 Hi, this is Tom Stewart with Cleaning Business Today. Got my partner Liz Trotter, who's over on the other side of the screen, and we've got a special guest today, Matt Ricketts, who is CEO and thinking here as the title Chief Experience Officer of Better Life Mades of St. Louis, Missouri. And I guess when we talked Friday, the thinking was that we wanted to take this discussion on Monday and get into the area how you can create public relations opportunities to get more visibility for your business in terms of how you would contribute to fighting infection and making people's lives safer. But we also said that that was contingent upon what happens between Friday and Monday and a lot of things change over the weekends. And after looking at where we are today, we really felt that the most useful thing that we could do with this time is to talk about how we can get more capital in our businesses because a number of us have voluntarily discontinued operations. Some of us have discontinued or taken a temporary shutdown on our businesses because of state or local mandates and the prospect of others of us having to do that I guess is looming. And regardless of that, there's what they would say a diminution of income. We're losing some business because customers are concerned about the virus. So you roll all that up, we're gonna need some money to make it to the other side of the valley, if you will. With that being said, Matt, you wanna share a little bit with our group which you've been working on the last few days? Sure, I mean, I put into plan maybe two weeks ago thinking that we were gonna probably shut down at some point once there was community spread in St. Louis. So when I got the word that there was the first community spread of the virus in St. Louis and a doctor had been infected in one of our local hospitals, I made the decision that we were gonna shut down. So my thought processes on that is first off, you all are gonna have to make your own decisions. But for me, it was first off, do no harm. I didn't wanna be responsible for causing any hardship to any of my employees beyond just the work hardship but causing them to be sick and potentially harming my customers. So that was one of the big decisions for me. It was a very hard decision to come to that because I think that there is help that we can provide and we are keeping our commercial accounts open that we serve that have a lot of common spaces like our apartment complexes and things like that. But that is a fraction of my business. So in advance of that, I began working with my creditors weeks ago and at first they weren't that happy to hear from me. I remember I negotiated my lease on my vehicles to $150 a month, which is about half of what they originally were. And I was like, okay, that's fine. That's better than what it was. As long as I maintain some cash flow, I'm good. Back to today, they got back with me after I panicked emailed them this weekend and said that deal's not even gonna work. We're gonna have to scrap that. Like I'm not paying you for four months. The president of that company called me personally today telling me how great of a customer I am and that he's happily giving us four months without paying on our vehicles, which is more expensive than the lease on my building. So that was good. Spoke to my landlord who I haven't spoken to in years. His son took over the business that he runs and they're giving us April deferred. And honestly, that one I would pay no matter what because they've been so good to me and like I would make that payment because we're still on 10 years ago rent. You know, they haven't raised our price in 10 years. So I felt guilty even asking that, but I'm asking everybody. I went down to $50 a month leases on our copy machine and I got that stuff deferred for four months. The watch machines that do our laundry, $200 a month deferred for four months. I mean, so four months with my question, nobody balked at four months. Because I think that they're all understanding that if this is shut down for 30 days, that's minimum. Cash flow is gonna be affected much longer than that. Another big thing that I did was before this was is I changed all the rates on my workers' comps so like typically your rating is based on your payroll for work competent. It can be rated differently. I'm not sure state-by-state how they manage risk, but for me in Missouri, they typically go by your gross payroll. And so I lowered my gross payroll from $860,000 for my labor down to $500,000. So that means first of all, that they're not gonna have anything to do, any payments on that for a while without even them doing anything special for me because I've already prepaid so much. And then I also put all my vehicles in storage starting April 1st, so I can't drive them around, but I wasn't planning on it anyway unless we come up with some creative use for them like delivery or finding some other pivot we could get to, which is an option, right? We have to think of anything, but right now putting them in storage saves me. It takes them down from like, our rates are pretty high. We had some accidents from some silly stuff. So I would say that saves me, God, I wanna say like 2,000 a month and not paying auto, so just putting them in storage. And I'm getting word from my insurance agent anyway that most of the agencies are not gonna be canceling or most of the big insurance companies are not gonna be canceling for non-payment. They've already started that in the restaurant industry. There are a couple of weeks ahead of us in terms of hardship. So those are some good strategies that are like top of mind, but as far as your personal finances go to, there's no shame in anything you have to do to make your money last. And my bank account balances look pretty good right now, but if I were paying all my bills steadily, six months from now, I might not like this if this goes on, if this goes on, I'm making decisions to act as if I have to live off that money for a couple of years. I don't think it'll come to that, but I'm afraid I may not be able to pay myself a regular check like what I was paying myself before for quite some time, even if we get things back and running. So personal bills, everything is up for negotiation, right? Like mortgage, we refinanced that to a 30, but as soon as that gets done, we were around 15 and paying aggressively to pay it off. Well, put it on a 30, I've never had a 30 year mortgage before, but I'm gonna join everyone else in the low payment game and keep that as low as possible. I do wanna come out of this with decent credit, so I do plan on continuing to pay that if they're, but I think they're gonna give deferrals to everyone on their mortgages. So I don't think that that's gonna be something that's gonna necessarily herd our credit. Same thing with any other personal vehicle loans or anything else you have personal debts. Everything should be on the table. You should be thinking about contacting those lenders, letting them know the situation, where you're at, what you plan on being able to do and attacking that stuff right away. So that's the main thing, Tom. What were some other thoughts you might have to add to that? Yeah, the whole credit thing in terms of credit history and your credit ratings is interesting. And there's a school of thought out here that, for the next six months or so anyway, we're all gonna get a mulligan for this because when it's over, the banks are gonna wanna lend money to people that are credit worthy. And for the people that were caught into this, working a lifetime, a unprecedented event, probably won't be as big a black mark, if you will, as what it would be under other circumstances because you're protected by the masses. Everybody's dealing with it. Two things I thought of too, but you go ahead, it's finished. No, I was wondering what your thinking was about borrowing money and all the channels that are available out there now, even with things going south at the moment and looking a little bit scary, there's a lot of different ways that you can borrow money. Is that something you've looked into? So, I mean, I'm getting every kind of predatory lending off from the world. I would avoid some of that kind of world. I think there's gonna be some better opportunities. So, I mean, this is probably too late for a lot of you, but if you have stocks, two weeks ago, I liquidated about half of my portfolio and I wish I had just sold everything. Just keep watching it go down and down. But, so I liquidated about half of my portfolio and basically money that had been worth $100,000 two weeks before I got a check for $70,000. It was very, very painful, but that's money in the bank. And I'm not saying everyone has that opportunity. That's money that I've been saving for years and didn't really want to have to touch. I mean, that's money I was hoping that when I was old, I would be spending and not when I'm 40 basically, right? So, liquidate assets. I would consider Facebook posting stuff that you don't need. But the other thing I would do is, and have no shame in this, is if you are a W-2'd employee of your own business and you stopped paying yourself or plan to stop paying yourself, file for unemployment. I filed for unemployment for both my wife and Angela and I have to pay myself every week and go in there and do it. But I have no shame. That'll be $500 a week for each of us, right? So for some of you, if you get your bills down low enough, that could make a significant impact in what you do. And if there's any more relief on that, I believe that there's gonna be some more relief on that. We're gonna see, there is some negotiating, fierce negotiating between the tribes in Washington right now. And I think when this is all said and done, there's gonna be some relief for the average guy that's gonna help them. But I can't make any promises on that. Why for the SBA lending? Me and Tom have both done that. He's got his account or his account working on his. My life is a little simpler than Tom. I don't have like 15 LLCs, I just have a couple. And I was able to do my financial statements and everything else pretty quickly, just based on QuickBooks and my own reckoning of what stuff is worth, what my house is worth and how much equity we have and things like that. That SBA money is not gonna be free. There's gonna be some strings to that money, but at three and a quarter percent, at 30 years is what it looks like. It's cheap money and I'll take as much as they can give me. It's a lifeline to get reopened. For some of us, it's more important to others. I don't have Matt, Matt Andrews is on the call. He's a guy out in LA. I think he got a bridge, some sort of bridge loan that actually is helping him cover some really short-term costs. So there's some short-term money too if you don't need the long-term 30-year bigger chunk like I'm looking for. I believe there is some short-term relief that'll help you make payroll. And I know we're all in different situations, right? So typically I usually keep a lot of money on hand, cash on hand, but if you're in a different cycle of your business, you've been investing in it recently and all of a sudden this hit and you have less available to you, that's gonna be really important to jump on right now. Tom, did you have any thoughts on the SB lending from when you did it? Well, we're still in process. I kind of ordered it and looked at that and I just called my CPA and said here, you guys figure this out because we've got several legal entities that we do business under and it was a little bit of work. But when you did it, Matt, how long did it take to fill that out? Maybe an hour or two. I mean, I don't remember. I stayed up on Friday night when I got off work and just did that and applied for insurance and all was a blur. It was a long night. I know I finished around 11 o'clock that night but I think the unemployment honestly took longer than actually filling out the initial SBA paperwork and I'm gonna follow up with them probably in the next couple of days and find out what else they need. I didn't feel like it was that burdensome. I'm gonna check in on it, probably regularly to see where I am in the process. Liz, where do you hear it out there? Well, pretty much the same thing. The only thing I haven't heard mentioned is lines of credit. A lot of people are talking about if they have a line of credit, what are they doing with it? And most people I've heard are trying to go ahead and hold onto that money and use it while they have the opportunity. To spend your money first before your cash because they oftentimes freeze lines of credit in situations like this too. So what do you think about that Tom? Spending lines of credit first? You wanna, if you have a line of credit right now, my advice would be to max it out, take all the money out of the line of credit and put it in a checking account. Yeah. And if you really wanna be safe, put it in a checking account in a bank other than the one that you just raised right now should be really low. So a few months if you don't need it, you can put it back, but when things start getting really tough, especially if the banks get squeezed, they will pull lines of credit if they need to to make their balance sheet look good. Yep. Yep. Those lines of credit, even on your home equity lines and stuff like that guys, if you have home equity lines of credit, they can freeze those. So take the right to check to yourself now before the banks start really fearing that people are not gonna pay them back. You know, those things are only as good as the faith that the bank has in you at the moment. You know, it's... How about, how about, sorry, Tom, go ahead. No, you go ahead, let's please. I was gonna change your subject, so please. The Federal Reserve, which is a separate entity in our federal government who typically loans money to the banks, you know, any of the financial institutions, made a statement this morning at eight o'clock Eastern that they're going to start making money available directly to small and medium-sized businesses. And that is unprecedented. I didn't hear that, that's exciting. Very vague on the details. And the thinking is they probably still administer that through the banks, but as of this morning, nobody really knew, but, you know, back in 08 they talked about helicopter money where the Fed was just flying around, you know, kind of like an analogy of throwing money out of a helicopter. That's kind of where we are now, but back in 08 where that money was going to financial institutions and, you know, basically Wall Street, if you will, this is supposed to be their way of getting money to Main Street. So, you know, the thinking is the underlying economy is good. If you had a good business before this happened, you should have a good business once we make our way through this, you know, call this is the new definition of the Valley of Despair, how deep it's gonna be and how long it's gonna be till we get to the other side, we don't know, but there's gonna be a lot of money out there and, you know, I say we scoop it up and hold on till we can get to the other side. Yeah, and, you know, a lot of this happened a lot faster than I'd been working on this for a while and, you know, my wife, she's like, I've never seen you get nervous before because I, you know, I did this Iron Man last year and she's like, you weren't even nervous when you were like, you're not like, you know, like it was like 50-something degree water to go swim that day and I don't love to be cold or, you know, I didn't even like appear nervous that day. I was internally, but I was giving her signs of nervous. Guys, it's okay to be nervous. It's okay to be worried about this, but you can't freeze up. Like you gotta keep moving and keep hustling. Like the problem I see with a lot of people and stuff like this happens is that they just freeze and they stop and you can't stop. Whatever you're doing, you gotta keep researching everything you can keep finding out. As much as we're sharing ideas, I mean, what I'm doing all day is just searching through the news to find anything that is a ray of hope and like I hadn't heard that from Tom so it's good to be having these conversations. I had not heard this about the Federal Reserve releasing funds to small, medium-sized businesses. I'm gonna be reading about that. So, you know, you're gonna have to become an expert on things you never thought you were gonna be an expert on. By the time this is done, if you're gonna pull through this, it's gonna be because you worked hard through this and did a lot of things right. So, but that's my biggest advice is don't stop moving. Yeah, I, it's so- And on the flip side of it, I do wanna say don't get, so what Matt is saying is move forward. And he also said that you have to get a lot of things right, but don't worry that if you don't get it right you're screwed because that's gonna keep you from moving forward. So, you still gotta keep moving forward. If you don't know what to do, pick and pick the best option that you can research, find out about and move forward with that. I have two more things that I've heard people talk about that I look into my notes here. One is, do you guys have you heard anything about credit cards? If people have credit card debt, is there going to be any kind of forgiveness? Will they be able to do anything with their payments there? Has anybody heard anything there? I already told Tom my thoughts on this. I'm spending credit card first. Everything's going on a credit card right now. Cash is king, man. Like keep your cash. That's my thoughts. Tom, your thoughts? I haven't heard anything about credit cards. You know, it wouldn't surprise me that there's not gonna be something happening there that's going to forgive some of that debt, if you will. But I don't know. I'm not bashful about borrowing money, but having interest at, you know, whatever it is is a bit, you know, I would go for the cheaper money first. How about that? I understand that there's a lot of discussion about, you know, letting people on the personal side, giving them forbearance on their personal mortgage, where they can push those payments out, and money's money. So you got personal cars or personal house payment, or, you know, if you're renting, whatever. Everything that we've talked about here was kind of in the context of your business, but look at it on your personal side too, because if you can save money there for down the road, at the end of the day, you're just taking money out of one pocket and putting it in the other. So, you know, save it on your personal side too. Even as high as interest rates are gonna be, though. So, and even as strong as my cash position is, I moved everything out of my checking account and put it into savings, so that every dollar goes on my overdraft protection first. So I have overdraft on my checking account. So I'm spending that money first, putting everything this month on anything else, business-wise, and whatever in a credit card, to preserve capital just to see what happens. And I can circle back to those and pay them off if the SBA lending comes through. But if I wanna make my cash last longer, even at a little higher percentage right now, I mean, I'm sort of of the mindset is that a lot is gonna be wiped clean from this. And if we do get the SBA funds quicker than we'd like, then we pay those down at the cheaper interest rates. And those are all topics for the future. Right now, I'm in capital preservation mode. Just I want cash to be sitting in the bank as long as possible and spending money with credit or lines of credit as quickly as I can. So if you have a line of credit, like I said, spend that money first before you much any cash. And if you haven't talked to your bank yet, and I say your bank, the people that have the checking account that you put your deposits in and do your payroll checks and so on and so forth, you wanna do that now. And you wanna ask what programs do they have? A lot of banks are putting in programs for small businesses. And I heard of one today that if you asked for $50,000, they would give it to you on a 10-year amortization with an interest rate locked in at prime at the time of closing, which means you'd be getting a dirt cheap $50,000 loan that you could pay off over 10 years, pay off sooner than you want it to be. I need to find out about this, this is good. Yeah. Those are the kind of things that are out there. And I just think it's gonna, I see, I think we're gonna be seeing more of that. The more that the federal government gets involved, this whole thing with what the federal reserve said this morning is gonna, the more money is out there, they're gonna have to do something with it. And unlike last time, if it doesn't get to small businesses and if it doesn't get into the pockets of people are gonna be spending it, there's gonna be, it's gonna happen, it's gonna be spread around more evenly this time. So one thing we didn't talk about is auto bills and ACHs. I was just gonna, that was my second thing that I was gonna bring up. Okay, ask the question. It's not a question, one more thing I wanted to bring up is we went through our checking account and we just stopped all of those so that I have to personally pay them now. And so I'm recommending that to everybody. I talked to one person today and some of them are so hard to stop that he just canceled that account, opened a new account and he's now depositing his money in there and all of that stuff is going to, it's gonna hit his, he's setting up a system where it will auto pay from another account but it's gonna hit him first, it'll warn him so that he can pay it. So that's another strategy. That's one thing, that's really good. Also, if you aren't gonna go that extreme, you can talk to your bank about all the ACHs you have. Like I have leases from a similar company that Tom has for some of our vehicles. And so I called my bank and I said, all right, I want ACHs from this company to be blocked. And normally they would charge you a $40 fee to do that and they're waiving the fees on all that stuff right now. So I blocked ACHs from all the big ACHs that I have so I don't even know what ACH stands for. Probably automatic checking something, whatever. But it is, it's a common term used for one of your vendors to pull money out of your account on a semi-regular basis without even you approving those things. And like Liz says, I'm writing checks. Like I'm, and probably will for the rest of my life. Like this is gonna change the way that my financial systems work forever. Like I don't know that I'll ever be comfortable with an ACH ever again. I'm going to like grandpa or Warbucks mode where like every dollar's gotta hurt. Cause it's like all this, like all this comfort in like, oh yeah, there's money there. Like it's only a thousand dollars. It's only a thousand dollars. And then you start, then you start really thinking about that now with like monies that come in and it's like, damn, that's a thousand dollars. So that's all got it. That's all got to get blocked. So if you have some of those big ones, block that stuff right now. Stacy was asking what, Dana Sutton was asking my bank. I use, I have two banks. I use a US bank, which is a, you know, decent size, large bank. I know maybe Tom and I had used them cause they were on the West Coast as well. And then I use a local credit union here for some business stuff too that has been good to me. So those are, those are my banks, Dana. And yes, the answer to your question is banks can block your auto debits. Robin, yeah. And I don't know if all banks can, but then how, how to go about it. But you can definitely, it's your money. You can make it happen. I just take more money. Counts if they, yeah. I didn't know they were waiting fees though, because typically they would charge you for that. So that's really awesome that they're doing it for free now. Yeah. I don't think they have a choice cause I think they're getting so many calls and getting hit by people that are in Armageddon. Cause the guy originally was like, normally it's a $40 analysis. You know, it's like son of a gun. And he's like, we're waving that right now. And I was like, oh, good. Cause like, if I need to need more fees from you guys right now, analysis fees, right? Like that's, that's all things that I'm going to be like, I never look at that stuff. Now I'm going to be like, analysis fees, another bank's getting, getting my business. Cause that's some BS at this point, like everything matters. Every dollar is going to matter. Well, I guess my analysis fees are going to go down cause I'm not going to be writing that many checks next month. But, you know, that's the bright side. I guess that the banks aren't going to get an analysis fee for all the checks that I normally write. Yeah. Oh yeah. So then also on your, on your, a lot of your auto debits and stuff like that. I mean, if you can, you can, if you can't easily get a hold of them, this is not necessarily like best practice, but you could go in like, let's say Infusionsoft, which is a company I don't particularly like very much right the second, you could go in there and change your credit card number so that it like, you know, like looks like a good credit card or bad, you know, or put a bad, you know, expiration date or something like that in. So then when it pings, you know, you know, then, you know, it won't cancel right away and they'll be working with you to try and get a hold of you. And then it'll make them start calling you too when they're not getting their money and then you can renegotiate some of this stuff with them if you just don't have the time right now for some of this. But even, even Infusionsoft, I mean, I would call anything. You can't cancel some stuff. Some stuff is just like your phones, your business software. You can't cancel that stuff. But a lot of them are working on ways to make their software more fair and just paying maintenance fees and things like that for some period of time. So everyone's gonna hurt, you know, and I hate to say that because Tom's a software vendor too, but everybody's sharing in the pain right now. You know. At the bottom line, if you're paying money to somebody, you need to contact them and find out how can they help? Are there things? Can we push it out? Can we just pay a little bit later? There might be some options. Another thing is, this is terrible. I'm embarrassed to admit this, but one of the things I do regularly is I will set up an automatic payment that is above what I know I'm going to pay. And so I will routinely run a credit somewhere like the power bill. I paid $250 to my power bill. And right now I've got a $1,200 credit there. Yay, that's money back to me. I'll take that check, please. So I had a few of those that I'm like, send me my cash. And so if you do that too, get your cash, right? Don't just let your credit sit there. Sometimes it's really convenient, but take my money now. I did have one more thing that I just remembered. A phrase that is going around that I don't think a lot of people have understanding around and I thought you two gents might know is the phrase force majeure. So talking about when there is something like this that's happening and hitting mostly around insurance and that kind of stuff. What do you guys have to say about force majeure? I'm not sure how it applies directly to the way I do business, but certainly Tom has a lot of contracts where it probably applies to a lot of different things. I mean, he writes a lot more contracts than I do. So he could probably speak to that better than I could. Yeah, I can give you a layman's definition. Most contracts have a term in there that basically, this is a deal that we have unless the world changes as we know it and I can't do this in which case we need to sit down and have a discussion. I think generally that's what it is. It's kind of that loophole that this is our agreement, but there could be some things that would happen in this world that would require us to do something different than what's in this contract. Yeah, I think we're there. I think, I don't think, I mean, like I said, like I said, I've been watching this for a while and I thought, okay, like nobody was gonna do anything as you know, I'm actually really happy in some ways that we're actually taking it pretty seriously. Like, you know, a lot of municipalities are taking it pretty seriously because if we're all in this together and we're all like having to suffer the same thing that we might have to shut down, we might have to not operate, it's almost better. It takes the pressure off the decision to do the right thing or what you believe to be the right thing. I don't want to tell anyone what is the right thing for the business. I'm sorry to say like that. It just takes, it took the pressure off me when I knew that everyone else had to do the same thing called City Hall and found out which of my contracts I could serve, which of them they really didn't want me to be at. And they were very helpful in accommodating what they wanted and what they didn't. And your municipalities are gonna be different. You know, some places are not, but force majeure is in effect. And I'm like, this is a act of God that we could not predict of any proportion. And I think we're, like Tom said, I think the economy has strong fundamentals, but there is gonna be a little bit of suffering if we don't help each other out in the next, and help each other out being, you know, some relief in terms from our vendors from the government financial institutions that we do business with. You know, it could be a lot worse if they don't get involved. That's why you can definitely think that causes an effect. I don't know that I would have enough legal expertise to argue that with them, but I would definitely throw it out there and see what happens, you know? For the conversation, again, everything right now is, I think to have the conversation, ask the questions, what can you get? You don't know, not like, well, a lot of people are not even thinking to ask the banks what do you have going on? What opportunities are there for me in my business? I'm a small business. How can you help me? That's a great question. Ask that question to everybody. Who can help you? How? And the people that you're gonna be asking that question of are being asked that question, like every minute of the day. So they're prepared for it. And, you know, you're not even negotiating in a lot of times. They're just, you know, they're trying to give you what it is that you're looking for so that they can move on to the next one in some cases. It's a different dynamic. We're protected by the masses, you know? Normally you call up somebody you owe money to and say, hey, you know, I need you to help me out. The thought process is that, you know, you screwed up, you're a bad business operator, you're a bad risk. Okay, well, it looks like we got a troublemaker here, but that's not where it is now. I mean, they're expecting it. They're used to it. They're dealing with it, you know, through all day long and, you know, with almost without exception. You know, I don't think there's a single person we've talked to that hasn't been willing to help in some way. And that's a great point. Is that basically the banks own you up until this point. We kind of own the bank at this point, right? Because, right, they're all so hosed. If they, here's the conversation I had with one of my lease, with one of my leasehold cars with my cars, which was like, because at first they were kind of being a little bit stubborn and I was just like, I was like, I'm your best bet to pay these things back. Like, because I'm gonna be strong coming through this. I'm a smart business owner. I've been successful at this for 12 years. I've got a lot of money in the bank, but I'm not paying it to you right now, right? So when this is over and I'm running again, I'll be more willing to untie that money and start sending off checks. But until that day is that I'm operating again, you're not seeing a dime. And you know why? Cause I know that every other person that does business with you is calling you too, looking for the same thing. I'm not alone here in this. I'm not some sad sack that's like, just trying to tell you a story. This is everyone is gonna be going through this and everyone is gonna be suffering equally. You are not beat down in any way. Like, dude, take this advantage to beat them down. This is not you being weak. This is about you leveraging the strength that you have, the strength to negotiate. So don't be afraid to ask. I mean, that's, I can tell you, I know that my wife was embarrassed by some of these conversations. I was telling her to call her mortgage and do these things and she was embarrassed. I was like, cause it was two weeks, it was like two or three weeks ago. And she's like, no, like, and they were like, the banks were not even like, they weren't even clued in yet. Like I was on this like weeks ago and she was just like, what are you doing? And, you know, she was getting nervous. I was like, trust me, we're getting ahead of like a global crap storm that is coming that is gonna hit us in the face. Like we're renegotiating everything. And, you know, and now I'm already done with a lot of it. And I don't even have to wait on hold. I tried to call one place today and I held for like an hour before I got through to him. And so I already did all that without the hold times for most of this stuff. So the downside is now you're gonna be on hold for hours cause everyone else is lining up too. But they'll get, they'll get to you eventually. Maybe they'll even do it by email. But the upside is the rules keep getting more generous every day. So, you know- I didn't even do that anymore. I've renegotiated it twice. Yeah, you might, yeah. You might be on the phone, you know, being on hold an hour tomorrow, getting a sweeter deal than you have already. True. That's all true. Do we have any questions, Liz? I don't see any over there. I think everybody's just taking it in and glad for some direction. And I think a lot of people are more hopeful just having the conversation that, okay, so I'm not just gonna get hosed. There's a chance here that I'm gonna make it out of this okay. Yeah. My biggest advice is, whatever you have to do cash wise, pay your people their last checks, their PTO, all the money you owe them, do not stiff your people. Whatever you do, that's the thing like, cause that'll shut you down. That'll kill you. So, you know, hopefully you have the cash on hand to do that. Tom, would you agree? Like, that would be- Absolutely, because on the other side of this, you know, it's gonna, you know, I see this looking a little bit like cat herding cause you're gonna get your clients. You kind of need to get back in the fold and you're gonna get your cleaning technicians, you know, back and it's not gonna be like, just turning on a light switch. Just kind of, you know, be a process. And, you know, you want to stay in touch with your people too. You know, have part of your communication plan. You need to, you know, make sure that you have regular communications, just kind of checking up on people. So, when things start coming back around, they're gonna be there. Yeah. Those are the people like, those people you can't negotiate with. They gotta get paid. They gotta get every dollar you owe them. And you can help them in any way through this and whether it's just support or words, but that last check has to be the T. Not a penny can be missing. You know, they need it more than you will ever need it probably. So that's the only thing I can tell you is, you know, if money's tight for you, just imagine what it is for them, figure out how to get that last paycheck in there. Cause I know a lot of us, you know, when times are good, we're spending money ahead of time a little bit and we're oftentimes, you know, maybe only a few days ahead on payroll. So shut down like this is definitely scary. So figure that out, though, whether you, I mean, whatever you gotta do to make that last payroll, that's gotta be, if you're gonna come back, that's gotta happen. And I guess there's legislation, I haven't seen it in the last couple of hours, but we're still being hammered out in the Senate. And it's my understanding that there's some monies that would go to employers to help keep people on the payroll. And again, I'm not sure what all the details are, but as I understand it, it could be retroactive going back to the beginning of March. So even if you had to furlough people, you could actually bring them back and put them on the payroll. And if you kept them from some period of time, then that actually becomes a grant. And grants are really cool because you don't have to pay those back, it's like a gift. And we're gonna be getting more. So make a list of all the things that we find that are available that we can actually link to, even if it's just articles that they could read on this financial stuff, maybe a sub kind of Reddit of the link short you're doing, I'll try and find some too that I've been getting good to us. The tricky part about that, when people are writing about legislation that hasn't become law yet, you're just kind of, yeah, you're kind of chasing. Sometimes it gets people too excited or it gets people too stressed out and then just changes anyway. Yeah, it's true. Cause a lot of the good things I heard initially that were gonna happen, we're not on the initial Republican bill as far as like higher unemployment rates and things like that. So they didn't make the initial bill, but it's all again, it's all subject to negotiation, subject to change. Everyone has different opinions on the best ways to help the economy. I just have to believe they're all acting in good faith and what they think is the best and hopefully it becomes things that helped the little guy cause we are all in the same little, like American Airlines drives me crazy, Delta specifically, they did a $3 billion stock buyback last year and now they're gonna be begging for money from the government. $3 billion of stock last year, they could have had money on hand that could have probably weathered this but it went to shareholders instead of keeping money on hand for a rainy day. Cause nothing ever bad happens to the airlines. I was a pilot for a decade and I went through two economic disasters in 9-11 and 2008 in that industry. Nothing ever bad, nothing ever bad happens to that industry. So I just couldn't even believe that they're asking for a bailout and they're gonna be first in line most likely. So I'll let us wrap up. I know Tom, you got me thinking cause I'm agitated now because they're stock like a month ago was trading at 57 and now it's down 22. So that drop, are that, how many billions of dollars was it? $3 billion stock buyback last year. Like two of it, they just put a match to it. They just kind of went up into money. 22 from 57, is that what you're saying? Yeah. It's about what it's worth right now. That's like from 60 to 20. And I hate to say it, I mean I have so many friends that are in that industry and people that I care about, but it's just a greedy industry and most of the money goes to the executives and for me, for them to be bailing out the airlines, the only way that I'm okay with that is if they're gonna promise to keep the people employed. Like it cannot go to parachutes for executives to jump out of this ship. You know, that's the stuff that we can't allow and you know, whatever, let's not get too much into that. You know, Liz, I've got a word, I could call them, but I'm holding back. Good job, Tom, good job. I was just having a question. They don't want to know, Tom are you still cleaning homes and at what percentage do we lay people off? We just continued our residential cleaning operation Friday and it was one of the most difficult business decisions, probably the most difficult business decision ever made. And I'm still kind of working through the morning process on that. At what percent do you lay people off? I'm not sure, anybody know what that might mean? I think she's saying like what percentage in your revenue? Like do you, I mean, I just look at it. I mean, go ahead. No, go ahead, Matt. I think that that's what it is, the how much loss. Yeah, I mean, I'm running at 10%, right? Well, maybe 15% right now. I don't even know yet. Cause the commercial businesses I have normally do 15,000 to $16,000 a month, but I think that they're gonna want to scale back their scope of work as well, because they're closing common areas. They're closing amenities that these apartment complexes that we do, but I'm gonna keep them running because I mean, honestly, I'll probably go clean them if I've got a couple of employees on those. But if it comes down to it to keep those contracts and somebody needs a sick day, I'll go out and clean. It's been a decade. I'm probably terrible at it, but I'll go clean. Like cause I want to keep those contracts. Those ones are, those are my gravy every month. I appreciate those kind of big checks coming in. So I'll do what it takes to keep those going. So I don't know, for me on the residential side, it was more of a do no harm, less so about, how much percentage of revenue. I didn't make it, I didn't make the decision on that. I don't even know what the answer is, because I don't even know what my fixed costs are right now because I've cut so much of them. Normally I would be able to tell you, I'd go to P&L and be like, my fixed costs are this. Right now I'm hoping my fixed costs are like, five or 600 bucks, right? Just like Tom's software, the internet, the phones, like some stuff that I can't get rid of cause I'm going to still have to call customers back when this is over and I need internet. And I'm going to be at my office, I want to have the internet cause I'm going to work from home cause I got three kids homeschooling right now. So I'm going to keep this place. But Dean, I don't know the right answer is, for that question, I think that the question probably is better is, any dollar in is money in at this point, right? It's just not going to necessarily cover your fixed costs. Yeah, our decision to shut down the residential operation really wasn't about, the loss of clients that we had up to that point. It was more about just, we weighed the risk and the benefit of it. And I found myself having this discussion several times over the last few days. Hygienic cleaning actually reduces the chance of a spread of infection and it's valuable. But on the other side of the scale, you've got this uncertainty of how many people are running around with the virus that are contagious that you don't even know it because they're asymptomatic. And if you're cleaning a public space that everybody's in, like an elevator, then in my mind, that has to be clean. It's irresponsible not to. But if somebody is sequestered in their home, then we might be in a point, and I guess it was my judgment that we are, that they doesn't need to lock the door not anybody and even the cleaning service. And if we give them some pointers on how to clean high touch areas and they can take care of that themselves for the next few months. There could be exceptions. I mean, there's people who need help and all kinds of stuff. So I'm not saying that's 100% either, but that was kind of our thinking as to how we got to that decision. So this isn't, we probably can't cover this ground today, but I think this would be an interesting discussion for next time is, what are you gonna do with your downtime? And so like for us, we talked about sending people how to clean their homes. We're actually creating some blog posts where we kind of detailed, I shared some pictures of things we had created in Made Central. So join Made Central, join Tom's group in Made Central and see, I post, just search me up. I posted some blog posts that we're gonna start creating on how to clean. We're gonna send all of our customers the cleaning checklist. I am actually gonna package and send them or even drop them off myself. A cleaning caddy full of tools and supplies and sell that for marginal costs. I'm gonna need to make some money off of it, but if they have to clean their house for a while, I'm gonna hustle a little bit. If I can make it for some selling cleaning kits to my customers for the next month, I'll box stuff up and do that myself. There's all kinds of things. But so we're gonna take this time to also create a ton of content for our customers. We're gonna do Better Life Mades at home. My wife's a lot better looking than me. So she'll be in front of the camera. We'll be talking about fun projects. You can do cleaning wise, things you can really like take some before pictures of like the kid's Lego room and then like do like some stop motion of them picking up their things. Do we run a pretty strict house and our kids pick up after themselves and like even just little rules we have at the dinner table like you have to make four trips after dinner. You have to make at least four trips of stuff. And like a fork does not count as a trip. So like little fun tips of like, ways to make this all less stressful. So again, we can just give you a whole other conversation of things we should be doing during our downtime. But those are some ideas of what I'm gonna spend my time is. And then I'm also gonna work on a lot of processes. They're gonna make my business safer and better when this is over so that we, this is not gonna be over when this first sequester is over, right guys? When this is over, we're gonna have to work and live with this. Tom talked about it a little bit. But the first 30 days that they do these shelter in place, it's not going away. It'll keep coming back and we're just gonna have to figure out what our risk level is that we're gonna be able to tolerate as a business and as a society. And how do we live and work with this and protect our employees and protect our clients better than we ever have before. And we can, we have to be businesses that don't cut corners. We have to be the best. I think that'd be a great conversation of how we set ourselves up for the other side of this time. What feedback have your customers been giving you for, you gave them the word that you were discontinuing temporary, discontinuing service? Almost all positive. Although I had one healthcare worker who said that we did it because she was a healthcare worker and we saw her stethoscope and didn't wanna serve her. Even though we had ads out on Facebook that we were giving away 20% off this last week we were open, any frontline healthcare workers or first responders before we shut down. So, you know, she seemed to, I don't know, she went off the rails. So you'll have those, right? You're gonna have people. I had her like emailing me and I was so kind and like, I've had this client for seven years I don't know what happened there. But most were overwhelmingly responsive to it thinking that we were doing a socially responsible thing, that we were making a good decision that benefited them and society. When we were down 140%, we could have struggled on and kept making money and doing things. But I'll tell you what, today, I mean the number of call-outs I had from employees even just running our last day here it's gonna be a struggle just to get them in the door and make them feel good about it. And I don't wanna be in the business of twisting anybody's arms through this. I know Liz is probably better about the communication side of this and I've done a good job with that with our customer or with our employees. But our customers overwhelmingly were very positive on the decision. And I will say this and I've talked to Tom about this. There's a line on your balance sheet called Goodwill, right? It's a made up item, right? We use it to give our business value. And right now I think that line has more value than ever. The Goodwill that you actually, you come out with on the other side of this through the decisions you make. And I don't think you wanna appear reckless right now. I think you wanna appear, if you are gonna continue to operate you need to be running a tight ship. You need to be like doing things really well, right? I mean, and again, cause no harm, do no harm. Like the doctors are, you know, that's their first thing. You know, before you make a buck, I don't wanna kill anyone over 200 bucks, right? Like that's definitely the way kind of into my decision making. But if you really feel like you can safely operate, you've got really good processes and procedures in place and that you are confident that what you're doing will cause no harm, then continue. And again, like public spaces, stuff like that, obviously need to be cleaned. And this will be an ongoing process. This is not gonna end in 30 days. So we'll have to circle back on all of this. And we said that we were discontinuing for two weeks. So we're gonna see what happens over the next couple of weeks. And we're prepared to, you know, have it shut down for a longer period of time. If you had to ask me today, I suspect we will be for material while more than two weeks. But we don't know, you know, the data just keeps coming out. And if they come up with some type of study saying that we really, you know, overestimated how, you know, the spread of this thing works. And, you know, the whole idea of, you know, vaporizing and being able to contract it by breathing in the air is much, you know, overdone and with a couple of some precautions, you know, it's, I mean, I'm making all this up. But if we have something like that happen, we might come back and tell our clients, okay, well, you know, two weeks ago, we have a bunch of caution, we made a decision. Here's the most recent data that says maybe it's not as bad as we thought it would be. If you'd like for us to come back, we'd be glad to do it. Yeah, that's good. I think, again, staying on top of the data is going to be important and learning as we go. So, yeah, I mean, my guess is, Dana asked when you think you'll truly open my guesses, there's a shelter in place order in St. Louis for 30 days. I have exceptions for my commercial employees. I did not seek them for my residential employees. So I'm going to probably go with 30 days in St. Louis, April 22nd would be my reopen date at the minimum and really see how that goes. I'm hopeful that we learn a lot in that time and we learn a lot on how to operate our businesses more safely and, you know, what I'm really hopeful is is that the businesses that are ops going to continue to operate out there, do a good job and keep people safe and show that it is fine. But if somebody goes out there and kills somebody, it's going to hurt all of our businesses. If they bring something home to some elderly person and they were reckless. So, you know, the flip side of that is I'm worried too that our industry could be hurt from, you know, the push to consider ourselves essential versus a luxury in that sense. That's the flip side of the coin, but I can only hope that actually they show that we're responsible and do a good job and that it doesn't cause any harm that they were the guinea pigs for us all, I guess, you know, so. Crystal Ham has a question here. Once no, are you requiring employees who are laid off to return all their equipment? Yeah, let me, here, I'm going to pick up my computer and just kind of show around the place really quick. So, yes, so going into, this is my office. We just ran out of storage. I can't tell if we can really tell, but, you know, in my office, we have stored everyone's vacuums. I'm still waiting on a couple of people. I took everyone off direct deposit that hasn't given me all their stuff back and they'll have to come in by Friday to deliver on this other side of, well, our other storage room here is really full. I think I'm going to donate some of these gloves that we bought, like tons and tons of, I can't, yeah, there's stacks of gloves, gloves up there, gloves, masks. I'm going to be making some donations to local hospitals with some of this stuff because we're not going to use it as quickly as I was imagining. So, you know, everything is laundries being stored away. Everyone's bottles are put away. So, you get the gist, everything is kind of, you know, stored here. And I did that for the reason that I actually don't want my employees cleaning with my equipment when they're out on their own because, again, if they want to go clean or do anything else on their own, I just don't want them to end up hurting anybody. So, you know, I just wanted to take that, those tools away from them so that if they do it, it's on their own. We do teams of two company cars and the cars and the equipment and everything winds up at the office at the end of the day. So, there was really no equipment to recover. Yeah. The only thing we had is uniforms. Everybody still has their uniforms out there. I'm not worried about uniforms. I mean, it's a t-shirt or, you know, or a button down for us and, you know, an apron. You know, I've got some in stock. I guess if we had to rehire everyone, I have about, of my 44 employees, I have about 17 that I know will come back no matter what happens. And that's the core that I can rebuild around. So, I'd say identify your key people that you know you can build around and continue those relationships really closely as best you can through this, even personal phone calls and staying in touch through this as best you can. Because, yeah, I definitely know there are people that won't come back. I had a couple of email me today and I tried to tell them, like, don't quit your job. But they wanted, they were adamant, they wanted to resign. Like, you know, like, they had another job offer. I'm like, okay, I hope that pans out because the world changed. So, somebody quit today and put it in an email in a letter form. I'm not gonna fight unemployment if it comes to that. It's never a good idea to quit your job in the middle of a global pandemic. So, you know, I think. Chris also wants to know if you removed everybody from your scheduling software. So, I think what she's trying to get at, are you laying people off or are you furloughing them? I think that's basically- It's the same, I think it's just a different word. A furlough is just a different, it doesn't really change. So, we did a temporary layoff, but I didn't give a return date because that gives them the ability to keep claiming unemployment without having to like, you know, go back and forth with Missouri. So, I didn't give a definitive date, but I told them, you know, probably April 22nd would be the return date. So, again, a plug for Made Central, it makes it really easy to make big scheduling changes all at once. So, I think last night, when no one else was on, I selected a two week period and I deselected all my commercial accounts that I didn't want to erase. And I ended up erasing them anyway because I rebuilt new schedules with higher rates for them during this period. But, so basically you can set it up to email them all that you're canceling their jobs and you can change the text of that. And then it automatically pulls them off the schedule for two weeks and cancels just those jobs, not the rotations. So, again, a plug for Made Central. No one's switching software right now, I know that. But it really made it very easy to make that change. And anyone that is on Made Central, I can do a demo of how to do that and show you guys it's really quick. If there's any users- Yeah, hit them up later, hit them up later with your sales speed. No, no, no, for current users, current users- Oh, I got you. Current users that are on that know how, that don't know how to use that feature. Yeah, Tom has, he's like, I don't even want to think about software right now. Matt was telling me this yesterday, and I was like, yeah, that's probably a marketing dimension that I didn't consider. You know, we have the, if you want to, you know, we have the best software out there to close your cleaning business. All right, so Matt, it looks like Bridget and Sarah are both saying some help. So maybe go into the Made Central Hub. I'll make a Loom video or something like that or I can get on and get on a meeting with them. What is your entire business with a click of a button? Yes, yes, I, and I would strongly suggest Made Central users that are on there that are going to do this, do it like after eight o'clock because it's pretty resource intensive. If we all do this at the same time, I'm afraid of the consequences. All right, damn. Well, yeah, we'll be right around the software for sure. So if you do decide to do this feature, like I did it like at like nine o'clock last night and you know, when I knew there would be no one else looking at things like I figured most of you guys were asleep if you're on the East Coast and whatnot. So I actually am the cause for a couple of the glitches in the software last year with a lot of mass things I was doing. So my apologies for everyone on Made Central for some slowdowns last week. I didn't realize how intensive some of the like the reports and things I was running to try and get ahead of this work. And yeah, I don't think, I don't think the system was ever designed for the amount of emails that I'm sending things like that. I see we've got a question here that I wanna make sure that we address. My longtime friend, Bill Gelderman is on our call and he lives in Atlanta and he's one of our clients there and he wants to know who's gonna clean his bathroom now and Bill- I know, I know who. It's a guy that his name has four letters, first letter, first of the B, right? Yeah. I'll tell you what, Bill, we'll do a call and I'll walk you through the standard operating procedure for that, although I imagine in the Marine Corps you had a little bit of experience that that somewhere along the way you'll just need to, you know, recall. It's like riding a bicycle, ma'am, you can do it. And it's time. And Crystal, to your point about having everybody collect their equipment and so if you're doing a temporary layoff, is it gonna make it seem like it's too permanent to them? Just tell them that they need to bring it back because you're laying them off so that they can get their unemployment, right? And so that's the reason why. Because it needs to be a right thing. You can't have them have any company resources because one of my employees was like, she has like 120 hours of PTO that I've somehow let her accumulate and she's like, I'll just leave it in there. I was like, I can't. I was like, I gotta pay you for it. And she's like, why? I was like, because if it's there and they ask me then you've gotta get paid that money. I was like, I can pay you that money over three weeks. I'd rather do that than do it in one big chunk but I'm gonna just pay it to you on this next check so then you can start getting unemployment quicker and it might actually increase what you get paid. So yeah, I mean, every dollar that you owe them when you lay them off, that's the hard part if you have like sick and PTO leave. And this is where Tom may like be able to hold over me that my PTO policies are a little generous because I'm feeling them right now. That's what it'll all work out on the outside. Guys, we've been here for smidge over an hour and I don't know, we're probably getting to a good point to wrap this up. Any last thoughts? No, I think we covered a lot of ground. We got more to cover on another call probably. I think there was some other ideas we should talk on. You've got your own plans this week but there's some things we can cover to help people for sure. Oh, absolutely. You do wanna post Tom, post the link to clean your business today where people can go find resources. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. We can do that. Oh, and if you notice I shaved my beard cause I had corona, corona, beard, virus, anxiety. A lot of people that had beards are clean shaven now. Yeah, if that's true, but a couple of people sent me different articles and I was like, you know what? Like I'm not normally like somebody that has anxiety but this beard is giving me anxiety. You're just a lot of people playing with their beard. So I think that's a really good reason to not have that. So here's cleaning business today, folks. If you haven't subscribed, you can go over here to the right and just give us your email and name and you'll be getting our newsletter and we'll be updating you on the coronavirus as things develop. Here's our most recent article on it that's a pretty good piece if you haven't read it. There's some stuff there that's certainly useful. I encourage you to do that. And our resource is if you go here and type in coronavirus.downloads and I'll actually paste that down here in the comments and that'll get you a different place. These are a bunch of downloads. There's some material here that Matt's loaned us. Some videos, some examples. If you guys want more, I mean I'm constantly putting out information and communicating. Go to my blog too because the letter for our shutdown I think is a pretty good example of a letter and I know that some other people have posted things like my other useful, that are useful too. Sorry. So, I don't do it for today, but we'll be back another 23 hours and we'll do it again and get some rest, stay safe and we'll see you tomorrow. Thank you. All right, talk to you later. Night. Bye.