 Hey, good afternoon, everybody. Tom Stewart here with Liz Trout. This is smart business moves. Hi, y'all. It's a Tuesday. It's a Tuesday. Good to see everybody today. February 9th. Is February 9th have any significance in history? Did something happen on February 9th? This isn't like Groundhog's Day. No, no, that's a second. No, it's really close to Valentine's Day. Yeah, that is coming up, isn't it? So close. I just realized yesterday, I was like... Like the weekend? Monday, maybe? I don't even know, Tom. Dear God. All we do, Tim and I do is cards, thankfully. Love that, man. And so I already have my card. As long as I don't... Do you have to go buy a card? No. Are you kidding me? You would love it if I would make one, but yeah. Okay. He'll make something. He always does something. He's... Something more thoughtful. He's better than I am. Yeah, we all acknowledge it. Everyone that knows us knows he's the better one. Maybe I'll start. Hi, Robin. Sunday. Okay, ooh. Gosh, Sunday makes it harder, though. It's kind of like you gotta put in effort because you don't have the work excuse. Yeah, I'll make food. That'll be my thing. It's easy. You could make another thing. I'll make another look. Can you get... I guess you can order cards from Amazon, like just one card? I did. That's... I got my card. I already... Is it like prime? I mean, that will actually ship you a card. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I actually ordered mine on Love Pop. So I got a cool... I got cool cards, you know, that pop open and make like fancieness. But yeah, food, right? I'm in. I'm doing food, Robin. I got a fancy card and I'm doing food. I feel like I'm like ahead of the curve here, especially for my past years. Hey, Denny. All right, so... Anything happening with PPP or Employee Attention Tax Credits or PPP One Forgiveness or... I did a notification from my bank yesterday saying that they had a new, simpler forgiveness application coming, which I was like, even simpler? All right, that's interesting. Is that the one with the $150,000... I don't know, I just thought it. I didn't even look at it yet. Hey, Brian, I just got it yesterday. No, they're not Christmas ones. They do kind of look like it though, huh? They have all different colors in them. You've never seen me wear them. I've had them probably 10 years. I was like, today is the day. I've got Denny's Christmas hats over here. I could break them. It's not Christmas. You gotta come up with some kind of new decoration that's not... Like a Valentine's Day hat, like a Valentine's Day arrow through my head or something. Oh, there you go. You couldn't even come up with a birthday paper hat for Leslie. I could have made one of those. You know, I think it was Denny's birthday too over the weekend, right? Denny, was it your birthday on the weekend? Terrible on the weekend. I don't get on Facebook. So, but I'm pretty sure she said... Happy birthday. Happy, happy, belated birthday, Denny. I hope it was Denny. Somebody said that in the second. I think it was. Yeah, happy, late birthday, Denny. So, we are, yes, yeah, happy birthday. I feel bad that we didn't say something much earlier. She's good at remembering stuff like that. She's like, Johnny on the spot. Tom's gonna change the subject. She's like, let's look at KPIs. I'm gonna do that. Let's do that. All right, let's do it. Get us some numbers. Still talking about price increases, price adjustments. That's what we talked a little bit about. We did, you and I didn't talk about this Tom, but I thought we could talk a little bit about the letter, whether it's mail, email, a phone call, text, and what types of things people like to put in them that have some of the best results. We don't have to talk about that, but I thought we might. Yeah, we can't talk about that. All right. So, this is not a journey, isn't it? Yes. We're not done yet, but every day is a step forward. So red numbers, green numbers, green numbers go up, red numbers go down, and you do pick any combination of these you want to, but if you make the green go up and the red go down, you're gonna be more profitable. Yeah, and we did do one entire row here, Tom. We did LDPR, we did it. We got tons of things for people to do to lower the LDPR. That's a whole idea. A lot of times, I've done this in the past. I explain all the math behind it. It's like, well, you gotta go figure out what the heck you're gonna do to make the numbers move, but this is how the arithmetic works. That's not very useful, is it? Well, it can be useful for some people, but I think it's more useful to give them some action items, some things to actually do. Do these things, and this red number is gonna go down or this green number is gonna go up. It was a time, I'm rolling the pot back a while. If you remember, some of these examples here were dated like 2003. 13, wasn't it? Not three. Yeah, we went back, we went back 10 years from that. Well, 2013 was a few years ago. Anyway, we felt that it was almost like KPI jeopardy that if we can answer the questions we were doing good, the answer to the questions wasn't really making us more profitable. We were just doing fancy math. Yeah. So we decided that we wanted to take it a step further. So that's why this is taking longer because if all we were doing the fancy math, we'd have been done four weeks ago. Yeah, so hopefully you guys are recognizing that and going, oh yeah, I'm gonna do that. Yes, I can do that. And sometimes it's a matter of what you can do. Like, yes, I can make myself do this thing. We're talking this week in group and one of the women was saying that this is the first year, she's been in business a long time. Can't remember how long. She's actually on this call today. And she said this was the first time she's ever actually written a goal. And she just couldn't do it before. And now she's done it. It's hard to make yourself do some of this stuff. Just whatever the thing is. So, I mean, whatever you can do is good enough. Do that to get some of it. And that's what we're doing. We're giving a long list. So you don't have to do everything, do something. That's within your means that you're comfortable doing. And that can become a habit. And then, you know, if it gets easy, then do something else too. And then you got other people in your office, get them involved, have them do something as well. Because that's really, I don't know if we've talked about that enough. You can't do this by yourself. I mean, you've got other people in your company. You need to get everybody involved in what we're doing here. Yes, that was you, Linda. I didn't want to call you out, but I'm glad you did call yourself out. 15 years, Tom. She's been in business 15 years. What a great goal. I was so proud of you, Linda. Fireworks for you. That's a good start. No, no, she did more than that. I mean, not only did she write the goal, she's also got activities that are connected to those goals. She's broken it down by quarter, broken it down by month, working on it weekly. I mean, she didn't just write a goal. She's working it. I'm like, it's a big deal. It's a really big deal. Robin asked if we could give him some info on the groups, Tom, could you just put the link up there for? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, you can check out the website. So we don't have to get into it and waste anybody's time here, Robin. It's mastermindaccountability.com. I'm gonna get a link up there for you though. Dink, dink, dink. Here's the website. Here's the link to the video. Can I play the video? No, please don't. It's so bad. Please don't hold that video against me, Robin. You know it's better than this. You know you're making it awful hard for me not to. Please don't. I keep saying I'm gonna redo the video. I can do it at like 1.7. No, just don't do it. I'll redo it and then I'll let you do it. Okay, well I dropped the link in chat. We don't, well, we'll leave it at that. How about that? Yeah, thank you. Good job, good job. All right, so does anyone hear the humming noise in the background? I do. What is that? Oh, I don't hear it. Is it maybe here? Since I don't hear it. Let me turn off my microphone. Does that help? Change anything? Your microphone's still on, I can hear you. I know, but it's the other, it's the big blue microphone. It's a separate microphone. I don't know if it's working. You can only use my microphone, so you're not even using that one. You're using the one on your webcam, I'm guessing. Okay, it's off. I can't hear you and I can't hear the noise either. All right, that was my microphone. We are using big blue. All right, so it is my microphone because you couldn't hear the noise when I turned it off. Let me hold it. It's a cat. Is that any better? Where are the cats? Are they running the vacuum cleaner back there? What, do you hear it? Is it really loud? No, it's all gone now. You're good. You know what, I had it sitting on top of my computer, the microphone, so I'm thinking that's what it was. Are you good? Can you, is it gone, Linda, for you too? I used to have a mic that would sit on my desk and I got away from that. I had to get something to hold it up in the air because I flail a lot when I talk and every time I would touch the desk, it would make a little intonable noise. So, anyways. Well, I hope it's gone for everybody, not just you, Tom. Do what? I hope the noise has gone for everyone and not just you, especially Linda said it's been there a couple of weeks. I didn't know that. I didn't, I get, you know, I just noticed it. I thought it was like highway traffic or something. Anywho, it's too quiet in here now. It was driving your nuts. Sorry, Linda, it was such a big thing to do. Can I like put some like background music or something in here or? No, sorry, Tom, now we have to suffer. All right. I think that Derek carries around with him that makes all these like noises at night. He sleeps? Yes, and he plays them really loud, like grasshoppers. And like- It's like a story of waiting for like a lion or something to jump out. Okay, but that is not as bad as, who was it that had to have a fan? Remember that? That loud roar of the fan. Who was that? I don't remember. We had to search for a fan. You finally found one, but we did. Okay. And you think of the fan. I got to share this one. We also have a friend that went to Foundations. Her name's Angela. And she sleeps with a hairdryer, y'all. This is not a secret. Hair dryer that's on. That's a real thing. And she's not the only one. Google, I mean, Google it. I did Google it. There's a lot of people- There's like a clinical name for it. Oh, that part I did not- Yeah. But yeah, I was like, wow. All right. That's a thing. All right. Anyway, you don't remember who the fan was? I don't either. No, but I remember it. It's like you get it anyway. Yeah. Anyway, we're all mutants. All right. So I wanted to go back to the idea of activities and action items and figuring out what you're going to do. So we're going to be talking some more about annual rate increases and adjustments. And I just want to remind you guys that while we're talking, be thinking about what can I do? What can I do? Don't think about how that won't work for me. I can't do that. What can you do? Because you don't have to do everything. You just need to do some of the stuff to make the green numbers go up and the red numbers go down. And we say you, we're talking about everyone that works in your organization. Everybody can play in this game. Don't, you know, you're the CEO of the company. Your job really is to lead and get your team to get engaged in this. It doesn't mean that there aren't things that you're going to be doing with your own personal two hands in this. It does mean that you will be, but just don't get so lost in what you're doing that, this isn't something that you do that you forget about everybody else in your company and isolate them from this. They have to be active. They don't have to be, but if you want to be as profitable as you deserve to be, then you want to get everybody involved in this. Even the LDPR, y'all, have them help you get that number down. Think about it. Everybody can work on this. Think about it. We're talking about getting the loaded direct payroll down by being more efficient and being more productive. Who's in the best position to do that? You're cleaning professionals, right? The folks that are cleaning the homes every day. So if you're trying to do this without getting them involved, you're gonna need some. Have your lift. Yep, absolutely. And the result you're gonna get is gonna be suboptimal. And they're not as engaged. So everybody recognizes now how important it is to have engaged employees, right? So here is one way to not only engage them, but win. Make more money. Have them win too. If you make more money, there we go. Go back. Yeah, thanks, Tom. If you make more money, you have opportunities to pay them better. Anyway, slice it. I promise you, and you can promise all your stakeholders that they're gonna get more value out of the relationship with your company if you can be more profitable. And it's not about being old man potter. It's about being George Bailey, okay? It's not Christmas anymore. I need to come up with another analogy, but truly. Oh, and I've been on the other side of that. When you don't have profit, everything is harder. People don't get what they deserve. You can't pay people what they deserve. People aren't going to be as connected to your company. They're not as engaged. So you need to have the profit. All right, have we done enough proselytizing today, Tom? Maybe not. Let's go back to Don Finn though, because one of the things that people get hung up about is talking to their employees about profit. And he points out that, think about it, does any rational person wanna work for a company that's not profitable? It's a kind of common sense from an employee standpoint. It's like, this place sucks if it's not gonna be generating a profit. Of course I want the person who owns the company make money, because if that person's not making money, I'm not gonna be making any money either, right? Yeah. I'm sure they're not gonna be making more than that. I mean, it's head trash. A lot of times we get, we look at it wrong. But anyway, we're still drilling on a loaded direct payroll to revenue. And we understand the importance of that because the lower that number is, the more of every dollar that comes in flows down to covering our fixed expenses and eventually a becoming profit. And we are bing-bing, talking about rate increases and we talked about when to do it yesterday. I think that we're pretty good on that. And I think we're in agreement. If you do it at the anniversary day, if you can do it as soon as possible, the sooner the better for all the reasons that we discussed and spread it out over 12 months, don't batch it all up, do it as soon as the opportunity presents itself on at least a monthly basis. You wanted to talk about how to do it. Do we want to do a letter or an email, a phone call? There was a time when we would take a letter and print it out on the laser printer and fold it up and put it in an envelope with a stamp, put an address on it. Yeah, Brian, we just talked about this yesterday. So we talked quite extensively actually about that $15 an hour increase by, was it 2026 Tom or 2025? 2025 is the proposed bill but it's not, you know, it's far from being a law yet. But it kinda looks like it's worst case scenario for a minimum wage increase. The idea of it going immediately to $15 an hour on a national basis I think is pretty much off the table. Yeah, I can't even imagine that that's gonna happen. No matter who the president is, don't care. That's not happening. But if you want to go back to yesterday's, might find a link here if I'm lucky. This is what's happening where if this becomes law, it could go up to 950 sometime this year and then go up to 11 and 1250 and so on and so on. So by the time we get to 2025, it would be $15 an hour. But by the time we get to that point, you know, a lot of things will happen between now and 2025. So many things. Heck, I feel lucky nowadays if I can tell you what's gonna happen in December this year, I have no idea. All right, so back to how to do these price increases. So I know that there are a lot of people that are still sending letters. When email started to be really on the rise and we had everybody's email addresses, a lot of people switched over to email and we're sending a lot of email price increases. I think the email is a little bit harder nowadays than it was even like two, three years ago because people don't open email as often as they did. There was quite a good chunk of time where people checked email every single day, multiple times a day. And I know that there are a lot of people now that don't check email every day. But I still think that most people are checking their email often enough to be able to get your price increases out there or your price adjustment, your wage adjustment. What do I wanna say? Rate increases or adjustments out there. Yeah, it was hard, it was hard y'all. I know that some people are using text now. I don't personally know anyone that is using text and having a lot of success, but I'm curious about it. I'm interested in seeing how it's gonna play out for the people that are using text. We are currently doing email and because we're doing email and there is sort of a lag between when people receive the email and they open it, we are giving them a month. So we send the email out the first week of the month and then it goes into effect the first of the following month. That's what we've been doing for a few years. And we do them every month. So it hasn't stopped working yet. Yeah, we do emails as well. And a lot of times, not a lot of times, but sometimes the clients miss them. But if they don't have any discussions between the time that we send the email out and we say the change is gonna go into effect, we just let the change roll into effect. And occasionally they'll call up and say, why don't you do my rate go up? And it's like, well, we sent you an email and such and such a date here. I'll send it to you. Again, it was like, oh, we missed it. It's all good. Yeah, it hasn't been a problem. There was one more, what's your next slide, Tom? Do you mind giving me a quick show? See if I want to... Variable rate. Okay, yep, this is good. There was one more thing that I wanted to talk about. We were talking about fear and that a lot of people are afraid that the main reason that I hear for people not sending out price increases on a regular basis is because they're afraid. They're afraid of losing customers. They're afraid of upsetting customers. They're afraid that they won't have enough work for their cleaning professionals. So lots of fear around sending these out. But Tom taught me something way back in the day that I had just never heard anybody say before. And I was like, oh my gosh, that is brilliant. You don't ever have to lose any customer to a price increase. Send the letter. If the customer box, they try to cancel service. They're not happy. You can always unwind that. You can always say, you know what Mrs. Johnson? You're one of our favorite customers. I'm actually not going to raise your price. Don't tell all your friends because I still need to be able to increase our rates but for you, I'm not gonna increase your rate. So worst case scenario is you keep Mrs. Johnson at the same rate that you had her at before and now she feels special for it. She feels like you gave her some sort of a special deal and now she's more loyal to you. So that's worst case scenario. So sending the letter actually gives you a boost no matter how you look at it either in money or in relationship. So I love that strategy. I don't see any reason not to send it unless the customer hasn't been happy with your service recently. And then they're right. You shouldn't be raising their price. You need to get your act together first, fix the problem and I'm speaking from experience here. If we're not doing the job, yeah, you shouldn't pay me more money. No, don't pay me more money and don't tip anybody either. Make us work for it, come on. So that's the only time I think people shouldn't send out a price increase. How about you Tom? Anything else? Any other reasons? You can call me. No, I mean, basically, basically, if you've already given that customer reasons to fire you, you don't need to give them another one. You wanna get them back to a point where at least they're seeing value in your service before you approach them requesting more money. Okay, now I do have one talking about adjustments versus increases. Sometimes what can happen is, and I'm sure that some of you have dealt with this in the past too, the customer's not happy with the service, but it's because you don't have enough time to get the job done, right? Because the job is bid, for example, at $100. But they actually need $130 worth of work. And so you're always going in there for $100 worth of time and you're doing that much work and the customer's not happy because really, you need to adjust their rate to be able to match up with the work that they want to have done. But that's not on them. That's not on us. Ooh, I like the green bar, green numbers. Nice, Tom. Yep. We should actually have green bars on all of them. I'm just kind of doing this on the fly. I'll get it fixed. But since we're kind of talking about rate adjustments, you wanna explain, Liz, what the difference between a rate increase and a rate adjustment is? Sure. How I think of rate adjustments is when something has happened to make you, there's been an outside force that has made you need to change that price. That doesn't have anything to do with the economy or anything else. So some common reasons that I see needing to make rate adjustments are, first, maybe bid the job wrong. You thought it was gonna take four hours, but it actually takes four hours and 40 minutes by your fastest person. All right, you need to adjust that. You made a mistake, get it fixed. Another one is maybe your customer with the 2000 square foot house had a combination of carpet and vinyl, vinyl in the kitchen, vinyl in the bathrooms, and then carpet everywhere else, great. And then they got all of their floors redone and they got tile and marble throughout their whole home. You need to adjust that rate because you're not getting that house cleaned in the same amount of time. Another one is that their kids go away to college and now you're only cleaning this much of the house. You might want to adjust the rate. Now, this is a different type of rate adjustment. Not a lot of people agree with the idea of lowering the rate, but you might want to. Or what about they come back from college, now they're back in the house, trash in the house again, you might need to adjust the rate. Another really big one, two more actually real quick, dogs, new dogs, new puppies, babies. You bring either of those two things into the house. Sometimes you have to adjust the rate, not always, but a lot of times. So people, pets, square footage. Oh yeah, like if they build on or something? Yeah, people, and plus you've got the whole, for a period of time, you got the whole construction thing going on, which makes it that much more complicated. Yeah. And a lot of times the confusing thing for the homeowner is they might want you to not clean three areas while they're in construction mode, and they want you to take this money off the price, but they don't recognize that it takes a lot longer when new construction is going on or any kind of a remodel is going on, so much dust in the air, people in and out, moving in your space, there's all that extra stuff in the way, it can end up taking a lot of time. So that's another time when you might need to temporarily adjust the rates. I'm not, go ahead Tom. Let's just talk about strategy for these rate adjustments. One mistake that I see often is that customers are, I mean, companies rather are hesitant to do adjustments. You know, they've got, you know, they're grossly underpricing a job and they just keep doing it, you know, month after month after month, not ideally, and I guess, you know, I know that you and I've had this discussion in your philosophy and I think it's really good is, you know, assess after three, you know, for a recurring customer. And not just assess after three, what I like to do is, because I'm all about expectations, right, setting that expectation is letting the client know upfront when you're signing them up for a job, especially y'all, if they bid online, right? If they bid online, or maybe you have set pricing and just square foot is always this amount of money, but then you get in there and the client wants a different service. That you need to be ready to adjust that price to fit what they need, to fit their expectations and whatever it is that they want to have done, because especially when it's done online, you're not really doing that. You're not really giving them the service that they want. All right, what does Katerina say here? If your customers come from referrals, you need to charge equal amount as they always exchange information. I would rather increase for everyone than for half. I mean, we've all run into that thing why, you know, my next door neighbor said, you guys are awesome, so I want a quote, you get a quote, and they say, well, my next door neighbor's paying something less than that. Why are you charging me more? Yeah, well, my thinking is that you just need to know why you're charging more. Ideally, you would not want to talk about the time. Ideally, you would not want to say that it's because your house takes longer, or your house is dirtier. Or your house is dirtier. You would want to be able to point to certain things about the house that maybe take longer and have something that is not, doesn't sound derogatory. Well, if your house was clean like your neighbors, right, that's not good. But you can talk about, you know, there's a lot of factors that affect what, you know, how long it takes to clean the home. I know that we don't want to just say that it takes longer, but if you explain that, you know, the types of flooring you have and the types of furniture and how much furniture, how dense it is, and how many people are living in the home, there are a lot of factors, and I don't have your neighbor's information available to compare it to yours, because at some point, I mean, it's not like HIPAA law is a medical, but you really don't want to break down, you know, and explain everything about the neighbor's home either. I mean, it's kind of, it is confidential. Your neighbors are trusting, you know, all your customers are trusting you not to just put out there and tell anybody else that comes along what's going on inside of their home, but just give them a general idea of all the factors that can affect, you know, the, your cost and charges associated with cleaning a home. And usually people will accept that. Okay, I understand. And a lot of times I'll use examples that don't have anything to do with either house, just so that they can see that there are a lot of things. For example, well, like at some homes, we make beds and at some homes, we do dishes, some we do laundry. So the pricing of different homes is going to be different based on the scope of work, depending on what they want. So the reason why your price is different than your neighbor and Mrs. Johnson's, you guys don't have the same thing done in your homes. Yeah, the scope of work can make a big difference because some customers have to take certain rooms and put them on request that even your, even if they're two homes might be the similar size, we don't necessarily claim the same number of rooms and each home. And the rooms don't take the same amount of time. Now, what I will say is if Mrs. Jones is asking you why Mrs. Johnson's house is $22 cheaper than her house is and you give her the answer and she doesn't look like, Oh, that makes sense. Then you need to be able to follow up with and we can absolutely get your price lower Mrs. Johnson by changing the scope of work if the price is a problem for you. So be ready with that. What can you reduce? What can you do differently? How can you? And there are a lot of things that I think, and not for all companies. So if your company is deep clean only, that's all you do deep clean, then you don't have a lot of leverage. But if your company is able to modify your scope of work for individual clients, then there are a lot of things that you can do. Last week, my bi-weekly customer said, today you don't need to clean, I was getting cleaned too filled. I said, I don't know, I was surprised. Yeah, that happens, doesn't it, Katerina? I'll give you the response that works really well for that. When she says, today you don't need to clean my office, can you clean two full bathrooms instead? You say, oh, absolutely, that will probably cost about $18, does that work? It's the same strategy that they use at the restaurant when you say, hi, can I get two ranches? They say, sure, it'll be $1.50 for that. How often do you say no, no thanks? I always say, yeah, sure, I want the ranch. Bring me my ranch. So it's sort of that same strategy. Can I substitute the steak for the chicken? Sure, that'll be an extra $5. Yeah, especially if they're asking for more work. Now, sometimes they'll say, I don't need you to do the master bathroom, the master bedroom, or the regular bathroom. Instead, could you vacuum the hallway? All right, well, you just reduced the scope of work by $40, and you're asking for a $4 add-on? Sure, I'm happy to do that for you at no charge, Mr. Johnson. I mean, you should have some allowance. We talked about the canned standards where how long does it take to clean without the 1,000 square feet of carpet. You should have some idea how long it typically takes you to clean a dry room, a wet room, a kitchen, a bathroom, so on and so forth. So you start getting this game of taking rooms off and adding rooms on, do the arithmetic, and say, well, what is it? You know, from a time standpoint, what's the difference? And if it's saving you time, but they just want to do a swap, then great. You're actually making more money, but it's gonna take you more time. You want to charge for the delta. And if your customer switches a lot, then you might look at what makes more sense. Maybe their price needs to be higher, or maybe it needs to be lower to accommodate for their flipping so that they can change it up all the time because customers don't like it when you're constantly changing the price on them. Some don't mind at all, but some just feel like you're nickeling, diming them to bits when you do that. Okay, well, I'm gonna have to charge you an extra $2 unless that's your only profit in the job. Try and suck that up, you know? So charging for every tiniest little thing can start to grade on people's nerves also. So the whole point to this rate adjustment thing is if you look at every customer that you have and make a graph and take the customer that you make the most profit of and put them at the beginning of the graph and go across the graph in terms of the ones that are making you less and less profit, by the time you get to the end of the graph, the curve's gonna go up really sharp and then it's gonna start to flatten off and at the end, and this almost always happens, it kind of dips down a little bit, that you have some customers that, honest to God, you would have more money in the bank at the end of the year if they weren't your customers. You're losing money on them when you take into consideration your cost of goods sold plus all the changes that you're having to make with their schedule and moving jobs around and situations where you've got teams that aren't even, that were scheduled to work, that weren't even able to generate revenue because of the scheduling problems they create and billing problems and chasing down money. Problem is you don't know who those customers are or maybe you have some idea but you can't put a number on it. And that's why this is- I'm sure you don't want to because you're afraid. Yeah. You don't want to know. But you really need to know that and for the ones who are not paying what they need to be paying in order to justify the service that you're providing them, you need to do this rate adjustment. Because if you don't, I'm gonna go into that. Back to what we talked about yesterday, Tom, if you want to be able to have the availability to not do the adjustment on those people that are losing money for you, then you have to do the rate increases and the adjustments on a regular basis so that you have that flexibility. You have to be profitable enough to be able to choose, yes, I'm not going to charge Mrs. Johnson. I would rather charge her an amount of money that is not tenable. I don't mind losing $5 a week every single time I go to Mrs. Johnson, but you have to be profitable enough to make that decision. You can't just willy-nilly just be not charging people for the money that you need to charge. Brian has a comment here too, Tom. My experience has been when a customer threatens to leave because of a price increase and you stick to your guns, they usually don't cancel. There you go. So that, I know that a lot of people also have this experience. So stick to your guns if you really don't care also if this customer leaves or not, stick to your guns no matter what, you're taking a chance but the odds may be in your favor, especially if they're very happy. If you're looking at your scorecards and they've given you perfect scorecards all along and you raise the rate and they're like, why, why, they're, they're, it's a struggle. They have an internal problem as well, right? They have to figure out what they're going to do. If you remember this example here, and that was this, you know, dummy data, but you could lose 10% of your customers and still have the same amount of revenue. And you need to know that, what that number is. Yeah, yeah. So like Brian has a lot of confidence that even if they leave, it's okay, but he doesn't have to get all flustered because he knows that the majority of the time they don't. They don't leave. And sometimes they'll threaten and sometimes they even will. Sometimes they will crawl back after that. Yeah. They don't crawl backs that, you know, that go out and they shop the market and they find out that they really, we're having a pretty good deal. And plus they appreciate your service. And there's something in the middle too, if they do leave you and let a couple of months go by, reach out to them. Four months, y'all. Three, four, okay. Four months. That's the magic number right there. I've tested it all. I've tested two, three, four, five, and eight. Four, four wins. You'll get back so many customers at the four month mark. So they've tried somebody else. They may have tried a couple of somebody else's. What happens at the four month mark as it's right at the, that's right at the timeline when the other company has just settled in and isn't doing anything special anymore and not paying attention to them at all. And they already had to maybe even three cleanings that were subpar. Something was missed and nobody's reached out to them. Nobody's talked to them. And here you come all reaching out to them, telling them how much you want them back, how much you love them. They feel special again. And bam, they come back. Yep, Leslie, it's okay if they leave. Up to a certain extent, right? You don't want them all to leave. So if you are raising your prices to a degree that everybody is leaving, I would say if you're losing 50% of your client base, you better be knowing what you're doing, be paying attention. Is that what you wanted to do? Was that intentional? Are you going to be making enough money that you can afford for 50% of your people to leave? That's a thing. That can, you could do that. You could choose that. You could decide I'm gonna go solos and I don't even need, I don't even want this many people. I don't want this many customers. I want to make more money and the people who stay, awesome. Just make sure that you're paying attention. What, Tom? I'm just playing here. What are you trying to make here? I'm dying to see what you want to do is the anniversary day. Cause even worst case, you're only hitting a small number of your customers anyway, right? Yep. So even if they all quit, then still like one 12th on the average. Yeah. And they're all going to quit either. And that. It gives you an opportunity. Nobody's going to quit over a few percentage of the ones that you do. But if you do it every year, you can deal with it. And plus you're getting more data and you just get better at it. It's like anything else. You get better at it if you do it every month. So you want to do your rate increases every month and you want to be looking at your rate adjustments every month as well. And if you do that, you don't get in these situations where, you know, gee, I'm so upside down. I miss is Jones. I don't know what to do, but I've been cleaning her forever. And if I go back and tell her, I got to raise the rate 50%. You know, she's going to lose her mind. And this all it's gets so dark on easy. And what happens is your loaded direct payroll to revenue goes down and you're making more money because you're building more for the same amount of work for the same amount of cost. It's very less. Your life is easier to get more profitable at the same time. Yay. And your people get paid more depending on how you pay. So. But you don't want more because you don't have to do it. You know, you're going to do payroll every week because if you don't, you know, you're going to have a lot of people that are angry at you and your business, you know, goes away if you don't pay your people and you get in trouble and you go to jail. Nobody knows. Nobody's making you do these rate increases, these rate adjustments. And I'll get to them next week. I'll do them later. I'll do it. So Tom, you're making the perfect argument for why you shouldn't do that. Have somebody else do them. If there's anyone else in your office, that's their job. Put it on them because they don't have an option. You tell them to do it. They have to do it. It's their job. I'm going back to many, many years ago. I don't know. I want to say 15 years ago, maybe longer when we started taking credit card numbers over the phone. Well, back in the day, I was probably closer to 20 years, that wasn't a thing. You didn't really like give your credit card number over the phone. That was crazy. And I was like, we are taking credit cards, period. We are. And you guys all know Mindy and Mindy worked for me. And she was like, Liz, I can't. I can't ask people for their credit cards. They're going to slam the phone down. They're going to yell at me out. They're going to cuss me out. I just can't do it. I was like, so here's the deal. You either get everybody's credit card or another job. I don't care which one, your choice. And she quickly found out that, yeah, it wasn't as easy as she thought. It took her a while to get her groove. But we got all the credit card numbers. We got all the credit card numbers. And I couldn't have probably called and gotten all those credit card numbers, but she didn't have a choice. It was her job. So, and she actually looks back on it as that was really a good experience. Did you ever get to where it's like, I wouldn't have been able to do that. I've been scared to death, Mindy. Absolutely, I told her. I couldn't have done it. I couldn't have done it. You had to do it. That's why you had to do it, or I had to find somebody else who could. We needed credit card numbers. So, same thing. If you can't do the price increases or the price adjustments, have somebody else do it. Also, price adjustments for a recurring client after the three jobs is just like a sweet spot there, especially if you tell people upfront that you're going to do it. You've had enough time to figure out how this house works and determine whether or not you really can do it in that amount of time. But if it's for another reason, other than when you first bring on a client, then the idea there is as soon as possible. I don't know if anybody else has ever had this experience, but I have. We've noticed for whatever reason, bless you, Tom. Didn't notice for whatever reason that somebody's price was out of whack, fell through the cracks. Here it is, eight months in, we've been cleaning at this bad price. Now we need to adjust their rate. We try to call the customer and tell them that, yeah, nothing's changed about your house, but we have been cleaning up for and losing money for eight months. Now they just think you're a crap business, that's a bad word, a bad business owner, right? That you don't even know how to run your business. What? So you expect me to believe that you have been cleaning my house and not making any money for eight months? Yeah, no. Let me give you one other thing here on the rate adjustments. We'll move on. Don't forget to look at your- Ryan has a question too. Ryan has a question too. Okay, we'll jump right on that. Don't forget of active customers though, because they are inactive customers, come active customers again. And while you're at it, you know, go ahead and look at those rates and adjust them as well or increase them, you know, go ahead and rate increases as well. Old one-time customers include those because a lot of times they become on-demand customers and they wanna go again. You just wanna make sure that when somebody calls up, wants to go on schedule again, you have some process to make sure that they're paying a new rate as opposed to some quote that they were given three years ago. Yeah, yeah, that's really good. Even all quotes for people who never became customers, oddly, you can kind of turn this into a campaign and say that, you know, we've been going through and we're making rate adjustments, but we'll go ahead and we'll give you one cleaning at your old rate if you wanna take it, you know, within the next two weeks. And sometimes people will sign up for service again and all tied in to, you know, I wanna get a deal. If I'm ever getting a home clean, I'll never have a better opportunity. Yeah, people don't like to miss out on stuff, right? FOMO, it's a thing, y'all. All right, so hopefully you're getting some ideas about what you can do, not what you can't do. Brian, how do you guys set up a customer anniversary rate increase reminder? All right, so it happens automatically in May Central, so Tom can't speak to this, but for years, we just used QuickBooks. You can sort by start date when they started service with you and we would just open it up, sort by the date, pull, export everybody from the month that we were in. So if it was February, we would just export out everybody that started in February and all those people got rate increases. That's how we do it. I think just about any production management software out there would have a start date. Yeah. You just do it, you know, everybody who started in January, everybody who started in February, it's kind of the same way you do birthdays, right? You run the report. Yeah, same way. Figure out who's getting a birthday card. Yep, same way. I know people that use Excel to do it as well, Brian. The idea there is just do it however you can find that it's easy for you or whoever's gonna do it for you, the easiest way and just do it that way. Later, you'll find a better way, an even easier way, a quicker way, something that is more streamlined. You just gotta get on board with the idea of doing them on a regular basis because then it becomes easy. Make it happen. It's a habit. Yeah. You want to have it. Inactive customers, old one-time customers, old quotes, yeah, yeah. Good. How about just charging more per hour? Remember, we got the a lot of direct payroll here divided by the revenue down here. If I'm charging more, then the whole load of payroll to revenue is gonna go down. And we talked earlier about increasing productivity, right? Increasing productivity will actually generate more revenue per clock hour. Certainly want to be focusing on that. We talked about all of the ways that you can increase productivity. Let's talk about charging more per hour. If you really want to maximize the amount of revenue that you can get per labor hour, do you want to quote hourly or do you want to quote based on the job? For my money, for the job, all day long, every day. If you're making it a strategic initiative to be as productive as you can be and if your member productivity is the allowed time divided by the actual time, you want to be able to learn how to clean the same amount of space to the same scope of work in the least amount of labor hours possible. And like Sharon Tenberg and Debbie Sardone, they've got a lot of training material out there that you can use to basically implement some of the industrial engineering techniques. You don't have to break out the TheraBlades and the Stopwatch and do all of that stuff. A lot of that work's done for you and that's not really my superpower. I'll leave that to the other experts in terms of how to maximize productivity. But if you do that, you certainly don't want to sell by the hour because every quote you get, you're going to be the highest, right? All right, so I am going to argue for the other side for just a minute here. I am all about not charging by the hour, but you can charge by the hour. I do know a couple of companies that charge by the hour. Isn't it Steve? Oh, what's his name up in Canada? He swears by the hour. He swears by charging by the hour. He charges you whatever it is, $55 an hour. How many hours do you want? That's how long they stay in the house. So not to say that you can't be profitable and charge by the hour, absolutely you can. Lots of great companies do this, big companies, and you can be profitable. You can just be more profitable. You have opportunity for more profit when you charge by the job. You also have opportunity to lose money, right? So because if you don't manage the productivity and you don't manage these things, then you can end up losing money if you're doing it by the job and people are spending double the time or you spend, you send too many people into that home and they trip over each other. I'm sure that we've all dealt with a little bit of that. Anything outside of weekly or bi-weekly, we charge hourly. We charge hourly for anything that isn't on a recurring basis. So if it's recurring, we can come up with a price, but we charge hourly too if it's. Now, I do know a couple of companies that recently have started just having a flat rate regardless of when you're cleaned or how you're cleaned and they're having some success. So they set the rate higher than what they would normally expect to charge and people are taking them up on it and they're making some money. So I'm thinking of one company in particular that has recently started doing that and she's having success. She's like, I'm loving it. I don't know that I'll ever go back. So I always have flat rates for them. Here's, I'm by the hour. Yeah, initial cleanings by the hour. I think Carrie recommends, so we do the same as you do, Katarina. I think that Carrie recommends, oh, we're running tight on time too, recommends not charging more for the initial clean. Instead, just charging your regular price, yeah, it's gonna take you a little bit longer, but then rotating in some of the deep clean stuff and she's had some good success doing that as well. Finding a way, using it as a benefit. So one of the things that her company does is we don't charge you that initial clean fee that everybody in her area does and we do free electrostatic spraying with victory sprayers that have not been recalled. And... One minute. She has that. What? Are there any out here that haven't been recalled? No, mine have been. I checked the numbers last night. I just wanna show you something though. Let's pretend. That'll be quick, because top of the hour. You do 700 square feet an hour. Do we wanna save this for tomorrow? Yes. Just a minute, do you know? No, I don't. Top of the hour, we'll sit, we'll do this tomorrow. It'll be good tomorrow. It'll be awesome. Yeah, it'll be good. Okay, what's tomorrow, Wednesday? Wednesday. Okay guys, take care. We'll see you here tomorrow, five o'clock Eastern. Bye-bye. Bye y'all.