 I hope it looks like my head is camera. I had a good afternoon everybody. Tom Stewart here. Smart business moves, five o'clock Eastern time. Got Liz Trotter with us. Hey Liz. Hey y'all. And we got a really special guest today, Paul August. Paul is, has a cleaning business in New Hampshire. I've met Paul a couple of times at convention, but kind of new to our group here. He's one of the few people that we've actually had on this that's never been to foundations or yet. I didn't realize that actually, Tom. We don't have to fix that. We might as well fix that. Sorry Paul. I had to go and hook you up with him, right? That's okay, don't worry for the rest of an hour. Don't worry about it, it'll go fast. Okay, I'm trying to pull us up. Why is, why am I not being able to find our Facebook live today? That's a question. Is there anybody on comments yet? No, I'm wondering. We got a few people watching, but new comments yet. I wonder what I'm doing wrong here. There we go. We all know operator error, if it's, we're, you know, I just need something just to see if it works. Marlowe's here. Okay. Yeah, I see. Hey, do you know Marlowe, Paul? It's her birthday. Oh, Marlowe, it's your birthday. Happy birthday. Yeah, happy birthday Marlowe. Well, this is a good thing to be doing for your birthday. Yeah. It's an awesome thing to be doing for your birthday. What else, what else would you want to do? Oh, Leslie's here too. Hey Leslie. It's really her birthday. It's just something that happened back in Savannah. Her birthday's in August. August, I forget what. Oh no. So, did you guys get her like, make her get a birthday celebration at a restaurant or something? I don't know what happened. I wasn't there for it, but I heard all about it. So the whole time I just got on the same happy birthday and everyone thought it was her birthday. Did she get like a birthday cake and they came out and sang for her? There's a picture. There's a picture. I'm gonna post it in the group afterwards. I have this picture. Okay. I love it. Every day is my birthday. Yeah. Thank goodness that every day is not my birthday. I'm not thinking I could handle that. Oh, you must know Deneet, huh? She sounds really excited that you're here. What? Oh, it is. Yeah. Really? Oh, Sarah too. Oh, hey Paul. Where you guys at? Hey, I'm glad you didn't mention you was gonna be here. Say again, Paul. No, Deneet sent me an ice cream maker. So I had to come outside because I think the whole neighborhood is at my house making ice cream right now. Homemade ice cream. Straight up. Ice cream here. Oh, I love homemade ice cream. Are you making vanilla? The soul. I'm making. I just ran outside because it was too loud. That's awesome. Hey Deneet, that was very cool that you sent him that. Oh, she thinks she can't. Can you see the comments, Paul? If I go on to the other screen, but it's a little delayed. If I go on Facebook, it's there. She wants me to send you her best. Deneet says, send Paul my best. Oh, I can see a live comment. Oh, there it is. Right there. Can you see it? Okay, you can't comment in there. Perfect. Which is kind of a bummer. I always wanna comment, but we can't. Oh, God. So, well, it looks like a lot of you guys know Paul. Yay. Well, I'm gonna have him for the people that don't know him. I'm going to have you, Paul. Go ahead and tell us a little bit about who you are, how long you've been in business, what you do, just a little rundown. Yeah, absolutely. So, me and Paul August, and I started actually, if I had backtracked, my first cleaning company was when I was 18 years old. I was working for this nonprofit organization, and I got laid off, me and a whole bunch of teachers. And for the longest time during that point, I thought I was gonna be a teacher. Well, they laid me off during field day, and I had to go home. I had like the Native American fake feathering, the war paint and everything. And I had to walk home three miles and put my wife and the whole time, like, what the heck am I gonna do while war paint's screaming down my face? And what, well, I had $200 in my bank account and I figured, okay, well, I took marketing in a business school and a trade school under that. So, let's make this work for us. So, my wife and I, which is my girlfriend then, we went to Family Dollar and just loaded up on the $200 worth of cleaning products. And we went on Craigslist. Our first cleaning job, guess how much we charged? $40. $30 for two people for three hours. Wow. Oh my God. What is the value of my time? But anyways, that business didn't end up working out for obvious reasons. I can't believe you're still doing it. Right. What would you charge that for? Say again? Charge more than that now. Exactly, exactly. We knew something was there. It's a barrier of entry in this industry is pretty low. So, it's easier to get into. So, when I was employed, we started reprimanding and restructuring and came back and we opened up our complex cleaning. And I was back in 2015, we were open officially. Nice. All right. So, tell us about how big of an area do you have? How many employees do you have? Tell us a little bit about your, because you're in New Hampshire. I mean, you can pretty much clean the whole state when we have what, 25 customers or something? Actually, our business is in Massachusetts. So, I live in New Hampshire and my business is in Mass. We do some Southern New Hampshire, but not a lot just because Massachusetts tends to be, I guess, deeper pockets for lack of a better term. People are not afraid to spend on what they need there versus New Hampshire. And it's weird because the border is right there, right? You think it'd be in the middle of it. But so, we service like Boston area. And what I didn't know when I started was that a lot of cleaning business owners don't have such a wide area. We were just saying yes to anyone in like our county. It was like driving, it was ridiculous. And it's still that big. So now we have like two locations. We have our Tingsboro location. And then we have a Wuburn location, but that's basically like a storage unit that we use like a resupply station kind of thing. Right now we only have 18 members. We went from having 12 and we kind of scaled down obviously with COVID and everything. We're getting back to our norm. I actually think we're gonna get back to better than what we were. And I actually think we might still be able to hit some numbers this year. But keep our fingers crossed and hope that it stays going good, you know? Yeah, well, that's actually what I wanted to talk to you. But first, before I talk about that, I got a real quick say. So Marlowe says in 1986, she charged $20 for a team of two and included dishwashing. Wow. Aren't you feeling a little better, sir? Yeah, I guess we both. $20 was worth a lot more than it is today. Let's go. Let's go. Not saying you're old, Marlowe, that's and you wouldn't do a lot in four weeks. I wish I could remember what happens. Well, you have so many birthdays. Yeah, you get old faster that way. I really wish I could remember my old numbers, but I can't. I feel really happy when I can remember what I was doing last year. Not to struggle sometimes. Well, so one of the things that I really wanted to talk about, Paul, is what are you doing? What are your strategies? How are you growing out of this? Because you do have this marketing thing going on. How are you making it work for you? Yeah, so immediately, I was a little echo-y after you were saying something. Immediately when this happened, I got on, literally I got my whiteboard and I said, all right, what's the worst case scenario? What's the minimum number that you go to and how does that look like? Remember, how do you look for a family? We started looking at it. Hold on, hold on. You're really, I'm not sure if it's you, maybe if we mute, it'll be better. Let's mute. Liz, do you mute on mute? Let's see what happens. How's that? Is it still echo-y? All right, awesome. So yeah, we went down to, we figured, okay, what's the worst case scenario? What's the worst thing that can happen and how do we kind of mitigate that? And thankfully we weren't at that low worst case scenario. I think had we been a little smaller, we would have felt the impact a little bit more than we did. And I automatically, I started thinking, okay, do we keep marketing? How does that go? So I was still running my Google ads. I was still running everything because my competitors weren't. So I figured if we're losing customers, we can get them back on this end. And it just, it was like call after call after call and it just started, it was like watching an airplane just go down to flames for a little bit. And I got nervous. I'll tell you, I got really, really nervous. Like everyone did. And there's a pie in like, that's something that you don't wanna think about. Not at all, not at all. So we started really, really focusing on SEO. And SEO is a long-term strategy. So we're like, okay, if we're not gonna spend money right now on Google, why the heck wouldn't we really optimize our SEO? So I started restructuring my website. I do a lot of work for other people's websites, but I never really care about mine as much. So I started going through there. We took every service location that we service and turned it into its own page and put videos everywhere, really getting content heavy and just kind of diving into that because it really took no money. It didn't take as much money for us to do it. And I know SEO can be expensive, but the things that I knew, I put into practice and everything. And we ended up getting a full-time SEO person on our marketing team. So that kind of helped out a lot. Actually, the other day- But you were the one doing it. So it was a lot less expensive. It wasn't me, it wasn't me. A lot of contents, I wasn't writing my own content. And some of the things I was doing on the backend, building backlinks and whatnot, but there's so much, I always tell everyone, like, there's no real, I don't think there's a real SEO expert, because these websites, they change things all the time. So today, you know what the heck you're doing. It's tomorrow, it makes no sense because you're being penalized for the same thing you were doing before. All right, so I try to get as much, I try to get as many people that know what they're doing and see what makes sense. So the whole Coley things, you know, happened over the last several months. I know there's a thought out there that SEO is kind of a long-term play. You know, most SEO experts, if you talk to about consultants, they'll tell you it'll take a year or so before you'll actually start seeing benefits. Have you been able to move the needle any of the last few months? Yes, I'll say yes, because it's not something that we weren't doing any SEO and we just started one day doing SEO. So there was that backlink building, for example, on the, that's been happening for years, but I never went as aggressive as I did. But the other day I got a message from one of our team members and I actually posted it on my Facebook page and she goes, hey, can you turn off the marketing? I'm like, that's not marketing. She's like, that's all SEO. And we're not always the number one for everything, but just that changing, adding every single location we service as its own page has shown to make a difference. So I can already make that strategy. So you build a city page for every location that you're doing. I guess you have to put a fair amount of local content with each city there in order to make that work. Yes, you do, you do. So right now the way we originally did it was we just changed the location. For example, if you were doing Boston Manifestations, we would change Boston, Massachusetts, which is like the city name, the wording would be exactly the same. That's what we did to get it out there immediately. Now that we got time and we already published that, we're going back and putting new content on each page. It's individual content. That's where it takes time because, you can either do it yourself and come up with a content or you can outsource it and have somebody write it for you. That's where it's gonna take time and money. So Paul, one of the things you said you were doing is a lot of videos and stuff. Can you tell us a little bit about what kind of videos are you putting out there? Are you creating on somebody else doing them for you? Talk to us about video. Yeah, it's a little bit of both. They ask you, Ann, some Marcus Sheridan? You get to know the book? I mean, that book is gold when it comes to marketing. Yeah, literally, it's amazing. And I can't stress it to people. I tell people, okay, remember years ago when you told a business owner, hey, get a website and they would tell you, oh, I'm on the yellow pages. I don't need a website. Now everybody has a website, right? And it's the same thing. Videos like, hey, get a video. Oh, I don't need a video. I have a website. Video is one of those things that you are going to need. Everyone is going to need. So we just got out there and my video's on my website. You guys can check it out, homepluscleaning.com. They're not the best, but we needed to get something out there to answer the questions that were being asked. Now, once we get it out there, we can go back and make it funny and come up with some creative ways. But I just needed something there and I needed Google to see that. So we created a video for every service we offer. So there's a video for that. I created a little bio video and should do some myself. I created a hiring video as well. I actually did that the other day. Wasn't the best. I'm like, oh, let me get this out there just so we can get people to see when they're applying. Here's who we are. And this is our team. They're fun. We want you to be part of that. Cause like attracts like. Well, you know what? This is Gary V strategy too. So from long before, right? Yeah. Before Marcus came along, Gary was pushing this hard. But then Marcus came around with just that little bit of a twist that has really made a big difference. I think a lot of people in our industry are huge fans, right? Of Marcus Sheridan. He's been at a lot of our events. So I'm hoping to say again. Well, he was at Artsy in November. Yeah. It was at Artsy. He was at, was it Phoenix time or Tucson? Where were we? Tucson. Or is that a leadership conference? That was, that's probably a couple of years ago. That long ago? He was also at Quality Driven, I think? Or? Service. I don't think he was at a pilot. Oh, a service auto pilot. I think so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Sarah is on here. She's on a different website. I think she's on Modern Cleaning. Yeah, she's my long lost son. I can't connect with her cause I'm on clean business today. And I think she's on Modern Cleaning so we can't respond. But the videos, I love this idea of the videos. I think Tom's probably gonna pull up your website and show a couple. So one of the things you said that I think is super important, Paul, is they don't have to be perfect. They just have to be out there. Yeah, they don't have to be out there, you know? Exit me on something and yeah. I think a lot of people have this idea though that yeah, done is better than perfect but now when it comes to video. Because people have that idea on everything though. Done is better than perfect until it comes to this or that or this or that. And I remember coming back from deployment. I almost, I spent the entire end of my deployment just cause everything was getting a little crazy so we couldn't go out and do things anymore. But I spent the entire end of my deployment planning this business and I got back and I almost didn't execute on it. Cause I wanted to have it perfect. I had to have this and I had to have that. And one of my roommates, he's like, hey, what's going on with this? He's like, I forget what he said. He was a big reader as well. I forget what he said and he quoted a book and he's just like, just go there, do it and you're gonna learn it as you go along. And if you go with my videos, I don't have the best editing skills but I just went and took my Mac and started doing it. Then I got a better program and just started playing around with it and it all fell together. Well, what program are you using right now, Paul? I don't even remember the name. It's on my desktop at the office. It's like moving something. I'll share it afterwards. Do you use Mac or PC? I'm sorry? Use a Mac or PC? I use a Mac at home. The other program is for PC and Mac but I purchased the PC version cause I was too cheap to put a Mac in my office. I need that because all of the ones that we hear about all the time are for Macs. So I need one that's for PC. I think I paid $49 or $50 and it's way better than iMovie and it's for life. No monthly, no one-time fee. Oh yeah, we need that. Yeah, we definitely need that or at least I need that. All right, so are we gonna play a video here real quick, Tom? Yeah, can I come in and play this? Yeah, let's roll. Who are they? How do I know they're not criminals and they're gonna steal everything from my house? How you doing guys? My name is Paul August and that is a very good question. So I'm a former natural police department officer and I'm still a certified police officer in the state of New Hampshire. So why did I tell you all my credentials beforehand? Well, my primary role at Homeless Cleaning is to oversee all of the HR. I oversee the recruiting and the background checks in accordance with state and local law and I also do the character references for all of our team members that come on board. When someone applies to work at Homeless Cleaning, we do an intensive background investigation. We're really sure that the first number you send against your home is trustworthy. A lot of the time with new applicants, the references that they provide us are friends, family members and supervisors that they like. So what we do is we still contact those people and just ask for a character reference. But we take it a step further. We actually call their employers as well that actual job that they left for whatever reason and we just ask them simple questions. I want the key questions we ask them is if you had to hire this person again, would you hire this person? We want to make sure that the person that's sending to your home is 100% trustworthy. And all the years that we've been in business, we have never had any issue. So if you're worried about who's going to your home, you don't have to worry about it. We're not just pulling people up the street and sending them to your home. We're going on Craigslist and just finding anyone to just work with us. We only hire the top of the top and we're the best of the best. And I think this shows throughout our company. All right, so I got a little bit of a problem. So that video right there, like on a scale of one to 10, how would you rank that? 10 is high, one is low. Oh, I can't hear you. Oops. I'm... You muted you. You're good now, Paul. I'd give that video a seven, eight because that video was definitely better than when I first started. Okay, good. Cause I thought this is what you were trying to say that this is not a good video. I'm like, come on. You know how I got better at editing? So Amar from Zen Made. Amar and Fran did this 100 day video challenge, which I only got to like 30 or 40 something days. And literally that's when I started editing. This was in December. Oh wow. So I just, every single day, I had to edit a video. And by day 30, I can edit a video very well. Yeah, no kidding. So if you allocate an hour a day, that's aggressive. It was probably not even an hour a day for trying to do something, you can get better at it. I also got a green screen kit from amazon.com. It cost me $80. Green screen, light, everything. $80. And that's from an iPhone. That one was from an iPhone 6. Wow. Really? So for the iPhone 11, I do my videos through there and it comes out really well. You don't need much. A lot of people think you need this whole setup. You don't need much to make something look really presentable. Yeah, that looks really good. Are you using the mic? It's just like native on the phone? So for the iPhone 11, you don't even need the mic. But for those ones, I had the mic. Cause my iPhone 6 didn't have a very good mic. But this one, I just use the mic from there. As long as you got a quiet space, it's incredible what you can do with something that's just in your pocket. Like this is just, this is not even a phone anymore. I don't even want to call it that. This is like, this is a whole tool. Like I never pick up my laptop to do any work. I mean, I just use this. That really looks good, Paul. But I mean, you also have a very good, crisp, clean look. But, you know, not all of us have that look. So, and you present well, you know, just you're really believable. Not everybody looks that comfortable. Do you think that it's still okay to have somebody that doesn't look comfortable or should they hire somebody that looks better? You know, it's a double-edged story because I think we all think that we can, we're not fit to do this. I'll tell you what one of my barriers to actually doing video was, and this is, I thought it would be, and it's funny because I live in the North so you don't have that as prevalent. But I'm like, you know, do I really want my customers to see my face? What if they don't like black people? That was literally my thought. And I just did it. You know, everyone has this thing like whether it's true or not, you know? Like it's just this, this doubt about what they can and can't do. Just go- That's a really good point. I love that. Yeah, that's a really great point. I wouldn't have thought of that, but yeah, you got it. Everybody's got that thing that's bugging them, right? Like me, I moved my hands too much. People are gonna think I'm flighty and, you know, ah, but that's no difference, you know? People are gonna think what they're gonna think. So, okay, I get that. If the objective is to boost SEO, I mean, you don't want anything that's gonna hurt you, but from an SEO standpoint, if that video is an eight or a five, you're gonna get the same SEO value, right? You know what? That's a good question. In terms of the quality of the video, you mean? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you're talented and you speak well with confidence. I mean, that was an awesome video. But even if you weren't that good, you're still gonna get a lot of SEO value on shooting a five video as opposed to an eight, right? I can't speak to what Google is actually doing in terms of listening to these videos. I don't know how the algorithm works, but they want to see stuff like that. Like Google loves content. These search engines love content. The more, the better. Like back in the days, you can get away with putting 500 words on a page or 1,000 words on a page. Now they want 2,500. I mean, I ran a analysis on my website just the other day and I'm like, man, I gotta put more content up. It's not enough. You're not writing enough. Yeah, they want epic, epic pages, stories, a lot of stuff. Let me put the video this way. You know, like you said, done is better than perfect. You know, if you got a choice between, you know, maybe I'm only capable of doing like, I don't know, scale one to 10, a five, but a five is better than no video at all, right? But, so, absolutely, absolutely. Let me show you something. Actually, go to About Us. Okay. I'm gonna give you guys a golden nugget here. Go to Video Gallery. Promise of excellence. Nope, a video gallery. Oh. So these are my frequently asked questions answered in video format. Now click on one of Catherine's videos. How easy is that? Press play, that's not me. No. And you can get your team members involved in this. I'm gonna get asked some great questions from our customers. Hi, my name is Catherine and I'm a client fancier at Home Plus Cleaning. And I wanted to take a moment and answer some of the most common ones. Question, do you always send the same house cleaners? We believe that it's very important to always send the same team member to clean your home. And we do everything in our control to make this possible. When you choose our cleaning service, we assign you a primary and a secondary cleaner. If your primary team member is absent, you can expect to see your secondary team member. All of our residential housekeepers undergo extensive training to ensure that the quality of our work is always consistent. And being law enforcement-owned, we take the security of your home seriously and would never send an unscreened person to your home. Contact us to request a free estimate. That's for me. No, yeah. You think it doesn't have to necessarily be you and in reality, should all the videos be me? No, it shouldn't be me because if I ever have plans to sell the company down the road and the company's built around me, somebody's gonna ask me to do a stay on for X amount of years, make sure I hit profit, no, I'm sorry, the sun is in here. I gotta move you. Make sure I hit certain earnings before they can see that the system is viable, the business is worth it. Everything can't be built around the owner. So get your team members involved. I have a video, one of our girls, Tiffany, she's petrified of videos. If you go to our contacts and join us page, it's a hiring video, she's petrified of videos. And when I recorded her one time, she was like shaking, but she did it, like just get everybody involved in it. And... Is it this gal right here? Yes, that's Tiffany. Does she work for you? Your client, cause she is, does she... She doesn't work for me. She doesn't work for me. She's an old person. I'm sorry? She's a spokesperson. So you just found her like on Fiverr or something. Exactly. Oh. Why was she so afraid if that's what she does? This girl works for me, Tiffany works for me. Oh, okay. Right. This one right here. The lady at the photo gallery was... Oh, no wonder. I'm like, hey, she's really good too. Yeah. How long was she clean? I'm sorry? How long was she clean? I don't know. I wanna see Tiffany cause she's not a spokesperson. Hey, what's going on? And congratulations on taking the next step to joining Home Plus Cleaning. Now our goal throughout this whole process is to make sure that not only are you good for us, but we're good for you as well. So what we'd like for you to do is use the link down below to schedule an interview with us. And from there, we're gonna talk about our company and make sure that we're good for you. So the first part of our hiring process is to tell you all about us and let you make that decision, right? So schedule it below. Also, can you tell us some of our team members have to say about us? I'm Tiffany and I have been with Home Plus Cleaning for about two years now. I joined the team when I was at a point in my life where I was sick of sitting behind the desk all day. And I really wanted to get out and get myself active. So I joined the team and about two years later, I'm still here. My name is Bella Delaney and I'm with Home Plus Cleaning since February. The best thing that I like is that once you get your flow, you kind of move your schedule. You schedule that a house for three and a half, four hours. But if you've got your flow and you know your house, you could be done in two and a half hours and now I have time to hit the grocery store before getting the kits. But I'm still making the same money as if I was putting in 40 hours a week. At the end of the week, I'm only putting in like 35 and I'm still getting a check. Over here, I've got a breakfast set up and everything. Gonna make some breakfast. Gonna make some breakfast. Breakfast, breakfast. Okay, so I'm almost finished here next month for a year and I've only noticed like two weeks ago that I've lost so much weight because I started working here. I started off probably around 165-ish maybe and I went down to probably 130. So that was my goal. Looking for rock stars. If you can be the next rock star, you're definitely encouraged to apply. Have an interview. All the tools and training you need to be provided. Don't leave a lot to be seen and experienced. There's a team of rock stars here who are ready to jump home, get you trained so you can start making that push-ups and start a new adventure in life. You want to work for a company that you are truly appreciated because most places you're just a number and you can work as hard as you can and you will never get further. You will never be told, hey, good job. That's never an issue with this company. You never question how much you're appreciated and where you stand with this company. And if that's what you're looking for, this is the company for you. That is really good. That is really good. Thank you. And that video was, let me just, I think me going live on my page is ruining this. Can you hear this? Can you hear me good? We're good. That video besides me talking in the beginning and Tiffany's intro and speaking, that was shot a year ago. And I just never put it together, but the camera quality, that was my iPhone 6. The mic wasn't the best mic. And the editing, you can even tell because you can see a little green, but I did it. And even in the beginning, this video that I shot a week ago with me speaking, I stuttered and I'm like, you know what? I don't care. I need to get this on here now. Like time is, everything is time sensitive. And if we're not the first ones to do it, somebody else is gonna do it and they're gonna do it and they're gonna beat us to it. I'm impressed, ma'am. Those are great. Those are really good. I'm impressed. Yeah, and I love it. I'm glad that we looked at that one too. Because you said that Tiffany was so afraid. She was shaking. I couldn't see that shaking at all. Did you? No. Go ahead. Go ahead. Talking about weight loss, Leslie. Yeah. Yeah. She was worse than Tiffany in terms of being afraid. Literally, that's the only bit that I could get from her entire thing. But that's all you're looking for. There's that quick little 10, 20 second blurb that's perfect. And I tell them, I'm like, even if you mess up, just keep going through it. I'll do the editing on the back end. And she was moving like this. If I show you the raw footage, you'd be like, I didn't even get this piece from there. We just got to. That's great. I'm super glad we watched that. I think that that was the best example of how it doesn't have to be perfect to still be good. And to be really effective and to do what it's supposed to do. And I almost like it better. Yeah. It feels really real. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay. I really liked that a lot. That was great. So Paul, do you attribute a lot of like what you're doing, your growth and how you're coming out of COVID too? It sounds like you do then. To your website, your SEO work, videos, all this kind of stuff. I'd say it's not just like, oh, COVID happened and we started doing these things and it kind of all together. I think it's been kind of like a long-term strategy and building our team in that culture to be able to service them. Because if we didn't have the great reviews and being able to do this, we wouldn't be able to provide, we wouldn't be able to get any traction. So the website absolutely helps. But I think it's like the people behind everything that really makes a run together. It's just that everything kind of flows. And although there are deviations in the road, sometimes we don't follow the system to T all the time, but we adjust and we learn. Yeah, I love that. And I do know what you mean about having to adjust and learn like the 2,500 words per page versus 500 words. Yeah. I'm not looking for that one. How often do you add content or change things or what do you do there? Yeah, so I told myself I was gonna do it once a week, add something new, but it's not that consistent. Sometimes things get, other things happen. I'd say the last time we had, actually we had a content last week, so I take that back. But at least every month, something's going on the website. Every month something's going on. And it's important to just stay relevant. And that's what it is. You're staying relevant to the search engines. You're telling them, hey, I'm here. I'm a real website and I have new things going on. So don't forget to refer me. It's kind of like that kid in school who keeps putting their hands up and the teacher wants to ignore them. They're like, all right, I choose you. Kind of one of those things. And that's not an exact science, but it's work for us. Yeah. So if you were doing a once a week schedule, is that like writing blog posts or building up city pages or just taking the existing pages you have and trying to get to that 2,500 words, videos? But that's where you use your time. So in terms of for the SEO aspect? Yeah. I'd say the website is gonna be key in terms of, so this kind of goes in more into the back and making sure that your title, the meta tags, those are more like the techie aspect of it, making sure all the code is right because these people have to make sure everything's appropriate. Well, if you're putting a blog every single week but your title tag on your website sucks or it's just broken meta tags and, I guess here's how it's summed up. You have to clean your house up a little bit first before you start adding new furniture. So I guess that's the way I would sum it up. So make sure your website is functioning to a point. You guys can all check it out. I use Neil Patel's Uber Suggest, Uber Suggest. And I pay $29 a month. Like if you ever hire me and my team for SEO, we're gonna put your name through that and everybody's like, oh, why are you telling this? We're gonna put your website through that exact search to get a whole analysis of your keywords, SEO, the way your website's functioning, all of that. And you guys can do that yourself. There's a free aspect and you can check what your website is doing, any kind of critical errors. And I will tell you this, every website is always gonna have a critical error. It's nothing's 100% perfect, but speed is a big thing. Make sure your website's loading fast. All these little things, once your house is clean, then you can add new furniture. Yeah, I love that. Well, I posted your website in the chat and if anybody wants to use Neil Patel's tool, I'll go ahead and just drop that there. And if you guys want my scripts, by the way, I think I gave it to a whole bunch of people on the QDS page. If you want my scripts for my frequently asked questions, let me know, I have it on Google Drive. Tom, I can send you the link afterwards and everyone can just kind of go into the scripts, just remove my name, make sure you're not staying home plus cleaning. But you guys can do that and you can do it. Well, actually, if they did, that might be helpful to you. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Tuesdays, please say homeless cleaning. We have a resource page on cleaning business today that we add things that we talk about during smart business moves. So if you want to share the link, I'll be glad to post it in our resource. Absolutely. And then also, Paul, you said if people haven't been having you do some of this work for them, implying that they could maybe get you to do some of this work for them. So I actually started a marketing agency. That's my background with marketing. So I started a marketing agency back in 2018, August Global Marketing for Winners. And I took it as a hobby because I love marketing and I love talking about what's what, the principles that stay the same and the principles that are changing. And I wanted to do it as a hobby, so I never took it as a job. I was like, oh yeah, I'll do a few people if you want me to do this. And then it was a little bit before COVID, I kind of started gaining a little bit of traction and actually when COVID happened, we started, I'm like, all right, let's make this a legitimate business. Let's run it like a legitimate business. Let's hire some people in-house and outside and let's build this. Okay, so August Global Marketing for Winners. Augustglobal.com, it's like my last name. Augustglobal.com, okay. Dot com, all right. So can you tell us? I don't know if you can do this because I know SEO is really hard, but can you give us any kind of information around pricing? Like, how much does it cost to hire, like, and I like what you said, nobody's an SEO expert. No one, man, no one's an expert, you know? It's a lot of, yeah. So having hired many SEO companies, I feel like I can really attest to that fact. I mean, marketing in general sometimes is just, oh my goodness, I think I had spent, it was $45,000 over a course of a year and a half, trying to figure out Google myself. And this was on credit cards, by the way. I was like, swipe, swipe, swipe. And I'm like, what the heck? I just thought like I could figure it out. I'm like, oh, well, I took marketing at school, you know, I'll figure it out. Well, that wasn't the case. And then I hired a companies which I won't mention and although they knew what they were doing a lot of the time with certain things, they didn't understand my industry and that was a problem working with a company that didn't understand the cleaning industry. And one company, they specifically worked with lawyers for PPC, people click on Google, and I'm like, oh, they work with lawyers, they can definitely do my company. Yeah, that was just something. Not good. Yeah, so. So Leslie's asking, what should we expect to pay for monthly SEO service? Is there a range or? There is a range and you'll find some people on the lower end and some people on the higher end. I'd say anywhere between 600 to 1200 is about the average range, you know, and we kind of fall right in the middle of that. Okay. That sounds good. I think that's super, super helpful for people. Before you hire someone for SEO, like I said, make sure your website's already done. There's still a lot of things that you can do yourself to make it a viable thing. You can write, you can say, okay, I'm gonna spend one hour every single week and I'm gonna create an article or I'm gonna write something that my audience wants to read about, although most people are not gonna read about it. What I also recommend is taking those articles. What we're gonna be doing next is taking all of the blog articles that we're creating and making them into a video. And we're posting the video on the page and then posting everything in there. Just for content, it's for content. Yeah, I think that makes really good sense too because you hit both audiences. Some people really love to read and some people really love to watch video and some people are like me. I wanna read, but the video is what makes me wanna read it. Yeah. So I watch the video and then I'm like, okay, done with that. Now I wanna read everything. So, all right, Leslie also wants to know what can we expect for that money? Cause it really is hard for us on this side to know. What are we gonna get? How do we know that it's worth our money? Absolutely. It's one of those things but we have to specifically verify that what's being done is being done. And there's no, for example, if you hire someone for AdWords, can you hear me? If you hire someone for Google AdWords, for example, you can go into your history and see how active they are in your account. Oh, there's no change. They haven't done this or maybe in a month they created one ad and added two keywords. With SEO, it's very challenging. It's one of those things that I hate to say, you're almost walking by faith to some degree because if you hire someone that doesn't know what they're doing, you're not finding out in one month. You're not finding out in two months. You'll find out a few months down the road and that's the challenge there. But what you can expect, what you should expect is that they're building backlinks. That's still a big thing. They're making sure that your website is functioning, that it's fast, that the load times are not taken forever. They're creating content. I can't believe how many people will do SEO but when creating content for you, content's important. So they're creating content. I'm sorry? Most of them. Yeah, it's a good amount. And for the amount of work that it takes on some of the other stuff, you can add in the content. You can add in a video a month, right? Now, this might not be me getting on camera and talking about the industry. It might be a little animated video but something like that, anything, anything that can answer a question that could satisfy somebody's needs. What is it that they wanna know? Let me answer that. And you can ask your customers, if you guys don't have a list of the best customers, at least 10 of them, I recommend doing that. Call them, chat with them, ask them what's going on. And I remember when we started the company, my wife's role was the home advisor. This is before any home advisor thing, by the way. It's cool to hear. Your job is to become best friends with the clients. And to a certain degree, in terms of, I wanna know, and I tell our team members this too, I wanna know when their kids are graduating, I wanna know any serious life events. I wanna know what's going on, especially with our top clients, they all know that when they go in that client house, if there's a loss in the family, a dog passed away, they got a new dog. We know these things, we're sending things out. So these customers, they get comfortable with you and you are their friend. They're going into their home and they're willing to give you information because one, they wanna contribute because they feel like they have an invested interest in your company. And the other part of that is like, it makes it better for them as well. I have a question, getting back to the SEO and the backlinks, cause that's always a topic of discussion, it seems to me, it doesn't matter what SEO consultant you're talking to, getting more backlinks is always part of it. We're talking about the onsite and the offsite SEO. What's a backlink campaign look like? I mean, how many backlinks should I be adding to my website each week? All of them. I'm sorry? I said all of them. Now, so back in the days, you could just go pay like somewhat a couple of hundred bucks and they'll get you all these backlinks. And next thing you know, you have like a thousand backlinks on your page. I guess there's blog sites and all kinds of things that are kind of, I don't know, like that kind of stuff. Those websites are getting penalized. Like you can't do that anymore. You can't just go out there and say, I'm going to pay someone to get a whole bunch of backlinks because Google's realizing like they caught up. And I keep using Google because it's just the biggest search engine. And whatever happens on Google, the other ones follow. I'm sorry, I got you guys out of the sun. But they kind of started figuring out, okay, this is happening. And these websites are getting ranked because they're doing, not because they're necessarily a good website. And just for you guys that don't know what a backlink is, think about it as a review or referral. It's another website saying like, hey, this website's credible, you should check it out. And that's pretty much that. I'd say, somebody might say, Paul, you don't know that because you don't know how that algorithm works. To be honest, like this is really, I don't have the ends with Google to tell you what it should be. But I mean, I wouldn't be putting less than 10 backlinks a week, a month on my website. That's actually helpful. The algorithm changed, they just had it. So everything is rapidly changing. That's why you have to be on the cutting edge and test things like, okay, I was doing this this month and it was working for the whole time. All of a sudden there's an algorithm change and I'm still doing this, but now we're not ranking anymore. We're actually getting penalized. So let's switch it up. That's what you have to do. It has to be constant and it's almost a full-time job to make sure that you're ahead of them. But then I've been giving out this information. Here you go, here's the Bible on what to do. Yeah. So Leslie has a question here. She wants to know if it's reasonable to ask for a list of what they've done for the month with their invoice, like how much time they've spent or whatever. It's very reasonable, very reasonable. So to piggyback off of what she's asking here, Paul, like what should we request from them? Should we just ask them how much time they spent or should we ask them what back things, what did you do? What's the actual thing we should be asking for? Good question. So the time itself is not mostly like, okay, hey, you spent an hour versus 20 hours. It's not one of those things. It's what's getting them. Now, where are, if I'm targeting Boston house cleaning, that's my keyword. Where was it last week? Where is it now? Where is it last, I'm sorry, where was it last month? Where is it now? What have you done to get it to where it's at? You know, what content have you built around that keyword to get it ranked? And some keywords are easier to get than others. Boston is a very challenging one. It's just a competitive area. So we're fighting to kind of get those more hanging fruit. So you take some of the, let's say for example, you're in a big metro area and you target the outside areas. Focus on those for the SEO purposes. And as those gain credibility, the other one will start gaining credibility as well once you start targeting that. So versus I'm gonna spend all my money. I'm gonna tell you, hey, take $100 a month, just get me first on Boston. Well, that's gonna take a long, long time. We're not talking 90 days, you know, or half a year, we're talking a long time. And just because you're there this month, doesn't mean you're not gonna get knocked off the next month. Yeah. It's one of those things that you have to do, but unfortunately it's like, it's not a set it and forget it. It's not, yeah. Yeah, I guess there's only, you know, 10 natural search slots on the first page and everybody's fighting for them. Exactly. Yeah. I know. So would this question be a good question? So I'm going back to my thing then because it's really hard if you don't know about SEO and if I don't want to spend, would you say $50,000, $40,000 learning how to do it? I don't want to spend that. Then is it would a good question? I've been learning about it. What? That money didn't help me either. I had to take it first. That's even worse. Oh, yeah, actually, I spent more money after that. I took it first. Oh, yeah, that's even worse. Okay, so if I don't want to do that, I want to hire somebody. It would this be the thing to say, yes, I want to hire you, but I need a monthly accounting of what you did for me. You should get that anyways. Absolutely, you should get a report. I think anyone that's doing any kind of marketing for you should be given your report to see, okay, what directly is going into it and what's coming out and does this still justify it? And I think that's across the board with this, Facebook marketing, Google, somebody's doing YouTube or SEO. You should always get a report. And I mean, it's just good business practices, right? Good business practice. You want to know your sales at the end of the month, and it's the same thing with marketing. You want to know that and how they all play in together. And one thing I will say too, it's the hard part with getting somebody that it's not proven that it's just like a new guy. Maybe he actually knows what he's doing or a new girl, they know what they're doing. The hard part is knowing that their results are gonna be what they say it is before it's too late. So what I would say is if you're looking at a company, just you can look at the reviews, that's good. But if you can ask them, and some won't do it, some will do it, say, hey, who do you have in my industry that you've worked with that can vouch for you? You know, that's, it's so simple, but some people have like all my clients confidentiality, but I think that's a good stepping stone. Now, whether the other person on the other line is gonna tell you the truth or not, because you might be a competitor or whatever the reason is, is a whole story. But try to get someone that's done it, like, hey, I've worked with so-and-so before, they got good results for me and let's do it, you know? And quite honestly, you know, we've heard those stories too, where I've worked with a particular SEO person and it was really good and I got a lot of benefit until they became popular. And then they took on a whole bunch of clients and then it wasn't as good anymore. That's exactly what it is, that's exactly what it is. They're spending less time on the account and yeah, unfortunately that's just, that's exactly what happens over time. I mean, it's like cleaning if we start just not worrying about our clients and diluting it, you know, any industry that can happen. So it's more for the owner to make sure that they're accountable for what they're doing. Yeah, of course that makes sense too. All right, so Leslie says, so for her guy, she creates all the content because nobody does content that she likes. Should it be less expensive for her since they're working together or and he is okay with the arrangement or should she expect to spend about the same amount of money? Yeah, if you're free. Yes. You feel us? Again, not every SEO person's gonna go out there and create content for you. They're just gonna say, oh yeah, we're building, we're targeting these keywords and we're doing a backlink building and all that. I think content is really where it's at. Maybe some people argue with me, but I think content is equally if not more important than backlinks because you can have the backlinks but if your website is just, it's not juicy for the, for the circumstances then they don't really care about it that much. I do have a real quick question too. So are you doing anything special with content during this COVID period? Are you checking it up? Are you directly addressing it on your website and is that working, not working? Yeah, so I have to say this and I gotta be completely transparent. I wasn't as aggressive as going for the COVID, like everything that's going on COVID as I probably should have been or that some other people are. Mainly because, so I did a hazmat cleaning, like that was my job in the military, hazmat, things of that nature. And I knew, first of all, no one knows anything about this. Like, I have a good friend of mine, he's a surgeon and he's like, you don't know, no one knows. So there was that aspect. I don't know what I'm putting my team members into. The other aspect was we don't have the PPE. So if we don't have the proper gear to go in there, how can I target that? As far as addressing it, we didn't address it on our website. Although if you actually go to my website, you'll see COVID cleaning. We actually put that on originally and then I'm like, wait, wait, wait, wait, we're getting way over our heads. So we didn't do that. But what we did was we contacted customers and actually a lot of our customers got a personal phone call when we see like, okay, a lot of people are attending the ship. Let's see how we can address them and kind of put them in their mind at ease. So when we started, we didn't have the option of pre-paying for the cleaning or donating the cleaning. Actually, a lot of our customers, our bank account grew bigger while we were in COVID. It was the strangest thing. And I'm like, what's going on here? Well, we weren't spending on certain things and customers wanted to contribute. They wanted to see that team members get paid and they were able to donate some to the police department. And one thing that we were able to do too because of our customers, I actually just posted this yesterday, we were able to, we had pushed back our insurance, May 2020, we were supposed to have health insurance but we had pushed it back. I didn't know what was going on. I didn't know what steps we were gonna have to take. And I said, everything has to be lean and mean but we were able to restart our insurance program with health and dental, I mean with vision and dental as well and that's all because of our customers and we reached out to them and let them know, hey, you were able to do this and our customers were so ecstatic about that. We are pushing right up against the hour. And I gotta say, since we've been doing these Facebook lives during this unprecedented event, almost missed it. This has been one of the most useful Facebook lives we've done, Paul, truly. This is a lot of awesome information and I don't know what you typically do at five o'clock, most afternoons, but you could become a regular here because this is good. Thank you very much. Liz, you're... Thank you. We do have to ask this one question though real quick. Leslie wants to know if you offer website appraisals to see if they need to make a switch or what they might need to do. Absolutely. So in terms of redesigning a whole website? I'm guessing she wants you to just look at her website and see if she needs more SEO, a different SEO. That's right, that's right. So, Leslie, what you can do is you can actually drop me a message at PaulAugustOfficial, that's my Facebook page. Drop me a message with your website URL. I'll run an analysis for you and I'll send it to you. And if I think that, first of all, I see some websites out there that are incredible and people are like, oh, I want to change it, Paul. I'm like, yeah, I'm not going to lie. I'm not going to do a better job than that. It's pretty good, you know? But I think it needs to be changed. I'll go ahead and I'll send you a mock-up. If you're interested in it, a how it would look like if we designed your website. I brought the link to augustglobal.com too. I'm assuming they can reach you through that. Yes. Okay. Okay, perfect. Thank you. There was a question that you wanted us to answer, Liz, about what your practice should be if you have a client that tests COVID positive. You're so good, Tom. I'm so glad. Linda, I'm so sorry. I almost let that slide by. We got Tom here. Yeah, okay, well, we're good. Early information, you know, led us to believe, and I guess we're still working from a lot of this that people are most contagious even before they're symptomatic and then in the early stages. A lot of companies, our company, and a lot of other people I work with, they have a policy in place that they stay out of the home until two weeks. Whenever they become non-symptomatic, we wait an additional two weeks and then we resume service. I haven't seen anything contradicting that. So, we're presumed that, you know, that's still good practice. Yeah, see, Linda's very grateful that you remembered her. Yeah, we're doing the same thing, Linda. I think most people are still doing that too. I think that's a good answer. Yes. So, Norma, everybody, I think that Paul meant that if you guys put your information on there, he'll get to as many as he can, not just largely. You might not do everybody, but he'll get to as many as he can, so be fast. Get on there quick, Norma. And then he'll be like one of those people that had so many clients that he was in early... I don't want to do that on a paid website. Like, what is this, Paul? I'm not in a cocky way, I guess, because I said this one time to somebody, and they're like, that's pretty arrogant, but I'm happy about the clients. I'm more happy about the clients that I turn away than the ones that I say yes to, because I just think it just keeps it better. And I don't build my life around my business. I build my business around my life, so if I won't be able to go flying and have some fun, I won't take on the job. That's for the... All right, that's nice. That's a good saying. I like it. Also, I got to tell you that you are one of the least arrogant people I have personally ever met. So whoever said that, yeah, no. Wrong. This is cool. I've gotten to know you a whole lot better over this last hour, and I'm excited about continuing the discussion. We are right against the wall here, though. Liz, who are we gonna have tomorrow? You can't see. So tomorrow, we're having Carrie Knight. And Carrie is awesome for those of you that don't know her to pull her up on Facebook because we're out of time. I can't tell you too much about her, but pull her up on Facebook and just see what she's about. She's an amazing person too. You're gonna love having her on the call tomorrow. Thing about Carrie is she keeps it real. She'll tell you all the good, the bad, and the ugly. And Friday is on the spot. It's a rapid-fire Q&A where Liz and I and our special guests each get one minute to answer your questions. We did it last week for the first time. Paul Fried joined us, and we had a lot of fun. Do you have a hint as to who our special guest is? So I do have a hint for our special guest. So she is one of my favorite people. There. There you go. That's it. That's my hint. Mine as well. Mine as well. Hey, now they know it's with the she. They didn't know that yesterday. Oh, my favorite people. She is awesome. She is. Okay, guys. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Paul. Thanks for your day. We'll see you here tomorrow at five o'clock Eastern. Bye-bye. Guys, have a good night. Thanks, you too, Paul. Thanks again.