot of times we're picking between bad alternatives. And that could be one of those scenarios. Let's see, Robin, self-terminate. Yeah, again, Tom is speaking to that for sure. Linda says, I thought what was said yesterday, under 25 is automatic exempt, but under 50 you have to file for exemption. Am I confused? I'm not sure where you heard that. I think you might be talking about the town hall call with ISSA. I'm not sure about that. And I don't think Tom is either. I remember hearing someone say that, but I don't remember if it was the expert or if it was somebody asking the question, so much information going around and around and around that the information I'm operating under right now is that under 50 is possibly exempt possibly under 25 almost certainly, but either way you're still going to have to file for it and nobody knows how to file for it. Nobody knows how you're going to get it at this point. Yeah, again, this is rapidly changing and, you know, we're trying to keep up with it the best we can, but it's my understanding that nobody is automatically exempt unless you have more than five or new people. Yeah, yeah, those are the only people. And Karen says, lay them off and have them file an employment. What do you think about that Tom? Well, every situation is different. You know, in each state handles it differently. I mean, we've just gone through that exercise at our branches and castle keepers and we spent a good amount of time here over the last few days reaching out and talking to our team members and finding out how it's going and there's a whole lot of people that are being laid off right now and the states are like backlog processing the information they send you to a website that's down more than it's up. It's not a great and seamless solution that makes everybody feel good at the very least. And in some regards, we're growing more and more concerned that what's supposed to be happening and what you would hope would happen. And I guess what we were led to believe would happen isn't gonna happen nearly as fast as what we wanted it to. And the other piece about that, Karen, is make sure that you're thinking about at the end of the month, some of the stuff is gonna change around the FMLA requirements, et cetera and how that whole thing plays out. So there isn't just one answer. There isn't one quick, this is what everybody that has less than 25 employees should do for everybody that has less than 50. That's not the situation right now, unfortunately. And the bill that we talked about at the beginning of the call, the beginning of this discussion, two-trade dollar bill, which is still a bill, has provisions in it as currently written anyway that has money is going to businesses in the form of loans, but if they can demonstrate they didn't fire anybody for some period of time. Some part of that can be converted into a grant. And a loan is by definition some expectation you're gonna be paying that back at some point in time where a grant is money that's given to you by the government that you never have to give back. Money. But the devil's in the details on all of that in terms of what percentage of those monies could be turned into grants and is it actually washing out everybody's salary 100% and for what period of time and... And what is keeping them fully employed? How many of them? What if people just leave for any other random reason or the number of hours they're working is diminished because number of homes you're cleaning is less, is that gonna be considered not, who knows? Are you still going to have to pay them their full wage? Even if they're only working 12 hours a week to be able to get that, there's a lot of questions there too. For the same thing, it's kind of like, what do we do? What's a smart thing to do? The smart business move during the coronavirus. And without, you know, it's kind of like a card game where half the cards are flipped down and you're having to guess on what to do on only what little few cards you see and we won't really know until more of the cards are flipped over. I love that, Tom, you haven't used that one yet. That's a good one. I like it. I'm using that one. It is, right? Like playing poker. Oh no, until you see all the cards. And the other piece of it is this game might be one of those and I don't know what it's like. Sometimes the people don't have to show all the cards, right? They can just say, yep, and you never get to see them. I have a feeling that there's going to be a lot of that where we're just not going to see all the cards. We're gonna have to be okay with that. Karen says that she has contract or she was just relaying what others are doing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely, Karen. A lot of people are doing that. It's just one of those situations where I'll make sure it's a good decision for you if that's what you decide to do and know all of the different things that it could potentially be impacting to do that. All right, you see Steph's comment here, Tom. Have you thought about our entrance rate after this? Has there this duty pay? What do you think? Think there will be seeing anything like this? I hadn't thought about it, Steph. There's nothing happening here that's going to make our rates go down. There's absolutely nothing here. It's just a combination of stuff because the insurance market at the end of the day, it's all kind of lumped in together and it's sometimes auto rates. Last couple of years, auto rates have been going up because the losses have been exceeding the premiums, but this is something that I learned the other week as well that private equity is putting money into law firms so they can do class action lawsuits and stuff like this with the expectation that if they win, money goes back to the private equity. So basically the plaintiff's attorneys don't have to, in the past it was kind of like they'll take something on contingency and if they won, they made money and if they didn't win, then they basically lost money but they're being backed by private equity so they win regardless. Not in the 100% cases, but this is something that's just kind of recently been happening. So the expectation is there's going to be a ton of litigation out there, a ton of lawsuits from the cruise ships to just all kinds of people about stuff that we've never really considered before because I was harmed, I suffered damages because of the coronavirus and somebody's gross negligence, fill in the blank. And all of that at the end of the day is gonna add up to the insurance companies that need higher premiums to cover those risks moving forward, unless the government winds up giving them some bail out too, which, you know. Could happen. Very well might be part of that $2 trillion bill, who knows. Well, it started out at $4 trillion, didn't it? And they cut it in half. So maybe that's what they're keeping the other $2 trillion for, I don't know. Let's see, Eluisa says, what about health insurance? Do you know if there is any information about this? I'm not exactly sure what the question is about. Do you know, Tom, do you have an idea what she might be asking? I'm not aware of any thing in terms of, you know, this emergency legislation regarding the coronavirus in terms of changing the requirements as an employer in terms of, you know, what you need to do with healthcare benefits. I mean, the Affordable Care Act is still in place and I don't think there's been any modifications to that. Not that I'm aware of, again, I don't know, but I haven't heard of anything. I haven't heard of anything either around health insurance at all. Unemployment contribution rate will not go up in Pennsylvania due to virus. Yeah, not in Washington either. So I don't know about all the states, but I've heard that, I've heard a lot of people saying a version of that about their state. That's interesting. I guess I've heard a couple of different interpretations of that. One of them is your loss run as a company is not gonna go up relative to the number of unemployed, but the aggregate pool, yeah, the aggregate pool, I think it's big, that's gonna be borne by all companies. Yeah, they're all going up. Yeah, you can keep everybody fully employed and in some states, yours is gonna go up anyway because everybody else got, you know, all the other companies were laying off, that's my understanding. So this is another really good example, Tom, for your pitty remark of nothing that's happening here is gonna make it go down, right? There's not much good news in any of this as it pertains to insurance, as it pertains to risk from, you know, litigation. There is good news on the back end of this in terms of how the world perceives cleaning and the value on it and the competitive forces and I see a lot of opportunity once we make it through this initial storm, if you will. We just gotta get there from here. Elulisa is saying also that she's still working and Austin, she believes she fits into the sanitation of residences and buildings. That sounds reasonable to me as well. Of course, nobody's gonna ask me if that meets the standard of essential services, but sounds good to me. I would think that that is about as clear as you can get there. Tom, maybe we should put the link to the letter that you might wanna give to your employees saying that they're essential services if you're self-determining or if you believe the government is telling you that you are essential services just because. Go ahead, Tom. But you've got a great example of that, right, Liz? Yeah, yeah, I have one. I can give it to you and you can put it in the links. Sure. It's just a basic letter saying, hey, this person works for this company that is essential services and that's why they're out driving around. The main thing that this letter does is gives your people a feeling of ease. It's not gonna help them if they don't have a license, of course, right? I had somebody say, oh, well, let's get my employee off the hook then because she doesn't have a license. No, no, no, no, she can't drive. But the letter will help them to feel more confident about driving around if they're nervous about being out and about with the stay-at-home order. And I will send that over to you, Tom. Believing that we fit, yep. So we may be exempt, but we don't have enough info and we could file for exemption, but there's not enough info on how. That's the latest info? Sorry, yes. You should be in here with us because you speak, I don't know, better than almost anybody I've ever seen. Good job. Yeah, you don't know. At least so, we wrote a letter to our employees to have with them, yep, that's great. But if you have an example you wanna send it over, we can use your example, maybe. Somebody I know gave them all letters, but then also printed on those little business cards, card stuff, a little card that said kind of the same thing that you keep in your wallet. It's like, okay, that's a good idea. I saw something, Ben Ferris had one of those. Yeah, that's what I was talking about. Ben just doesn't like his name bandied about, so I have to be careful. But talk to her first, I didn't. I might be wrong. Scratch that, sorry. You heard nothing. Richard did hers today and also put it in her online chat channel, awesome. Yeah, send it on over, oh, we said great. We were going to talk today, our plan was to talk about some communication with the customers, whether or not you have stop services for a couple of weeks or you haven't, how are you moving forward and what kind of communications are you doing? We still have about nine minutes here in time. If you wanna dive into that a little bit, I'll keep track of the questions over here. You could probably get a good chunk done in nine minutes. You, let me see if I can come up with something. Anybody have any other questions while Tom digs this out for us or any other comments? Anything that you're doing really well that you're like, okay, this is working. Ah, I'm feeling a little bit better. Anything that's making you feel like the water is below chin level, share that with us, that would be awesome. And a lot of people are feeling like, yeah, I'm not holding on, I'm drowning over here. Y'all hear this dinging on my phone every single time it dings? That's a text message coming in. It's just out of people right there. We can post this as a template in the Clean Business Today resource page, coronavirus-resources. Here's just an email blast that we put together and sent to all our clients late last week, letting them know that- No Tom, no, that's not what this is Tom. It's not? Uh-uh. This is late last week, yep, that's the wrong one. Sorry, I got too many. We'll share that one later. We gotta get first things first, right? Yeah, get them in order. Sorry. What is your opinion about spending on marketing? So I can tell you what I've been hearing about marketing. I don't have the be-all end-all answer, of course. If you are planning on staying in business and you are not planning on a temporary shutdown or anything along those lines, probably is in your best interest to put some money into marketing, but put it into marketing in the ways that are gonna work the best for you. If some things aren't working, don't use them anymore. Of what I've been hearing, a lot of people are putting more of their money into like AdWords, trying to get some better pages up on their website. I've heard that, sorry guys, for sure, people have been doing for sure. I have no idea why those would work. None, but I heard somebody was having some good luck. So, Dana says, one of us should write a book on how to run a cleaning business during a pandemic after this. Start writing, Dana. Start writing today. You're getting lots of good stuff everywhere, right? I don't know how long it'll be until somebody's gonna want that book again, but at least it'll be there. Ah, ding, ding, ding. Okay. All right, Tom, go ahead. Share it with us. Is this the letter? I hope so. This looks like it. Yep, yep, yep. Yeah, we've been out late last week. Just letting our clients know that we're doing a temporary, temporary shutdown. Suspend, temporarily suspended field services with the tech was the term that we used. And we said that we're gonna take this two week period to assess the risks. And there's risks on both sides of this. If we continue to clean homes, there's risks that we could be exposing various parties to the spread of infection. Unbeknownst, a lot of asymptomatic people out there, at least the thinking is, there's the body of science, I guess it's kind of changing day to day on that too. Flip side of it is there are a lot of people who depend on us to provide our service. In some cases, they don't really even have other options that if we aren't providing the service, they're gonna have to find another vendor to provide the service. And that vendor might not be somebody that has the training and the expertise and the skills and equipment and so on and so forth to do it in a way that's as good and responsible as we would. So, and you go up and down the spectrum, we made the decision not to include in this things like multi-family housing, common areas, office-based commercial, that's anything that's being highly used by a lot of people. We felt that the risk of those high touch areas not being cleaned and sanitized on a regular basis exceeded the risk of us continuing to work. And even after launching this, we've talked to a lot of our clients and we're getting a lot of stories that even though they're a residential client, they're in a situation where they feel that they need house cleaning services and they understand that we're the most qualified to do that for them and anything less and that they feel that they had more risk than if we didn't provide services for them. So, we're in the process of sorting out here and taking this two-week period to do it in terms of who should we be providing services to and maybe who would be better off and more comfortable if we continued to suspend services for a longer period of time. We just don't know and we're looking for guidance from our government officials as well and that's kind of sparse and kind of mixed. Our president, I guess, made a statement yesterday. He wants everybody back to work by Easter. So, you know... Oh, he just wants us in church. Well, he wants us back to work too. I think he wants us back to work today after Easter, right? On Monday. Yeah, maybe. That's not gonna be a driving factor in any decision we make, but it's just an example of all the things that we need to consider. But we're talking to our staff or team members on a daily or almost daily basis and we're making a concerted effort to reach out to our clients through multiple channels of communication, regular emails as well as making some phone calls as well. And texting too, don't forget texting. Yes. Video is working too. And Tom pointed out something earlier that I wanted to just add a little tweak to. You know, if you're not cleaning for your customers because you wanna help to flatten the curve and slow things down, that makes great sense. Of course, if everybody's doing it, it's gonna go much faster, but if not everybody is doing it, then it kind of puts the cleaning company who is at a disadvantage, especially if there are customers that still want cleaning. And on the one hand, what if they hire somebody who is not as qualified and does not have the training to do the best job? That's not a good option. And on the other hand, what if they hire somebody who is, right? So again, maybe not the best option. On the one hand, bad for the community. On the other hand, bad for your company. So none of these decisions are easy, easy decisions. If they were, we'd all be doing the same thing. But they're tough. Gotta keep saying the same thing I've been saying all along is day by day. Gotta make these decisions day by day. Every day, you need to stop and think, what am I going to do today? With the new information that I learned in the last 24 hours, and there has been some, what am I doing? Did that cough sound dry? I don't know. Allergies, y'all. All right, Tom, we have a couple of things to do. It's great class, housekeeping. So, oh, thanks, Tom. Thanks. I'm gonna take a picture of one of these. Right here. My hand motions were not good for that, but my forehead should have done this. It was better. Is that the way you do it? Yeah. So, Tom, and post for us, if you would, the Clean Business Today link. And the reason why we're posting this link every single day, you guys, is because every single day, we're having one of these calls, or one of these Facebook lives. And so you might wanna go back and see some of the other ones. Yeah, right now I'm with you. I change my mind day by day, hour by hour. I'm trying to not do that, because it's too stressful for me. So I'll tell you what I'm doing. I don't think I've shared this with anybody yet, except for my mastermind group. When I wake up in the morning, and the first thing I do is I go check a couple of sites that I have, three different sites. And I just, 10 minutes, I just think, what is the smart move for me and my company today? Do I need to make any changes? Do I need to pivot in any way? Now, what am I gonna do to support that decision? Just, what's the decision? That's hard enough. And then, yeah, every day. So every day I'm doing that, not usually making that decision sometime around six o'clock in the morning, with whatever information came in overnight. So I wake it up in the morning, it's like, what? That's what happened today, right? The $2 trillion thing, they signed in right over midnight. Who signed it in the Senate, Tom? Well, they didn't sign, they had a handshake. They had a handshake, okay. And it still has a, after I saw it, they still haven't passed it. Yes, still not. Okay, good, I'm glad you looked. Sarah, so good to see you guys. Thanks for being in support. Good to see you too, Sarah. Dana says, Tom, if I close for 30 days, should I not lay off my office manager? Should I just pay her out of pocket? She's the glue to my business. But I can't float that more than 30 days. Tough question. I can tell you that the decision that we made at Castlekeepers was to keep our managers and leadership team, if you will, in place and on the payroll. Our ability to do that for a long period of time isn't there either. At the same time, there's gonna be monies floating around out there for businesses. We've been talking about going to the SBA website and applying for a loan and that's an option. If you haven't talked to your bank, the people that you have your banking relationship with that you do your checking accounts with and you do your deposits with, you really wanna talk to them and explain your concerns and ask them what programs they have to provide some additional working capital for you through this thing. Now, borrowing money, well, this needs to, we probably need to make this a whole another discussion. Borrowing money means the expectation is you're gonna pay it back. Just because you borrow it, you need to make sure that you got a plan on what you're gonna do with it and how you're gonna get to the other side and how you're gonna be able to pay it back. It can be dangerous if you don't do that. It's kind of like, sometimes it's not too hard to get in trouble with things like credit cards and the next thing you know, you've maxed out your credit cards and you can't pay the interest and the interest on these loans is relatively low but nevertheless, I don't wanna just tell people to borrow a bunch of money and all your problems will go away but that could be a way that you could finance and keep some of these key people going a little bit while you're waiting to go to the other side but while Dana, there's no one answer for that. What do you think, Liz? I agree, Tom, no one answer. I can tell you that I'm of the same campus. Tom, though, if you've got somebody that you really don't wanna take a chance of losing, I'm just going to keep my people working, period. And so maybe they're still gonna stay on the payroll and I'm gonna work them. I have plenty of work for people to do, always. I will find work for you to do because my plan is not to close permanently and if I'm not closing permanently, I've got work for you. So I would not tell anybody else to put yourself into whatever indebted situation you might put yourself into but for me, I'm keeping my core people that I can't, in my mind, I guess I can't afford to lose them so I won't keep them. Hey, we're about to put the kind thoughts there. You guys are welcome. Let me bounce over to Cleaning Business Today, our website's cleaningbusinessday.com. Over here on the right, you can subscribe to our newsletter. I saw that one went out today. If you didn't get it, you're not subscribed. Please do that. That's the best way to stay up to date with all the work that we're doing. And there's a link that we don't really have published on the site because we want this information to be available to the people who are helping us make these Facebook Lives relevant but you guys know what it is. forward slash coronavirus-downloads is what it is and I'm gonna copy that, I'm gonna paste that again. The comments here and I'll take that word document that I shared in terms of the letter that we sent out to our clients at Castlekeepers last week letting them know that we're temporary suspending services that you can use that as a template. It might be helpful. So Tom, maybe tomorrow we should talk about ongoing communication, whether you're in business, whether you're not. We didn't really get a chance to talk too much about that. Maybe you can plan on that for tomorrow. Does that make good sense with what we know right now? Yeah, if something crazy happens in the next 24 hours there might be something else that would deserve some discussion too but let's make that the plan and see what happens over the next 24 hours. Sounds good Tom, for your tell it like it is section segment tomorrow it would be awesome if you could find out the nitty gritty on this Windex rumor that's been going around. I know just the person that can get us the real skinny on that. We'll have that for you tomorrow. Awesome, thanks everybody. Good seeing everybody on the call and see y'all tomorrow. Take care guys, thank you. Bye y'all. Bye bye.