 You know what? Hey, good afternoon everybody, Tom Stewart here. This is Smart Business Moves. Our guest today is Diana Henley with Natural Care Cleaning in Houston, Texas. I know you're somewhere around Houston. It's kind of Houston proper, right? Right in the middle of it. We are right in the middle of Houston. Yeah, city company, yep. You guys have had some other this year, haven't you? We just lived with that knowledge that there were always gonna have something actually poor Louisiana gets the brunt of it. But yeah, we've had a few, a moment or two. Yeah. Liz is gonna be with us today. She's having technical difficulties, having connection issues. I guess that's technical difficulties. Yeah. So we will power on and, hey, Liz Day is here and Denise, okay. So how you been? You haven't talked in a while. I know, I have been, how have I? I've been good. We've been really good here. Just moving along, making lots of changes this year. Exciting changes. I've been really learning new stuff. Kind of turning things around, I think. We had plenty of time in that beginning of the pandemic because we didn't have a whole lot of clings to do, to think about things. So that kind of spurred some action with us after we've been in business for 14 years and we just started kind of switching it up a bit, making it a little bit more exciting. God, that was a weird time, wasn't it? Cause you felt like you needed to be doing something but you didn't know what to do. We gardened. Guard. We had amazing gardens. We've been really busy this year though. The gardens are kind of neglected, but yeah, that's what we did. We talked a lot about what our next moves would be. Do you like freeze and can stuff or do you? Tom, you're not gonna believe that, but that's like my dream is to be able to garden and can and free stuff. But no, we don't usually. We use it, freeze a little bit, dehydrate a little bit. But yeah, one day when we're not so busy, I'll put a lot of attention to that. Yeah, I remember when I was a kid, that was like my parents did that. I mean, they had like a really big garden. Oh yeah. Hell, they'd freeze stuff and it would stay in the freezer for years and years and years, a lot longer than it should. Yeah. Into the bottom and you never find that. I think our parents did things like that. Yeah. We're more aware of that sort of thing these days. And every once in a while I find something and say, oh, I'm slipping. It's something happened. Right, right. Turning it into your parents. Yeah. Yeah, it was a weird time, but it was good too. I mean, not good for a lot of people, obviously a lot of loss, but a lot of reflection. So what type of, what did you guys decide to do? What type of changes have you been making? Well, one thing is we switched software and that was a big, so you know, but so I'm in business with my family. So my husband and I and my daughter, we partnered together. So we all partnered together. And so it's interesting. I had wanted to switch software quite a while ago. Hi, Liz. Who's here? Hey, Liz. Glad you could make it. Can't hear. She can't hear. Well, that's okay. Face yourself. Smile and wave every once in a while and maybe drop something in chat if you have something to add. There you go. But she can't hear me, so it really doesn't matter, does it? Cause she doesn't know what I'm talking about. No, it doesn't. She can't hear you. She's just gonna do that for a minute. She knows we're goofing on her, though. Can you guys hear me? Yeah, we can hear you. You can't hear us? I can now. Oh, good. Oh my gosh. I can't believe it's only been seven minutes. Feels like it's been an hour. Welcome Monday. Happy Monday to you, Liz. I don't know what happened. I've been having trouble with connectivity stuff all day. Thanks, Aja. Wait, we have a question from the audience. Aja Holiday wants to know, how is Liz so adorable? She's trying to make up for not being on the call today. Right, Aja? Don't butter me up from not doing your job today. There you go. Oh my gosh. There you are. Here you are. I'm so glad I finally made it. All right, so what did I miss? What have you guys been talking about? Gardening. Gardening. Well, I mean, Diana, you do have an amazing garden. Yeah, it's fun. I know. I actually told my husband when school started this year that I was gonna cut my hours at work because I needed more time in the mornings in the garden. I need more time. It sounds fair. I like that, yeah. That sounds right. Right, yes. Oh, so anyway, Tom, we were talking about the changes we made this year, and I said we changed software. But when you have partners, I think, I don't know if you guys are familiar with this feeling, but I don't usually say, you know what, we're gonna switch to Made Central, and let's go. I have to have long conversations, and everybody has to be on board. Really, everybody has to be on board. Hey, Martha. So Chad and Candice, we're not on board as quick as I was. Okay. But to be fair, they do all the work. Yeah. Right. We're using it for you to make a decision if somebody else has to do the work. It is so easy. Yeah. It is so easy. So that was one of the changes that we made and when we decided we were gonna make that decision, we knew we had other decisions to make, and we wanted to get the full function of Made Central. And so we knew that when we switched, we were eventually going to have solo cleaning technicians. We were gonna change the way we were paying and then change to solo. So we just kind of stair stepped, started really looking for money in the company. That we could redirect to our cleaning technicians and away from things that, you know, just other things. And so my, how I talked them into it was, guys, I think that if we use Made Central and fully use it, use all of its features, we won't have to hire another person for the office right away. Was that the answer? Right, right. So, you know, I could either start looking at hiring a salesperson or another assistant in the office. And so that's how they got on board? It was, it was how they got on board. A couple of things happened. One is I wanted to give raises and I've been pushing and pushing and pushing and but, you know, we were over 50%, you know, 55% very often. And so that's a hard push when we're over 55%. And so I started writing down, because I do all the interviewing at our company still. I started writing down, I made a list. I had a long list every time because when I interview people, one of the questions I ask is how much they made at their jobs. So whenever they were at like Lowe's or, you know, one of our local grocery stores or one of the, you know, a known Walmart, Target, whatever, I'd write down what they were making. So I just created this list, how long they'd been there and what they were making, how long they'd been there and what they were making. And I started to see we were hitting way too close to typically low-paying jobs. Like I could see those low-paying jobs were going out, like CNA positions that are usually here in Texas. I don't know about your area, but for me, CNAs just do not get paid very much. Not near what they need to get paid if they're taking care of grandma and grandpa. But so I just brought my list to chat and said, so Walmart and we're kind of getting way too close, we better do something or we're not gonna be able to hire. And so that's when we made this switch over to Made Central, when I could bring a list, here's what's going on in our community right now. Here's what people are paying. So how are we gonna fix that? So for the people who are gonna watch this later, Diana and I might not know you know what you're talking about. When you were talking about getting at 55%, you were talking about payroll percent revenue, right? Yes, our labor cost was consistently around that. Yeah, we were running high, that's high for us. That's higher than we needed to be to have a healthy company. One of our favorite KPIs. Yes. I mean, that's the eyeballs are on that one every week. As a matter of fact, right before we got on this, I called Chad because they did payroll today already. Okay, what was last week's labor? Yeah, I mean that number right there can just keep you from having so many problems, right? We'll pay in your bills. We can keep you from paying your bills. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so we started to get really serious about it. The very first thing we did when we switched over to Made Central, so we had a big breakfast at a nice restaurant. We have this really nice restaurant in town that spaces out the tables for me and they have a nice TV for me to use, and they're closed in the morning so I can have breakfast there. They're fabulous. We had a big breakfast meeting there and announced that we were switching software and that everybody in the company across the board was getting a $2 an hour race. So that's where we started in March, right? And that went over well, but with that... Oh, we're home soon, we're home soon. With that came responsibility. And that was that we were gonna be switching to solo and so we were gonna really start making that transition to solo. And so that, we did lose some people. Yeah. Pretty quickly. One person that when we switched to solo, we created a new procedure, which makes perfect sense to me. But what it is, is if you get up earlier in the day, like two or three o'clock in the afternoon if you're off early and you're a full-time person, you just post in our group, hey, does anybody need help? Right? And so they do it, they do it fabulously. I love watching that every afternoon for the people that get off early. Oh yeah, I do need help. Yeah, can somebody, you know, so I love that. One person hated that and left. She wanted to do her two jobs and be done. And so we go, well, you're not checking in. How can we're not checking in? Nevermind. So she'd been with us for a while and she decided she was gonna exit. And then we had two other people that left. But that was it. So that's not too bad. Yeah, actually. No, not bad at all. It was a great change. Cause you were working two people, three people, what's the last teams where you were? All of that. Two and three people. Two would be best case scenario, but three people, we were just, Tom, I just can't even tell you how much time we were wasting with two and three people. We're very nice too, which is a problem. But did you find that like some of the people who were used to working in teams just couldn't function as a solo? We found that it was really hard to convince everybody in the company, including the office staff, that it was gonna be okay. So the office staff would go, well, this person though really shouldn't be solo. They're just not, they're not comfortable and they can't do it. So they really need to be on a team. And so we actually paid the teams a little bit less than we paid the solo. So what we told them was, look, if you're solo, you're efficient, this is, here's the revenue, here's the, this is your productivity numbers, your efficiency numbers, you know, if you go solo, you don't have to come into the office every single day. You only have to come in once a week. This is gonna be great. You guys that are not quite ready, we're gonna give you some time to get used to it, but know that the solo technicians are carrying the revenue load. They're the ones that are helping us, you know, meet those revenue goals. It's not gonna be the people on the teams that are coming to the office. And I actually have one person that still comes to the office, cause she uses one of our cars. And I looked a few minutes ago, and I can't remember now, but I thought, well, look at there, we pay her, you know, like $40 a week or something more for that drive. Yeah, because she's leaving from their office everything, because she's leaving from the office every single day. So anyway, we did have some issues getting people switched over, but then, you know how something happened in Candice's brain, honestly, where she could see that, oh, we can do this. Once she could get it and enjoy the perks of solo cleaning technicians, then she, now they're very flexible. Yeah, just weirdly flexible. This person starts at nine, this person starts at 7.45, they get off at two, they get off at five, but yeah. You know, I think it's been a big shift for our industry and not in the past year, just this idea that they're going, we as an industry are going to have to be more flexible. We're going to find ways to make it work. We're going to have to have smaller teams. I knew one person going into a house, there's just a lot of things that we had to make happen. Well, we still meet at houses quite a bit because we clean large homes. And so if it's over four hours or so, we'll have two people meet, but still they're coming from their home. Yeah. It's not a huge labor burden. Well, don't you find also that when they are solos coming together at a home, it's a different dynamic than when they are come as a team and they're, it's a different dynamic. There's still working kind of as solos. Well, and it's not without some of its issues because what we do find now is because we don't have that ladder of cleaning technician, assistant lead, you know, trainer. Nobody really wants to, I shouldn't say nobody. Often we find that one person's not doing a full quality check. So that's really the only thing that I can think of off the top of my head is if we have somebody that's not as productive with quality, you know, they're not as good with quality. The other person really doesn't want to check their job. They just want them to pull their own weight. So when you've got two solos meeting at a house together, it's not clear who's in charge. It's whereas if you put them together as a team, you've got a team leader and a helper and yeah. Yeah. And so most of the time we'll match two people at fairly regular like I have this one team or a couple of teams that I can think of that they just work really well together and they they're not teams. I'm sorry. They're solos that we'll meet a few times a week, right? They'll come together a few times a week for larger homes and deep cleans or whatnot and they get along well and they hold their own. It's when we have somebody that's falling down a little bit. Yeah. That we have a problem. And because the other person doesn't think that's part of their job to have to, that's not my job to get you to do your job. It's not your job to get me to do my job. Right. Right. I know. So there's that. Yeah. So we're working on it. Our quality holds steady. We do have some ups and downs, but for the most part, I'm satisfied with where the quality is with the system. And then of course, we changed recently from hourly $2 an hour more and we worked on everybody's productivity and efficiency. We had a meeting every single morning. I want you to know with the managers every single morning looking at the previous day. Well, we talk about five minutes of other things and then we look at the productivity and efficiency. Where are the holes? What problems are we having? How do we need to fix this? Is this a lack of training or is this somebody not a good fit? I looked at, thank you for asking me to do this because it made me look at every single person that we've lost this year. Oh, cool. Uh-huh. And I found out that we lost 17 people this year. Of those 17 people, 15 had write-ups. Like, we either terminated them or we were heading in that direction. They were having productivity or quality issues. Two people left, one for medical reasons and one, we all cried when he left. But he went to go work with his family business. Installing windows or something. I mean, we're like, yeah, that's awesome. Go be with your family. Yeah, we love family businesses. So we were happy for him. If you look at people over that same period of time who had write-ups, how many are still with you? I'm just, you know, this could be like a good way to predict and intervene and, you know, maybe, you know, this is like artificial intelligence, kind of. You can figure out it's gonna happen before it happens. So here's where we fall down is we're super nice and Candace has got more hope in her heart for people than anybody I've met. And so we actually did have a termination today and I actually go to, I work in the office on Mondays. I go in for a little bit on Mondays. And so I was there and she is just, this is just so hard for you. And I just want you to have a job that you're more comfortable with, you know? And so she has hope in her heart. I care too much for you to allow you to continue to work here. Right, but she gives them lots of, you know, so today in our meeting when we had a win, so we talk about our wins from the previous day or the week or whatever. And I said, well, one of our wins, from my perspective is we had a termination, a valid good termination, somebody that needed to be terminated. I would hope, moving forward, that we continue to work on following our structured procedures and, you know, helping them out the door a bit sooner. Nice. Yeah. So I guess that one was soon enough, it sounds like, Diana. It took too long in my, this should have happened a month ago. Okay. So the story is moving forward. We don't want to ever cheat anybody out of the opportunity of having the job they really want. Right. There you go. There you go. Yeah. One day longer in the job that they don't want is one day that they shouldn't have. Yes. I will tell you that I had thought before, oh my gosh, what is she doing? This person is not a good fit for the company. They can't handle the job. And in two or three months in, they turn it around and something clicks for them. And I think, oh, I was so ready to terminate. And she, her little hopeful heart, to where we then have a solid employee. Yeah. Yeah. And so there's a time and a place for that too. When you've got employees come in like crazy and you're not really worried about that, yeah, cut them much, much faster. But when you're fine people, when you're spending $500 to $1,000 a month and indeed adds and you get people come through the door, hold on to these people just a little bit longer, maybe work with them just a little bit more than we might have worked with them before. Right. So they really struggle to get the work done. Well, yeah. And we have, we've stayed pretty staffed most of the time. We do have some dips. And right now they, you know, I get informed regularly how many people we need. And so I know how many I need to hire right now. And that is, that is a deciding factor sometimes, you know, more last year than this year. But I'd rather turn the work away myself than then have somebody going out in the field that just, you know, embarrasses the company really. Oh yeah, absolutely. You know, yeah. So, so then the next step we did recently, which is just my staff so far is thrilled is we went from hourly to the percentage thing. Right. And it has been a beautiful thing. It's been a beautiful thing. So Diane, tell us a little bit more about how you went from hourly to percentage. I know you guys were really worried about it as Chad especially was like super stressed out about how that was gonna happen. And like what were some of the things that you did to make a smooth transition because it doesn't always go nice from hourly to percentage. Well, in March, when we switched over to Made Central we introduced the idea of productivity and efficiency. And we just really stayed on them from March until we made the switch in at the beginning or the end of last month, we just stayed on them. This is, hey guys, remember productivity. This is what this means and how long are you in the homes and how much time are you taking and are you going shopping between house one and house two? Like what's going on? And so what really helped was I have a couple of field managers that are in the Made Central user group. And I asked in that group what is everybody's productivity? And everybody gave their numbers and ours was the lowest. And my managers saw that. And so I went to their trainer meeting like the next week and I'm supposed to be a bystander in that meeting. I'm supposed to zip it. So I'm listening to the training manager go, I was so embarrassed and oh my gosh what is wrong with everybody? And she was just shocked. And we weren't like horribly in the gutter but we weren't at 100%. We were like at 92 or 93 or something where I'm thinking, well, it's not great but it's not horrible. And then I see everybody else at 110 and I thought, oh, okay, we could do a whole lot better. So that was a nice little eye opener. It's good for them to see, yes. That it's not educating myself but I have to remember that they need to get into the mix with the other cleaning services. Absolutely. You don't need to tell your field managers this but it's really kind of hard to compare those things across companies because everybody bids a little bit differently and you might not be giving your teams as much time to clean a home as some other companies are. So there's a lot of things that could factor into that but never for us. Right, but we actually went head to head with Matt. How much time are you giving for this size, huh? I mean, we are like broken down. Oh, okay. Chad, my husband, I will look over at him driving down the road or sitting at the dinner table and say, what are you thinking about? And it's always numbers. Okay. So yeah, numbers. And when I go to sleep every night, it's to the nice QuickBooks light or spreadsheet of some QuickBooks spreadsheet, whatever, he's always looking at the number. So he and Matt, he's like, okay, well, the square footage is this. So they picked it apart to see like where we were falling down. So that was super good, but it's amazing what happens to your productivity when you say you're gonna now be paid by your productivity. It immediately, just it, the first week it was over a hundred and it has stayed over a hundred. But you know, I don't think you wanna underestimate to how beneficial it is to give them that training in advance, put the focus, make them understand it and understand what some of the tricks are and start thinking about it. You guys did and you put daily focus on it. Six months. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And they're understanding it, but they're thinking, ah, I don't know how, I don't, ah, and they're getting over a lot of that. Then you kick them over to percentage and they're like, okay, we had all our practice time. Right. Here's the game. And of course, same thing with this. When we moved to percentage, we immediately lost, I think one person that I can think of, maybe two, right away. And they said, there's no way because they knew they would hit base. Yeah. And their base pays 14 bucks an hour. And if they hit base pay a couple of weeks in a row, we give, everybody has a month from start of this new process to get to where they needed to be. But then after that, they would have basically, like a recovery program similar to what we have for quality. If you have quality issues, we have, okay, here's your first issue that we do this, second issue that, third issue that. We do the same thing now with the base pay. If they hit base pay productivity, which this week we had three people hit base pay. They did payroll this morning and three people hit base pay. And only one of them was from hit base pay last week. And one of them had the highest hourly rate last week and then hit base pay this week, which was interesting. All right, so first I wanna explain base pay for people who don't know what that is. Yeah, oops. That's okay. So for people who don't know what base pay is, what she's talking about, she pays percentage and for example, easy numbers, 40% of the job goes to the cleaning professional, but she guarantees that they'll never make below what she calls base wage. So for example, like $14 an hour is base pay. So they make a certain percentage, but if they spend too much time in the house so that they then drop below where it would actually be even less money than $14 an hour, she'll still pay them $14 an hour, but now they're in the bad person system. They have to start making more money. They need to make at least $14 and one cent to be making money. Which I think I only had, I had three people that didn't hit base and only one other person was in the $14 an hour range. They averaged this week, 17.85. Nice, nice. Because if you've got a cleaning professional that's not at least hitting base, at the end of the week, you have to add extra money to their check to get them to base. That extra money is called supplemental pay. And supplemental pay basically is another way of saying that is that's profit that you would have had that you don't have. So if you're constantly having to do the supplemental pay thing, at some point they sit down with Candice and talk about what job they really would love to have because it's not the one they're in. Right, and Candice did point out to me. Okay, so this person's hit base pay two weeks in a row. So she and I will be having a conversation to find out what the next steps are, which would be making sure she's very aware, which of course she is, and then, okay, we need to come up with a plan. So then she comes up with a plan. And then if we do it again, then we're gonna do some retraining. All right, so this is what I just heard. First time at base pay, nothing really happens. Second time at base pay, hey, let's show you you're at base pay twice in a row and let's come up with some type of a plan. She can- Yeah, what's going on? Why do you think you're hitting base pay? What's up? And then the third time, if they hit it again, third time, is it three times in a row or what if they're good for two weeks and then they hit it again, hit base pay again a third time? So I'm kind of using the same process that we have with quality. I'm sure we will be adjusting it as I see. So with quality, it's like heads up, have a talk and make a plan. Third is retraining, fourth is three day suspension, fifth is termination. So that, and that's all within 30 days. So like if they get to retraining, but then they don't have any more issues for 30 days, right? Then they start from step one, say in 60 days they have issues again. Congress starts again. The clock starts over. Yeah. Yeah. I just don't want to have a lot of opinions. So it's better for me to have a structured system because I really like people. You know? And I think, she's done a race though. And her husband's not working right now. I know, I know. Oh my God. You know what? I'm sure she's pregnant. Oh my God. She's had a terrible break up. Yeah, that's the worst right there. You definitely got to have a good system. Yeah, you do. Especially if you like people. So. You see Tom's not going anywhere. What were your second and third steps? Heads up is the first when, hey, you know, you hit supplemental pay last week. And what do you do the second time? You call them in and have a chat with them and find out why. You just ask them, why do you think you're hitting base? Create a plan. Okay. It's a more detailed. Heads up is, you know, you didn't hit base. Right. The second one is, let's have a discussion as to why you think they're not doing it. You tell me why you think you're not hitting base pay and you tell me where you're falling down. So I will say it's a lot of times it's just poor communication. You know, if they're in a first time clients home and they're not requesting time, which is legitimate, a legitimate request, then it's poor communication. But we do have, you know, this is not the easiest job either, right? It's not. No, it's not the easiest job. So you have to think about all the moving parts when you're out in the field. Yeah. All right. So did you get your answer to your question, Tom? Yeah. Well, I'm just trying to think, once you get to the point like suspension, isn't there much turn around at that point? Like, you know, I'm at the fourth level and now you're suspending me for three days. Well, okay. Well, the heads up didn't work and the channel line didn't work and even the retraining didn't work. Right. But for three days. Okay, now I'm going to be more productive Yeah, not usually. Yeah. Right. So this morning, the termination could have been a three day suspension, but we had rolled around this before. So that's why we decided to skip the three day suspension and go straight to termination because we had already been here with her before. She'd come around that little corner before. So that could happen. That makes sense to me. I mean, the first time out, I could see going through all five steps, but the second time, the clock starts. Right. Right. Now there's, you know, you just lost the stuff. I don't know. I'm thinking the third time up, you lose another step. I don't know. Would I even retrain again at that point? That's what I'm saying. Three steps now. Right. So the person that we terminated today had been retrained one time. And the field manager's perspective was, she's still doing the same things. So we're like, okay, well, at that point, and her productivity just went into the gutter. So, and we knew she was writing long letters of, oh my gosh, I'm trying so hard and this is what I'm doing. It just wasn't a good fit. I mean, this is truly a situation of, she was doing everything she could. She just wasn't a good fit. Sometimes you really do need a different job. This is not a good job for you. I mean, not every job is good for everybody. I would be a terrible person to stand at the freeway exit and beg for money. That would not be good for me. I would not be good at that. Some people will go good at that. You were gonna say you wouldn't be a good person in the toll booth or something, which no, I probably know you wouldn't. I wouldn't have to go with that either. Yeah, another good one. No, no, asking for money, probably no. All right, so another thing that you've done a lot of this year, and you guys might have talked about this, well, I was playing around and relaxing over here. I think you had to do a few pay increases. So one, you pay increase of that $2 an hour. $2 an hour. And then did you do anything else besides percentage pay, which is another pay increase? I thought you did three pay increases. Well, we actually did two. I thought we did three also. What we did is we did the hourly $2 an hour across the board. And I mean, across the board, like everybody. And then when we switched to the percentage pay because we actually offer a weekly bonus, that took us a minute to kind of figure that out. So then we have our percentage pay plus, what is it, 4% more of you bonus out that week, which is quality productivity and attendance. All right, so you guys decided on 4% then. So everybody has their basic percentage. And then if they certain standard, they get an additional 4% and then weekly bonus. It's weekly, yes. All right, so for those of you that are considering doing this or something similar, the hard part can make this work is when it is weekly. Yes. If you try to stretch it out too long, you're not going to get the same results. No, we used to do it 10 years ago or something monthly. And we found that if they bombed the first week, forget about it. So we do it weekly. I'm just going to take the rest of the month off and try again next month. Yeah, yeah. And so it's a nice selling point too when we're interviewing. Every single week, you start fresh. You know, you get a chance to make that extra 4%. Yeah. All right, so I do have to say now we have been doing, we've been, for the last two months, we have been using this new selling point that I mentioned once on here. And it has been working great. It's the first question that we get when people apply. And since we started using this of the people that we have hired, brought into the company, only one person has taken the job and then not shown up, which is before that was, we were having more of that problem. We're not having it. And this is what we're doing that is different is every month when we do a price increase, we post the names of all of the customers that are getting the price increase in our communication channel. So we just list because anybody that cleans any of those houses is getting a pay increase. And so how we list it is, hey, pay increases this month, going out to everybody cleaning these homes. And then in our ad, we have pay increases every month. And then when they ask us, so I read about the pay increases every month, how does that work? Well, we raise client rates every month. So we have pay increases every month. Sometimes though, you might get one house, two houses, you might get a bunch of them, you might not even have any, but every single month, we are raising the money that we pay out. And people love that. That is awesome. It has been really, really awesome. It's not a ton of money, right? But all the idea that they really are getting a pay increase and they're tracking it now. So that has been what's nice. Yeah, it's just a new spin on the same old information. Well, I actually told my staff that when we switched, but I didn't say it with much vigor because we still had some clients as we were transitioning where I'm like, why is that client still at this hourly rate? You know, oh, that's my sister. No, you know, or something, and we had a pay increase. Well, keeping your sister has to pay. That's it. Yeah, for sure. So yeah, that's, I actually, I will tell you, we've been trying to really pin down everybody's roles in the office. And so one of the things that I used to not do that I've started doing recently is I would interview everybody and if I wanted to hire them, I'd give it all to Candice and she would call on them and arrange the first day and do all that. I recently started doing it in the last month, maybe. And we have had more no shows in the last month than I can think of in the previous six months. So I told her today, I don't know what you were doing, but you were doing it a lot better than me. So we need a switch back to where you're, and she goes, I'm so friendly to them. She goes, I call them and go, hey girl, I'm so excited. I said, okay, I'm not doing that. We did that. Yeah, you get that job back. But anybody that sees you, like they see you on the screen, anybody that doesn't know you, or people that do know you, it was like, what? She's more friendly than you. What? Oh, I know. Okay, so I'm like mama friendly. She's like friend friendly. Yeah. She is the in-house therapist. I'm like, you know, let me help you with your credit. Yeah. You're the mom and she's the friend. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. I am the oldest person in the entire company. Yes. Oh my gosh, is that true? So true. It's the truth. You're absolutely true. Yeah. Wow. I'm not the oldest person in mine, and I've got two decades on you. Nope, it's me. I'm the one. There's two people really close. There's two people that were around the same age, but I'm still older. Yeah, I'm still winning. I'm still winning there. Okay, so we're talking a lot about money here, right? My favorite subject. Yeah. So many people, right? So many entrepreneurs. And we also talk about how, you know, the people in this industry aren't necessarily motivated by money. That they're motivated by a lot more than just money. That that's like, it's the, you know, you've got to meet that need. But then after that, people aren't really motivated by money. So is that all you're doing, Diana, is focusing in on the money? And are you thinking that that's gonna be the long-term solution or tell us a little bit more about that? Well, I think it's a big part of the solution, honestly. So obviously we focus on the money. My history was, before I started this company, I was in the service industry my entire life, and I lived on sales and tips. And so for me, that mindset, the harder I work, the more money I make, it makes sense to me. And it's always made sense to me the way we pay our staff. But I recognize that not everybody thinks like I do. But they do like to be recognized a lot. And so I know, and I haven't seen it yet, but I know Candace is listing not everybody's hourly rate, but everybody's productivity. So she'll put, you know, Jane's productivity and John's productivity. So she has a list that she posted on our group. So we know who's productivity and they're competitive that way. We still have, since COVID, we went from weekly breakfast meetings to monthly, but we pack a lot of hoopla in our monthly meetings. And so I think they really like the recognition. And so like one person this week, there were a couple of people in the 20, one, two, three, four, five people in the $20 plus an hour range. They wanna, we wanna shout out, are you kidding me? You made 20, one person made $25 an hour. She was training. Jasmine made $25 an hour. They love for us to do that. And this- So you post that in the group that Jasmine made $25 an hour? Well, we post their productivity. We haven't been posting what their hourly rate is. I don't really see a problem with it, but we'll have to talk to them some more. We just started the percentage. We've only been doing this for a short time. So I have to see how everybody feels about it. But I have conversations, because I go in on Mondays, because that's when the whole staff goes in. And I asked people, what was your hourly rate? And they'd say, oh, it's $16 an hour. And I asked everybody, are you happy with what your hourly rate was this week, this last paycheck? Were you happy? Were you satisfied? And so you're at 16, were you satisfied? Well, I am satisfied, but I know, because I talked to some of my friends that they were at 18 and 19. And so I'm trying to figure out what they're doing to get to 18 and 19, because I really wanna go and be at 18 and 19. I'm satisfied with 16, but I wanna be at 18 and 19. So just lots of conversation about that. And I love that they help each other. That's really important. Yeah, absolutely. That engagement is really important when they have money in. Let me ask, what percentage you pay, Diana? 38% and then 42% for people that get bonus. And are they making, and you just started doing this. So it's- Right. So in labor costs this week, from last week, is 42%, I believe. We hit 42%. So much better than the 55. So they're making much more an hour. And we are hitting better numbers. Nice. Yeah, by about 10%, your- Is that crazy? Your margin's probably doubled, right? I'm not looking over there right now. I'm just focused on the labor cost and the efficiency. Yeah, chat probably does. But the 4% extra, how do they earn that? That is based on quality. So they can't have any complaints. Productivity, so they have to hit their number, their base pay and attendance. Because we still have attendance issues. We don't really have attendance problems with individuals because they cycle out pretty quickly. But we have one or two or three every day. Can't come in for whatever reason. You know what? I think another thing that's made a big difference is the flexibility of our hours. Once I had the office staff on board, one of our friends in a group said that she did a poll and a lot of people, like in a job group, would you rather work nine to two or eight to five or making X amount of dollars? And so many more people wanted to work nine to two. So when I started offering shorter days, they have to work five days when they work shorter days. But shorter days, holy cow, that's really taken off. Yeah. And they're making lost money, but that really isn't an issue. It doesn't seem to be. It doesn't seem to be. And that, again, goes back to that. They're not motivated by money. They're motivated by that time. They're hitting the amount of money that they need to be able to make their bills and pay their rent and handle, buy food, buy this bill. This has been a West Coast thing for a while now. I guess just the rest of the country is seeing it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm picking on Liz a little bit. Yeah. I mean, I think too. I finally understand. I'm in Texas, Liz. It takes us a minute. Yeah. Our minimum wage is still $7 and 25 cents an hour here. Same here. I mean, is that insane? And we talk about that in our ads and in my interviews, like, isn't that terrible? No way. We're not, we're no, we're near that. I mean, that's just, it is. That's pretty shameful. We would do that too. Oh my gosh. When earlier, you said you went back and you looked at the number of people that you've, that left your company over the year. And how many, what was that number? 17. 17. And roughly how many people, how many technicians do you guys have? 28-ish, maybe? Okay. I actually asked Chad what our employee attrition was. And he said currently about 10%. Well, on an annual basis, it comes out to be like 81%. I'm doing a little bit of, let me tell you. So this is the last six months. Okay. Yeah. I'm just looking at it. If you take that on an annual basis, that's 81%, which really in this industry is not bad. Well, I can't remember seeing the numbers 250%. So, in my company. Yeah, 250%. So yeah, I'll take it. And for me too, it's still the 17 that we lost. These are people after training. These in my mind, they're my fault because I do the hiring. So something wasn't communicated well enough. I go into great detail about showing up for work, ask them a lot of questions about all of that. But yeah, but that's good. That's something I can work on. I can work on improving my hiring. Okay. So Aja has something here. She says, Liz is so adorable. No, wait a minute. That's not it. Why is she laughing about me being adorable? That's what I wanted to tell her. So she's asking about flex weeks that this is. Eight to five, four days a week or something like that. We do that too. So they have two choices for part time, Aja. They could do nine to two, five days a week or three or four days a week, same hours, eight to 530. Yeah, we do four days a week, three or four. They have to work in minimum of three days, four full days, three full days, four full days. So yeah, we have to, yeah. So we're pretty flexible. Yeah. Yeah. And that, isn't that, well, the people that work full days, but fewer days are mostly students. Yeah. Yeah. And then people that are doing that short day. Parents. Yes, parents. Got to get out and take care. And most of them start at the same eight to two. They do eight to two. I think I only have one or two that start at nine o'clock. But that's just to get them, drop their kids off, go clean, pick their kids up. Plus the people that are getting off at two, if they finish their one home at 1230, then they're perfect to go send a help, somebody until two o'clock. So they take a little. Why do you guys care when they start? Why do we care when they start? Like you have this nine to two thing. Why can't they work eight to one or nine to three? It's mostly for the office staffs, ease of scheduling. Just so they communication. Yeah. And then the clients, you know, we have AM clients, PM clients. It's just the schedule. It's really just the scheduling. Because when we first started, we've done this fewer days, eight to five fewer days, eight to five 30 fewer days forever. The nine to two thing was like, ah, you know, they did, they were not thinking I was cute with that. You know, a little bit of pushback. And every now and again, I get a little comment. Oh gosh. Well, you know, she's one of those two o'clock. Let me figure out what I'm gonna do. Thanks, Diana. Yes, but we're fully staffed, aren't we? That's my job. Yeah. Yeah, right. So I was trying to do the shorter day for parents, school hours. Yeah. It's really seems just a flip of the switch of the way you think about it. Cause once they, once they kind of flip that switch and they're, I hear nothing out of my part-time short day folks, seriously, I hear nothing. They come in and they're getting their job done. They're doing a great job. They're taking their kids to gymnastics after school and they're happy. Yeah. I happen to like that. You know, I happen to like that. Well, and it really ties into your sort of, I don't know that you call it a core issue, but you do have kind of a core issue of these family values. Yes. It's a big thing that you believe in. It is. And I'm not, I don't, I mean, I don't call my staff, my family. They're definitely not that kind of a family business, but they know that my family works there and they know that my family is very important. So no, I'm not going to work on Christmas Eve or the happy Thanksgiving, you know? And neither are they. And if they want to work from nine to two because they want to spend more time with their kids. Yes, I agree. Yes, spend more time with your kids. I think it's very important. Please do take care of the kids after school. Yeah, I mean, I have a lot in common with that kind of thought, you know, so I like it. So really we have a lot of just family, people that just have families and it just works nicely that way. It's a different mindset, I think. Yeah, I agree. I think the biggest obstacle is the office mindset. I don't know how, we can't make that work. Well, and I know that's true because like Tom said, we've been doing it on the West Coast for 10 years. It's easy to do, y'all. I don't really know what you're talking about, but it's never done. Change is hard. Change is really hard. And when you tell somebody you're going to change something, if you don't have a boatload of benefits to load them up with before you tell them about the change, they're going to just see problems. And so, right, so with our field staff, we could go, whoa, look how pretty this is. This is going to be great, yay. But then the office staff, I didn't, I forgot about telling them all the boatload of benefits on why we needed to hire people from nine to two. We'll be more staffed. People will be happier. That's it. That's all I had. So they did. Because our contingency plan is you guys need to go out and clean the homes because there's nothing more to do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. They would love that. It's looking better, yeah. Definitely, it's a lot more to play with that argument. I would say. So we are right at the top of the hour here. It went fast, didn't it, Liz? Oh, wait a minute. You weren't here for the four hours, so you wouldn't. It went super fast for Liz. And you know what? It almost felt like 45 minutes or so. That was funny. All right. Diana, thank you as always. This is so much fun. He's all right. I've been told, you know, you have a sparkling personality. I've heard that. I've heard that as well. I think it's like, yeah, right? Yeah. Well, guys, thank you for, so it made me dig in a little bit deeper just to be prepared for the conversation. So thank you for that. I'm happy with my attrition. Me too. All right. Well, good luck everybody. Good to see everybody. And we'll see you on Wednesday. Who's our guest on Wednesday, Tom? But my, Kevin Conkle. Kevin Conkle. All right. That's going to be a good call. Our good meeting. Yeah. Kevin was with us like too long ago. Does work for Department of Labor, has some pretty interesting insights on how things work in today's workforce and some, have some hints for us in terms of how to build a workforce that will stay with us. So spirit of employee retention. Yeah. All right. Thank you guys. Thank you Diana. See you guys Wednesday. Bye bye. All right, bye.