 Hi, this is Tom Stewart with Cleaning Business Today. In this KPI tip, we're going to show how you can use a spreadsheet to estimate the number of regularly occurring clients that a cleaning business can have at any point in the future. To start, you need to know the average number of clients that a cleaning company is gaining each month. In this example, we're assuming 10, and you need to know the average number of clients that they're losing each month. In this case, we're assuming 5%. Notice that we have a constant on the gain side and a percentage on the loss side. If you think about it, it makes sense because the more clients you have, the more you have to lose. So we do that as a percentage, but as a company gets bigger, its ability to sell really doesn't go up proportionate to the size. So in this model, we're going to assume gaining at a constant rate and losing as a percentage. If you want to calculate the long term over the long run, how big a cleaning company could be, assuming gaining 10 a month and losing at 5%, that calculation is relatively straightforward. You take the gain per month, which is 10, and you divide it by the loss, which is 5%, and that gives you 200. So as long as a company is gaining 10 and losing 5% on a monthly basis, the biggest that it could ever hope to be in terms of regular recurring clients would be 200. That's a good number to have, but if you're planning and trying to figure out how many people you need to hire and how much equipment so forth you need, it would really be useful to know what that number looks like on a monthly basis, on a month to month basis. So let's show how do we do that. We're going to assume that a company is already in business and maybe they have 100 clients currently. We're going to assume that they're gaining 10 a month and we've got that number there, so we're just going to do a plus and add that, and I'm going to put a dollar sign there so I can drag that across. Now we're losing 5%, so we're going to take our 5% number and multiply it times the number of clients that we currently have, which is 100, and I'll put my dollar sign there so I can drag. So the total that we have is 100 plus 10 minus 5 or 105. Now going out to month one, we start off with the number of clients that we started with, which is 105. We're going to say that we gained 10, that's a constant, we're going to say that in this case we lost using the same formula that we have here, we're going to drag across, and since we had 105, 5% 105 is 5.25, and the total here, we'll just drag this across is up to 109. Now I'm going to take these formulas and I'm going to drag them all the way over, and the number above is the number representing the month, and it's 120 months or 10 years, so you notice once I do that for 120 months, it says the number of clients that we have is 199.788, which is very close to 200. So on any given month, based on gaining 10 and losing 5%, I can go out to month 12, which is a year out, and we'd have 145 clients, or go out and it'd be 170 clients or so on and so forth. Now once you've gotten to this point, I find it useful to create a graph, so you can see a little bit more clearly how the growth pattern is progressing. In order to do that, I just highlight this row here that has the number of clients in it, and I drag all the way out to month 120. I go up to the top and say Insert, Line, and click on the graph, and there it is. It's pretty straightforward. I can make it a little bit bigger, and you see where it starts off at 100, that's what we assumed, and it flatlines at 200. I want to go back here and say this is a brand new company, and we're starting off with zero clients. We can do that. See how the number goes to 10 to 19 and so forth, and if I go back out here and look at my graph, it adjusts accordingly. I hope you find this KPI tip helpful. Thank you for watching Cleaning Business Today.