 Hi, y'all. Liz here with Smart Business Moves. And look at, we've got new faces on here. No Tom is out on vacation for those of you that are thinking, what? Tom does go on vacation every once in a while. But we have a co-host today. We have Danit from Two Buckets Cleaning. Hi, Danit. Hi, I'm so excited to be here, Liz. Thanks for asking me to co-host. Yeah, I'm excited to have you here. We talk a lot, so I thought it'd be fun to have you on here. And then we have our wonderful guest, Chris Schwab, that has been out a few times, right, Chris? But we were trying to figure out how long it's been, and we can't figure it out, because the numbers that we come up with are not possible. We don't believe it could possibly be two and a half years. Well, we've, gosh, oh, we've been doing it for a long time. So I don't know. But, Chris, tell us a little bit about where you are right now, and what time it is, and what you're up to. Sure. Yeah. So, thank, first of all, I always appreciate you guys having me on. It's always a good chat. You know, I was telling my management team yesterday I'm not going to be available for them at this time. I'm usually walking the dog at this time, and I check Slack and stuff. And I said I'm going to be on, I actually got it, I got it wrong. I said cleaning business today to them instead of made central. But, but I said cleaning business today tomorrow in writing, I said I'm going to be on the cleaning business today podcast tomorrow. And they said, is that the name today tomorrow show? And I said, no, I'm going to be on clean business today, comma tomorrow. So a lot of a, a lot of, what would you call it? Not on the ball. Punctuation. Yes, no punctuation, and I'm, I'm mixing up my, my names here. So, you're going to laugh when I tell you this, because I think that you think the name of this program is made central, don't you? Oh, yeah. So you're going to love it. Hit me with it here. Smart business moves. Smart business moves. See, I got smart business moves in the title, but then I got a made central email. Someone from. Yeah. So Sarah, our organizer, she works for made central also. So that is, okay, okay. We've all got multiple businesses. So when we're all emailing from our different business email addresses, it gets very confusing. That's exactly what it is. Yep. So smart business moves is made, it's probably, I guess, hosted by Tom and made central and me with core profit builders. So kind of these two, two companies are, are hosting smart business moves. I apologize. No worries at all. None, none at all. We barely can keep it straight. We've been doing it daily for, or actually we're only doing it weekly now. So we did daily for a year and then we switched over to a couple of times a week and now we're down to one to week that we're doing it, but that's, it's been a long haul here. That's a good balance. Daily is, that's a little tough. It's a little tough. Doing another thing daily right now. My daily lizards that I'm doing loses actions, repeatedly done to lead to success, right? This is, these are what lizards are, and they are a lot of work doing them every single day, but I'm, I'm committed for at least a year. I love the name. Crazy. My marketing guy came up with it, Don from Market Pros. I love him. He's so creative. I've done videos before. I did, I made, at one point in time, I made daily engagement videos to be shown to team members and cleaning professionals. They're just short little videos that you could show to your people to help them do a better job. And I made 603 of those. So I feel like I'll be okay with, with this for commitment for just a year. It seems small in comparison. That's a lot. I can only imagine much coffee was consumed, but they're, they're not heavily produced, let's say. So they might not be as time, they didn't take as much time to produce as you might think, because I pretty much film and post, film and post, not a lot of editing, minor, minor editing. Yeah. That's, that's me too. I film it. I don't even cut. I just say, here you go, guys. Take it away. That's it. Okay. Bye, y'all. So Chris, what are, what are we planning on talking about today? Sure. So the four evolutionary stages that your cleaning business needs to go through before you can become an absentee owner. That's kind of what we have, I think, planned for today. So I've got a few notes. I walk people through this type of thing regularly. It's not always specifically absentee, but it's often going remote, living in a different country than your cleaning business. And those two models being absentee or being remote, they're kind of 85, 90% the same. There's a few differences in, in terms of personal involvement, but it's a, it's a very similar model. And so I thought it'd be cool for us to talk today about just the different stages that people tend to progress through as if it was a linear line of nothing is linear in business, but as if it was a linear line from, you know, the beginning stages of your business all the way to kind of a, a bigger business where you have someone running it for you. So I think that's, that's kind of what we have planned today. Wonderful. That sounds great. That does. But before we get started, Chris, why don't you give me your website? And then while you get started, I will pull it up and I will share with everyone so that anybody wants to get in contact with you because I know as soon as you start talking, they're going to be like, how do I get in contact with them? Yeah, apologies in advance. I always feel like we talk about so much, there always has to be a part too. So, so website, a little difficult, I've got a couple, but the, I think the one that I use the most that people can contact me on is InnovaLocal.com and I'll type the URL in the chat box. But if I put in the comments box, does everyone see that? Or is that just for you? No, but if you put it to me, then I'll go ahead and I will post the link to it. Sure. I dropped that in the host chat. So that's the URL. That's, that's just my VA company, but that's also got my email on it. That's where people connect with me most easily. So, so if they go there, that's, that's really the root or just Facebook. If you, if you Google my name on Facebook and, or you go to Liz and you go to mutual friends, you'll find me there. Yeah, easy. All right. Sounds good. So go ahead and you are going to share a little bit, aren't you, about the difference between or why it might, well, the different, you said that there are some subtle differences between being, I'm not sure actually. Sure. Remote versus actually does absent. Ah, so you just want me to define the, sure. Go ahead, Denny. What are we going to say? Yeah, it'd be nice for you to define it because there is a slight difference in, you know, each of those terms. Sure. So, at least in my mind the way I think about it, when I think about a remote owner, it's someone who's running their company geographically from a different location than the company is based in, but they can still be very involved in the company. They can still be working on it every day and growing it and, and still really managing it. Whereas an absentee owner, you know, they might be in a different location, they might be living in the same location, but their involvement in the company is minimal. They tend to have a management team running it. They have managers and assistants and a team who are actually handling everything day to day for them so that their level of involvement can be minimal or almost non-existent, but the business is still able to function without them. So it's, it's more, that's what I mean by remote versus absentee is, is it's kind of, at that point it's your level of involvement. A lot of absentee owners, they may have two or three or five businesses, but they're only focused on one at the, one at a time and their teams are running the other businesses, for example. So that's, that's kind of in my mind how I differentiate between the two. That's exactly how I see it. So that works really well for me. It's a struggle when the guest is talking about something that's not the same as what I have in my mind, that I'm like, I'm trying to get on board here. All right, now take us through, or at least start us through these four. Sure. So there's a couple different frames I use for this. I think the simplest one is to start from a beginning cleaning company, but just as a quick reference, I wanted to do a 20, 30 second mention of another frame of reference for how I describe this to people, depending on the stage that they're at in their business. So the first kind of lens that I look at this through is if you're a, I'm sorry, just, just one second, my dog is chewing my chair. I'm going to move for share. What is that? It's, it's normally her walk time. I got up early to play with her, but she wants the attention, so. It's time to go for a walk, dad. Come on now. She's, she's six months, so she's still firmly in the, firmly in the public stage. Okay. She should be good now, but if you hear barking, it's going to happen. So, okay. Evolutionary stages. So, so there's kind of four main stages that cleaning business owners tend to go through. This is very generic, but there's a lot of in-between each of the stages. The first, when you start your cleaning company, you're typically cleaning in the field still, and your main goal is to establish a recurring base of clients, right? You're not even thinking about getting out of the field. You're thinking about survival and income and making sure that you have enough houses, and you know those families really well, and they're just, they're a part of your regular weekly service that you're doing. This is kind of the first very beginning stage. The second stage is where you kind of get out of the field. And this is the first stage of my four stages is, is, is getting out of the day to day cleaning. So you're making this gradual transition out. Maybe you hire a part-time cleaner to come clean some of the houses with you, and you, you know, you gradually introduce each home to that cleaner, and then you kind of start to take yourself out. But, but however you do it, you're getting out of the field of cleaning yourself so that you can start to manage the day to day, the office, the marketing a little bit more. So getting out of the field is this, is this kind of first stage of evolution that's really big in your business where you notice that it's evolved into something else. It's kind of evolved beyond yourself into a team. This is the first floor. Right? Sorry. It's actually starting to be a company at this stage. Yes, yes. You're a company. You've got cleaners. You've got clients who you might never meet in person. You might, you know, many I know do personal walkthroughs. Still, I don't. So most of our clients I've never met or talked to on the phone. They may email me if there's a big issue, but that's rare. So you start to become a business that's, you're the face of the business, but you're not the one going out and doing the service anymore. And I find a lot of people kind of straddle this stage for years where they're still, you know, they've managed to get out of the cleaning part time, but some of the time, if a cleaner doesn't show up or someone's sick, they're still going out and doing it themselves. And so they're still, they're still kind of in the field, you know? Yeah, they keep getting pulled back in and it's tough. Two houses a day is tough, but two houses and then handling the business is just exhausting. And I find this is the big one where people get really stuck for a long time. And it may be years. It's not months. It's typically five or seven or eight years where they're just kind of, they feel that they can't finally get out of that stage, right? So this is the first evolution. And we can talk about each of these if you want, just giving kind of a quick overview of them. This is one of the first evolution your business has to go through. And the second one is systemizing your business so that you're running it more efficiently. And so this is kind of, this is a little bit, I think, newer, the past 10 to 15 years in our industry. Many people, like myself, start the business without being a cleaner, right? It's common for people in our industry now to have not been a cleaner and then progressed on to becoming a cleaning business owner. Many first business or after a long career in the corporate world, they're starting a cleaning business now without that experience. So this second stage might be the first stage for them, right? It really depends where you're coming from. But this second stage is where you start to actually make your business run a little bit more efficiently. You start to get a handle on the chaos. You've got a marketing system. You've got a client retention system. You have a system for hiring people consistently or at least semi-consistently depending on how quickly you're growing. So you've got these kind of core systems in place where you've got a framework on how to actually run your business. So it's not just crazy all the time. And this is kind of the second big evolution that you go through where you're starting to make that transition from chaos to order, but in your business. So that's as philosophical as I'm ever going to get, I think, but where it falls down, wise words. But no, no. So that's kind of the second stage that I see it is realizing that you can't do everything yourself and you have to start to rely on some of the great softwares and the great tools out there that we have. And once you've got to this stage, you find that you're able to grow a little bit more, which is great, but you're still prohibited by being one person managing the office. You're still human, even with all the tools in the world set up perfectly, you're still one person handling a lot every day. And everyone still wants your time. Customers want your time. Cleaners want your time. Vendors want your time. It's still you. And so this is something I got from Derek Christian. I think I mentioned this every talk. I think it's so perfect. He talked to me early on about the cleaning valley of despair, which is where I was at when I talked to him. And this is kind of the 20 to $50,000 a month revenue range where you're growing and it's busy, but you're starting to drop the ball everywhere because it's just, it's a lot. And you tend to get stuck in this stage. This is the other big stage I find people get stuck at for months or years is there, is they feel that they're growing a lot, but they keep slipping back down. And they're afraid to hire an admin because they would have to take a personal pay cut at that stage because the business isn't earning enough profit yet, even though it's very busy in order to justify that hiring of an office team. And so I find a lot of people get stuck here because they're unable to make that jump or justify to themselves that this is a necessary stage of growth to actually get to the next stage. It's this, it's, it's actually growing truly beyond yourself this time because you may have got out of cleaning, you may have some systems that support you, but this is the stage where you actually make it grow beyond yourself, managing everything. We're still in stage two, correct? Yes. This is kind of a transition to stage three, though, where you're, where you finally do make the jump to hiring an office team. It could be a VA, it could be an office manager, it could be a lead cleaner who can take on some of that help, but you're bringing someone in who can facilitate your work as an owner, but in an office capacity. And so this is where you're learning to find and hire and train that team, where you're teaching them how to be self-accountable. This is kind of the big daily admin stage where you actually get out of the daily admin. So this is, this would be the third of the four stages is becoming less necessary to your business, which is one of the most important things you have to realize is you have to become unnecessary to your business if it's going to thrive long term. You can jump in and help it grow, but if you're always necessary for it, you're never going to be able to walk away from it for any period of time. So I really love the way you're wording this, Chris, because I think that one of the things that is hardest for people to do and the reason why they struggle right here is their sense of identity. They've worked for so long in this business and they, they've been the face, they've done everything. They've been so important and they've found their identity here. So trying to shed that at this stage is so difficult. People feel just so unimportant and unnecessary and it's, it's a hard, hard little shift for a lot of people. Oh yeah. Yeah. And Danita, I'm sure you found the exact same thing as well as you've gone through it. Yeah. And the other thing I wanted to mention is I think up to this point for a lot of people, their systems, their operations are kind of still in their head, right? Because they've done it themselves all this time. And all of a sudden you get to this third stage and you're like, oh my God, you know, how do I open the office in the morning? Or, you know, so I think part of it is being able to teach somebody else. And that's a whole, you know, that's a whole, you know, party in a box kind of. Yeah. This is a whole other conversation. I have strong thoughts around, but many people just hire an office manager of VA and throw a bunch of work at them and say, do a good job. And then they don't do a good job because they weren't given the tools to do a good job. So, but that's a different thing. That's a whole three-hour talk right there. And start to do a stage two. Yeah. But you're right. A lot of people, they take a long time where they have to write things down and they have to learn how to turn that into something usable by another person who's not them, who doesn't have the context. They have to learn how to, and this is a big one I find is, and it's not anyone's fault. I think it's natural. Your business is your baby. And when you bring someone on to help, you micromanage them at first because you're afraid they're going to mess something up or they're going to book someone into the system wrong or they're going to assign the wrong team to the wrong type of house. And you're going to go, oh, no, that's $300. I could have earned that. How could you do that? You know, there's so much emotion that comes up when you're trying to allow someone to come into your business for you. That's a very hard, very hard thing, emotionally more than anything else, I think. Yeah, totally agree. I think it's the same type. It depends on, okay, so I have too many thoughts going through my head all the same time. So it's a similar to when you're getting out of the field and you have to let other people do it. They're not going to be able to clean as well. They'll never be as good as you. The reason why your company is so successful is because you personally are such a good cleaner and you can't find anybody because nobody works as hard as you do. Nobody cares as much. I see so many people that get stuck there and they have to let go of that. Same thing at this stage is now that you're in the office, now they don't input. They don't think about the customers as clearly or as compassionately. They don't know the little tiny things like Mrs. Johnson's dog barks every time. It doesn't mean that the dog is scary. You still have to go, you know, all of the stuff and they just feel like nobody's going to be as good as they are, which is again, part of that identity thing. It's like, ah, it is my identity. You can't let go. It's a huge one and I can speak a little bit personally to this. Well, I'll keep it to two minutes. I want to give it a two off track. A big part of my identity, the first couple of years in business, was the whole remote business thing, right? That's kind of why people know me. I moved to Japan and I lived there and everything. I found that when I looked deeper into that, that wasn't really an identity. What it was was, it was, how do I describe this? No, I don't think I can do it in two minutes. Go ahead. You have more. It's only $2.23. We have plenty of time. Basically, I think a lot of people, business is so all-consuming. It's just, it takes everything from you, all your attention, your focus, your energy. A lot of people's friendships suffer, their relationships suffer. They give everything to their business and they become very focused on the goals of the business, of growth and profit. There's nothing wrong with that. When you're growing a business, you do have to go through that stage for a little bit where you, it just consumes you. But I think because it consumes you so much, you start to lose other essential parts of your identity and it can be hard to find them again when you do find that you have more time. When you finally do reach a stage in your business where you're actually able to give some space to yourself again mentally and just in terms of actual time, you find that you need to rediscover those parts of yourself. But it needs to be a conscious effort and if you don't put that conscious effort in, you're just going to be all business all the time and it's very intense for the people that you work with if that's the only mode that you can work in anymore. I'm just speaking from personal experience here too. You really have to work at facilitating the other parts of your life and continuing to keep them even when you're in the thick of business. Otherwise, it's just you're going to come out the other end and it's going to be tough to rebuild everything else from your life from scratch. If business is going well, you have to make sure that your health is still being taken care of. There's so many components to running a successful business, but it needs to be one part of your life. It cannot be all of your life, I think is what I'm trying to say. I agree and I can also attest to having lived through this myself and in my situation, I became the only thing that I really had in my life was cleaning. The only thing, really, other than the things that I needed for survival, the eating and abathing and other than survival, my only interest was that family, my kids, but then even then, my immediate family, not my mom, not my family that lives 10 miles from me, not them, just my immediate family because they were part of what I needed to be able to get through the day. When you're trying to get out of the other side of it, who are you? That's what I mean by identity. I was in that for so long, I had no other, I didn't know who I was, I didn't know what I cared about, I didn't know what I liked, I didn't know what I wanted to do, I didn't know what I was interested in. I was interested in cleaning. I feel like I see a lot of people in that mode and struggle. You know who doesn't, you know who has never really done this and I'm always so admire her is Sarah Mitchell. Oh yeah? Yeah, Sarah Mitchell from day one always knew what she wanted out of her business. She wanted a business that she could have that would be able to create a life for her and her family. She wanted to revolve her entire life around caring for her kids and her family and spending time with them, valuable time with them while they're young. And she's done it every step of the way. She sacrificed profit, she sacrificed, she sacrificed everything to be able to have that time with her family. It's the only person I've ever seen do this successfully. And now she's running a, I don't know, two, probably $2 million company somewhere around there. Yeah. I've never got the opportunity to speak, but I really want to because I've seen her progression in the group over years, you know, 20,000, 30,000, 50,000, 100,000. I'm like, wow, Sarah, you're really, you're really taking it off, you know. Yeah, she's doing it. And she's off for the summer right now. She's off. That's perfect. And she has, she has hired a strong support team. So even when she's here in town, currently, I think she meets with her team once a week for an hour. So she's really good. Yeah, she got it dialed in. Yeah, she's doing a great job. Yeah. Most of us are not focused and committed to that and goal that we're looking for. She really had that vision though. You know, she had that vision so much stronger than most people. Most people think, I gosh, even today, same story from five years ago, just want to get that million dollar mark, million dollar revenue, right? You're still here today, right, Chris? I just talked to somebody yesterday that was saying that I just want to get the million dollar revenue. Wow. Okay. Still a thing. It's very funny. I don't, I don't mention my revenue anymore yet. That's the first question people ask me. They say, how is Japan? How big is your business now? I'm like, man, you're asking me wrong questions right now. Doesn't that take us to this weekend when I was telling you that, you know, I run into people and one of the first questions is how many cleaners do you have? And I'm like, ho, ho, ho. Let's just, I'm doing great. Thank you. That's it. Committee first. Yeah. People are, I feel like that's not unusual. People want to know how other people are doing, right? How are you doing? And if you are really mired in this business, if this is all you do and all you know and who you are, it's the only thing you know to ask, right? All you know to ask is how is your business? How many cleaners do you have? How many clients do you have? How much do you charge per hour? If you, if you start answering one question, there's going to be 20 questions because that's what they care about. It's the whole life is wrapped up in that. The stages, the stage to get out of. Yeah. Because of that. And not to extend it too long. I'd like to add one more thing about this stage that might be helpful and people might not. But one of the realizations I had when I started my business, and this goes back to Sarah a little bit actually is making sure you write down and really get clear on the reasons that you're starting your business. One of the things I did was I had a very clear goal in mind, which I achieved, but I didn't have anything after that. And so what I mean is my goal when I started my business was to be able to move to Japan and be with my wife, girlfriend at the time, wife now. And that was, it was a clear goal that I could work like crazy towards. But what I was actually doing was escaping from something rather than escaping to something. I was escaping from my current life situation in DC, escaping a traditional nine to five job to try and be with my wife. I didn't have any plan after that. It was it was build a business, get over to Japan, and then whatever happens after happens, I didn't have a long term thing. And I think that's the true for a lot of people who say, I want to build a million dollar business. Okay, after the million dollar business. And for me, it was what's after moving to Japan, I've done it now, like what's life. And I spent a couple of years kind of not really knowing what my long term vision was or what I actually want to do. And so I was just kind of growing the businesses and just kind of it in hindsight, to me, I feel like I was wasting my time personally on on on vanity metrics in my business. And those don't really matter. And so I think, when you're when you're serious about your business, you have to know how the business fits into the bigger picture of your life and what the ultimate goal that is not the revenue metric or the fancy number. But what is the ultimate goal that your business is giving to you? What is it actually providing that enables everything else that you care about? So I just wanted to add that because I think, like me, a lot of others, they have a big important business goal, and it's impressive when they hit it. But then once they hit it, they just don't really know what to do. And you should get clear on that before you hit it. Because if you're not, you're not really going to know what to do with yourself. That's a really good point, Chris. Thank you for bringing that up. I think that's a lot of people I talk to are including myself sometimes are stuck kind of in that. Where do we go next? Well, y'all are going to see for anybody that watches any of my lizards, you are going to see me looking exactly like this with these earrings, these same lips, these glasses, talking about this exact topic because that is the lizard that I filmed two minutes before I jumped on this call. So yes, I really, and I'll just drop it here since the lizard will have already landed by that time. The action for that lizard was to sit down with yourself, give yourself 15 minutes to 30 minutes, add a minimum and think about what is your life going to look like? Not what is your business going to look like? What is your life going to look like? What will you be doing when your business is what you consider to be successful? What will you be doing? Will you be sitting at home watching TV? Will you be running another business? What will you be doing? What's that going to look like to you? And if you can't get it done in 15 minutes to 30 minutes, probably won't, then the next day sit down for another 15 to 30 minutes until you sort of design a life. Because and the reason I created this lizard is because I talk to so many people on a regular basis, especially people in my mastery circle that have achieved a certain level of success and they're depressed. I'm not clinically depressed, of course I'm not saying that, but they're bombed, they're down, they hit this goal and now what? They just, they lose their momentum, they lose their motivation, they lose their enthusiasm and excitement, they just now what? So you gotta sort of put that plan in place beforehand. So speaking to exactly the thing that we're talking about. If I may provide a book recommendation, I think might be good for the lizards. There's a, it's not a business book at all, but it's very, very relatable to business and how it's run today. There's a famous psychologist called Eric Fromm. Eric has felt a little bit strange, it's E-R-I-C-H and Fromm is F-R-O-M. It's called Escape, Escape from Freedom or Escape to Freedom. I'm forgetting which one it is right now, but. Somebody recommended this to me not that long ago. It's a really fascinating book. He takes you through the psychological development of the concept of freedom and what it meant to people at different stages in the human story and he talks about how it's gone from freedom from, like freedom from tyranny, freedom from oppression, freedom from constraints in our life to a freedom to mindset and modern society, where we should be aiming a freedom to do something with ourselves. But many people nowadays, what we do is we want to unfetter ourselves. We want to unshackle ourselves from some commitment or some debt situation or some other situation in our life that we don't want to be held down by. And so our goal is often to escape that thing that we don't like. We want to get freedom from that thing that we don't like, but we don't have a plan for what we want to go towards. We don't have a plan for what we want to be free to do. And I think it's a helpful expansion on our talk. It goes into this a lot more in depth than we have of course in 30, 40 minutes. But it's a really interesting kind of psychological journey on what freedom means to you and what you might want to take out of that to actually, as you're planning for your business and the goal that it's just, I think, a helpful book to read to add some depth to this conversation. So take, take, if you get a chance, take a read of it. It's a little dense, but it's not, it's not like an academic textbook or anything. It's just a little dense because it's an old book. Well, I think it's meant to be that I read this because you're the second person that has recommended it to me. So I'm, I'm getting it. I do love to read. So this, I guess, this is my next book here. I'm excited. It's kind of a self, it's not, it's not, it's not like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but in a sense, it's kind of a self actualizing type of thing. If you, if you have a freedom from something, once you're free from it, you don't know what to do. But if you're, you have freedom to go towards a higher goal, you will always be able to work towards the higher goal. So I think that's what it is, have a higher goal. Being there for you. I'm loving the idea of it. I mean, don't what you're telling, telling us and what you're sharing. It sounds like you're not just left bereft because there's always that thing out there that you're moving toward which we need, right? So I love that idea. Well, then going back to this last weekend again, we had talked about the, and I think, Tim, my husband had brought up how it's one of the problems when people retire, right, is now they have no purpose. Now they have nothing, nothing to work toward. And there's some research, there's quite a bit of research out there saying that people who work longer or at least keep working have some purpose live a lot longer than people who don't. So it seems to all be tied in together there. Yes. And I think the reason we spent so much time on that stage is because it's so psychological and so mental, right? Like when you're getting out of the cleaning, it's so time and energy intensive. But when you're getting out of the daily admin, it is time intensive, of course, but it's mentally intensive. It takes up your mental space. And so thinking this through is, it's important, yeah. But should I mention the fourth stage or should we? I've got a lot for you. But as always, well, there's never enough time to get through it all, right? So the fourth and final stage, once you've got the daily admin sorted, once you've got someone helping you manage the office is to train them to be self-accountable. It's to train them to actually be able to be independent and run it by themselves. And this is kind of the final, there's a fit kind of optional stage I can talk about briefly if you want. But this is kind of the final stage of the four evolutionary model that I want to talk you guys through is now that you've got the office team, they may be doing the tasks for you, but they're still looking to you for direction and leadership. And they're still very dependent on you to fix issues or mistakes or handle emergencies. And so they're not independent yet. You're still managing them. You're still a manager in some sense. You're just a higher level manager. You're managing the managers. But you're not an absentee owner, right? Absentee means your team can do it themselves and you know that they can do it and you're not sitting there at 2 a.m. worrying about it. And so the final one more real quick thing I have to add on there, Chris, because a lot of times when we're talking about this people are like, but I am there. But unless your company is continuing to grow, you're not there because they're not, right? That's what happens. People get out before they're actually at this stage and the company can keep going. It can hold itself together until it begins to decline, but it can't grow. You took the words out of my mouth. That was the fifth option stage. No, no, this is good. I'm glad we're on exactly the same thread right now. So this is the thing I find with a lot of people and we talked about this a couple of years ago. I know on the chat is a lot of people will hire a VA or a manager and then they'll get out because they haven't had a break in 10 years and then they become mentally disengaged from their business because they finally can take a break. And then the business suffers because they've become too disengaged from it. There's no balance there between how engaged they need to be to provide for their team and actually still working towards growing it in a healthy way. And so they've lost that balance. They've just traded one extreme for the other. They were extremely interested. Now they're extremely disinterested. It's not a good place to be. And I'd say most people go through a stage like that when they do go through this final stage. You need to be consciously training your team to be accountable to themselves and to care about the quality of work that they do. Otherwise, you are just going to at best maintain the level of growth that you have. You're not going to continue to grow. And so this fourth stage, I'll kind of wrap up quickly. It's training to be accountable. It's preparing to actually become an absentee owner. It's doing a dry run. I call it a 1-1-1 dry run where you do one day away from them, one week away from them, and then one month away from them. And if they can handle everything for one month without your input largely, if there's an emergency, of course, but if they can largely handle it without your input and the business's numbers are going directionally in the right way, that's usually the time period where you know that your team is truly capable of doing this without you and you can start to take much more extended time off like Sarah's done. You can take a summer off. You can take six months off in summer cases. Most people don't tend to take that long off, but it's possible. So this accountability stage is showing them how to be accountable to themselves. And we can talk about some tactics if you want. It's preparatory stage, preparatory work for actually leaving, and then doing those dry runs to ensure that they can do it. But this this fifth stage I'll mention for 30 seconds maybe if you want me to. It's learning how to grow when you're uninvolved from the business or when you're completely physically absent from it and not just maintain that growth. And one of the big things I think is we can cover it again if you want. It's learning how to stay mentally engaged with your business when you're not involved in the day to day anymore. But there's certain more advanced growth tactics you can use. One that we're using right now, for example, is we're rolling up smaller cleaning companies from owners who've built a solid foundation, but they no longer want to be in the cleaning industry anymore. And so we can open up new office locations in different states by approaching owners within a certain revenue range and saying, hey, look, you've got great reviews. You've got great teams. You've got a great reputation. Would you be interested in passing the mantle on to our team? There's these advanced growth tactics you can actually apply to grow very quickly once you've got a really rock solid team in place who can handle everything for you. There's options that become available that weren't so available before. Because before your team was rock solid, you might have a manager quit and then it's chaos again for six months or you might and we've I'm sure we've all gone through that stage. But yeah, yeah. So you need to have backups for your backups, right? You need to have more than one manager trained who can do everything for you. You need to have at least two people who can do that. You need to have you need to have a certain structure in place that I recommend people have for when disaster strikes that there's always someone who can attend to that disaster because often you can have the perfect system in place. But if the person who's meant to who's meant to operate the system is absent, then the whole thing falls apart. So once you've got this rock solid office team in place, there's a lot more advanced ways that you can start to grow your business that just weren't available before. So there's a whole fifth thing we could talk about later about continuing a trajectory of growth after you're absent. Yes. Hey, Chris, you mentioned that you recommend a certain structure. Can you share a little bit more about that? Sure. So there's different stages, sort of there's different structures you're going to need at different stages of growth in your business. So typically these are all these are all just guidelines. Every business is unique, of course, but generally I find just because I run a VA company so we have access to a lot of cleaning businesses that we work with, we generally find most people in the kind of 15 to $50,000 a month range do well with one main office manager that they're still working very closely with. There's one person in the office doing much of the phone calls and emails and managing the scheduling for you, but you're still working fairly closely together. You're meeting at least weekly. You guys are there's a there's a rapport between you where you can you can easily switch stuff between you if you need to. So that's kind of the first very basic minimalist structure if you will for your office is you and an office manager or VA and maybe a lead cleaner who can assist sometimes as well with the with the cleaning and the scheduling aspect of it. Once you start to get into kind of the higher stages of growth, this is like the 50 to $150,000 a month range or so, you're going to want to add a second and potentially a third office manager to your team. And the way that I recommend people split it up. It's a very clear division of duties. A lot of people will hire a second person with the intent that they have their own their own kind of domains in the business that they look after, but then they hit a growth spike and then they're then then both managers are doing everything and then it's chaos again, but it's chaos with three people instead of one person, which is even worse because then you don't know who's done what and that's awful. So what I recommend people do is before they bring on a second and a third person, they have a very clear structure that they adhere to and one of the easy ones that we do at ThinkMades, for example, is we have a front end person and a back end person. So we have a person, so we have a manager who does front facing tasks, that's anything to do with phones or customer communication or sales, all of that customer brand facing stuff, that's done by one person. So they're always in that customer facing mindset. And we have a separate person who handles all of the back end parts of the business. So that's handling a lot of the teams and scheduling, that's handling some of the hiring, it's handling a lot of the operational materials and the website. It's handling a lot of payment stuff. So all the back end stuff that's actually managing the running of the business is operated by an entirely different person and they communicate daily of course, but there's a division between what they do, so they absolutely know who should have done what. That's the second part and then at this stage you're going to want to also have a fairly established team of vendors who are handling the expert stuff for you. You don't want your VA doing marketing for you beyond thumbtack or basic lead responses, you're going to want a marketing agency who actually specializes in this exclusively who's handling your marketing for you. You're going to want, if you're a little bit bigger, you're going to want to have a sales agency or sales executive who would be doing that for you as well. So you want to start building out a team of vendors who are not, you know, they're not managers or they're not technically in-house, but they handle one specific thing that they're true experts in and you know that they've got that part down pat. So this is kind of the basic structure that you can do up to kind of two, even two and a half million in revenue. The amount of people might change slightly, it might be two or three or even four office managers, but that basic structure where you have kind of departments within your business and you have a manager of each of those departments remains the same. And so you start to resemble a bigger corporate entity almost if you will, where you have a sales manager and you have a customer manager and you have a hiring and team manager, you start to resemble that bigger template of bigger companies a little bit more closely now where the everyone's got their thing they do. So this is kind of a basic structure. Chris, maybe even like a second location or something like that, correct? Yes. So again, this is just a guideline, but I tend to find what we're doing is we're doing regional managers. And so you might have a Eastern Time Manager who handles Eastern locations and you might have a Pacific Time Manager who handles specific locations. There's so many ways that you can slice it, but the important thing is that you have a manager who knows exactly what locations they're looking after and they know what their duties are within that location. So yes, you can have one manager, one location if you want. The only thing I would say would be you need to have a solid foundation built out in each of those locations first. Otherwise, that work is going to be distributed to the rest of your team and then your other locations might start to suffer. And that's not a good path to go down because that might actually make you smaller instead of bigger. So adding second, third, fourth locations is a talk I want to do at some point with people because it's an art, I feel like. When you're starting a new location, you can start from scratch. You can acquire someone and then rebrand as your company. There's a few different ways you can do it. But in terms of the actual managing multiple locations, I find regional managers are having that as a concept to work with is very helpful. All right. So I'm writing this down because I am going to have you or ask you plead with you to come back and to talk about how to expand into multiple markets. That's something that not a lot of people have had a lot of success with, right? Very few people have had success, at least in the residential industry, right? Commercial, that's happening all the time. But residential has been trickier for a lot of people. So I'm definitely going to have you come back for that if you can find time. I know six in the mornings early and your dog doesn't like it, but I'm going to sacrifice. I'll have to send you some bones or something. I don't know if you'll be able to see, but she's right there. She doesn't even look like a puppy because she's just laying in there now, right? You don't think a puppy's just laying around like that. It's so funny. She looks big for a puppy for people, but actually she's very small. Her physical body is small because she's a very fluffy dog. The fluff makes her look big. But if you compress the fluff and hold her, she's tiny. I definitely have a cat like that. Every once in a while she'll get really matted. I'll go on a trip or something to get matted and we'll have to jave her. Just this little tiny cat. It's huge, yeah. It didn't all go. All right. So what should we talk about? We have nine minutes left. Chris, where do you think we would best use this time? Well, okay. I'd like to mention two very quick points on the expansion front just to kind of make perhaps as a teaser for our next talk that people might want to think about. I'd love to give you guys a business and life update for a minute because I apologize. I didn't give that in the beginning. I've got something pretty cool coming for people that I think might be fun, but I'm not here to mention it if that's not okay. Sure. So well, the two things that I wanted to mention quickly are in terms of expansion, the hardest part isn't expanding correctly. It's actually the tax stuff. It's the accounting and the bureaucratic stuff because when you expand to different regions and states, it's all those states and city licenses and all the insurance that you have to have for that. There's so much tax and accounting stuff that you have to do when you do this. It is truly overwhelming. Even if you have a good tax team, they're going to be emailing you every day for signatures and filling out forms and it's really annoying. So I just want to share that with people just to say if you're thinking about expanding, I cannot overstate the time investment that you're going to have to give initially when you do expansions if you do it legally and properly, you're going to have to give a lot of yourself to do this. So just be sure that that's the path that you want to go down because it's a time suck like no other. So that's a big one. And the last thing I wanted to say, I just wanted to return for just 10 seconds to the kind of third stage when you're building out your admin team and you're teaching them to be accountable. There's a principle that I live by with my team that I think is very helpful principle for people to use when they're encouraging their team to handle mistakes or accidents in the business and get confident handling issues. And it's this, you should never ever punish someone for an accident. You should only nurture them when an accident happens. So if they deliberately do something wrong, of course, there's consequences for that. But if there's a genuine accident that someone made and it maybe cost you some money or it cost you a recurring client, which you worked hard to get, don't punish them for that. But you have to actually guide them through the correct way to do it. And you might have to do that many times. You have to facilitate a positive environment where they're actually encouraged and enjoy the independence. Because if they're stressed out by the independence and worried that they're going to make a mistake when you're not there, they're not going to do a good job because they're afraid to actually put themselves out there and manage the business because they're always going to be looking back to you for approval. And so I want to make sure that when you're building your team out, you have that mindset of not like a punishment mindset, but more of a nurturing mindset with these people. Because these are the people who are allowing you to live the life that you can now live. And so you need to keep that in mind. Yeah, I like the word nurture too. I tend to think in terms of celebrating mistakes and errors because great opportunities for that person to learn the lesson. It's similar to the way the owner learned the lesson. You know, you had a mistake, you learned the lesson, and now you start to fix it because you have a visceral feeling of how bad it was. And so when your managers have that celebration is, for me, is in order. It's like, you're getting the owner mindset right there. Yeah, that's what it feels like. Good job. It's not easy, but don't worry. You're going to come out of this better than you were before. And just remember that you're not the one being shouted at anymore. So you have to be kind and patient with them too, you know? Because if they're getting shouted at by the customer and then shouted out by you, they're not going to stay very long. So true, Chris. Yeah, you got that right. We have somebody, Dee Felder, and I'm not sure who Dee Felder is. The name doesn't sound familiar to me, but hi, Dee Felder. Nice to see you. All right. So you wanted to tell us about something exciting that you're working on, Chris? I am. It's very early stage, but I just, I'm just kind of tentatively getting the word out there because I'm seeing what people are interested in this, but I'm bringing back a book club, a business book club for the cleaning industry that I did a few years ago, and I wanted to just put that out there that I really enjoyed doing this. We did this maybe three, four years ago with a group of owners, and it was a lot of fun where we met together every week, and we would read through a book every month. And every week we would do like, we'd split the book into four parts. It'd be like part one, two, three, and four instead of chapters. And we'd read through those parts, and then we'd meet to discuss that part of the book, and then we'd make an action plan and a summary based off of that part of the book that we would implement into our businesses instead of just moving on to the next book. So, so I wanted to mention that. I know. She, she's freaking out because we have something that we call book talk that every Tuesday, we break the book up into four sections, not chapters. About each section, we create an action plan for book talk. And here's the funny part, Chris. We just decided yesterday, which is the reason why Denise, like, we just decided yesterday that we're going to open this up to, to a much wider audience. We've been doing it only in our circles. And so yeah, so it's very, very funny that you are, we're, we're working on a book right now called Never Split the Difference. Have you heard of that? Chris Foss, it's a great book. It's so good. Yeah, it's a great book. If you've ever watched his talks. So you can see him, we follow him on Facebook too. So he's, yeah, yeah, I've, I've seen him too, speak. How, but how weird is that, Chris? It's truly uncanny. I did not know this existed, but we need to, we should definitely talk about it because it works for a while and it's, it's such a fun thing to do with people. There may be a nice collaboration here, Liz. Yeah, absolutely. We're gonna have to figure something out there, Chris. I will not step on your guys' toes. I mean, there's no toes to step on. Books are books. More people reading more books in my mind. I tend to read about a book a day. And so I get a little, I get a little behind sometimes in book talk because we take a month to read one book and talk about it a lot throughout that month. But I definitely get a deeper, deeper understanding from the books that we do in book talk because, you know, we, we have that discussion and that we create those action plans. I think we've been doing it for about three years now, maybe, Ginny. Oh yeah. I've been seriously involved really heavily involved for the last year and I just love it really. It has changed my life. Wow. How have I never heard of this? Because it's part of our circles. It's only the circles, but seeing how we can open it up and, you know, Chris, we'll talk about how we can make this work. So good that we just decided literally yesterday that we're open up. Yeah. I'm doing it. Have you ever heard of Meetup, Chris? Sorry? Have you ever heard of Meetup? Meetup? Yes. The Meetup, the Meetup Group app, the communities app. Yeah. So I'm doing some marketing in there. I'm using it as a marketing channel and it's one of the things that I'm inviting the Meetups to is to book talk on Tuesday. So just so great minds. Great minds, Chris. I think the universe has something. I think we have Chris as a, you know, host or presenter. I mean, the information Chris has will likely be incredible. You might just have two, right? Maybe, Chris, you're doing yours on Thursday. We're doing ours on Tuesday and we get two books. You know, me, I'd love that. I got two books in a month, right? Because I'm liking this. Yes. I'm thinking that this was meant to be that you're on here today. So we're talking about book talk and then we're also talking about Escape from Freedom, right, Eric Fromm? Also heard about it twice. I mean, this is meant to be here. Well, we'll add the Fromm book to book talk. It's a good idea, Dawn. Great idea. I don't know what we have on for July, but we've probably traded out. It's so good, especially if a lot of your inner circle are doing the whole remote thing, they'll get a lot of value out of it. It really, it's good for that crowd and it's good for the crowd who want something, some meaning in their business, I think. It's very good for that. Almost everybody wants meaning in their business, even if they're not remote or trying to become absentee. Who doesn't want more meaning in their business? More meaning in their life. It sounds like it's about having more than just your business, right? Yes. Yes. So it's not just to clarify. It is kind of a little bit of a dense, older psychological book. It's not like a self-development book at all. So there's no goals of the book. It's an exploration. But I found the exploration to be very deep and very, very relevant for our times and the way that we do business and what people want out of their lives now. And kind of this direction that a lot of people have now, it's a very important book in that sense, I think. So just to preface that, if you go into it, it's a lot. Well, it sounds like it's kind of a timeless book, which is really interesting, right? Because I know it's an open book. But it's about balancing your life and your life has many parts to it, family, business, what have you, self-care. And so I love that. I'm going to download that book this afternoon. Good job. Good job. Kelly, I appreciate the comment too. It was fun. I did it. I did the same thing as you. I did an initial week many years ago in Japan. And that was the moment that clicked for me where it was like, wow, this can work. So thank you for that, Kelly. Kelly's husband is from Japan. They moved over here. And I know that you know, it's a challenge when you're trying to do any of these things. But Kelly has since moved on to doing some other really amazing and fun stuff. Right? Yeah. I haven't seen Kelly around in a while, but our time has kind of come to an end. If Tom was here right now, he would have already shoved us down and been like, what are you guys doing? Gotta get off the, get off the call. All right, Chris, I'm going to have Sarah read out to you about this thing that I told you about, and let's try and get you back on. That sounds amazing. Something I haven't heard anybody really talking much about. That would be great. Thank you so much, Chris. Do you have any last thoughts, anything else that you'd like to share before we head out of here? No, but what I can do on the book club run, if you want, is I can send a separate email or Facebook message, and we can make something fun for people to have them. It would be awesome. That would be great. Appreciate it. Have a good night. Bye bye. Take care.