 Hey, good afternoon, everybody. Tom Stewart here. I'm with Liz Trotter. This is Smart Business Moves. Our special guest today, Matt Ricketts is with us, and Joe Walsh is in the house. Hey guys, how's everybody doing? Is it bad to say these are two of my favorite people on here? Not bad. Not if it's true. Not if it's true. I love having you guys on here. So I'm trying to make it happen, baby. I'm tired of hearing that. You can say that as much. Liz Trotter, this is Smart Business Moves. Sorry. What's that? My Facebook topped up this meeting all of a sudden, and we got the feedback of ourselves. Sorry about that. No worries. Close that tab really quick. It's not the worst thing that's happened to me today. Matt, can you hear all right? Usually you struggle whenever we're on a call together. You hear funkiness with me. I heard it a little bit, but it's better now. I think it's off and on, but I hope it's not me. I'm muted, mine, and it still happens. It's the feedback between you and Tom, the distance, I think, sometimes. Yeah, that's gotten into trouble a lot over the years. All right, well, good. I'm glad. Hey, hey, Denet. OK, who's our Facebook user? Robin, Sarah, Linda. It was Linda last time. Who are you? Anonymous Facebook user. OK, so I try to take it upon myself to keep an eye on the news, especially on days that we do Smart Business Moves, because sometimes things happen that can affect us as cleaning business owners. And I completely did a dismal job of that today, so I'll throw it out there. Does anybody, anything happen today? What happened then? Cryptocurrency. Oh, it's tanking, isn't it? I heard you heard that. You've got to buy. If you've been wanting to buy, today is the day. Oh, really? Oh, good. Investment advice, I'm doing that. There we go. You want to get in today is the day. That's the time, huh? So I introduced Joe to this investment book that I read, and he's like, this is the most conservative investment stuff ever, but I'm going to take some of this advice and use it. I'm so conservative. Crypto is the last thing I would ever put any of my money into. It's like, I get it. Maybe some people have gotten rich off of it. Just if I don't believe it or understand it, I won't put my money into it. It's like, it just doesn't, I don't value that. But I get it, man. A lot of people are doing really well with it. If you had started at the beginning of this year, and even at the beginning of COVID, it was probably around $10,000 for one coin for maybe a little bit more. For a Bitcoin, and it reached $50,000 two weeks ago. I think it was down to $30,000. And it's back up to $39,000. So you could have timed the market today. The money was good. Bought at $30,000, and it's back up to $39,000. So it's back up 25%. I mean, it's certainly not a hedge against inflation or a safe place to put the money. If you had some money you could play with, it'd be a fun thing. I mean, that's kind of cool. I know people who have done well with it too. Sure, sure. I mean, it's really not retirement planning advice. That's not, it's not your retirement plan to invest in crypto currency, but it's- It's not advice at all coming from me, you guys. I'm just saying, if you already plan to buy, today's the day. Come on, Liz. You call me up and said, Tom, take all your PPP money and put it in Bitcoin. Today's the day. So I seriously, you know somebody that put idle money in today. Oh God, it's back up to $39,000 though. So I mean, it dipped down to $30,000 and it's back up. I thought it was down to $30,000 at one point today. Maybe that's just the steady decline. I'll have to look. I thought I saw it as low as $30,000 and it's at $38,000 right now, $39,000. Hey, Diane. Hey, Robyn. Oh, Linda's there. Oh, that was Sam. Hey, Sam. Yeah, my son-in-law loves crypto. He does. So he's got a jump of change in there. Yeah, I'm on Coinbase right now, trying to see what the prices are. If you remind it too, I've got like four extra computers and I was somebody telling me that I'm doing that. That's environmentally unfriendly now. They figured out that the electricity consumed to get one coin now that they're so scarce is contributing to climate change and just it's bad right now. It's bad, yeah. Wow. There was a point where like, and it always probably, it still is this, is that the amount of money that was consumed to make a Bitcoin or a Minot coin was more than the electricity and obviously you've got sunk equipment costs and stuff like that. But those people that were mining it for $250, 10 or 12 years ago, that looks like a pretty good investment now for sure. But anyway, I think that's kind of interesting. Markets have been down basically steadily for about four days straight, down from highs of about 35,000 down to, I think around like 34,000. So probably off what, two, three percent. I mean, that's significant. Usually 5% starts to indicate you're going into bear market territory if you have 12 straight tape. Looking at 12 straight negative trading days, typically you start calling it a bear market and the correction. So we're kind of getting into that zone a little bit here with the markets. I'll still keep buying it to me, it's value-based buying. I mean, I just buy every week, some goes into my Roth IRA automatically on my wife and I's checks. So we're S-Corp employees of my company so we can take advantage of payroll benefits and things like that. And then I have a certain amount until my kids go to private high schools that I put away every week. I don't know when that hits next year, when it's like $2,000 a month for my kids high school, then I don't know that I'll be saving quite as much. Matt is easily the most aggressive saver that I know. I'm wearing this about Matt, very aggressive saver. I save about 40% of what I made. That's gonna change a little bit next year with kids going to private high school. Less-made central starts making me a lot more money than I'll, I'll, we're trying. We're trying. I'm rooting for you, Matt. I'm rooting for you. I've got to pull my weight there so I've got to bring on new users and help them be successful. So, yeah, that's, I do believe in saving and I do believe that, you know, that's probably most of our best path to wealth is saving versus getting lucky on something, you know? And save up because the high school costs more but, you know, you haven't seen the fun part yet. It gets worse. I know, I know, you know, we've done a lot with our kids for their savings accounts. So they have 529s and, you know, their employees and I give them, I give them work every week and count their hours and pay them through the business. So, you know, I think there's ways that you can help with that, you know, through your own business and make sure your kids have some tools. Well, Danit's asking if we have any more surprises about new staff at Made Central. Just to wait. Yeah, I mean, we can't like put all our, you know, cards on the table one day. We kind of strained this out a little bit, but yeah, Dan Smith has joined our team, chief customer support officer. I think I got the title, right? Basically, he's going to be running our customer support. We think we have an awesome software platform, but we've known all along that, you know, there's a lot of work in it to provide the necessary training and customer support to go along with it. And, you know, we've got talented people, but we don't have all the tools and processes and knowledge bases built in a way that needs to. So we're going, we're going all in on the customer support side of Made Central and it's going to make it more useful for our users. And we're excited about Dan being part of the team. He's an awesome dude. Super smart guy. I'm really, I look at, I look at this as like an investment in building another feature for the software that's like an incredible feature that makes your life better because the support, you know, is going to really make using the software like easier to use and better to understand. So I am really excited about this investment in the software. So, you know, we've been talking about it for a while and it just, you know, Dan materialized as somebody that has the experience and has the know-how that really fit. But I do think we are looking to grow the team. I mean, we're adding a ton of users, you know, and we're going to need to expand our support team and look for talented people. So maybe Danit, maybe you want to apply. I'm going to say anybody out there looking for a side gig, hit me up. Just message me. I'll put in a good word. Okay? No. So smart investment moves, no, we're not qualified to do that. You know, we're actually, please do not follow any investment advice you hear on smart business moves. We, you know, we'll help you with cleaning homes. Talk to your other professionals on how to invest. So we're here today for the week. We're talking about leadership and we had an awesome call Monday. Had some technical issues with coach, RJ coach. And, you know, we're going to try to get him back on here in a couple of weeks because, you know, he was a, he was a genuinely a, you know. The real thing. Yeah. You can feel it that this guy had something to share that we would all benefit from hearing. And we really weren't able to do that as well as we could have. And, you know, call this selfish. I want to hear it. We'll, you know, everybody else can join us. Okay. Joe might have a heart stop. So maybe we want to dive in. We do have a heart stop. I am just brain. I do too. I'm, okay. So we all do. So, you know, when COVID started a little over a year ago, Joe Matt and I basically kind of formed a ad hoc support group. I guess you could call it the peer group, call it wherever you want to, but we were talking, gee, like on a daily basis there for awhile, just trying to figure out, you know, what we needed to do as leaders within our organization to lead through these unprecedented times. You know, it was, you know, in charted waters. And I think we learned a lot. We learned a lot about ourselves. We learned a lot about running our businesses. It's a lot of what we learned, I think has as much value today in what I'll call post pandemic. Can I say that now? Or at least we're moving in that area. Post issues we're gonna get for a while. Yeah. Feels like it, getting there. A new phase, let's put it that way. Yeah. So, thank you. We were awesome from the beginning. Okay. Thanks, Robin. That is, that's appreciated. So, you know, Joe, you're, you know, share with us a little bit about what those experiences were like and some of the discussions and the activities that we were doing. How was that tying into leading our organizations and just the experience? I was thinking about this question this afternoon and the thing that sticks out most in my mind is fear and how it's like talking about what's my biggest takeaway from the past? Well, it's not even been 12 months now. When did it spend 14 months at this point? Yeah. It was the same that long ago, does it? No, it doesn't. And I still remember like, you know, calling Tom when I was thinking of closing the business and I'm looking at my numbers and made central and I'm looking at the predicted revenue for the coming weeks and it was doing this because so many customers were canceling. I realized I got to a point, you know, you gotta know your numbers. And I got to a point where I realized like I'm gonna lose more money by staying open than I would like completely close it all the way. But something that sticks out to me is the when you take the fear away as a leader then so many things become possible and leading change becomes a lot easier. And I mean, for me, COVID took away a lot of fear. So because when you're sitting there every day thinking about, wow, I could lose a loved one. I mean, I was worried about my parents. My parents would be high risk. My wife's parents would be high risk. And when you're sitting there thinking about well, I could lose a loved one, I could get sick. You know, when you start thinking about fear at the level of loss of life then everything else just seems petty. And then you realize, hold on a second. I need to make some changes in my business if my business is gonna make it through this. And those changes become easier when you take the fear away. And suddenly I felt free to just make a ton of changes. And Matt and Tom and I and Liz, we talked about a lot of this stuff as we were like navigating it. And we had taking that fear away was huge, you know? And then you just need to make decisions based on the data you have and use good data to make decisions. But that's, I think that that was a big learning for me. If you can take the fear away, you can make some pretty incredible changes. And those changes that we made are we're gonna stick with them, you know? For the foreseeable future. And some of the changes are cultural in the company. And I think that's really powerful important stuff. And some of the changes are tactical and structural. So like we changed to solos from a team model. And we'd been talking about doing that for years. But we had so many reasons we kept telling ourselves we weren't gonna do it. Well, what happens if customers are frustrated because we're in their home for too long or won't people get lonely working by themselves? And I mean, there was some basis for concern there, but it was all things that could be managed. And COVID just forced our hand. And it was like, we kind of have to do this to comply with social distancing guidelines. So I didn't really see a choice. So fear isn't really a factor anymore. It's just like, we have to do it. There's no other way to go. We have to make this decision and move forward. So that's something that's tactical, like a structural change that we made that definitely gonna stick. There was a lot of number crunching though. A lot of mining going through, we had a lot of data to support some of the decisions we were making. So we weren't just flying blind. And some of that data was useful in making decisions. And some of that data was useful in selling the decisions that were being made to your staff that was gonna have to execute, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so I could, we could look at efficiency reports and made central together as a team and say, like, look, this is how much work a team can get done and how much they get paid. And this is how much work a solo can get done and how much they get paid. And for folks who had a fear of working on their own or weren't sure how this was gonna work for them, we could show them that data and it became more obvious. I think most importantly for my management team, they were fully bought into the changes because they could see, we could look at the comparisons. And it was like, oh, wow, if we switch to solos, we can, because of the data we could look at that we had available to us and made central and efficiency and things like that, we could look and go, wow, a solo person could work, a shorter work week and make better money. Like that seems like a no-brainer. Like why wouldn't we do that? And by the way, there were a whole bunch of other benefits switching to solos that we didn't really see coming, but yeah, the data has to be there. And it helps me be able to manage too. Something else we could point to is customer satisfaction scores. So it's really easy to track customer satisfaction scores. So I'm able to look, my team can keep track of customer satisfaction scores and customers that have solo cleaners were happier. So that was another easy thing to point to. So yeah, definitely data happening there to drive those decisions. Danit has an interesting question. Is there ever too much data? I got some bulk on that. I think there can be. I think you can be overwhelmed by, it has to be in a format that you can take action on. It has to be actionable data. Would you agree with that Tom? Like that's where I draw the line. 110%, you know? Yeah. Go back to the days when, you know, I mean, there was a time when computer reports were printed on this green folded paper and you'd print like reports, like this deep with numbers in them. And it was a ton of data, but there was nothing useful there because it was just numbers. So, you know, the real art to data is having a bunch of data, but then having it summarized and synthesized and analyzed for you where it's giving you insight and direction, giving you information that you can use, as Matt said, to make smart business moves. Yeah. I mean, it has to be actionable and you have to decide what you're focusing on. I mean, I don't think there's too much data. I think there's maybe too much that you're trying to focus on at once, but like the more data that can be collected in the background, you never know when you're gonna look at a different metric. That's a better point than I was making. There's, it's not that there's too much data. It's like, you can over focus on, you can only focus on so many things and move the needle on so many things at once. You can only really have one or two key initiatives that you're really trying to control and move and make big changes on at once in your business. And so you can only hammer on, you know, a couple of key data points at once to make changes. Now you should be, you might have like 10 or 15 metrics that are all important to you when you check, but you can only move the needle on a couple at once. And you know, I think that's part of the art of leadership, right? Like that's not something, that's something that you can learn from experience. You can also study it and learn to get better at it, but I think that learning what to choose to focus on is something that's a little bit of trial and error. It's also just kind of living the day-to-day of the business, but in my experience, when you're leading a team of people to run the business for you, which is always my goal and is how I run my business, then they can really only focus on two things at once, maybe three, and that's it. So you've got to pick the things that are really going to drive results in other areas. Yeah. And I have two other points. One is to, to delete your questions specifically. One is first, you know that in the MMA groups, we hide a lot of your spreadsheets because we don't want you collecting all that data, which goes to my second point because you're doing it manually. So if you have a way to be able to collect data, and like Matt said, it's running in the background, so whenever you need it, it's going to be there for you. Awesome. But if you're collecting data and you're spending a ton of time manually, collecting data and putting it into spreadsheets and doing all of this, I would say yes. There's too much data sometimes. So if you have a great way of collecting it so that it's there and you can use it whenever you want, ah, thumbs up. But don't be spending time, lots of time just collecting, collecting, collecting. The whole point is where's the execution? Where's the action? What needs to be managed with this data? I'll show you there's some KPIs in a dashboard that I really, really like to look at. So payroll to revenue is one of the leading indicators whether I'm going to have enough paycheck. Top line revenue is great. We're certainly down from where we were prior to COVID and almost approaching almost $40,000 a week. We're certainly down from where we were, but I've still managed to make a lot of profit because we've moved to a solo model now and we've driven down our revenue to payroll down to around 38% or below every week. And prior to this, we were probably closer to 42%. I thought that was fine, but moving to the solo method, moving to mostly solos has really allowed me to drive that down and squeak out a little bit more gross profit and a little bit by 4% is significant. I mean, 4% is hard to do in our business sometimes. So would you like argue that part of this whole process that we went through during COVID in terms of using the data to drive our strategy and be better leaders of our company was focusing on the profit side. Everything was changing. Yeah, it's all in control. Yeah. Yeah, because of control. We did, Tom. We switched over, you and I, for our presentations to cleaning business profits because cleaning profit builders because people needed to spend more time focusing in on profits in a really big way. Yeah, it was obvious. So much more important. And I really like the cleaning hourly rate. I've really driven that up. So we're generating almost $70 per hour. It's kind of hard to read on this, but it's 69, 79. I don't know if you can see that on your screen. Like I don't know how much figure I can zoom that in. But yeah, so one of the things that I did was I looked at a lot of commercial work that we were doing that wasn't generating enough hourly rate where, yeah, they're big contracts and you're squeezing out some gross margins on them. Maybe if I redeploy those three, four, five people to other things, we could focus on the new customers that are wanting to come back. Because in the past, I was all very concerned with this number. What was my customer account? We had over 700 customers when COVID started. And I was very focused on this top line number. How many technicians do I have? How many of this do I have? Of course, I like to see the staff count coming back up. We're back up to about 32 employees when I was closer to 45 prior to COVID, maybe 40. I think my PPP was based on 43. So 43 prior to COVID. So of course that all matters, but what really matters is what's left, right? Like we all, I think that's part of my leadership is and Joe alluded to it, it was he's looking at all these efficiency reports. We stopped driving anywhere that was more than 11 miles from our office. So we actually canceled 20 customers because they were too far. And we found other providers for them. We didn't just leave them high and dry, but I called maybe Ashley will watch this, but she's a noble competitor and a little further out. And I called Ashley and I said, Hey Ashley, would you want these customers? And she was thrilled. Like what a conversation, what a gift to give. And she's like, well actually I have a couple of customers that are too far from us. So we reciprocated and helped her out too. So it was two way, it wasn't as big of a switch, but it was, we were helping each other. And so that was leadership that I wouldn't have had without the right data. And the thing that I really want to point out is my employees are making more per hour than they were prior to COVID because A, we've raised prices on customers and really focused on profitability and productivity and efficiency, all those kind of keywords. But I'm really driving home that I want my employees to make over $19 an hour. And I think that's, in my market, that's important. And in your markets, it's gonna be different. But for my market, $15 an hour is just not enough anymore. Right? You're not gonna cut it. No, it's the same in our market. So that's another strong data point because we pay by the job or commission pay as some people call it. I need to be able to show my employees how much they're making effectively per hour. And they get that every week in there and they can look that up in their dashboard so they can see how much they're making per hour. So they kind of know that now. It makes pay by the job a lot more transparent. I really like pay by the job. It works really well for us. One of the biggest hurdles to that is helping people understand how much they're making on a per hour basis because that's what most people are used to thinking of their pay in terms of by the hour. So, you know, the employees can access all that information in their own portal so they can see that. And so that's really helpful for attention. And I would say it's not so much making them understand what it is that they're making per hour. It's making it so that they can go and feel confident that what they're making per hour, they can see it with their own eyes. They trust it. They see it, they see it. They're like, okay, now I know. Cause you can tell them all you want. You can explain it. You can, I know companies that try to do this and they tell them, they print it all out on cute little sheets and tell them how much they're making. That doesn't work. People want to be able to go and look at their own data. Cause you get data counts. That's right. And Liz actually, Tom and I were talking about this earlier today, there's something about the transparency factor of having the data come from a trusted source. So this is like the platform that they use to run their days. Like this is where they get all their work orders. And so they trust the platform and it's stable and it works well and there's no errors. And like they, they trust it. So it removes that fact, that doubt factor, you know? And they can see it's transparent. It also professionalizes it. You're not giving them. We used to do that, by the way. We used to give people printed out like Excel, you know, reports, you know, seems like you could have fudged these numbers. How do I know if you did or not? You know what I'm saying? There isn't as much of, as a legitimacy factor there. So, you know, having their own, having their own thing and their, their phone, they get access anytime it legitimizes it and professionalizes it, you know? So I did want to show you this is what the raw data looks like for that, that's creating all these charts. And so this is, this is what I mean. This is all useful and you could use this like an Excel sheet and really rock this. But I do like the visualization of, of how it's kind of, I can see the trends moving and, you know, I'm a visual person. I like, I like the visual reporting a bit. And I like, I like this. This is a new beta report that's being worked on now. It's not a hundred percent done, but it keeps getting a little bit better every week. I really love this report. It gives me a lot of, you know, visual data that I can use to manage my company. So to tie this back into, to leadership and, you know, pre-COVID, during COVID, post-COVID. I mean, some of the stuff we're talking about here was stuff that we were aware of at some level pre-COVID. The COVID really created the opportunity and the sense of urgency to say, you know, come on guys, we got to get beyond just cleaning a bunch of homes and we really got to get serious about making money. But as we might not be cleaning as many homes, we might not have as many people working for us to clean homes and all those lessons. I think we're still, I mean, we're still learning, but, you know, it's a different focus now. Yeah. And I will say, cause I'm going to have to pop off soon something else that I was a big takeaway from COVID. I used to say that I expect clear, honest and complete communication from my staff. I think that I didn't have a full enough appreciation for what that kind of communication meant. What it looks like, what it sounds like and how to actually make it happen in real life. I think we were doing okay, but we clearly had gaps. And, you know, through COVID, because we had to all navigate this crisis together, you know, I remember having this meeting at one point, I picked my six highest performing field technicians and we had just lost a bunch of staff after we reopened. We were closed for six weeks. We lost a bunch of staff and I sat down with them and I just laid it out on the table and I just said, look, I can't afford to lose any of you. We weren't able to hire people. There's just the labor market was bad right after COVID happened. It's been bad since as I'm in a lot of markets it is across the country. So I can't afford to lose any of you. And so like level with me, what do we need to do here? You know, what do I need to do so that you'll work here for 10 years? I need you to stay through COVID and stay with me for 10 years. And we were just able to have really honest and open conversations about that. And, you know, we heard some hard truths but most of the stuff we heard was stuff we'd heard before but, you know, the crisis had a way of bringing it all into relief and making it all seem a lot more urgent. So we overhauled how we scheduled and we like gave people shorter weeks with better pay and this was all we were able to do all this through scheduling and like more predictable schedules. And just overhauling our scheduling protocol has contributed huge to both employee satisfaction and customer retention. So we do a whole show on what you've done but like the key word that I always come away with this consistency is what you've really created for your employees and that consistency is what they crave as far as not just our clients but you want to speak to that before you have to go or are you kind of, you're- Yeah, no, I just, it's, I have to, it's a daycare thing. So- Okay, all right, we'll talk to you soon. We said, hey. But yeah, no, I will, but I will, I have one more minute and I'll just say that it is about consistency and my staff, when I asked them that question they were like, you know, respectfully, we've been telling you for years that we don't get it when you send us through a job at the last minute at the end of our days or we don't like it when we have to go help somebody out because basically they're too slow, you know, or we don't, so a lot of that had to do with scheduling. So there was perceptions that it was, oh, it's because, you know, this other guy is too slow. Well, that's not really what was going on. It was that other person was being poorly scheduled. And so, you know, a lot of that was fixed with scheduling. So a lot of it was just listening as I tell my three-year-old, we have to tweak your listening ears and make sure you're really listening. And so, but the pandemic really helped kind of bring that into relief and helped me understand in a new way what it means to really respond and make the hard changes you need to make and listen to the staff. So the staff that was with us when we reopened from COVID, we have only lost one person. So we came back with 16 people. And since we've reopened, they've all stayed with us except for one. And that's because she went to school for physical therapy. She's changing careers. That's amazing. So it's really worked. So that's what I'll say about that. But thank you for inviting me, guys. I appreciate it. And have a good rest of your afternoon. Bye, everybody. Yeah, thanks, Joe. As always. I appreciate your help. Anybody over email, Tom has my contact info. And I'm happy to share if anyone has any questions. Yeah. Bye, guys. Bye, Joe. So Robin had a question if you want to read it out. So Joe and Matt optimized the schedules and clients served key takeaways. I mean, key takeaways is what Joe really said there about that consistency created some really strong loyalty for his employees. And I don't have it down as well as he does where we are not having our teams help other employees or do any of those things. But we're certainly not having them do extra jobs at the end of the day. We're not selling any last minute jobs. We used to do that think like, oh, if they're going to be done at noon, well, maybe they want some more work. No, they don't want to be surprised. They're mentally thinking they're done at that point. So if we didn't sell it before that day, we don't do that anymore. We ask them if they want to pick anything up. We don't give it to them without. We're trying to be more conscientious about meeting them where they are, where the way that Joe described. Man, I learned a lot from Joe during the things. I can't do everything that he's doing yet, but there are a lot of key takeaways about making your job as flexible and as fair and as consistent as you possibly can. Joe, which, you know, the theme this week is leadership. Joe's a heck of an operator. He's a heck of a leader. I mean, there's not many people. I'm not sure if there's anybody in the house cleaning industry I can think of that does it better than Joe. Joe's a good... He's a next level communicator as well. So that's the thing I was going to say. The thing that I saw change more than consistency or anything else is the leadership. What people were doing before business owners were managing their businesses. They were managing this piece and that piece and this piece and that piece and this piece. They're like making changes based on what they wanted to see and what they did. And COVID forced the leadership to come forward with people because it became a matter of having to lead people and you can't lead people by just pushing on them and telling them what to do. You have to lead people by finding out what they want. Are they interested in following you where you're going and telling them where you're going and getting them on your boat or your bus? And if you don't do that, you're gonna struggle. And so that's the big change that I heard. Everybody's going from or not everybody but a lot of people are going from managing and just doing things and changing and making these things making these big changes to leading the people. Yeah, and that's the thing. Like you do have to get buy-in when you're making big changes. So that's part of what we did was... And little changes. And little changes, right? We all know that our employees don't love change. Like change was never a good thing for them growing up and it probably doesn't represent like best case scenarios for them when we say, here we have this great new change for you. Even if it's gonna be awesome, you do have to get buy-in. So yeah, Robin employee centric, everything we did stuff I learned from Liz was like, we put out videos and communicated. We over communicated like through video, like weekly, maybe more than that. Even during COVID when we were totally shut down, I was broadcast messaging them a message almost every day of like updates and what's going on, what's next. Even if it was just five minutes, we were just keeping them in the loop, especially during the shutdown because I wanted to stay connected to them. And, you know, that was important. Communicating and getting buy-in, you're right, Liz. That's incredibly important. You know, we go through the calculations on how to figure out lifetime value of a customer. That's being math can be applied to a lifetime value of a cleaning professional. And it's integer values greater in terms of a cleaning professional is worth more to us as cleaning business owners as any client and any residential client who gets their home cleaned every other week. And value of that cleaning professional is going up rather sharply. You know, maybe it's not as volatile as Bitcoin, but, you know, that never keeps going. And one of the things that Joe's talking about in terms of consistency, we think about scheduling. Customers want to see the same cleaners. Yeah, they do. But cleaners also want to see the same customers. And I think that we underestimated how important that relationship was from the cleaning professional wanting to see the same clients. And that was a lesson learned over COVID. So Tom, I shared a screen where it kind of like highlights some of the employee's revenue over a six month period. And I'll zoom this in if I can a bit. Well, Matt's pulling that up real quick too. I wanted to point out another thing that Joe said that I think gets minimized or lost in the shuffle a lot. That most of the time we know what we should be doing, but we don't give it the importance that we should. Instead, we work on this other stuff. These things that we're trying to work on and we're trying to get to. But you heard Joe say he knew all of these things needed to happen, but he had the fear. It was holding him back, keeping him from making those changes. So a really big message coming out of this whole thing is when you're afraid and you know that something's holding you back, look for ways to finalize on that decision and move forward. I actually worked with Joe on this when we were in Foundations because he was struggling with a couple of areas. And just, you know, pull the trigger and make it happen. That's not easy, especially when you don't know what the outcome's going to be. All right, go ahead now. Yeah, I just was gonna show. So like, you know, this is one of my top technicians that's been with me a long time. And you know, we offer a lot of flexibility as far as like, you know, scheduling. So most of my employees don't really work full-time hours. They're probably average between 25 and 32 hours per week. And this employee probably averages close to about 26 hours a week. You know, this is over six months. You can do math. They've worked 712, 714 clock hours. So you can divide that by 26 and come up with a number for me for somebody if they wanna run a calculator. But, you know, for a part-time employee, she's generated, you know, equivalent of basically $90,000 a year in revenue for a part-time employee. She generates $64 a clock hour. And we all have employees like this, but what makes this work is because we have the data to say, all right, her survey responses are awesome. This all is working. And so her productivity is higher. So she actually cleans 45% more per hour than, you know, than what we predict. And yet still generates really good results. You're not gonna have all your employees do stuff like this. But when you do, think about what you should reward an employee like this. It's not just their pay. I mean, this is somebody you wanna keep around. And as a leader, you wanna recognize that person as much as you can. And talk about, wow, your efficiency is amazing. What are you doing? You know, this is like, you know, what can you do to teach other people in our organization to do what you're doing? You know, there might be some lessons learned from some of your key employees by kind of mining the data and seeing, you know, what employees make you the most revenue per clock hour and so forth and so on. And now this is not per job hour. This is revenue per clock hour. From the time they clock in to the time they clock out too, right? So, you know, this employee, if it was by job hour, you know, it's even higher, even higher, divide it by this, you know, by 80% I believe would give you the number, you know. But anyway, so yeah, that's, you know, looking at the data and mining the data is important, but then, you know, when you have people that you have incredible results from, make sure you recognize them, make sure that's leadership too. Make sure that they know that you know they're awesome. Too often times we're looking at the data trying to find people who've got the attendance problem or people whose productivity is too low. So we can, you know, talk to them, coach them or, you know, hopefully that's our thinking and that's important. But likewise, we certainly want to be, you know, finding our high performers and, you know, providing them feedback at their high performers and then try to learn from them. Because a lot of times, you know, there's lessons to be learned there. You know, why is it your productivity is 120%? What are you doing differently? Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes you have to help people figure out what that is. A lot of times they don't know either. Like, well, I just stay busy. I'm just fast and it's not that. It's more than that. And sometimes you have to help them. Yeah, well, some of it's like, I want to get home to get my kids and pick my kids up on time, but I still want to make good money. And, you know, Lacey, I looked, I just did a quick math. She averages about 27 hours a week. I mean, she's a part-time employee generating me, you know, $45,000 over six months. You know, in non-COVID times, would that be a little bit higher? Maybe, but I mean, I think she's exactly where she wants to be as far as what she makes. She's just an amazing employee. I can't speak highly enough of her. I mean, you know, and we all have those people in our company that just said we got to really keep them. I mean, my goal is to have Lacey work for me for another 10, 15 years. I mean, I don't want her going anywhere. So. You've got a crazy year or has a note. Boy, understatement there. Understatement there. We're almost, you know, a little over a week away from Memorial Day and, you know, people are getting vaccinated and things are getting back to normal. It's kind of hard to get your mind wrapped around. Yeah, that did change. The guidelines changed really fast. Like we're all kind of, you know, processing that data at the moment now, aren't we? So, you know, part of, you know, lessons learned from a leadership perspective. I know that, you know, we all embraced a lot of, you know, safety precautions from a PPE standpoint and a lot of additional training. Heck, we got together, I guess probably out of just nervous energy and actually built some training programs and put them on an LMS and, you know, basically, you know, turn that over to RxC, but, you know, you know, the whole idea of training and safety and PPE, I think those are all, you know, changes that took place during COVID and some of the PPE might soften a little bit, but I don't think it'll ever look like it did pre-COVID. No. I can't imagine. Although I do know a few companies that are going maskless already, if their people are vaccinated, they're going maskless and they've backed off the gloves. So there are people doing, you know, going as much back as they can. I don't think anybody is not using a disinfectant these days. Right. But. And, you know, do our customers, the consumers look at cleaning differently now than they did pre-COVID? Some of them definitely do. I think the market is different for sure. For whatever reason, there's a lot more demand whether that's there's more money in the market, you know, less people, maybe it feels like more demand than we've had before. I need to look at the data and see how many lead requests we're getting in compared to like 2019 and see if it's significantly more or if it's just that we're just so understaffed. Maybe it's not crazy. I just don't like it. Yeah. Yeah. Customers aren't leaving either though. Like, you know, we're doing a good job. As far as masks goes, as far as the leadership that we're providing in my company, every market, again, every market's different. If you work in a market that, you know, has different values and whatnot, you'll be able to do things differently and it would make more sense. But for us, we've told our staff that, you know, we're going till July 1st. If a customer asks you if you're vaccinated and you feel comfortable telling them and they offer to let you take your mask off, that's fine, but that's between you and the customers. Like, we're not, we're telling them they need to wear the mask unless the customer's explicitly, you know, tell you that it's okay for you not to. We'll probably go to a policy where we let them go mask free if someone's not home by July 1st. And then we'll kind of run a hybrid model after that. So if you're looking for ideas, that's what I'm doing in more of a big urban center. You know, St. Louis is, you know, fairly different than, you know, probably if you're in suburbs in Dallas or the, you know, wherever people are, it's going to be different. What people's, you know, comfort level is. But, you know, I would also think building a boy and there's some of the lessons learned on the communication side, you know, the context of leadership that we would be having communication certainly within, you know, within our company with our team members, but also with our clients kind of explaining, you know, the evolution of this. And, you know, I'm thinking it might be a good idea to say if particular clients would like for us to continue to wear some of this additional PPV, you know, that certainly is an option. Please let us know. Yeah, if you have the ability to track it, you could use tags in your software almost every software has the ability to use tags or something like that. You could create a face mask tag and track that as a request. Yeah, I think you could have, I actually think PPE requests are going to be common. Like, you know, we used to have shoe cover requests and we have tags for shoe covers. And yeah, we may have mask tags here, you know, towards the end of the year where there's certain customers that do request that we wear masks. That's a good point. Some clients are allowing us to not use a mask in their homes. We let the clients tell us what they prefer regarding the mask. Yeah, I think that's where it's going to be going. And I would suspect there's going to be some clients here going past July, they're going to still prefer that people wear a mask. And I know with one company in Chicago that they will be wearing masks forever now. That's part of their new model is that they're going to be the safest company out there and that you don't have to worry about the next time some big super bug comes along, they'll already be doing everything. So that's kind of their message. I'm another summer of this. I'm going to be thinking that that's going to be hard. I'm conscious of my employee's comfort as well. If we can do it safely without masks, I'd like to be able to give them the option if there's customers that are comfortable with it as well. But I am very conscious of the fact that my market is not quite there yet, that things changed really fast. And I mean, we hosted a gathering for a neighborhood like a block party and a lot of the people were still wearing masks outside where in other parts of the country, masks outside would be laughed at, right? Like that'd be, it's all different everywhere. So, but a lot of the elderly neighbors that came out, and I don't want to say elderly, but like in their 70s plus, that word can get a negative connotation. I don't want to say, but they were, some of my retiree, maybe, retiree, 70 to 70 plus neighbors, they were still wearing masks outside. And I was a little bit taken aback, but when I was near them, I went ahead and I'd wear these neck gaiters. So I went ahead and pulled my thing up just to make them feel comfortable because I wanted to respect their norms. So that's part of leadership. I think we're gonna have to navigate this in our own, in our own space and our own companies differently everywhere. And your people need to be led differently than Tom's people, my people, your people, because people need what they need and who you have in your company needs something different from you. You have to pay attention to that. But what are people are gonna be looking for and expecting, I think post COVID, that's looking different too. I mean, salary expectations, just all the benefits and flexible schedules. And those are our lessons learned through COVID that I think are gonna be very valuable for us moving forward because leading, leading our team post COVID is gonna look different than it was pre COVID. Absolutely, well, we've been talking a lot about that. Expectations have changed just what, and expectation is the big thing. When expectations change, you have to get on board with that. You have to have communication about it. We preach that a lot, unmet expectations is the number one source of dissatisfaction. So that's basically what I think one of the best definitions of quality, a quality outcome as expectations are clearly defined and then they're perceived to have been met. And if you're able to do that consistently, you've got awesome quality. Absolutely, and if you don't know that already, that's already what's happening, you guys. That's the definition that your customers are already using. They're not judging anything other than what they think they're going to get and whether or not it was delivered consistently. If it is, they think you have great quality. And you guys all know this too. You all know that you have that one employee that is so great at talking up all of the customers and she knows how to hit the exact things that the customer cares about, but the other things, not so much. You've all seen it. You send another team in there and they're like, that house was filthy. Don't clean that other stuff because she's getting a 99% rating over there. She knows how to clean it. So your people know how to deliver on, that that know how to deliver on what the customer wants and cares about. They're the ones making you money. That's Lacey, that's your Lacey. She knows how to deliver on the expectations of the client. Although, man, you know what? She cleans my house from time to time and it's a pretty big house and it'll take her two and a half hours and it'll take a team of two, two and a half hours sometimes. And I can't tell the difference between who cleaned it. I mean, it's like she's so good. So yeah, I mean, it is interesting. Like when you have employees like that, you need to value them, recognize them. And that's maybe not part of our topic for today, but leading them to want to stay with the company. It makes you wonder though, if there was a way that you could use her in a training capacity or just a case study or something. I mean, if she's that much better and gets the outcome that much more quickly, how do you take that and leverage it through your company? Yeah, I'm gonna put you on the hot seat here, Matt. What does she do differently? I mean, I think she just constantly moves and she has a good pattern. She's not, it's just the stuff that we all are supposed to be doing, but she never, you know, she never is like the back track. I mean, it's just very smooth and efficient. You know, she always starts in the same place. Like it's just, she follows really good patterns and cleans really efficiently. So I would say, don't guess, get a list. Yeah, yeah. These 10 things, this is what you need or start with the top three. I'll have Connie go follow her for a day and make her uncomfortable. Shoot video, you know, do side-by-side in terms of this is what it's supposed to look like and then shoot video of somebody that got lower productivity cleaning the same space and. Yeah, she would be a good case study. And I think that would probably, you know, help us, you know, across the board generate better results, right? You're right. And you guys are good at video. Yeah. You know how to utilize video better than almost anybody I know. Yeah, but I'm usually the one that shoots it and I'm really on this other project right now. So I'm not shooting as much video as I used to shoot. Like video is one of my hobbies and I'm really quite good at it. I will admit that I am a fairly skilled videographer but the editing part takes up a few hours here and there. I'm a little short on time these days. Yeah. We actually did some more business moves months past where you were sharing some tips and giving us just kind of a overview on how to get started with editing video. Yeah, some really good tips. The editing is what takes the time because, you know, you can shoot all the video you want but then you gotta be able to tell a story and make it compelling. And it's like, and then, you know, that's again, that's off topic today but I think video is a really good way to engage and learn and I think we all can be better at that. It's a useful tool. Yeah. So we're approaching the top of the hour and then, you know, again, Liz telling us to go out and buy Bitcoin. It's... Okay, that's not what I said, Liz. You just got here. So if you're thinking that I really said, go out and buy Bitcoin, that's not what I said. What's our topic next week, Tom? What are we talking about next week? It's a surprise, do you know? I don't, you usually do. Let me, I'll look it up, okay? All right. All right, so I'm curious, we have two minutes here and I would love to hear from anybody that is on Spark Business Moves today about any big leadership changes that you had to make in your company or things that, how you had to step up and be a better leader for your people. Did you guys see that happen as well or were you just sort of spinning? What were your experiences? I'm curious about that. I think there were a lot of opportunities for everybody. While they're typing, I'll tell you, I was the fittest I've ever been in my life. I ran a 145 half marathon because I was running every day just to clear my mind. I like, you know, I never have ever run a sub two hour half marathon before and I got down to like 145, eight minute miles, which is not fast, but for a big guy, like I'm not a big anymore though, Matt. You can't use that anymore. No, but six, three, you know, like six, three, two, 40. I'm like, you know, like that's skinny. You're a bigger guy for sure. Six, three, two, 40 is skinny for me. That's like looking kind of gaunt. I mean, I'm a big, I'm a big bulky guy. Like, you know, played hockey and there's not, some weight's never gonna go away. I'm never gonna be a 180 pound guy, right? So yeah, you know, I channeled a lot of that into like just thinking and running for a while. So I will say that the closed down, the shutdown was actually one of my favorite periods in my entire life. Cause I got to really think and strategize in ways that I never got to think before and just take the time to really like process some things. And I'd go out on two hour runs like it was nothing. And I would just think the whole time about, you know, what do I need to do? What do I need to be doing? And you know, it was very meditative and I would process a lot of information. Nice. Nice, Robin. Long-term value of employee and retention. Just putting more time, energy, focus there. Awesome. Great, Robin. That's gonna be long-term, the long-term value of customers. We always talk about what's ELTV. Man, the long-term value of an employee. We need to come up with a formula for that time because I feel like that's really. We have one. Okay, well we need to build it. We need to build it. We don't have it in the software yet, but we can show you how to calculate it. And that number, that's a great number to be tracked. We should turn that into like a download or a worksheet for people that aren't on the software that they can use to. We should create something with that because I see a lot of value around employee issues. We have a spreadsheet to do it, so we can easily view that. On your next live that you do, Matt, where you're doing the presentation, I'd be a great one. All right, well I'll look at that spreadsheet. I think that, Robin, you're right on the money, man. Employees are the goal of our businesses and we've often tried to think that adding customers is really where the goal is at, but it's really in developing those employees. People have told it to us for years and I think we haven't listened as well as we should have until now. Part of that is because the focus hasn't been on the profit. No, because without the profit, you can't do what you need to do in terms of building jobs that fit that model. True, true. I think this whole thing has been a really good opportunity for us to rework our businesses in ways that are better for our employees, better for our customers, and better for our bottom lines. I think this has been a great year in a lot of ways to rebuild in again, like better jobs for your employees, better outcomes for your customers, and then just better outcomes for ourselves, more profits for success. Building a valuable business. It is at the top of the hour, smidge past. Well, it's like I can't find our spreadsheet, but I promise you, we have topics for next week and it's gonna be good. And we're gonna be here Monday, five o'clock Eastern. We'll get it out there, y'all. Yeah, well, just keep an eye on Facebook. We'll get that posted here the next day or so. Matt, thank you so much. Thanks so much Matt, appreciate it. Thanks for everybody to join. Bye guys, I'm heading out you guys. We'll see you Monday, five o'clock Eastern. See you tomorrow. Bye.