 Hey, good afternoon everybody. I'm Stuart here. I am with Liz Trotter. This is, I guess the Christmas Eve show for smart business moves this year, even though it's not Christmas Eve, this is the closest we're gonna get to it. Yeah, it's Christmas Eve-ish. It's our Christmas show. Yes. It's what we could say. And we're dawning our gay apparel. Yeah, I hope that Danique comes on to see this hat that she sent you and how amazing it is. Actually, my good friend would say it's amazing. It's so awesome. And I had to dump the green screen because you wouldn't be able to see it if the green screen was working. Oh, Linda, I've already been on a call with her today. So she's already seen my cute little Santa in my cute little reindeer. But Tom, I don't think anybody can even notice what I've got going on when they see that tree. I struggle to see anything else but that tree. It's amazing. Am I right, Paul? I know, Danique. It's so cute. All right. And we'll introduce our guest today, Joe Walsh from Snowy Portland, Maine, which is probably about as close to the North Pole as I would want to get anyway. Well, closer than any of us, yeah. That's right. We don't have to go very far. Yeah, thanks for having me. I had to leave the call for a minute to go grab my hat. I didn't know that there was a hat that hats were allowed. This is great. I need to figure out a way to. This is the hat I wear when I'm putting the Christmas lights on my house. Oh, it's so cute. Oh, okay, you guys, speaking of Christmas lights, have you ever seen the permanent Christmas lights that they have, house lights? My son-in-law just put them up on his house. They're amazing. They're permanent and you can change every bulb. Each bulb you can change to any color. So you can run like Valentine's Day and Fourth of July and Halloween and any color scheme that you can think of, you can do on these lights. I'm like, they are so amazing. Oh, that's cool. And you can do them in any, so they can run, they could flash, they could flash like in chunks like red flashes, white flashes. I'm having visions of like Christmas vacation. I mean, is it like just, does the power meter spin when? No, because he has them on doesn't really sound like it, but there's a lot of peaks on his house until all he has done is just the peaks and you know, around the house. So it's very, it's very, I don't know the word. Tasteful, it's not over the top. I'm thinking it's kind of sedate, but not entirely. Yeah, so. His neighbors don't talk about him, okay. No, and the first house, their house is the first house you see in the neighborhood. So everybody loves those lights. Yeah, they're amazing, but yeah. Check them out. I'm just laughing, thinking about like that hat being Tom's strategic planning hat, like that's what the money gets on when he's like goal setting and trying to look forward for the year. Let me put my thinking cap on. This is how the sausage is made. You got to get away and make that little puppy stand up though, stay standing. Yeah, it needs something in it to kind of like stabilize, you know, that's what it. Yeah, like it's sticking there. Is anybody on the call crafty? Maybe you could send it out to somebody on the call and like. I am, I'm very crafty. Send it to that little thing. Get it to be a little taller. All right, well. It's awesome having you here for like our last show for Christmas. That's kind of special. And, you know, you've been a regular contributor to smart business moves, you know, and I guess I could almost say over the years, it's been over a year anyway. Oh, two years now. Yeah, two years. I think yeah, just when you said years, I thought it was getting close. Yeah, I guess we started doing this back in March, maybe. Yeah, yeah, March. Two years. Yeah, good call. Remember, but you know, I thanks for the invite and I'm excited to be here and hopefully I can share some things that will be helpful for some folks. And I really owe Tom for inviting me because it kind of forced me to get my planning process for next year underway. So when Tom invited me, I said, yes, because it's going to make me do it. Yeah, that's good. Got the ball rolling. That's right. Hey Tom, Linda has a really great suggestion for later. You just put tissue paper in it, right? And hold it up. What an easy solution. No crap you need it. I could jam maybe five rolls of toilet paper in it, all right? Love it. Or just like two sheets of tissue paper would be much easier. All right, so Joe, I am super excited. I am one of the things. I'm gonna be laughing this whole time. One of the things I have always loved that you do, Joe, is you are really a strategic man. You're strategic in the things that you do. And so I'm looking forward to hearing about your strategic planning. I know that you do some planning and budgeting and how you go about it. Usually when we hear people talking about their planning and their budgeting, they speak, yeah, me too. I meant tissue wrapping paper too, Linda. But usually they speak really broadly in terms of things like, well, I think about how much money I wanna make next year. I think about, and so I'm guessing maybe, maybe not rightly, but I'm guessing that you attack it from a pretty strategic angle. You have an idea. You probably have a little bit of an outline or something. Yeah? Yes, yeah, I definitely do. But also I think a lot of planning, like my planning also starts with very simple objectives. Like for example, you can just, some years I'll start with, I need to make this amount in my business next year. And that amount dictates everything else because then you can just play around with the numbers to figure out how to get to that amount. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, that's a, I start a lot of planning years that way. And a lot of times too, I mean, I have a process that I follow in general. And I did jot down some notes about that process while I was going through it this time around, just in preparation for this call. So I thought that I could share kind of how I approach it. But honestly, I do go into it with some idea of what I wanna achieve, but I always come out of the planning process with something a little bit different than I thought I was going to. So like, I think it's really important to enter the planning process with an open mind and like not be married to any one particular idea or one particular way that you're gonna approach a problem. And also, I'll just say that I try to keep the process as simple as possible because planning is necessary. And I think it helps keep you on track. But we all know that the first day the plan hits reality, it starts to change. So I think that you don't wanna spend, I've learned, I used to spend way more time doing this and it's just not worth it. So... What's the saying, man plans, God laughs? I mean, I feel like that's like, the man, we plan and the industry laughs. It's like, yeah, you're cute with that. Yeah, the world laughs at us or, you know. Let's see how that plays out. COVID's laughing at us, whatever it is, you know. Now COVID's part of it too. So... Something's laughing. But it's really no different than any other unexpected. I mean, it is different, but now it's just kind of becoming a part of what we're dealing with. So would it be all right if I just kind of jumped in and started to talk about what I do? So I was gonna put this, yeah, the only thing I have written for this part is on my whiteboard back there and you probably can't read that. So I'll just start by explaining that the first thing that I start with is looking at the previous year and the goals versus actual. So it's a great time to take stock of like what last year looked like and how we did versus our goals for last year. And I am not as disciplined as I think I'd like to be around revisiting those goals every quarter because again, you get pulled off track and I think it happens to all of us. But definitely at this time of year, I go back and I look at how did we do goals versus actual. I look at the main goals that we set the previous year but then I'll also look at some other metrics that I feel are important but maybe like we weren't totally focusing on. So like here's just a sample one here. So like this would be other KPIs. So it's like stuff that we're looking at that's not necessarily our main goals but we've got like revenue which believe it or not was not a main goal last year. I just thought things were too unpredictable and we were shooting at other goals but unplanned absence rate, shift capacity which is how we measure our total capacity. It's another way of saying full-time employees I guess but a more useful way in my experience a customer account, customer retention rate and our scorecard rating and made central. So those are some other metrics that we look at but we didn't have them set as main goals last year. So I kind of look at everything together and just take a snapshot of the business and see how we're doing. And what I'll do is this summary document that you see here it's actually just last year's goals document and you just add a column. So I try to keep it simple. So I'll like create a document and word with a table and it's got all my goals on it and I never have more than three main goals. And then when you want to create your goals versus actually just add a column. It's that easy. And you just share it with us. Say that again, you only have three main goals? Three main goals, yeah. For the entire year. Yeah, so actually let me just, can I share my screen? Absolutely. Here. So it might start looking something like this. These were our actual goals from 2019. Not sharing yet, Joe. Yeah. There we go. All right, so I'll hide this for now. We're gonna get to that but just do one thing at a time. So these are our actual goals from 2019. So I try to keep it super simple. I just write what our strategic objective is. So kind of like a verbal, like these are the things we're trying to accomplish or this is the thing we're trying to accomplish. And then the KPIs are how you measure that thing. So how do you know you're getting there? And so our strategic objective in 2019 was to stabilize the business, specifically reduce our unplanned absence rate. So that's callouts basically, reduce employee turnover and reduce injury rates. Those were our three primary goals. You'll notice revenue isn't on there. Now I pay attention to revenue. What we look at it, we look at it at least once a week very closely. And then I'd probably check it another couple of times through the week. But revenue is definitely something we look at but it's not in our strategic goals for the year. Because we were having, we decided, and it was really me who decided, look, I've got a bigger problem here than revenue. And we have other disability issues in the business that are going to affect our ability to grow in the future. So we've got to really focus on these. So spelling mistake there, look at that. See two years later, I'm still finding spelling mistakes in my work. But anyway, so these are our goals. And then a little bit on the bottom, I like to add this for my team about why we're focusing on that particular area. And this is kind of part of the process when you're setting the goals. So like in December or maybe January, kind of why are we focusing there? So you just explain a bit here about why and just one or two sentences. We don't want a novel, just one or two sentences, why are we focusing here? Make it easy to understand. And it's like, the why is important for people, you know? Yeah. And so it's like important when you're leading a team that they understand why am I focusing on this? And sometimes I have to be reminded. And you often have to remind yourself too. So I put that there as much for me as I do for my team. And then we discuss tactics. And I mean, that's a broad base outline of the strategy part of the process. There's a financial part of the process that goes on as well that's parallel to it. And I think for most people here, you're probably doing your own financial planning or maybe you have an outside person who helps. Does anyone on the call have someone on their team that does their financial planning for them? When you say financial planning for them. I mean like projections, I don't mean bookkeeping. I mean like looking ahead to the next year and projecting. Yeah, it's like projections and budgeting. Yeah. Because I'm assuming everyone here is doing that themselves. So I'm kind of going on that assumption. Yeah. I think it's a safe assumption to work with, especially with our typical audience, Joe. Every once in a while, we'll come across somebody that is doing something different. But I think that's a great assumption to start with. Yeah. So basically, when you're looking at the previous year, so like let's pretend that we're meeting about these goals and we're wrapping it up for the year. There is a meeting, like a meeting format that I follow and it's very simple. I'll just drag my notes up onto the screen here and I'll zoom in so hopefully folks can see it. Let me zoom in on my view here. Yeah, look at that. That's good, we can see that. So this is what I'm talking about now. We just had this meeting this week on Monday. And I love this meeting because it gives you a chance to look back on the year but with your whole team. So I do this, so I have a HR and admin manager. I have a field supervisor and an assistant field supervisor. So it's me and those core folks that sit down and go through, look at the goals versus actuals. Did we meet them? Didn't we meet them? Why? Why not? And the two biggest discussion points are what are the biggest learnings and where did we fall short? And then what have our biggest wins been? And I love this part of this process because I always hear things from my team that I didn't think of myself and I love that. So like on both ends. And we had a really awesome conversation this year about our learnings and takeaways from some of the stuff we learned this year. And it was a tough year, it was a tough year with COVID and all the trouble that brought. So I really like that part of the process. So that's a really important piece right there is to go back and discuss with people and be able to look back. Now you can do this all in one meeting if you want but I typically split it up just because of logistics. It's hard to get everyone in the same room for three hours at a time. So that sort of discussing the previous year I allow for like an hour and a half for that. We took an hour and 20 minutes this year but you don't wanna kind of rush the conversation. People need to have time to wrap their head around what's going on with the business. And then there's a little bit of a teaser for what's coming in our next meeting around strategy which is gonna be looking ahead to 2022 and looking at our goals and doing the tactics. And that's when you bring out this document for the next year and you go, okay these are gonna be our objectives for the coming year. These are what the numbers are. This is why we're focusing on that. And then let's talk about how we're gonna get there. And one thing that's important too is I always send this around at least three or four days in advance of our strategy meeting because you wanna give people time to look at it and digest it and understand it. So what I did this past week, for example is when we had this recap meeting here I presented next year's goals during the recap meeting to give people a chance to expose them to it and also give me a chance to see how people are reacting and see where there might be some discomfort and so we can already start moving towards solutions. So I love giving them that time to process because a lot of people need that time to process to be able to bring their best ideas. So I love that. Yeah, so that's been huge. So I did the recap meeting. Yeah, and then next, so we can't do it next week because of the holiday. We are, and we're understaffed. So we have, I have actually my field supervisor and my assistant field supervisor cleaning which I don't like to do, but it's a holiday week and we like to do everything we can to get all of our customers cleaned around the holidays. So it's an all hands on deck situation. But the week after New Year's Day, that first week in January, we're gonna circle back to the strategic objectives. These aren't our actual objectives. These are old, but we have a new set for this year and they already have them. They know what they are. We've had that preliminary conversation. They're already talking about it. There's chatter in the office. People are talking about, oh, we're shooting for this. Like this year, we're shooting to bring our employee turnover rate down back to where it was in 2019. Because I'm actually happy to say that we almost met this employee turnover rate goal in 2019. So we got it down to 72% in 2019, which was really awesome. So we did 65, but we got to 72. What would you say? Almost had heard of in this industry. Truly. Yeah, it was awesome. We're back up to 109 this year though. So it wasn't fantastic. But we want to push it back down. So we're going to be focusing on that. But I'm actually proud to say that we almost met this goal. We actually did meet this goal back in 2019, the unplanned absence rate. We got it down to 4.0 even, which is crazy low. Really nice. Super nice. I mean, we had 27 field staff or 28. No, 30. We had 32 field staff, sorry. And we would have like one or two callouts a week for periods of time. Like, it was really awesome. Yeah, it was crazy. It sure is a lot easier to plan for scheduling for everything if you've got an unplanned absence rate that low. You know? Oh, and it's way easier on everybody. Like, it's just so much easier. Oh, it's awesome. And then COVID kicked that right in the Turkish. And now that's like, because now there's child care issues and COVID issues. Somewhere through all of this, Joe, I'd like for you to speak about what happens. You're talking about what happens at the beginning of the year and what happens at the end of the year. But there are a lot of weeks in between those two. And what do you guys do on a weekly basis to actually execute and make these numbers work? I don't know if you're going to be getting to that later. But I want to make sure that we don't miss that part of the discussion. No, that's really good point. And I can definitely talk about that. I hadn't even considered that. But yeah, I will definitely get to that. So but anyway, that's kind of the annual planning. So we've set next year's goals and objectives. So I typically do that on my own. And again, like we talked about the beginning of the call, company goals are really often intertwined with my own goals. So it might be a amount of money you want to make. It might be I want to take a bunch of time off this year. That's been my goal for several years of the past few. And it's been great to be able to do that. You know, to say I want to take eight weeks of vacation this year and only work 40 hours a week when I'm in the office. I mean, I can set goals like that. And then you can you can make your business work around that. I mean, you're the entrepreneur, right? So like you get to dictate what your priorities are. I love that you're saying that, Joe, because I know that there are a lot of people and there are people on today that get stuck with feeling like this just has to be a revenue goal. But for a lot of people, the revenue is not the big thing. That's not the thing that at the end of the year is going to make them go, yes, I feel great now. Actually, I was just talking to somebody in one of our groups today, and he met all of his goals, met them early, met them in November. And they were pretty great goals. And he's like, I need to talk about why I feel unfulfilled even after that. And so we came to the whole idea that you're talking about right now. A lot of times it's not just about the money, especially once you get past the place of having enough money. And it is money. When you don't have enough money, a lot of times, like you're nervous about how you're going to make payroll or pay your taxes or whatever. Then, yeah, money is probably the thing you need to be paying attention to, even if it doesn't motivate you. It is. And I think at different parts in the entrepreneurial journey, it matters for different things matter. So I have a three-year-old son. And I want to spend time with him. And I want to spend time with my wife. And so for me, that's been important. And so I've made that a priority. But when situations are different, like let's say, for example, when he's in school full time, maybe I'll return to focus on revenue a little bit more. Because I've been like, well, I've got to pay for college now, so let's focus on some revenue. But I mean, or maybe I want to buy a lake house. Or maybe I want to buy a new boat. I mean, there's a lot of things that can motivate you. Maybe I'm trying to help support family. There's a lot of reasons that money can become a goal, but it doesn't have to be the goal. So yeah, I think Heather seems to agree with that. Yeah, absolutely, Heather. Yeah, it's helpful. So I've always made lifestyle goals a part of my goal setting for my business. But again, it can be revenue. It can be bottom line profitability. I mean, it can be anything you kind of want it to be. So that's up to you as the entrepreneur. Another benefit to being in charge is you get to go after goals that you care about. That are important. Yeah. That are important. I will say though that revenue and profit are a forcing function for a lot of things that are good for your business. So that's why revenue is always there. It has to always be there. Doesn't have to be your key focus. But setting an aggressive revenue goal can actually force you to grow as an entrepreneur and as a person. So I don't think that that's a bad thing either. Yeah, I was kind of wrestling with that. I mean, certainly, food and shelter kind of presses a lot of decisions until you get beyond that. But you've got a lot of different things that you can set as priorities beyond just being profitable. But kind of as a byproduct, could you argue that you almost have a fiduciary responsibility to all your stakeholders to drive profit? Because with the profit, you're able to make better jobs and provide a better business, provide better service. It's like the fuel that makes everything happen. Absolutely. I like that, Tom. I don't think you really have an option. While the profit might not be the goal, I think you must watch the profit. And that has to be one of the first things that you're looking at. Because if you're not a profitable company, many, many times, increasing your revenue is not going to fix that problem. So you can't grow out of every problem. So revenue is not always the answer. So you've got to look at profit first to be able to figure out at least partially where you're going. Actually made me think of a great book if you're looking for help getting financial discipline. It's Profit First is awesome. I love that. I subscribe to some of the, I mean, I didn't, if anybody's read Profit First, you'll know that he's very prescriptive. And he's like, do this now. Just do it the way I told you and yada, yada. And I don't exactly do that. But I do, there are some fiscal discipline lessons in there that I think are really good. So I'd recommend that book if you're interested in learning a bit more about fiscal discipline for business owners. That's for Caliwitz, isn't it? Yeah, we recommend all of his books. Yeah, we love him. I want to point out something that was really, somebody pointed out to me, actually, it was my daughter pointed out to me about Profit First. She's like, Mom, I don't really understand what the big deal is about Profit First. Isn't that just the envelope system? She's like, remember when we were little and when we would get paid, you made us put all our money into different envelopes and we could only spend this money on this thing, I was like, it's absolutely the envelope system. It is. It's like a beefed up envelope system. It totally is. I love it that way. I mean, I think if you know how to use QuickBooks and have some knowledge of business reporting, you don't need to follow that system that strictly. But I think for some people, it could be really valuable too, because maybe you need that level of thing. But for example, one of the concepts that's introduced in Profit First is that he's not prescriptive about how much profit, but you gather that you really ought to be somewhere in the 15 to 20% range. And so I think that 20% is killing it. Anything above that is just overachieving. But 15% would be healthy and you'd want to be shooting towards 20%. And I'm talking about net profit. But I think knowing that number is really helpful. And so definitely I've made the mistake in the past of actually thinking that I had to trade profitability for one of the other metrics. And that is not, that's never an acceptable, well, I shouldn't say never, but that's rarely an acceptable mindset. I mean, sometimes you are gonna trade profitability for growth, but you better have a plan to harness that growth. That's what I was gonna say. As long as you have a plan, do you know where you're going? It might be a short term. You might say I'm gonna take this profit and I'm gonna put it here for this amount of time to get this return so that then my profit will be back where it's supposed to be. But again, you have to plan it. You do, and I've just seen in this business all too often working as a consultant and a coach with Tom and Liz, so many businesses, the fundamentals of the business aren't healthy. So you're trying to grow, but your payroll percentage to revenue is too high or your estimating process is broken. So you're kind of feeding poor inputs into the system. And so you're growing something that it's just, it's like, it's underperforming now. Instead of being a $500,000 underperforming business, it'll be a million dollar underperforming business. So you do have to pay attention to those fundamentals for sure. A concept here that maybe helps with trading off profit for growth is called the law of 40. And a lot of startup companies use this and they start out wanting to grow fast and making a profit really isn't the priority, but on an annual basis, the law of 40 pretty much says that you take your growth rate and your profit margin and add them together and it needs to be 40% or more year over year. So if you have like a negative net operating loss of 10%, you better be growing at least 50% year over year. And as long as you're able to meet the law of 40, arguably you've got a sound growth strategy sacrificing profit for growth, which you don't want to do is sacrifice the profit and not have the growth either. Yeah, a lot of startup software companies use this to rationalize basically losing money initially for the sake of growth. That's great Tom, I love this. This is gonna be so useful. I've always wondered in a service business, so let's just take in a service business, you would have to be growing at 20% and profiting at 20%. I mean, that's like a 20% net profit and 20% growth. That is kicking some serious, but that's a super high performing service business in my experience, would you guys agree? Yeah, but don't you love that that's the standard that they're setting so that moving forward, I love having this because moving forward, we can point to this and say, hey, we need to be shooting for this. Instead of, I have always hated this random, we just need to be a million dollar company. I much prefer to be looking at this new metric that Tom just threw out to us. Matt, I think it's gonna grow us all much stronger and faster. That's awesome, Tom, good job. Well, it can take the rest of the day off. Yeah, way to bring the goods, Tom. No, now you get to have a Merry Christmas. So, where was I wrong? Can we expand just on this a little bit more, though, because I mean, the point is that you're a business and you get to choose what's important to you and what your priorities are. And it could be a rational decision to say that, I'm not gonna do weekend work because that doesn't fit my lifestyle. And you can certainly make decisions like that and give up revenue and profit for that. But I've heard people, in some cases, abdicate managing their business responsibly and the name of it being a lifestyle business. It's like, I don't really feel like doing rate increases. So, it's my business and I can choose not to do that if I want to. And at some point, you're kind of just being irresponsible. So, I don't know how that fits in the whole equation. I just don't want people to kind of just take this as a blank check that's, I do what I want. I guess you can, but there's some framework that you need to be responsible while you're doing that. And I'd argue the other side of that, Tom. I love to argue about this stuff. I would say you don't have to be responsible but understand you won't be doing this for very long. Okay, fair enough. That's the option that you're choosing. And of course, you've got clients and employees and a lot of other people maybe banks you owe money to that are counting on you doing that too. So, you're not just letting yourself down but there's a lot of other people that could be hurt as well. Absolutely, your family, so many people. And just like my take on that would be that you need to shoot for a 20% net profit and that the bottom line you should allow yourself is 15% unless you're meeting the rule of 40. I think if you're growing in such a way that you hadn't make any money this year but all the extra money was going into advertising and growing and hiring and all that. I mean, if you have a plan, that's fine, but I always shoot for 15% as a floor and or sorry, 15% I use as my floor and 20% is my target for profitability. So just kind of throwing that out there. So how is the business constrained? Focus your effort and goals there. I mean, I know it seems obvious, but I think we as business owners get distracted by shiny objects. And particularly you'll see, you'll hear a great idea that somebody has and you'll be like, oh, I need to do that or I wish my business did that and you kind of get distracted but focus on where the constraints are in your business and your particular constraints are gonna depend partially on what your goals are. So if your goal is more time away from the business then a constraint could be management capacity. If it's growth, the constraints are most likely in the sales or staffing side in one form or the other. And that's kind of the foundations model of the cleaning business, right? Is that you've got staff inputs and client inputs and you're just putting them together. So if you're having a growth problem, you've got a restriction on one side or the other of that. And it could be a structural issue. It could be a lot of different things, but that's kind of, you wanna look for your constraints and address those. And then this is goal setting. It's an art, not a science. I know you can do whole classes on this, but just real quick goals should be realistic but challenging and based on honest assessment of your team's capacity. And lastly, keep it to one to three main objectives. Just avoid the temptation to set like 10 goals just cause you have the data. So some part of the art and art of this is figuring out what are the three and picking them effectively. That just takes. A large part, I would argue that's a large part. But do you do that for like the entire year? I've seen a variation of that as pick two or three goals and say this is what the focus is gonna be for the next three months for like Q one. And maybe one of those goals carries over to Q two and one of them falls out and a new one's introduced. Have you ever seen that approach? Yep. In fact, I could just add that in there. Can make them quarterly or annual or anything in between really, if you want depends on how quickly you wanna, you know, it depends on, I think part of it depends on what you're going for. But yeah, I think the more nimble I think the more nimble you can keep this the better. Yeah, absolutely. Very good point, Joe. Hey, Tom, could you share? I know you're good at going in and finding the link to a 12 week year. So we have been using this structure in our strategic success groups where everybody sets an annual goal but then it is broken down into, when we use four, so one for each quarter, the four things that you're going to need to do or change to get there. And then we just work one quarter at a time, one quarter, one quarter, one quarter. This book here it is? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's it, awesome. I think that's the field guide. But if you go there, that's good enough. People can see what it is. And that's helpful too, it's like a workbook. So, yeah, I love the idea because I like this thing that you said, Joe, nimble. I like that word nimble because you are gonna have to change. You know, it's what we were saying in the very beginning, what did Paul say? Everybody has a plan till they get punched in the face. Yeah, yeah. The different things. So that really is, people worry too much, I think, at least a lot of the people I work with about getting the right goal written down. I'm like, and I just push those people toward just get a goal written down because we're gonna tweak it as we go. You're gonna work that goal. And once you've worked toward that goal for a month, you're gonna find out, oh, this is how it needs to be modified. Oh, this is what I really need. Oh, I don't really care about that thing, right? So, I love that word nimble. I don't think we've heard it in context of goal-setting yet. I think it's the perfect word. You gotta be ready to just change it. Ready to change that goal. Yeah, change it and modify it. Yeah, it's awesome. So, then I just have a note here about financial projections. And there's a lot of words, but basically let's just, I'll just pull up a projection sheet. So, this is a little sample one that I did up. And this one is the input for this would have been a profit and loss report from QuickBooks. All right, so it's very simple. You take your profit and loss from last year and it becomes, well, actually it would be year to date. You kinda wanna take it from the current year that you're in so you can look at next year. So, you take your profit and loss from your current year and it becomes next year's budget and projections. Now, there's some funky math you have to do cause like I do my planning in December and we're only 11 months into the year so you kind of have to project what you think you'll end the year at, but at that point you're so close that I'm usually within like a few thousand dollars for my bottom line on my projections when I do them in December. Cause you kinda have a good idea of how you're gonna end the year. This is a really good point to be hitting on again. Derek, I think, brought this up the first week of this month because so many people don't do it this way. They set their goals and then they set their budget on what they're gonna spend based on the goals for the future that they haven't already had. Yeah, you haven't had it yet. So, in my experience, the only thing you know is what already happened. So, I have to base my budgets on what already happened. So, yeah, that's how I do it. So, basically I just take, now what I'm pretending here is that I, this is like a $1 million business congratulations. We made a million bucks this year in gross, that's great. I threw in some numbers here that are, I think pretty good ranges to be in. There's ranges for all of these. So, this is definitely not, but this is realistic. I think this is a realistic profit and loss. So, and then what I'll do is I'll start to kind of mess a little bit with the numbers because there are some things you know are only one time. Like for example, especially right now. So, for example, I had this year, I had a whole bunch of field staff bonuses like $39,000 worth. Now, those were PPP funded. Those aren't gonna happen next year. So, I took those out. As far as we know. As far as we know. So, but barring there being another round of PPP, that's not gonna happen. And if there were another round of BBB, then I wouldn't be paying for it anyway. So, it's not gonna affect my budget. And then, so the wages, I also had to adjust and put back in some cases because I had to remove the employee retention credits. So, like that stuff, you kind of have to look at real outlier things, but just be careful and don't pick out too many things. Don't start going, well, we stocked up on paper this year. So, I'm not gonna buy as much paper. Like don't, it just really big ticket items like that, for example, like PPP money or ERC money that you know you're not gonna get. And if you do, great, it's a bonus, but you can't plan on it. And so, you benchmark everything back. So, anything you see with a peach thing is an input that I made to change the numbers from last year. So, same thing here. Somebody on here, Joe, asked if that you would be willing to share what you are sharing here on the screen, the different documents. Are you willing to do that? Wait, share what? Like this little example that you have that you've made up, your little annual planning. I think that's what she was talking about was Heather Lowell. Oh, like share the actual document. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Oh, yeah, yeah. Send him over to Tom and then he can put him in the group to be shared or something. Yeah. All right, great, go Heather. We can do it. Thank you, Joe. Yeah, no problem. And so, basically, these are my numbers. Oh, you know, we did 16.42% this year, that's great. Now, let's see. I have gone in and projected that, I'm just gonna take a scenario and say, my goal this year is to make $200,000, okay? So, let's just see what I have to do to make $200,000. So, and then I just start changing this number and I'm messing around with it. And what I would actually do first is make a, what I would do first is make a copy. So, I mean, it's a pretty simple process. You have to be Excel, you know, so I just go like this, I just make a copy, I move it to the end, create a copy. Boom, now I have my, this is my base, which is what I did last year and then this will be what I want to do next year. So now I just start messing with the number. All right, let's see what happens if I increase this to $1,250,000. Let's see how I did. You'll notice that all my variable costs are responsive to this amount. That's why I modified this to make it so that when I enter the new revenue amount, my variable costs like labor, cleaning supplies, workers comp, that other stuff changes along with, it's all anything that's tied to the amount that you pay out in labor or that's tied to the amount that you do in revenue, you have to increase right along with your revenue. And then boom, you come up with a bottom line number and you can kind of see how you would do, wow, I'll actually make 300,000 next year if I can hit this $1,250,000 number and not change anything else. That's pretty awesome. So then from there, you can start backing up your financial projections. Nice. Boom, boom, boom, boom, done. So really one of the things that you're showing, Joe, that I think is gonna be really useful to the people that are watching today is you're showing it in a really simple orderly way. Start here, move here, go here and it doesn't have to be so hard. So a lot of times when people are thinking about annual planning, they get overwhelmed with how much they don't know, how hard it is, how they just get so, such a feeling of being stuck that they don't even know how to move forward. And what I like is that you're showing, hey, just start anywhere, start here. Here's the basics that you can start with and then see where you see what you feel from there. Well, how do you feel? What else is popping into your own mind about what you wanna do? And things will pop in your mind as you start working your stuff that you care about. So I feel like this is super helpful. What do you guys think? Is this helpful? Is everybody on here feeling like this is something that could be useful going into the new year? Oh yeah, hi, Sam. I do. Hey, Sam's on there. I think it is. Yeah. And yeah. I will do, Tom, you like to plan as well. Well, it makes it real. It's very easy to say, okay, our plan next year is to grow revenue by some amount of money or generate this much profit. But you don't really even understand what the inputs need to look like in order to make that happen unless you go through this exercise. It's the difference between setting a goal at the beginning of the year and looking at the results at the end of the year. And this is kind of what happens the 50 weeks in between those two periods. These are the numbers that get you from where you are or to where you wanna be. That's a good question, Tom. Tom, how often do you, Joe, do you look at your plan, your budget? Is it a weekly, a monthly, a quarterly? You just, nope, you're done and not look at it again until you get it. So I do wanna get to that. So let's say you've done your financial projections and I usually do like a conservative scenario and an aggressive scenario just to see how things might play out and know that I usually land somewhere in the middle. So honestly, this 24% down here looks a little high. So there's probably another variable cost that hasn't been changed up here. But basically I'll do those two scenarios and then I'll come up with, and I'll know I'm gonna land somewhere in the middle. And then I check these reports monthly from QuickBooks and I look at how we're doing. And I really like looking at things as a percentage of revenue. So that's a report you can run in QuickBooks. It's very easy and it's easier than looking at the actual numbers in my mind. And then we have a meeting rhythm in the company. So we meet, there's a meeting rhythm so that everyone is regularly reminded of what we're working toward. So we have, let me see, I can actually just pull up one of our meetings here. So I use one note to keep track of everything and this is a strategic planning. Let's look at this. So you can see us talking about strategy. So let's look back here at some point. So this is a template for a weekly meeting. So this is part of how we stay on top of it throughout the year is we have a meeting every week and we review how we're doing and all these goals. So like this year, we're looking at employee turnover. So on a weekly basis, we look at employees lost quarter to date. Because yeah, you have your annual turnover rate but really what's gonna make more sense to people in the moment is how many people did we lose so far this quarter? It's more real, you know. And then like days missed due to work-related injury, we track that, how many clients have we lost, quarter to date, et cetera, et cetera. So this is all part of our weekly meeting rhythm. This happens every week. It's myself, my HR, an admin manager, my field supervisor, my assistant field supervisor and we sit down and we do this. And then we have one-on-ones with each of those people. We're doing it every other week right now. You can do it every week or every other week. And then those one-on-ones are opportunities to work on their responsibility areas and help make sure that they have the tools that they need and that they have, if they're struggling or if they're losing focus, it's a chance to help get them back, you know, rowing in the same direction. So that's the kind of the one-on-one portion. And that's kind of our meeting rhythm that we use throughout the year to stay on top of staying focused on the strategic goals. And then we'll have like project meetings as we're, if something special comes up that we realize, okay, in order to meet this goal, we have to change this thing that's kind of a project. Then we'll have a separate series of strategy meetings for that, you know. So that's how we stay on top of it through the year. Does that answer your question? Yeah, sure does. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's something also that people struggle with is this idea that I don't want to have too many meetings. I don't want to have too little meetings. You know, when should I be looking at this stuff? And I think it kind of goes back again to get started and see what's working and start seeing what's not working and just keep focusing in on improving whatever it is. Get started, but I mean, honestly, there are some best practices. I mean, you know, you really should be having, if you have a management team, you really should be meeting with them at least once a week and with an agenda, with a set agenda. So that really should be happening at least once a week. And if you have direct reports, you really should be having some kind of one-on-one with them on a regular basis. Otherwise you're gonna lose track of what they're doing and you need to maintain that, you need to have that one-on-one focus time with your direct reports to make sure that you are staying in touch with them. You know, like, that's how you lose people by not doing that live experience. Yeah. And so it's not, but I don't like being in meetings. I don't like being in a ton of meetings either. So like, you know, I think we've got our meeting rhythm down to a pretty good, a pretty, it's pretty efficient. You know. It sounds really good to me. Another book for those of you that are on here that wanna know more about meeting rhythms, another really good book is The Rockefeller Habits. Pretty much Joe is talking about everything that I'm seeing here and what he's saying follows the rhythm of The Rockefeller Habits. Now they have an additional standup, a quick standup, like five to 10 minutes daily standup that they do that's thrown in there, but very, very similar. So that might be another good book to look at. If you're setting up your reading list for 2022, I think we've given you three books here. And actually we talked about The Pumpkin Plan on Monday by Mike McCallowich as well. So we're getting you started with a really good, yeah, that's a great book. Yeah, it's a good one. He does talk about, I read part of that book and he does talk, I remember the meeting rhythm thing from that. I actually learned that from a Vistage chair that I had. So Vistage is like a CEO group that I was in for a while and the Vistage chair really hammered that home. It was a structural thing and it was really helpful. That kind of regular meeting schedule is just really important. There's another really good one in traction. They also have a really good rhythm. Oh, Gino Whitman, yeah. Yeah, but they all follow basically the same thing. You're gonna hear that you need to have them on every week, they need to be at the same time that everybody needs to come. There needs to be a commitment around it. They need to be short and to the point, have an agenda. So it's pretty much the same thing regardless of which book you're reading or where you're getting at. Do it, do it. Just do it, just do it. In fact, I'll tell you that one of the things we realized this year is that like, and so we're implementing immediately is like, and I'll keep this brief because I am seeing that we're getting up to the end here. But we recognized recently, and I don't know why we didn't think of this, that the people who do training for us, like our frontline trainers, are not part of our meeting rhythm. So we actually get feedback that our cleaning technicians in general, generally speaking kind of love not having meetings to go to. And that's a change since COVID, because we used to have a standup every morning with everyone. And that's a change since COVID that our like more seasoned employees really appreciate. And I don't really have any intentions of changing that. It seems to work really well in that particular case to just have them doing their, to not have a daily standup, but for new people we're recognizing they do need that daily touch point because otherwise they feel totally disconnected from the company. And we're really trying to drive down that turnover number and we're losing all of our people in the first six months. And so that's something we're gonna be working on. So just an example, we're talking about meeting habits. And it's like, oh, for some reason I thought that didn't apply to the people working in the field but it does, so it's kind of good. So just to wrap up, we're gonna, and we'll be doing this in two weeks. So we're gonna present the goals and objectives and then we're gonna get into discussion and problem solving. So they actually already have the goals and objectives. They know what they are. They're already coming. People are already coming up with ideas. I just had a great ad hoc conversation with my HR manager this afternoon about how to drive more applicants to us. We really need to increase our applicant numbers for next year. And so we're already having these conversations but when we come to the table for this next meeting we're really gonna be talking tactics. And this is where I really focus on the next quarter. I never, when I'm doing tactical stuff what are we gonna change? I used to try and make a year long plan and all this kind of stuff. It's totally a waste of time. I just focus on the next three months. And so I guess I do set goals for the year which could change but the tactics which is like how are we going to move the needle on this? That's a three month plan. That's like something that, because it has to be stuff that you're starting tomorrow. You can't be like, oh yeah, in March we'll do that because guess what? It's never gonna happen. You have to start the stuff now. So that's- Absolutely, that's a big push that they talk about in the 12 week here. That's the reason why you're focusing in on just those 12 weeks as you get the same pressure that you get in the last 12 weeks of the year. Everybody knows that in that last quarter of the year everybody's like driving on the goal and you need to be doing that all year long. Every quarter you need to be driving like that. So yeah, an advantage to that is you get a win every quarter. Ideally you would get a win every quarter. So yeah, and so this year I'm gonna be working on breaking down those bigger goals into like kind of chunks per quarter meaning like more meaningful like this quarter we have to save two employees. So if we would have lost six, we can only lose four. We need to save those two, find those two, let's save them. You know, like I'm gonna really be working on that as part of my leadership to try and really be very specific about what it is we need to focus on. Samantha has a question here about virtual meetings with techs. We actually don't have virtual meetings with our techs but it's something that we've been talking about. Like geez, how can we get everybody connected because that's something that it's the new techs that miss that connection. They don't ever get it and so they're not engaged. So we don't have a tool for that. Like internally, when I meet with my management team we meet remotely a lot and it's, we just use Google Meet because we use Google Suite and our G Suite in our office. So we just use Google Meet. But I don't have a tool to meet with the teams. We are at the top of the hour and Joe if you wanna share any of this if you just wanna get it to me and I'll make it easy. If anybody wants copies of some of what Joe's sharing here you can just drop me an email. Yeah, no problem. I'll send it along. I want it. It all sounds great to me. You'll have to send me an email at the time and they'll touch on the comment ask for it. And then I'll send it to you. Send it to me at the same time. Copy. I helped today too. And I think it's important actually to add in that you've gotta follow through throughout the year with some kind of meeting rhythm. So, I may put a note in there but they didn't even occur to me to mention that today because I'm just thinking about this part of the process. But this process I'm talking about is meaningless if you don't follow up with a regular schedule in your company to make sure you're looking at these things. I would have to say that I have seen this system really great, great start, great ideas and motivation. Everybody's pumped up and I've seen it fail more than I've seen it succeed due to it just not being done. Just not being looked at again. Just put it on a shelf, just stuck there somewhere. So, 100% in agreement with you there, Joe, about this. And I know we're at the end of our time but I wanna say one of the things I figured out is that in this business for me, what was causing that was the instability. And so, because you're putting out fires all the time with so many people calling out and so many people quitting it made it really hard to be strategic. And so, that's part of the reason that we focused on stability in the first place because it makes it way easier to be strategic and have a meeting rhythm and stick to it. So, you're not like, I know I'm your manager but I have to clean today because we're short staffed again and we don't have anybody to cover it. Yeah. Good point. And we can't cancel on Mrs. Jones again. So, I'm going cleaning. I'm cleaning. All right, well, thank you so much, Joe. Thanks everybody that was here today. Happy holidays. Merry Christmas. Hi Diane, happy holiday, yep. And yeah, happy holidays to everybody. Joe, that's awesome, very awesome. This is good stuff. So wonderful, Joe, thank you so much. One of my favorite CEOs, truly. I love hearing that. He says that all the time too, Joe. That's not just a- I'll tell everybody that listens to me that when you're not. Yeah, I say that when you're not even there, Joe. He does, he says it all the time. I've heard it a lot, yeah. Well, I really appreciate it and the feeling is mutual and it's really great being on as usual, you guys. We'll catch up soon. Happy holidays and happy new year, everybody. Happy holidays. We'll be back. We'll be back Monday, five o'clock Eastern. You guys have a merry Christmas and we'll see you next Monday. Bye bye. Bye.