 Hi, good afternoon everyone, Tom Stewart here and we're lucky to be joined today by our friend Matt Ricketts of Better Life Made, St. Louis, Missouri. Hey Matt. Hi, thanks for having me Tom. Hey man, thanks for joining us. Liz is taking the day off, she's got some balls in the air and said go ahead, take the day off, Matt and I have this thing down called, this is just another day at the office, right Matt? Yeah, I'm going to open up Facebook so I can do what Liz does and do the questions so I'm going to try and find, when the broadcast shows up, I'm going to try and find those for us too. Okay. Yeah, that'll be helpful. We've got some updates for you here in a little bit, we'll talk a little bit about what's happening in Washington with the House and the Senate both have some legislation that they're going to be dealing with this week that could once again change the rules of how PPP is used and handled and that'll be helpful and good news. It would have been nice if that stuff was six weeks ago, right, but that's okay, I guess. I know some of us, I guess the first people that got their money are in there six weeks, I think I'm in my fifth week of it right now, so it would have been good to know some of that before, but we'll deal with it, right? You know, when they had that first tranche of money of like $365 billion and they blew through that and then they allocated, I think it was another $320 billion and the concern was that was going to go really fast too, but it hasn't. They've still got about $100 billion in PPP funds that haven't been allocated and people aren't applying anymore. From what I understand, and this is, so my bankers, you know, from my bank, which is Midwest Bank Center, I have a local bank here, we had the average lending amount for the PPP went down significantly from round to round. So the second round, the average was $43,000. The first round was like closer to like $280,000. So a lot more smaller businesses were able to take care of business on the second round. So I think that's kind of what we're seeing there. I think that's what we're seeing there as far as why the money's lasting. It's truly small businesses are being able to take advantage of that. Which is kind of a cool thing, but it makes you wonder if they've got like $100 billion. And actually there's more people giving the money back or just not closing on the loan. So even the monies that are out there, they're thinking that a lot of that's going to be coming back unused. For a lot of different reasons, there's articles where banks are just talking about confusion and people are afraid to use the money and rules aren't clear. There's a lot of contributing factors that they're claiming to those funds not being fully utilized. Yeah, I think we're going to see. I mean, there were some good faith certifications that like some of the larger businesses, they're going to have to go through, you know, that are going to make it a little bit uglier for some businesses that were planning on using the money a little bit. You know, I didn't necessarily need like one of the ones that really stood out the most to me wasn't the big restaurant change, it was the Lakers. Did you read that the Lakers? Yeah, that one stood out before to turn the money. That was that seemed very abusive to me where it's just like, come on, that's a franchise that just you can sell hats through this and get through this. You can sell merchandise like, you know, and people are going to still watch the games on TV. You still have contracts for TV rights. Yeah, you're hurting on some stadium money. And I don't know how much of I don't know how much of their revenue is hurt. But I was like, I was like, really, the Lakers. Like that's a trivial amount of money given their overall budget. I mean, salaries are capped at 100,000 a year. So I mean, they're not paying player salaries out of that. So I'm sure I'm sure it was back off the staff and things like that. But it's still it's still an absurd. It's still an absurdity when like, you know, press for again, you know, I am happy to see the smaller businesses being able to take advantage of it. And I'm happy that it didn't run through like like it did the second time. You know, I think 2020 I would have liked a couple more weeks to have, you know, you know, you know, gotten the money and better prepared to, you know, have a smoother start. But, you know, we've been we've been open now since I believe April 27th, coming up on, you know, reopen, coming up on a month now. And I think the first week we were just doing training. So I think we're not quite a full month of actual cleaning. But yeah, it's worked out. It's worked out the way that I think it's supposed to work. I think we're it helped us get back on our feet. It's helped us grow our cash position. But I don't I don't look at that as, oh, that helped us out. I mean, I spent $60,000 to wind down my business, basically, and my size with, you know, payroll, you know, things that I owed people that I needed to pay. So it's helping me get back my cash position to where it was pre COVID and maybe a little bit better so that I have a cushion again. If this goes sideways again and you have some thoughts on whether or not we're going to see some, you know, maybe some fits and starts with this recovery. So, you know, I think we should be encouraging people to to build up their war chests just in case. Yeah, I mean, you know, part of our jobs as, you know, running our businesses, being CEOs is strategy and anticipating, you know, what are the risks that typical SWAT analysis thinking. And, you know, we know that there's a ton of money floating around out there that, you know, the federal government pushed out a lot of it's going to dry out towards the end of July, as it stands now with all the employment benefits. There's some economists out there that are thinking that we're going to fall off of the economy is going to fall off a lot in August, just because there's not going to be as much spending because all of the unemployment benefits are going away. And once you get into September, you got local and state governments are going through a budgeting cycle and, you know, their finances, their coffers have been torn apart with all of this as well. And the thinking is there's going to be a lot of layoffs there. Like the airline industry and some of the larger industries had pretty, pretty significant bailouts of their own that were people on staff for a period of time. I mean, you probably still have friends that are pilots. Yeah, I can't remember the dates, but I'm thinking it's till October. And then October. I believe sometimes in September, maybe it's October, but their airlines are very open and saying soon as they hit that day where they can legally let people go, they're going to have to let a whole bunch of people go. So so one thing, yeah, so agreed. So that's so that's a sector that's going to be that's going to be hurting for a while. And so what I would suggest is, is that you're not going to see actually prices go lower. Like at first they were freaking out. They're just selling stuff to, you know, get butts in the seat. What's what's going to happen is they're going to right size the the demand. And, you know, it's going to be probably twice as expensive as it was before to do air travel because there's going to be less seats, you know, less seats available, but there are going to be some some some significant reshuffling. What one of the bigger problems is because the workforce has they there were some rules that allowed the workforce to change age from retirement, mandatory retirement at 60 to 65 for pilots. There's going to be some right sizing right now because that that rule is kind of like kind of hitting the point where a lot of those guys that were 60 that were grandfathered in that rule are turning 65 now. There's they're going to be able to do some of that with retirement. But it's going to be it's going to be rough. Now, you're going to be seeing that across all all all industries. Every industry is going to take this as an opportunity. I mean, this is I mean, you see that any recession businesses say, OK, we have to downsize right size, whatever. I mean, it's just going to be layered over top of what's happening to hospitality and restaurants and travel. Yeah, we're there's, you know, I don't I haven't read many people. Most people believe that we're still going to be in double digit unemployment going into twenty twenty one. So those are good opportunities, though, for a business like ours. I started my my business in a recession. And what I what I tell people is it's a great opportunity to build up an incredible team. So here's the thing. I can't really see it. Let me see if I can turn my board here. You can see this board with pictures. It's looking pretty empty. And we still have about three more people to put up. But that board's usually full. Right now there's twenty three people on it. We've got three people we don't have pictures up for right now. And then another three coming back. So we have twenty five to twenty six technicians right now with some more coming back. And normally we'd have closer to forty. So we're we're looking to and I've got a stack of some more people over here that are going on FFCRA. So I've got, you know, more faces like turned into the picture so I can get them in there. I've got another stack of people that need to go on FFCRA because they don't have child care. So we have, you know, an opportunity to kind of rebuild our staffing, though, the way we want it. We're actually to the point now where we are a pretty good supply and demand level with the staff that we have and actually have more demand than staff. So we're actually hiring. So I have I have five people scheduled to start next week. And if three of them show up, that'd be great. If two of them show up, I don't know who's going to really show up. We've we've interviewed them, you know, via via Google meetup or meets. You know, we've done we're requiring them to do all their paperwork and all their onboarding before they show up. But then my HR person was out last week and I did a lot of interviews. There were a lot of good, a lot of good candidates. I mean, I talked to some people that I wanted to get off the meeting with pretty quick, but I talked to a lot of good candidates. She hired two more people today. She's back in the office today. She did she did a lot of interviews and two of them turned out really well. And, you know, I'm hoping we can build a pretty rock solid staff out of this. I don't know about you, but we're in full on hiring mode. I plan on hiring as well. We you know, we had a meeting this morning. We're supply constrained, you know, we have we have revenue that we can't put on the board right now because we don't have the labor to do it. That's where that's where we're at. Like we're we're like hoping for cancellation. I think I have to pull up made central. But I think we have revenue of like a pull up. It doesn't matter. But it's, you know, normal day for us pre COVID was probably, you know, $9,000 a day, you know, so whatever interpolate that out to whatever your numbers are. This week, we're doing 5,000 Tuesday, 5,400, 5,500. So not not crazy busy. But next week, we've already we've already contacted most of our customers for next week. And I think we're looking at like six or $7,000 a day. We don't have the labor. We don't have the labor for it. So like, are you finding a lot of people are saying we want to start up for some reason, Jim seems to be up a mile. Yeah, I'm looking at I'm looking at Monday. We have 7259, 91 on the board, 68, 22, 73, 16, 8,000 on Thursday, though, I don't think we've sent out reminders yet for Thursday. And Friday still is 7,800 on it. But Monday being at 7,200 after we've already sent out, we've sent out reminders and called everyone. We're calling every customer right now still confirming every appointment because we don't want to be wasting any labor resources that we have driving the properties where we're surprising them. So I think that's a real number. We don't have enough labor to do that, even at guessing, I think we normally shoot for about 280 to 300 per person per day. We're not holding our staff to that standard right now because it's just it's hard with all the new processes, but times 25 people, that's more than we can do. 7,000 is kind of our cap right now with our current staff. So we need people. We've got a few comments coming in here. Sarah Mitchell was commenting earlier on when we were talking about the forgiveness window that six weeks would have been nice. I guess that was getting a little more heads up. We're going to talk in a little bit though. We all might have a bigger window than what we initially thought with the eight weeks. Karen Coy says she's got mine. Karen, is that your PPP or is that your idle monies? She also thinks that the Lakers should have enough money where they don't need any PPP. They can also ask for investors and any business that has access to the capital market should have been withheld from this money. Because you know how hard it is as a small business. Nobody wants to give us money. This is like a unicorn event. In all the years I've been doing business, I had struggled sometimes to set up a $30,000 line of credit with US Bank. When I switched to my new bank, they were happy to do it. But the amount of paperwork that it took to get $30,000, it was like a book. When this all started, I was in digging for every dollar mode of where I could find money. I had to dig through every piece of paperwork that they wanted, and it was quite intensive. And then it's funny for them just to drop $150,000 in my bank account based on this streamlined one-page application with no documentation. That's crazy. And I know some people were getting $500,000 that got the money earlier than me. Yeah. And there's some thought that, depending on if more monies are allocated, that we can go back and ask for more. I don't necessarily need it unless I see the opportunity to purchase a building, if that could be used for that. In some of the legislation that's out there now is laxing even the PPP funds in terms of being able to invest it in different ways to make the business stronger. Looks like they're throwing a lot of the rules out the window. We'll get to that in a minute. Dan, it's with us. She's a regular. Hey, how are you doing? Karen says that, yes, it was PPP funds that she got. That's great. And you might be able to do a lot more with that and different things than what we thought with some of the changes that are being proposed. Robin Murphy is with us. Hey, Robin, how are you? And she says that she's got four regular customers coming back tomorrow that hasn't been having been clean since March. We're dealing with that too, Robin. I think you're gonna, you gotta roll with it. Like, we do however you think is best, but we're trying to be accommodating and trying to let them know that we're not gonna be able to get it all caught up on that first visit. And Robin's business is just north of New York City. Really a suburb of New York. And wow, that's awesome because I imagine, you know, it's kind of the epicenter of the whole COVID thing here for the last X number of weeks. So that's a really good sign. Yeah, I'm excited for everyone that's getting back on their feet. I know I have a friend that has a business in Philadelphia, they've been shut down for a while and they're kind of getting geared back up. And another friend in Jersey City and she is starting the process of getting her business back up. But again, we have to remember this is so different for different parts of the country. And so they were hit so hard that the mentality of the consumer is probably very different too than what we're, you know, St. Louis is, you know, a major, what I don't know if you call it major Metro, large Metro. We've had a lot of cases in the city and county but a lot of ours have been in nursing homes and kind of especially in kind of lower income nursing homes and things like that. Unfortunately, I think about 70% of our cases have been in elderly populations. We did not do a good job protecting those populations in St. Louis for whatever reason they were hit pretty hard. I mean, it looks like a lot of the deaths living communities. Yeah, I think it was particularly high. I think it was particularly high here. I think nationwide it's close to 50%. And it was a little bit higher, a little bit higher here for whatever reason. It doesn't look like we have a really good plan to address that yet either. No, I don't know that. And I know, you know, initially my sales plan was to go back after those places when this was kind of like, like when this was all hitting and like, and I was like, I'm gonna really market to these assisted living facilities and to these residential communities for older adults. And now I'm like, man, I don't know if I want that liability. That's another thing that hasn't really been very well addressed yet. I've had some conversations with my insurance broker and there's some gray area that I think probably we need to address. There's some interesting things happening. Venture capital has made their way into plaintiff's attorney law firms. So there's a whole, you know, group of attorneys out there, law firms that have more money they know what to do with just to go after this type of litigation. So, yeah, I was talking to my agent about that a few weeks ago and he says they're expecting just a ton of it and people getting sued for things that you'd never imagine you can get sued for just because the money's there to do. Yeah, I mean, it's a virus, it's an act of God. It's beyond any control of, you know, if you're making good practices, you think you're making solid business decisions based on what consumers want and their decisions, but that is a concern. I'm hopeful there is some legislation that protects businesses. It's certainly being discussed. It's certainly being discussed. It needs to probably be addressed. And I think, you know, if there was something, if there's any ARCSI board members on the call, that might be something where, I know they're working on some legislation on trying to get some tax credits for businesses to restart and that would benefit us all as cleaning companies to kind of get in and help, you know, clean some of these small businesses and do some more additional cleaning for them during the restart. But I think that might be something to focus on legislatively would be, you know, protecting our members. I mean, I'm not a member of ARCSI, I don't speak for it. So, you know, but I think that would be something that would be, I would push for if I had any say. Here's Heather Day styling, he says, she's 30 minutes from Philly. What a process to regroup and find a new normal. Yeah, maybe the new abnormal. Right, even 30 minutes, right? The suburbs should be like, you know, probably vastly different than, you know, there's, so where I, where St. Louis, where I'm at, there's quite a few counties that kind of make up the region. There's St. Louis City County, there's St. Louis County, there's St. Charles County, where one of our long-term friends, Marvelous Maids, Kathy Gage, who sold it to Blue Skies a few years back, but that's one county over about 15 miles from my office, vastly different statistics out there, vastly different the way things have progressed out there. And almost all of their cases have been in nursing homes, not a whole lot of, you know, public spread and things like that, just, you know, in general. So it's just everywhere's a little different. I mean, we all have to kind of take this, you know, we have to take it seriously wherever we're at and we have to take a lot of precautions, but man, I think those big cities though, like Philly, New York, it's just the mentality of people coming back. I think it's gonna be a different, it's just you're gonna have to really sell them on all your processes and the way you're doing things very professionally coming back. Well, I've been, Steven's has got a question for us. He wants to know if we could discuss full-time equivalent reductions with employees and not coming back to work and loan forgiveness in the PPP program. Yeah. Is this a topic for today? I mean, I can cover a lot, I actually have a pretty good just summary of this. There's two ways to calculate your FTEs. I think the easier way is to calculate anyone that makes less than 40 hours as a 0.5. Did you look at that? I thought that was a great, that was actually like really very simplified because very few of my employees would actually count as FTEs as 40. Probably out of 40 that were on this board before, probably, gosh, I don't know, like 15 of them would actually be technically FTEs. Everyone else would be a 0.5. So my total for the calculation is much easier when I just use that 0.5 calculation. For employees that don't come back, that refuse work or that go on, I showed you that stack of people that are gonna go on FFCRA, they will count towards your FTEs for forgiveness. So like whatever you had before and after, they'll count for that. And you don't get hit against those for your reduction in wages because they made a choice not to be reduced. And the reduction in wages is based on individual employees. Every single individual is looked at as a... Most of your cleaning technicians, I guess, are being counted as 0.5. Yeah, but that was like before COVID and after COVID. So I mean, it kind of balances out. Yeah, I think that, so that was kind of like, that was kind of nice to see that the formula, instead of having to do that, like you can still do it the more complicated way where you go and look at like, all right, if they're 32 hours, they're 0.8. If they're 30 hours, they're whatever. For me, it was just like, oh, this 0.5 is great. Like this is super simple. It's a little easier than I thought it was gonna be. They really made it clear that you're not gonna be hurt for those. I mean, I've got three or four now. I just sent a message to one that I'm like, I need you to come back by next week or we're gonna stop paying you through. It's really working to your favor, right? Because if before all this, somebody was averaging say 30 hours a week. And after this, if they're averaging 20, they both count as 0.5. And that's an interesting point too, exactly. And so we are, but you could argue though you don't wanna reduce them more than 25% because that would actually be counted against you in the actual physical calculation. I've reduced everyone by 20% for the first few weeks of this. We go back to full-time work next week. We've been on this Workshare program and arguably it was working out well until the demand just started to shoot up this last week. And then next week, it's above what we can actually service. Robin's asking is full-time 30 or 40 and Marlowe's already answered it's 40. So basically you're either full-time, either at 100 or 50, there's no real. I don't think there's any real benefit to doing the calculated way where you do it like intense because so few of our employees actually hit 40 hours every single week on the dial. Anybody that averages less than 40 hours is a 0.5 and you can count them that way. That's a great calculation. I would think in most cases, this new formula, simplified formula works to our favor. I agree and I think that that's, I need to sit down and go through the final rules that came out this week. My bank has been really good about having, you know, a weekly speaker from a local accounting firm. So I would see if your bank has any resources on that as far as if they're doing any, not a podcast, but something like this, a live seminar of some kind. They're not the final rules. They're being, I forget the terminology they use. It's the most current interim rules, the final interim rules. They're saying it the way it's like, this is the rules as they are now, but don't blame us if they change again next week. Every time my bank puts something out, it always has a, this is the most current information as of May 27th. They put the date on every single, they're putting the date on every single thing that they're doing, because like this could literally be outdated in a week. Let me, let me share something here because this has a bearing on all of this. We touched upon this yesterday, but I found a little more information on it. This was, you know, Steny Horry or the house majority leader who is saying that tomorrow they're going to be putting a bill in front of the house to vote on which we'll do several things. It will extend the eight week, I'm going to put drop this in the link too. It's going to extend the eight week forgiveness window to 24 weeks or December 31st, whichever comes first. It will let businesses repay loans over five years instead of two. So this is a five year loan now or would be if this becomes law at 1% interest. It scraps the rule that no more than 25% of the proceeds can be spent on expenses. The Senate has a similar measure that it's looking to vote on which will extend the deadline to apply for the loan from June 30. And it will double the current eight week period. So I guess the Senate's version would go from eight to 16 weeks. And there are some other stuff here about being more liberal in the Senate bill in terms of how we can spend the monies as well. It'd be nice if they'd drop more money out there for us to reapply for to keep our people paid through that, that would be on top of everything. One thing I do want to address and I think people need to realize is it really is going to be hard to get full forgiveness on this loan. And you're going to have some, if you're paying people not to work like I was for a couple of weeks while we were training them and we've got some people that are on my payroll that aren't working out, which is I'm ending next week as we bring everyone back to full time. You're still paying the payroll taxes and things like that. I think we've all known that from the beginning, but I'm spending that down from my PPP funds and out of my $25,000 a weekly payroll right now, 5,000 won't be forgiven because it's going to be taxes. Some of that's state too, so it won't be quite the 5,000, but I'm still on it based on what we know now. Yeah, true. But I'm still on the hook for a few thousand dollars for the payroll every week. So you don't want to go crazy and just be paying people to do nothing because you're still gonna have some expenses of that. You've got your federal tax portion that's always been your responsibility, your FICA, any other taxes that are your responsibility and the money that's been deducted from their check already, you're paying that with their money and it's being deducted from those funds. So it was never your money to begin with, right? So about 15% of your payroll is gonna be money you're gonna have to pay back anyway, as far as I'm concerned. And that's not such a big deal, but if you are doing anything irrational because your business is in an area where you can open right away yet, you might want to think about that too. Yeah, but it doesn't, so much of this doesn't really affect the decisions you're gonna be making running your business. You're not gonna hire somebody or clean a house because your workers' comp insurance isn't gonna be forgiven under PPP. We're fretting over, well, gee, I'm getting a lot, but I want more. I know. I'm just thinking our strategy. But if you're not generating revenue. Energy focus is better spent managing our business in a logical way rather than spending a whole lot of time. That's why I don't spend a lot of time doing all these calculations in terms of how much is gonna be forgiven. I mean, I want to clean homes. I want to hire people. I want to hire people that we want to have an organization on to bring our people back. That workforce, if that works. And the PPP is gonna take care of itself. I agree. And- Our friend, too, Walsh puts it really well. He makes rational business decisions and he feels like some of this has led to some irrational choices in the way that people are choosing to spend money and do things. I do think as we get towards the end of the money, like you definitely need to right size your business for where you are at. I mean, I do know that I have some tougher calls with some management spending. I don't know that I have enough revenue to cover my current management structure. If we don't get back to 80%, which we're gonna be close, but I don't want to be spending through the work chest that I built up unless that I can see that we're trending. Unless that I can see that we're trending that way that we might get to 90% in the short term. But I'm also concerned that we are gonna have some ups and downs and that people are gonna freak out again and not want service for a few weeks and that this is gonna be fits and starts. But it's gonna be in so many different directions. I haven't used the term unprecedented event yet. So I'm contractually obligated to fit that in. So we can go ahead and check that off the list. But it is, this is an unprecedented event and the economy is gonna look weird in the months ahead. Can't predict how, but it's not gonna be the normal as we know it. The unemployment rate is gonna be high. There's gonna be challenges, but at the same time, there's gonna be surprises. Like what we did this article that we're looking at here, they're talking about taking a two-year loan, turning it into a five-year loan and allowing us to use it for things that we didn't think that we could use it on when we first got it. And they're not done yet, folks. I mean, five years is a big difference on the amortization schedule of a two-year loan too. I mean, just that drops this down. Whatever you have left, if you have $50,000 left, you might actually rationally keep that money on a five-year loan. That's like $600 a month, $700 a month at 1% interest. I mean, that might be, that might make a rational decision to keep that money because it might be you could purchase a couple of vehicles or something rational. Like you could actually do some equipment purchases with lower interest than you would pay or than you would pay on the free. And we don't know what they eventually, it seems like that they're getting more and more lax and more and more giving us more and more options before it's over with. They might say that we can refinance existing debt with this money. I'm making that up, I don't know, but it certainly is something within the realm of consideration. If you could argue that that's gonna make us more solvent and create a better chance for us to be in business. Did you cover earlier this week, I know the CDC had initially put out some changes on its website that kind of got the news media to kind of pick up on the idea that the meaning and sanitation weren't gonna be as important and that they had to kind of... Yeah, we shared that yesterday and put that link actually on the resource page. We can look at that again at the end, the one that we gave you earlier today. Yeah, we went through all of that. But to finish the previous talk, because I think this is really, really important, if this whole COVID-19 thing's a baseball game, we're like in the second inning. And every piece of news that comes out, we act like, well, that's the definitive answer to all of this and we know what the world is gonna be like from this point forward. And we don't have a clue. There's challenges ahead and there's opportunities ahead. There's gonna be fewer cleaning businesses in the industry. I mean, I get contacted by people on a daily basis that are looking to get out and do something else for various reasons, a lot of them logical. And for a lot of other businesses that are in this, for the long haul, those are opportunities, right? And we don't know from an infection control standpoint, like you were mentioning the CDC and maybe that's where the tie-in is where they came out with the guidance yesterday or the day before yesterday saying, hey, hey, hey, don't stop washing your hands and cleaning your high-tech surfaces. That's still really important too. How the world looks at cleaning is gonna be real. And I know that you bought some equipment to allow you to play that game in a different way. Yeah, so we have a couple of things. So we do have some victory sprayers that have been coming in and trying to figure out how to monetize this thing. This thing is really big. You know, this is one option that we have. These actually do a pretty good job. It's got an adjustable nozzle electrostatic so that it supposedly wraps around surfaces. I have thought that the sprang is a little hokey, so I'm a little, I'm not gonna be going into residential with this so much, but we have a lot of commercial properties, apartment commons, things like that, where I think this is a credibility piece. I'm gonna do some photo shoots with it. Up till now, we've been just using some of these paint sprayers. These are really low cost options to kind of get into spraying and these put out small enough particles to spray with. I think they're like 15 to 20 microns. Again, this is not cordless. This has to be plugged in, but we've been using these in some commercial spaces to do some really high volume disinfection of a lot of services. Like we have an apartment complex that has this like railing all the way down the hallway. And it would be a little onerous to spray and wipe it. With this, we've just been laying down the spray and then it really hasn't been leaving any residue. We've been using a kind of a tablet style, they're a non-chlorine bleach tablet called either BrewTab or GreenClean. It's the same chemical either way. Actually, all of those tabs are typically the same chemical. There's like PureTabs, GreenClean. They're actually all of their SDSs are exactly the same. They are the same product. They're just in different volumes and size tablets and things like that. But we've been doing this. It can leave some spottings. So you have to be careful about what you're gonna use it on. But so- Robin Murphy saw commenting here that they're using the victory sprayers in homes and their clients love it. I talked to Robin a lot off to the side. We share some common interests in terms of site created, re-engineered water. She does a lot of hyperchloric acid and actually brews a lot of her cleaning products. I would love to do a whole day of just talking about that. You should have her on. I'd like to learn more about, I'd like to get an on-site generator for my business. I can see that becoming more and more pervasive. Especially now that we're aware that hygienic cleaning matters. You're the math. I mean, your size business, my size business, an on-site generator can go from 5,000 to 15,000 or more, maybe 30,000 to buy something high-volume. That doesn't sound like it makes a lot of sense unless you're doing a lot of volume. But let's say in the middle, 15,000, that's one year of cleaning solutions for my company. Because we're in a centralized location. You have multiple locations, so that doesn't necessarily work as easily, but we have one central location doing, back in the good old days a few months ago, doing 60 houses a day. So that would be a really cost-taver. I'd love to hear that. Robin says, do it. You know, I'll pick my words carefully here, but a lot of the major manufacturers of cleaning products make their money off of stuff that goes in a trash can or goes down a drain. And anything that is generated on site that's sustainable that way, the traditional cleaning chemicals have a lobby. They have a lot of financial backing and a lot of big companies promoting it. You don't have a lot of advocacy on the side of taking water out of the tap and salt and applying some electricity to it and making a sanitizer that is efficacious. So we're not doing it. The reason that you don't see a lot of it isn't because it's rational, isn't because the science isn't there. There's a mountain of scientific evidence that it's efficacious. There's no body advocating for it because companies don't make much money. I'm probably right. You're right. So basically once they sell you the machine, I mean, basically you're just buying high-end salt basically for some of these OSGs on-site generators. So I think it's a great way to go. I think most of us that are building businesses that have gotten to a certain size and I don't know what that number is. It depends on the size of what the equipment costs for this is. But again, I look at my cross. If I were to put in a high-end, high-volume machine, one-year payoff on it, I think would really make a lot of sense. I mean, my on-site laundry made a lot of sense just from the fact of just, we were using residential machines before and then when those were break, we were driving over to laundry mats, I think your came to more expensive equipment sometimes pays off. It doesn't always go to be cheap, right? Mark, you're one of the best I've seen from a branding standpoint and telling a story standpoint. And not only is it just the cost of trading off between a piece of equipment versus the chemicals, but it's the most sustainable way you can go. You've got the smallest carbon footprint, there's no shipping, there's no boxes, there's no waste, it is green, you know? I definitely like to, I think that could be a good story. Right now there's so much waste in our business, like with these gloves and like shoe covers. That's unfortunate. There's not really what I see as like a really, yeah, but I think you're right. I think there's a story. It's efficacious, it's true hygienic cleaning. I mean, you're actually sanitizing surfaces. You can make a disinfectant if you apply the right amount. You can get a spectrum of product that you could make if you want to go down that path, and it's safe. You know, from an environment, it's not like taking EPA-controlled pesticides basically and exposing consumers to it, exposing your workforce to it eight hours a day. It's, okay, I'm sorry, I'm going too far. I think it's great, we're talking about investments into our future today, kind of like, you know, kind of future thinking a little bit. I think that that's an area where you might think about where you have some more money and resources than you've had in the past. You know, I've always thought it was a good rule of thumb to have three weeks of payroll in the bank, and after this, I'm like, man, that doesn't even feel like it, because I never thought my business would ever shut down completely. I'm like, three weeks of payroll, that's so much money. It's crazy to keep that much money sitting around. And anyway, you know, because anything more than that, I would want to spend and invest and do some other things with. Right now, most of us have probably more than three weeks payroll sitting in the bank. We have the PPP funds, we have money that's been building back up, building our word chests up. I would definitely suggest keeping, you know, a strong rule of thumb of some kind that you're going to stick to is what you need to keep this cash on hand. But I think it's a good time to make some investments like this that could pay down, you know, your operating costs over time. Yeah, I think that would be an excellent idea. Any other ideas like that, if anyone else is sharing? Sarah Mitchell had a point where this is back to the PPP a little bit. She's talking about she's going to be running low on her PPP funds here, and she's not sure what she's going to do. She's not back to like the right size business for her whole management team, which is kind of the same situation I'm in. So yeah, Sarah, we're going to have to make some tough calls. What I'm doing and just for your own benefit is, I'm keeping all of my managers into through July part-time on what's called Workshare in Missouri. So they're actually all my managers, including myself and my wife actually too, because we're in the same category in our business. There's six of us total are going to be on Workshare. So we're all getting paid, less than we got paid before 32 hours per week equivalent. But then we get Missouri unemployment plus the federal funds till they run out. And then after that, we're going to have to make some tough calls as to, so I'm kind of extending that out in my office a little bit with by putting everyone on part-time for the immediate future. And I'm not advocating the idea, but if you have idle monies, you can use that for payroll as well. What it's for. I mean, if you need to, and there's a good reason to think that that's a good investment to keep your business, you know, keep- You don't think about it as an investment though. If it's a matter of, if I spend these monies now to keep this key person because I've got good reason to believe my revenue is going to be at a point at, you know, on this date on the calendar where I can cash flow and pay that person out of my, you know, income as opposed to borrowing money to do it, then yeah, I miss exactly what it's for. But you don't want to burn that money week after week after week. If there's no- If it's one person and it's $600, $800 per week, right? The average entry level manager in industries between $15 to $20 an hour, if they're a higher level manager, maybe $25 an hour, that's probably someone you were going to keep anyway. It's probably one of your lower entry level managers that you're thinking about letting go. You're right. I mean, it's $600 a week. You could probably burn through 12 weeks figuring that out, only burn through 20 grand only, right? But- But- Do you remember when that seemed like a lot of money? Right. But it's amortized again out over a long period of time if you have gotten the EIDL funds, the EIDL funds is, you know, theachronism is quite easier to say. The math could make sense on that. And I could be persuaded. You could also make the call but it might be an opportunity that if you do need to right size your business and you think there might be some better people out there for management, you could play roulette and, you know, take a chance and see who else is out there and let somebody that was mediocre go. I'm not saying that's the case for you, Sarah, that might not, it sounds like you've built a great team from some side conversations that I've had with you. So, you probably don't want to do that. But- I think part of this as you make in process would be, you know, just doing the calculus if you let that person go, how does that impact your business? Does your revenue start sliding back at that point? Can you hold your same level of revenue by letting that person go? Can you still grow your business without that person? I mean, you know, I know a number of people on some of these calls, you know, buy into the profit first approach. And I think for a lot of businesses, it's a worthwhile and logical way to approach it. And, you know, the whole thinking is, you know, don't spend money, you don't have, but this is an unprecedented event. It's like a natural disaster under certain circumstances it makes sense to borrow money to save somebody if that's a short-term deal to get you the long-term profits. If you're just bridging again, if you're bridging a gap and you can see the, you can see the light through the tunnel, I could maybe make the, maybe make the call to do that. I think, so for me again, the way that I've rationalized it is I'm putting all my managers on part-time. So everyone's going to share equally in the burden a little bit, but for a little while, they're actually going to be making a little extra money with the federal unemployment for a little bit longer. So you could look and see if you have work share available for your management, and you could partially lay off all of your managers by 20 to 40% once your EIDL money runs out. And I think that with the additional federal funds till the end of July that you would be, you'd be able to have a little bit more time. What I found last week was is that my HR person was out and I was working pretty hard. I would have a hard time replacing what she's doing. So we were doing, you know, we're on average doing about five interviews a day via Google Meet and it's hard. I mean, she has a hard job. That's, you know, five interviews a day doesn't sound like a lot, but there's other HR stuff that she's doing on top of that. Five people giving them 45 minutes and then taking notes on each one of them and then processing them through, you know, a matrix of decision of whether you're gonna hire them. It's about an hour a person, basically, by the time you do it, like that's a big chunk of her day. I didn't like it. I don't personally wanna go back to doing that again. And I remember when I was doing three or four a day back when we were smaller and that was kind of one of my roles. And I thought I was pretty good at it. And I was like, when I did it last week, I was like, oh man. Probably weren't taking an hour a person, though. No, and she may not be either. I may be exaggerating that, but, you know, maybe it's 30 minutes a person, but there's some processing time that goes into that. It's probably some people you take maybe five minutes with. Yes. I was a couple that I was like, I can't get off fast enough. But I give everyone like the same sheet of questions. I give everyone the same benefit of the doubt, even if just because I don't wanna be like making any first, you know, rash impression that's not true. So it's, yeah, there are people you're like, can we get this over with very quickly? Yeah, that's, you know. Oh, one other thing we found, though, with kind of doing all this, we're not seeing anyone until the first day after we're doing these Google needs and we're hiding these people. We're assigning them all of their paperwork and all their training to basically assess whether they're gonna show up and do their job. It's actually been wonderful because we can actually already identify the people that aren't gonna show up on the first day because they haven't done the work they're supposed to do, you know? And we've offered to pay them four hours of pay for that work if they show up and do the work on the first day, but we're actually identifying so many people that are just, they're not gonna work because they're not actually doing the pre-work to get started. So that's been kind of a cool thing. That's something we'll stick with probably past this. So Google meets, is that a good platform? Is that working for you? It's okay. It's because we have G Suite for our email and so it's included in our pricing, $5 per user per month, everybody has it. I will say that a lot of big corporations were using it before Zoom, but Zoom really is much more stable, better visual, better, Google just seems like, it's like another half-baked Google product, which, you know, kind of par for the course for Google. It's good enough. I haven't looked at Zoom in a while for this application, but I remember being somewhat problematic because the candidate, the job candidate needed to have some client-side app on their phone in order to make it work. Yeah, you still need an app for Google Meet. You don't need one for, if they're on their computer, but they do need to download the Google Meet app for, but same thing for pretty much all of them, they're all being- Yeah, but that's going to be a problem for a lot of people, just the technology and just- I don't know, I mean, we use, me and you use so much technology in our businesses, it's kind of weeding out people that probably, like that probably wouldn't be candidates anyway, because if they can't run a smartphone, I mean, you know, they can't log in, you know, me and you use the same technology. We're gonna be able to get their jobs in the morning, are they? I mean, I have a couple of people that are just like technologically just disadvantaged people, and they have to work in teams, they wouldn't be able to get a job with us now under the circumstances, like they wouldn't even be able to do it. You know, so I don't, you know, yeah, I think it's gonna change what our workforce looks like and who can apply, it's gonna make it harder for some people to get jobs, but those people are gonna have to adapt the skill sets that you're gonna need, even in a job like, you know, what we would consider entry-level workforce, right? Like, you know, fast food, service work, you know, hotel hospitality, your technology skills are gonna have to increase. The workforce is gonna be, you know, more tech savvy in the next, I don't know, it's started quick. I think I would have said five years, but now I'm gonna say five weeks. You better pick up your game. It's gonna be a different, it's gonna be a different world and the technology's pushed, basically, everybody in the organization needs to be able to function on a mobile device and be able to do basic activities. Yeah. The paper's gone away. Yeah, I think we're talking about that a lot within, you know, within when we're talking about made central development, do we need, you know, an app? Like, you know, like a client-side app for the device, would it be, you know, more stable versus web-based and would it make it easier for people to use and things like that? We're having those conversations about making the technology easier for people. But, I mean, web-based, you know, web-based tools, things like that, I think most people are pretty confident, comfortable with. It's just, there is probably 10 or 20% of the population that's gonna be, you know, a little bit more challenged by that. My wife has more soft skills. Like she's like a human resources person, like in person, but like, you know, like her computer skills, you know, like, you know, she passes that on to one of our managers, but she's great one-on-one with people, but, you know, those skills are, you know, she's, I've just been impressed with her, like watching her, like learning all this technology, because she never wanted to learn it before, but now with teaching the kids like schoolwork stuff, man, she's like doing Google Meets with the kids' teachers and stuff that I wouldn't have counted on her to do. So I would have, I would say if she can pick it up, she doesn't even like to get on Facebook. If she doesn't even want to like log in onto her phone, she wants a flip phone. She didn't even want an iPhone. So if she, if my wife can pick that stuff up, she's like totally hates technology, thinks it's, you know, very anti-personal and just doesn't like it, then everyone's gonna probably be able to figure it out. Cause, you know, four weeks ago, I would have said she wouldn't be able to figure out all this stuff that she had to do for school, but she's very capable. She just, she just liked putting that off on all the managers, you know, like, hey, do this for me, do this for me, print this, do this. And now she's figuring all that stuff on her own. So I think everyone's gonna figure it out. I know we're pushing up against five. Do you have anything else you wanna cover? We've got about five minutes. On this show, everybody, we're cleaning business today as you haven't subscribed over here on the right, really easy. Just your email address, your first name, last name, hit the subscribe button, and you'll get updates on, you know, all our new articles then you'll be getting our newsletter and our super secret for smart business moves. Participants link is corona virus dash downloads and post that here in the chat. And some of the more recent posts that we have here. This was a really cool article that we went over yesterday. This was out of a Salt Lake City newspaper, but went through a lot of different situations that we either run into or might be contemplating how do we deal with buses and bars and airplanes and choirs and church and so forth and explains the risks that has data behind it. It's really cool article. And this was what Matt was referencing earlier. We talked about this a bit yesterday, but it's really important to us. The CDC came back out, and I guess they did this a couple of days ago to refine, you know, their position where, yeah, SARS-CoV-2 virus spreads a lot. You know, the biggest risks of spread is through airborne droplets where you're in close contact with somebody who has the virus for a long period of time. But that certainly isn't the only way. And high touch surfaces and hand washing and all of that still are very important and necessary part of staying safe and keeping us safe. So I think that they made some statements and the press picked up on it that kind of implied that a lot of the work that we do in terms of hygienic cleaning might not be as important as it really is. So the CDC wanted to set that right, Matt. I think that was an important clarification that everyone should get, because I wanna make sure, I was actually gonna push this out to our customers because I think there's probably something that got the news blip over the weekend. And then, oh, well, they don't, they don't actually, the news doesn't ever come back and clarify when they tell some big story like that. They don't ever come back and clarify. Like, oh, wait, you know, that changed. So yeah, I think this is a good thing to make sure you have in your education arsenal. I posted this link on my Google My Business page, but I'm gonna put it on my blog as well. And that's a whole another topic, but do post on your Google My Business page to keep it relevant. So the other thing going on is a PhD class. We've been working digitally. We've got several classes going in parallel now in terms of development. You're gonna see a lot of that coming out here over the next few days. Science will probably be wrapping that up tomorrow. The whole chemistry and physics of cleaning. It's an awesome class out of an awesome program. Matt, I know that you just finished shooting classes last week, right? Yeah, I did sort of the what to do procedure's methods productivity. I mean, I'm really excited to put like all my new hires and really put my staff through this course as well. I mean, I'm happy to eat my own cooking on this. I think this is gonna make my staff just next level as we kind of grow into the future. I think we've always had kind of low expectations of what our staff can know and understand and what they should know and understand. I think we have to raise the bar we have to invest in education. And I think this is a very, I think it's a very important class, very low cost and very, very good entry point for them. For cleaning technicians, for cleaning professionals, people who are cleaning homes every day, that's what this class is designed for. Not say for your cleaning business owner, you wouldn't benefit from this, you would, but the audience is the people that are cleaning homes every day. Yeah, I think I try and you know, like, you know, when we got into productivity, try to be very agnostic. So if you do things a certain way, we might have talked about like, you know, left to right, you know, top to bottom left to right, or, you know, aprons versus caddies, but we don't prescribe anything in there, you know, different ways to do things. I think we're trying to cover what some best practices are as far as, you know, avoiding your cleaning technicians spraying directly on glass and doing some damage to, you know, homes, things that are, you know, common knowledge in what to do. But man, I was looking at the science stuff today with Tom and Liz and Janice, and I guess Joe was on the call a little bit too, or Joe was on the call for most of the call. And, dude, Janice knows more stuff about cleaning than I've ever known. And, but she's really breaking it down in a way that I think is important for staff to understand. It's gonna be, I think it's gonna save you money on surfaces and damage. And I think there's a lot of potential that it pays itself back in a lot of ways. Robin's asking if it's in Spanish. No, not at the moment. I don't speak Spanish. I'm sorry? I don't speak Spanish yet. At the moment, I'm sorry, it's not, but we can, we're looking into ways where we can actually get the PowerPoint decks converted in Spanish, or at the very least do subtitles. So we're looking for some options, but. To be honest, we started this because we saw that there was an opportunity that I think everybody needed more education and we wanted to get this done quickly. This is probably version A of a five-year project that's gonna get better and better and better and slicker and cleaner and maybe even easier to use and web-based all in the future. But this is like version A just to step your game up now. And I hope we can have all those things in the next five years. In five years from now, you'll be wearing your glasses that you can actually see the content there while you're cleaning and really augmented with artificial intelligence and virtual reality and. Yeah, someone was asking where the robot will be doing some of it and big plans. Yeah, someone was asking where the business is gonna be in 15 years where our industry is gonna be in 15 years. I'm like, man, it's hard to see in the next five months the way things have been, but things have changed so much in, I started making some preparations for this in February and people were thinking I was crazy. My, I still think like my American Express bill for February was like 30 or $36,000 because I was buying everything I needed for like a year and my stock room is full of everything we need to get through the next year because I was afraid that supply chains were gonna be cut off and that whatever. I didn't really anticipate that we weren't gonna be cleaning for a month. That I did, that I couldn't foresee, but yeah. Matt, thank you for helping us out today for joining us. It was awesome. Yeah, it was a good time. I was just wondering. Thank you everybody for being with us. We'll gonna wrap this up or against the hour, but we'll be back tomorrow at five o'clock Eastern. You guys take care. Awesome.