 Hey, good afternoon everybody Tom Stewart here. This is smart business moves our guests today is Brandon Lazar from The state of not the state the country of Canada somewhere in the Western part out in Vancouver Ish area is that correct? You pretty much gonna lead them right to my doorstep with that Brandon has certainly made a day for himself and the window cleaning gutter cleaning exterior space cleaning He's a conquer coach. He has a Assas product to help service businesses Better leverage their human capital through instead of pay programs. It's Exciting stuff here. So rather than than than the me just droning on brand and why don't you? share with our audience a little bit about yourself and How you got to this point Yeah, great. Well, yeah, thanks for having me absolute honor and a privilege So start out with that. But yeah, so my name is Brandon Lazar and for the last 15 years I've owned and operated a gutter cleaning window cleaning and pressure wash business on the west coast of Canada and My story is a little bit unique in that unfortunately 12 years ago my family suffered a massive family tragedy So I come from a family of three boys inside of three years you can imagine how you know tight-knit we would be in that sort of a situation and One evening 12 years ago my middle brother Shane. He didn't come home He was tragically lost in a car accident and as you can imagine, you know Significant life event like that. It hits you literally like a ton of bricks, right? I was only a couple years into my business ownership journey I was trying to make my way through business college and all of a sudden this gets dumped on our front doorstep, right? So after the the process of grieving and you know handling that the best way a human can You know, you kind of go through that 12th of I would say 14 month period where you're just hollow and numb Right. What came of that from me though in terms of you know rising up Is I had an opportunity to reflect on on such a massive life event And really where it came down to is I like to see life as a journey after Being faced with something so tragic and so close to home, right? And I really took that to heart, right? I I basically rose up from that feeling like I want a life of fulfillment For myself as well as the people around me, right? And and really where I got to is I want to leverage my Entrepreneurship abilities and small business abilities to fulfill on that that pursuit of fulfillment Since that massive tragedy took place. I have backpacked through 25 different countries I've done the Mount Everest Base Camp in Nepal. I've done the Mount Kilimanjaro in Kenya I jumped on a motorcycle from east to South Africa just like literally Backpacking as we're going on the side of the road in Africa You know went to Thailand numerous times and Costa Rica surfing It's been a very rich and fulfilling life so far. Holy cow You're you're not kidding and you know what, you know, there's a lot of people out there who? aspire to be entrepreneurs and they start their own businesses and You know work very hard at it and realize, you know financial success, but you know oftentimes we don't Leverage the opportunity to to create value Be on the financial part of it. I mean the experiences that you just shared certainly Are our life changing? Experiences, I mean Wow Do you have where your plans moving forward? What's what's next? Well, and like to your point there, Tom, like I absolutely agree with what you're saying, right? Like as a conquer coach one of the first things we've tried to establish when we're paired up with a new conqueror is What is your why? right because it's so easy to subscribe to the Hustle culture of just you know, whatever you're doing just 10 exit and you know more sales more sales more profit, right? But I think that's just such a small portion of what the picture could potentially look like right? Maybe it's it's time-freedom Maybe it's not doing the things that you just really hate doing inside your company anymore, right as small business people We have to wear a lot of hats at times and some of those hats might not be very pleasant to wear anymore, right? So whatever that why is for you I think it's very important to incorporate that in your your goal setting and review as much as we do the financial talk, right? So let's talk about that for a minute So certainly it was was was a tragic thing when your your your brother passed away You came to the realization that you know life is precious. I mean, you know, I'm going to For for a lot of reasons in part I presumed to honor him to make the most of Yours did you just like wake up one morning and just start doing that? I mean, there's there was work in preparation that had to go into that, right? Could you tell us about that? I mean, I think just as you live through that sort of a tragedy and it's tragic in the sense that you you've lost somebody Who you love and who's been a part such a massive part of your life up until that point But it's also tragic in the sense that you know, it's just such a amount of lost potential You know, he he's just like it or not That's the world the way the world works and he's not going to be here for these these very Significant and exciting events that are yet to come. He's not gonna meet, you know his He's not gonna meet his his future nephew and his future niece you know and and Man that that hits you when you look at it from both those perspectives You have no choice, but to see the value of time being the most precious resource that we have That's frankly just completely not something we can generate it comes in it goes and then it just slips through, right? How much work was it and how much preparation was it to get your business in shape and to get Your life and I mean a lot of things I presume you had to do just to create the window of our opportunity to pursue those Adventurous, you know travels that you just shared. Yeah, so it's a great question and I almost see where I'm located as a blessing in disguise a blessing in disguising that we do exterior home cleaning and We're closed down for three months of the year because it's it's darn cold, right? We don't live in igloos and we don't use dog slaves to get to work, but it's almost that bad, right up here in Canada What that does though is it forces us to work on our business if we're so inclined it at least opens the opportunity up the window for that, right and You know, it's that idea of I want to work on my business and set it in my business in my business is very responsive And you're just you're you're reacting and you're not able to get above and beyond and rise above, right? It's my belief that our service businesses are gonna grow in the off-season or as I like to call the planning season, right? That's when we're going to develop and deploy new systems that are maybe going to address some of the pain points or some of the Struggles that we've had in the past and what I always like to say to the people I coach is When you're reflecting or going through the ordinary course of the day-to-day Be aware of the emotional points and what the source of that is right and keep a list somewhere of those things, right? You know, it could be ah customers are canceling like day of service, you know, perfect You're frustrated. That's a sense of an emotion and some way somehow we have to capture that so that we can work on it later Right though the worst thing that could happen is you keep stubbing your toe And you don't think to remove the thing the blockage that you know keeps presenting itself, right? all those things can happen in the off-season and really that's that's a component that was basically You know part and parcel to how I got there is, you know When I'm in the off-season is when I go backpacking and sure enough I would have my laptop there and I'd still be working on, you know, a new pay incentive system or You know figuring out a new supplier or whatever, you know We live in a world that you know, you can be productive pretty much any place you are Even in a developing world you can still have Wi-Fi and a MacBook opened up in the spreadsheet, right? so I I have some pictures here where like literally I was in Cambodia and That was that was what I did I went and worked during the mornings and the afternoons and then you know in the evenings go out for a nice dinner and just You know sightsee and be a tourist But that that work was very productive and it didn't really matter where I was and if you were living in a warmer climate you might never had had the opportunity You might have gotten to the cycle where you were just grinding it out, you know 12 months out of the year and never been in a position to do that It's like getting caught in a wave, right? I think that's a good analogy and you're just trying to gasp for air Well, thankfully the tide just stops for three months of the year here So you're able to fully get out of the water and look back on it and reflect on it, you know And hopefully build something to allow the fight to go a little easier the next time you have to get back in the water Okay, that makes a lot of sense You were mentioning conquer and your your your coaching relationship. How did you get into? How did your experience with conquer start and how did you get into coaching? Yeah, so I'm a little different than most conquer coaches in that I wasn't actually coached by conquer to begin with usually they kind of promote from within and if you're Rising through the ranks in terms of growing your business Eventually you'll you'll likely be offered the opportunity provided, you know You have all the the proper, you know attributes that that are the things that we promote at conquer Whereas I was fully from outside and it was actually the very first outside user of our software who is a Conquer coach his name is Caleb Winneger and he's an awesome guy super smart in the exterior cleaning space and He was the one who you know through our relationship in being the very first alpha tester of our software, you know He he kind of knew my story and made the offer at that point Okay, so how long you've been coaching with conquer? I've been a coach for just over a year now I coach five groups and in total I think there's 26 individuals that that I'm going through the journey with them We're going through the trenches together. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we've had we've had a number of Conquer coaches on smart business moves in the past and and all of them are very talented Individuals, so you know you hang with a smart group It's it's a very high perfume high performing group And and you know inside of their own home service businesses is one thing But then they tend to always have other stuff going on and they're on the bleeding edge of you know Where technology is heading and they're just yeah, they're top-notch very high caliber for sure yeah, I Know Brandon Vaughan just created like a franchise for garage You know it was almost like on a lark. It seemed I mean, I'm sure a lot of thought and preparation went into it But but he's rocking that isn't it? Oh? Yeah, he's got franchisee requests that are I I saw like 500 deep and Yeah, that guy is insane. I have the utmost of respect for him so the other thing that that you mentioned was Your your your software product could you? You're like a renaissance man brand and you got you got it all going on here. Could you tell us a little bit about that? yeah, so Basically as I was going through the journey of building up my home service business, you know again We're in a not only a seasonal business We're in a hyper seasonal business here, right because of the nature of although we closed down for three months We also like scale up dramatically We go from literally two people in the field that we keep through the off season To over 30 technicians out in the field So in order to do that you have to have really great systems and process and hopefully, you know a backbone of Really reliable overhead staff, right? What I quickly came to realize though is You know all employees are not created equally and at the end of the day We're selling the proceeds of each of their time, right? There's such a vast range and spectrum in terms of what that looks like and feels like when it's when we're talking in a productive environment That it's really something that's that's interesting to dive into and to see you know What is the difference of sending? You know technician a versus technician B in terms of what comes home, right? Or how long it takes them to do a given job? Okay So did you develop a a SAS product software to to help with that? Yeah, so we started out like most people do you know it starts on a napkin and then it goes on to a spreadsheet and then it gets clunky and you know you keep expanding on what you want it to do and Finally it got to the point where it's like K We're we're hitting like enter on the spreadsheet and it's like clunking around for a few minutes before it calculates all the things We're looking for it to populate And then that's when we started to put it online and it really was just The idea of scratching our own itch, right and we're going from three to thirty in the field You know, there's so much stuff that's going on in the background and when you're looking through You know all of the those personnel. There's some people there that probably shouldn't have a placement There's some people there that you know, they've been they've been doing this in terms of oscillating and being very Inconsistent with their their work quality There's other people that are just mentally checked out and they're showing up every day They're who rod the meeting and that's where it ends, right? So this stuff is happening in the background whether you have a way of seeing it or not The problem is is you have to pay for it up front and if you don't have a way of seeing it or understanding it Then it's just you who's losing out, right? Yeah, so the the tool that you have built Is Hourly IQ early. Yes I'll drop the URL in chat so Everybody your audience can click in and take a closer look at it You want to tell us a little bit about the product and something I didn't mention in the in the warm-up brand Then I should have if you want to do a screen share you have the ability to do that If you want to go in product and and show us around a little bit, you know that that might be useful Yeah, that sounds good. I'll start to to tee that up here But yeah, at the end of the day, you know, I built this product so that we could grow faster and And make more money. It's really what it came down to, right? I how do I do that the screen if you go down like in the tray there? You should see some settings where it says mute up cam The fourth one over it should say share screen Yeah, perfect And I'll stop sharing wine and if you click on that it'll show up backstage and I can cool Yeah, are you seeing that now? I am okay. Cool. So this is the dashboard and you know, we want to be a Coach a mentor, you know and a celebrator of our people and and what they're doing right because at the end of the day As a service business owner, you're nothing without your people your technicians on the ground, right? So what this does is it really not only itemizes and reports on their individual performance, but it puts it in a perspective that's meant to be recognizing them and rewarding them and Also spotting things before, you know, potentially they become an issue or before they, you know, good work ethic goes on noticed, right So Who actually has a login and password to To hourly IQ is this something that you use your office staff uses or to do all your technicians Log in and interact with it. No, so this is entirely admin-facing With that said we have this really cool thing here called a highlight reel and basically if you have a screen and the break room or the shop Basically what this does is it casts all the results onto that screen as as currently as yesterday's efforts, right? so the one thing about a Performance pay system when you're deploying it properly is you have to go have ongoing and regular feedback being given to your staff, right? If it's just this black box type approach, you're not going to get their engagement, right? They don't know it's like Pavlov's dog, right? Did I do did I do something good or did I do something bad? Well, I got no feedback. So I don't even know, right? whereas this again, it's all about recognizing and rewarding them and And keeping the the figures very current in terms of their bonus amounts that are accruing, etc Right an analogy. I heard a long time ago that always stuck with me is it's kind of like Bowling with a sheet in front of the pens you can roll the ball down the aisle and It'll go underneath the sheet and you can hear things rattling around, but it's not much gratification if you can't actually See what happened and that's you know Having a job without Feedback is kind of the same thing Yeah, that's exactly it and I don't think it was sharing there So this is the highlight that I was talking about so again very fun very exciting very motivating and you can customize this So if it's you know employees that are gonna be looking at the screen It's all employee stuff if it's managers. It's all like macro, you know, how is my business doing in general stuff, right? okay so you mentioned that the the genesis of this or at least a contributing factor to your motivation of Refining these incentive pay programs was the seasonal nature of your business being in a cold climate Do these incentive pay programs give you a competitive advantage it must be tough keeping a committed workforce that Basically loses their job three months Yeah, out of every year. No call it like it is. I mean There are some government incentives here where you know, we can we can actually top up their unemployment amounts So those things help a little bit, but you're absolutely correct, right? Like Especially towards the end of the season, you know, this the ship is sinking, you know So to get full buy-in right until the end is is really quite challenging if you don't have stuff like this Right at the end of the day, you get a carrot or you get a stick, right? That's what performance pay is, right? There's certain things where you know, we want to create that sense of alignment And there's certain things where you did something good. So here's a bonus or a benefit or you know Some something that you value and then sometimes when you step out of bounds, well, there's a repercussion It's the other team's ball, right? And you know that that's the handling So for us when it comes to things like say callbacks, right? You you were servicing a customer's home and you left the back gate open and the dog got out That's a callback, right? We have to go back there tail between our legs and figure it out, right? Maybe you left a piece of equipment on the roof. It's happened before, right? You know, those are valid callbacks and you know in our business that you know There's a deduction applied to your bonus amount owing because you got a valid callback, right? So it's really baked into our culture that we're all gonna care about the same things when we're on this team here So, you know, I guess most companies At least where they're they're starting out the easiest way to pay your your line labor is just hourly You track the number of hours they work in a week and you know, whatever they're making $15 $20 an hour Whatever it is, you know, just do the math and that's their their gross pay Incentive plans, I guess you had the potential of getting a lot more complicated Could you maybe go into a little detail in terms of what you know Your incentive how hourly IQ what that incentive pay plan looks like Yeah, so Like the whole idea in our approach for hourly IQ is we want something that's powerful But very intuitive, you know, you got to understand what's going on. Otherwise if we lose you It's got no benefit at that point. So you say you need to understand you're talking about your your your technicians You're well, both really your technicians absolutely need to understand, you know What this bonus system looks like but also you As the implementer and the decision maker you have to know what's going on too So at the core of it, there's kind of two main approaches. Can you see my screen right now? Absolutely Okay, so we've broken it down Customarily, there's kind of two main options when it comes to the world of performance pay So number one and this is the the greatest adopted Version or approach is called hourly plus bonus. Okay, so what that means is your technicians get a bonus wage likely per hour per hour's best policy And it doesn't matter what happens throughout the course of that day. How successful it was or maybe it was a Bumpster fire. It really doesn't matter. They're always going to get that hourly rate. Okay When it comes down to it basically You can basically establish tiers in terms of developing what the bonus amounts will be Okay, so in this example here with just some basic information, you know Average wage on my crew the burden rate and the target labor rate. We're able to say to our team now Okay, guys, we're going to develop this or deploy this performance pay bonus system If you guys do $80 an hour in productivity You get a dollar per hour bonus and if you do $90 an hour productivity, you get a $3 per hour bonus Okay, the benefit here is when you're paying these amounts out You're staying inside of your labor target So you don't ever have to feel like you're bonusing above and beyond what you're already paying And just you're you're being too nice of a boss You're doing this and actually benefiting as well as as a company Yeah, that is awesome. So I'm in that example, you know, I guess if 80 is your target and they get to 82 and you're giving them an extra dollar. You're still a dollar up And and even more than that right because if say in a different world without this They only would have done 60 dollars per hour. Oh, yeah Well, that's $20 per hour in addition to the number of hours they've worked that your business is now doing in terms of volume, right? So the the results are actually quite quite massive and you can tweak this as you see fit You know, you can have multiple tiers. You can have bigger gaps in between But at the end of the day, what's most important like we started out with is that your employees understand You know something this important to do with compensation has to be very clear cut and it needs to be something that's very obvious Okay The other route that you can do is uh paying your people using commission. So this is more like a piece rate type approach um now both Approaches have pros and cons admittedly uh, the main standoff to Using a commission pay structure is you never stop paying your staff Right, so there's never an opportunity for your company to kind of go and and reclaim When things go really really well Conversely, if things completely go sideways and the wheels fall off say a piece of equipment breaks or they get stuck in traffic Or you know, what have you and the day just is not that productive Well, they're getting significantly reduced in terms of how much they're making. So for those reasons, we're not as fond as As far as implementing the commission bonus structure goes Though our our software is still able to to provide it Okay, that that that makes sense if uh You know my truck breaks down and I lose half a day Dealing with that. I don't get compensated for that at all. Do I no no It's a really quick way to demoralize your staff, right? And that's pretty much the opposite of what we want to do here Okay One of the coolest things that the software does is uh, we have this Setting called snaps or this idea called snaps. So what you can do here is you can set a variable So it could be something like callbacks. It could be late. It could be absences It could be underpaid or overpaid Literally the system can calculate whether or not one of your technicians is Is overpaid or underpaid by looking at your target labor rate inside your company versus how productive they've been And you can set up a sensitivity level to do with each of those variables So you might say, okay, if somebody is late three times inside of one month, send me a snap Or if somebody's Underpaid by more than two dollars, let me know because I want to go give them a high five and I want to recognize Good work for what it is, right? So not only do we have the data The system is policing the data and push notifying you as soon as something relevant shows up So that you can be in a position of of knowing what's going on behind the scenes And be that awesome manager or coach or mentor and address the things as soon as they they They are presented to you Okay, so any type of Non-conforming issue good or bad if you want to know about it when it happens so this keeps you from having to be watching a dashboard all day or You know thumbing through reports. It's just if it happens it will tell you Exactly if you set up a snap Like this, you know jordan is trending more than five percent down So let's go have a talk with jordan, right? Does he not like who he's working with? Does he need more training? Is it something from home? Maybe just you know, had an issue with his relationship at home Like let's let's be in that position because the data is showing that he's going in the wrong direction now, right? Uh, katelyn here she's underpaid by more than two Dollars So let's go give her a high five and a raise because we know that we can do that confidently And staying true to our our financial responsibilities When it says underpaid by by two dollars, what would that look like in the real world? Yeah, so basically each employee has a Profile screen so i've had that conversation where you know they come into your office Then you know what it's about they want to raise and they're quoting things like oh I want to buy jet skis and you know my my wife wants to go on a trip or whatever this that and the other It's usually never tied to their actual performance Uh, and i've had that conversation before and the problem was is i was not in a position to really lend anything back to support Or you know, I just was going on nothing frankly, right? Whereas with the profile screen at a glance, you know how well your Your employees performing at their job, right? Everything's basically itemized here and over here Based on how much we're paying them matched up against with the math that obviously the the software does all the tough math We're looking at whether or not their productivity is above this wage productivity line That's yellow or below if it's above we're actually underpaying them So we can feel good about giving them a raise if it's below Uh, that means they're not quite pulling their weight and they're not producing where they ought to for the amount we're paying them So the the the yellow line in the blue line the the yellow is targeted in the blue is is actual so exactly okay And that gets summarized up here. So again, we want it to be powerful but intuitive. So, uh, this tab here Basically itemizes to the penny how much we're underpaying or overpaying an individual So if you click it, uh, again, it's intuitive and it spells out in plain English, you know You could still meet your labor target of 34 percent and pay kaitlyn and an additional two dollars and 74 cents And uh, that's very helpful, right? Because a lot of the stuff usually is just based on a gut a feel It's arbitrary, right where it shouldn't be right the stuff is happening in the background And you know at the risk of sounding like a super dork math is the path No, so so the target is is is calculated based on a percentage of of revenue Yeah, so uh, basically what it's doing is it's looking at your company's Uh target for labor. Okay. So usually in my space, it's 25 to 35 percent all in we're talking wages bonuses and burdens Okay, well, you're loaded You're loaded directly labor cost loaded directly labor cost, right? Uh, it fluctuates depending on where you're located and what industry you're in specifically, right? Um, but then what it's doing then is it's taking that and it's saying, okay, kaitlyn gets paid $24 an hour Now let's look at her performance and see how she's As like a component of that labor is she costing us more than our labor target or less then Is it basically the highlight version of it? Mm-hmm a little bit Yeah, what it spits out is you know, whether or not she's doing good and this is actually the combined amount So in on the year we've underpaid her by a total of $1,100, right? I once had a painting business and had we had this product It would have made your stomach churn because we had some painters that were just passing time and I would I would probably Suggest the figure would be no less than overpaying them by one of them was no less than $6,000 And again, he's just showing up spending time getting his paycheck And it's all good But like he's not pulling his weight and as a service business we're selling the proceeds of his time So had I had this product back then I would have seen, you know, how detrimental this situation is This is uh, this is really cool. So You see this I mean the the people that are managing your business does the tech I presume it would be problematic if the Technician knows that they're being underpaid by $2 and 100. Yeah, so this is a management tool, right? that said we're on the very last stages of developing a mobile application So what that'll be is basically it'll be a portal for your employee to sign in clock in and Basically get that the highlight version, right? But they're not going to get the nitty-gritty. We're certainly not going to give them fodder to to come in and demand a raise This is essentially what they'll be given. It's called the rundown. So instead of just having on their pay stub, you know Hours work times your your hourly wage and then a raw bonus amount that's just like it's just bulk and has no context You know, they will get this sort of a detail where yes, you started at $24 an hour But with your bonuses and tips you actually made effectively $28 and 44 cents per hour And in a tight labor market that we're in now You don't want your people just anchoring on this base wage that they get because you've deployed performance pay And they're making a lot more than that. So you want them to be anchoring on this figure here. Sure And then it gives a breakdown in terms of, you know, you did an upsell on this day. So you made $15. You did a review on this day You know, you got a bunch of productivity bonuses and this is what the payout was That is so cool So It incorporates tips it incorporates upsells. It's the the whole the whole deal Yeah, one thing that's really cool Because like again, and this is such a powerful platform that we're on now. We can just keep adding on do it Is this one here? It's called crew effect. So what this does Is it analyzes their involvement with each other team member on your crew? So if you're in the situation where you just randomly pair people up to work together You don't know if that pairing is optimal, especially across your entire team, right? Whereas this you can see down to the penny Whether or not those people work better together or far worse together, right? So I know katelyn works really well with tanner She has an effect of bringing his productivity up by fit $14 per hour that they work together Whereas if i'm going to match them up with joseph, that's going to be a bad day. I can pretty much predict it here yeah, now Be curious about that because maybe joseph and katelyn working together Don't make an awesome team, but If you look at joseph, joseph might have a red number next to everybody that joseph's working with is that a katelyn issue or No, quite possibly. So like in total she she's a net promoter. She's a five dollar per hour summary Uh, whereas we can we can dig deeper and see you know relative to each other staff member What the relative effect is so we could go over to joseph and see you know Is he just a net detractor and although he might be you know focusing or functioning on the scoreboard that's just purely because you know, he is He's getting pulled along right so his crew effect is quite a bit less right He only brings people up marginally and this is even getting around it at that So it kind of normalizes everybody's Revenue per per hour if you well it kind of If you work if you're working if you're always working people in teams it kind of Attributes it to the individual Exactly. Yeah, and like I guess the issue is is if you just have somebody paired up with a rock star Well on something like a leaderboard, they're always going to look good, right? Because they're on a winning team because they have a rock star, right? But they could actually be bringing out still the worst case out of that rock star each time they work with them And that's what the crew effect is doing yeah if you're Playing on a on a team with a professional athlete, you know, if you're playing doubles with You know professional tennis player, then you're probably going to do pretty good at the club Exactly, you're not going to struggle But again, this stuff's happening in the background. So that's what the software does is it spots it And brings it to your attention so that you can go do something with it, right? How does data get into that because you're you're you're tracking people's time and you're tracking the The revenue that they're generating. How does how does that get into your product? Yeah, so the answer to that is it's it's kind of threefold. So right now it's manual entry Though those days are short Short-lived here coming up So essentially what it is is it's two components here. We need the time worked for each employee And we just need the revenue figure That's all it is. So it's it's very lightweight. Usually it's about 60 seconds per crew per day to do this Is that done on a daily basis? Yes, I mean it's best suited because then you can provide the feedback to everyone on a relevant level, right? Great work for virtual assistants if you have virtual assistants, um, you know, this is excellent for them, right? Everything is streamlined it auto populates it has default. So it it does go quite quickly, right? If you like you can actually do detailed mode where you're going to put in each job that they did it, right? So you're basically doing buckets, but when you do that it basically does job costing as you go So it's it's actually a very healthy assignment to do because you know at the end of the day If we have a job or a day that didn't go as planned One of two things happened, right? Either we misquoted the work and our pricing was off So it doesn't matter who you send at that point. It's it's not going to be successful Or you know, there was a production issue. Maybe there wasn't enough healthy urgency or knowledge or experience on the crew and therefore productivity was was suffering, right? Well, what this this by virtue of doing this data inputting it's essentially doing your job costing Uh for that crew going out that day When you're doing that assuming a crew's got multiple jobs they're doing throughout the day How do you handle the time between jobs because you're still paying them for that it looks like That's correct. Yeah, so uh, usually Regardless of what state you're in you have to pay them from the time they show up to the time they leave, right? Also a healthy fine-tuned bonus system Recognizes the fact that driving is part of direct labor Okay, we don't want to look at just time on site Because that's going to get thrown off and and again What what actually matters is when the dust settles. What was our average productivity for the hourly rate, right? Um, so we're looking at direct labor and direct revenue only in a bonus system Um, when it comes to inputting here, you know, they basically clock in at eight Well, that's starting the first job at that point Uh, you can kind of get a little bit creative with it and basically when you get to the second job You know, we we basically start the time there Um at the end of the day though, you just have to be consistent with however you want to observe it Is what's most important so some of the What I guess you could call non productive time windshield time gets allocated to to One job or another it all gets allocated to a job So to do agree so like I said when when we're talking direct labor and direct revenue Direct labor is your technicians doing the thing including driving to to do the thing, right? That said if they're doing two hours of say safety meeting or learning about, you know, sales scripts Well, that's indirect labor at that point. So your bonus system would not have you would input it still You put a bucket and the time spent but we're not going to bonus them on that amount It doesn't get observed same holds true with indirect revenue, right? So in my line of work we on occasion will rent a man lift, right? That'll inflate a customer's bill from a thousand dollars to fifteen hundred dollars Well, I'm not going to look at the indirect revenue. I'm just going to look at the direct revenue the amount of Money that's coming into the business paying for our technicians doing the thing the thousand dollars the five Let me get credit for the five hundred exactly paying for equipment exactly I don't get on the weeds in this but I found this fascinating so if I'm driving From Say the office to the first job Is it the drive time from the office to the first job allocated to the first job? Yeah, it tends to be You also see here. Um, we have a simple mode as well So if you don't want to get in the weeds and do individual job costing you can just do shift costing And basically what that is from start day into today Exactly Then you don't have to do the buckets the risk there though is you know You you forego the ability to see where the wheels fell off or where we really hit our stride, right? Because if we have job costing we're going to see, you know, the day didn't go well We know that now it was job two specifically that our labor went up to 60 percent From 24 percent and then it went back down to 25 percent, right? So let's talk guys about what happened at job two, right? Did we not find the place? You know was the lady not home for the first 30 minutes to let us in like Piece of equipment failure like what was it? But I can I can really articulate as the leader What the issue was and when it took place, right? Would you make an adjustment for something say the truck broke down and they lost two hours? Yeah, so one of the charge codes we have is is misquote, right? Like it's something that we shouldn't hold them accountable for So we can go in and basically manually trick the system so that their productivity doesn't take it on the chin Okay, yeah so At the end of the process here, you've figured out everybody's gross pay for the for the pay period I presume so do you then take that information and give it to some payroll processor who Does the withholdings and yeah, so what's good here? So again, like at the risk of this being on the slightly more tedious side You now have your employees hours in one standard artist location, right? What you can do then when it comes to payroll processing is you basically can export the csv So this itemizes now each of their hours work on each respective day It also observes things like tips bonuses and overtime, right? So you can export this as a csv Or upload it into something like gusto and basically do your payroll processing off of that so cool Yeah, and I presume if if your business model is based on using independent contractors as opposed to employees This works quite well for that as well Yeah, usually that's more on a commission structure when you're using third party contractors So it works seamlessly with that as well Okay Yeah so Getting back to How this helps you Be more competitive in an environment where you actually have worked Nine months out of the year How does how does this? Help you with with engagement and retention and Keeping the wheels on when it starts to warm up a little bit and you're ready to go back to work, you know Totally you don't worry about if if the people that were there three months ago are still going to be around Yeah, no, and I guess where I go with that is it just provides full clarity, right? Like I can understand the entire picture of my my full-on business But also with respect to the narrative associated to each individual technician. I know what's going on I know whether or not they're they're meeting expectations or or not and more most importantly They they have an idea of this as well, right? Because we're sharing this on a regular and ongoing basis They are clearly in the know whether or not they're above or beyond, you know, where we want to be Yeah you know This isn't a real popular book, but the premise of it is that Are you familiar with this brand? I'm not okay the premise of this book. It's uh You know the the good jobs strategy is that You want to be an awesome employer and to be an awesome employer you have to pay your people well, you know a living wage and The only way you can do that is to help your people be more productive create an environment where I guess from an economic standpoint the nerdy way of referring to it is return on human capital if Your employees can produce more it creates an opportunity for you to compensate better provide benefits and just you know, you're making good jobs and You figure that out and you've built a piece of software to help people do that totally and this comes out in the interview, right because Call it like it is In a tight labor market the applicants have tons of opportunities, right? You go through indeed or zip recruiter and you just they've made it so easy to just hammer off resumes, right? So we have to separate ourselves from all of our competition now I'm not talking just if you're in maid service. You're competing with other maids. Yes, you are but you're also competing against retail and landscapers and painters and Anywhere else that that Service hospitality that it goes on forever Absolutely people you know this Exactly you unveil this interview and one of two things will happen, right? They're gonna say oh, wow that looks amazing the last job I had the boss threw me a shovel and said I'll see you again in three months And that was it and I got paid my hours work times my hourly wage and and that was the extent of it, right? This is different. I'm a producer. I'm a performer I'm a superhero and this is going to observe and reward me for that, right? The second thing that can happen and I've had this happen is oh, wow Gosh, this this is a little overwhelming. You know, I I don't know like this is this is intense I don't I've never been in a position where I've been responsible for producing anything You know, so it's like great like thank you for letting me know because Like call it like it is as a home service business again We're selling the proceeds of their time that person doesn't sound very confident that they're going to perform on this level So it gets baked into the culture when it gets unveiled in the interview and then it perpetuates You know as we use it on a daily basis so I'm assuming there was a time when you were Using more simpler methods to pay your people that you were just kind of doing hourly So as you've built on this and involved and perfected your your incentive pay programs So A big motivation you've shared was just to get people to come back. You know when the weather starts getting warmer as far as you know Turnover engagement some of the other things that that we all strive to get from our workforce. Have you noticed in any objective way how these innovative pay systems are You know, what are all the positive impacts you're seeing in your business? Yeah, so there's a list, right? So first and foremost as a business you're going to see a dramatic reduction In your labor pay, right? So the first year we unveiled this we went from a labor budget of $454,000 and we reduced it by 4 percent going forward So it we saved like $18,000 just by deploying performance pay in general, right? As a business coach done is better than perfect. Okay It doesn't have to if you use hourly IQ great if you do this on a napkin great It doesn't matter That what matters is that you take action and you you come up with something and deploy it When it comes to the benefits for your staff, you know, ultimately we're looking to motivate Engage and retain with performance pay, right? We're also looking to create a sense of alignment, right? So they care about the same things I care about because how frustrating is that when you're like Oh, man, they show up. They're flat footed. They're taking too long to get out of the yard, you know They're hanging out at the trucks, you know coffee machine. What have you You're not in alignment at that point. They're not caring about being productive, right? So what this does is it creates that sense of alignment. So now they care about the same things you do They want to go be productive. They want to get a review or a referral because they get a bonus They also want to avoid the bad things. They don't want a valid callback So they're going to make that extra trip around the backyard to make sure we have all our tools and equipment and that that gate was closed, right? That's that's hugely beneficial The callback you touched on that earlier. So if if it is like a valid callback Yeah, how how does that impact my my performance pay? Yeah, so you can again I like to think that performance pay is a way to project your company culture, right? So it could be something as soft as hey guys, you got a valid callback. No problem. We got it taken care of I just wanted to bring it to your attention and that's it, right? I would still go into hourly iq and log it and it would still show up in their little time feed that I showed you on their Profile, right? It would also still trip the snaps if it becomes more of a pattern and it becomes an ongoing issue, right? On the other end of the spectrum, you can say hey guys, you guys got a callback. You know what that means Unfortunately, we're taking $50 out of your bonus away, right? We're never going to touch your wages. Those things are safe But the game that we've all agreed to pay in our company is you know, $50 comes out of that accrued bonus away, right? Bonuses are paid out on a voluntary basis and that's the fine print here, right? So you have some skin in the game. We also like to Basically back up the payout in terms of when the bonuses are released to usually I find the sweet spot is a month, right? So even though you pay your staff on a weekly or bi-weekly basis Letting them accrue to maybe absorb two or four pay periods Will provide more skin in the game and just a more exciting pay figure at that point, right? They might have four or five hundred dollars that is getting paid out at that point Okay, it's about a callback though Somebody has to go back to that job site and do something, right? So they're still on the clock. They're getting paid for that It's just they might lose something out of their bonus depending upon How that's being handled. Yes. Yes. And depending on the industry callbacks are very expensive Like we're we're talking about brand and Vaughn with the floor coding business If you get a floor coding callback like we're talking days of labor to correct it and thousands of dollars, right? Whereas for us, it's almost, you know, not I don't disregard the fact that it costs a lot of money But either we broke something or we didn't clean something and we got to reclaim it That's pretty much the boiled down version in the exterior home cleaning Uh industry, right? But you're you're absolutely right from the time that your csr has to answer the phone And dispatch and schedule and then a crew of two people heads over You know, you're you're very quickly into that hundred two hundred three hundred dollar mark Which makes the job kind of pointless at that point, right? Yeah Yeah, no Just as a kind of a qualifier or a disclaimer, you know Uh, neither one of us are our labor attorneys who are authoritative voices and Across all 50 states in the in the u.s. And it's a great and in Canada So if you're as you're refining these programs and there's a lot of different ways you can do it But different parts of the country have different local rules in terms of what you can you can't do It's always a good idea to talk to a labor attorney who really is versed in How these rules are applied in in your your service delivery area before you start Tweaking with with with people's compensation Agreed. Yeah, and and no matter how you do it, you know, you have to observe minimum wage laws You know, you have to observe overtime laws Uh maximum hours work like all those things have to obviously Preface the conversation before you deploy for sure. Do do you guys Test for that like if somebody works overtime. Do you do the math to figure out the premium dollars or 100%? Yeah, no, it all just gets baked into it. Yeah, there's a setting there where depending on your state's legislation You you input what the standard is with respect to a minimum wage or overtime handling so if You do the minimum minimum wage test a minimum wage isn't being met you would tell them this is How much extra money you need to pay in order to? Yeah, and the the beautiful part about is regardless if you're paying commission Or hourly plus bonus like commission is almost sometimes taken out of context because the proper way to do commission In my opinion is you pay them a base wage Right and that wage needs to be above and beyond minimum wage, right? That's how we overcome that dilemma potential From there, you just multiply their hours worked as you ordinarily would So say it's $10 an hour and you worked, you know eight hours Well, we're we owe you $80 at that point But if you go out and your commission comes out to 150 Well, then we would just give you a $70 bonus on top of that So you would still see your hours work times your wage on your pay stuff Plus a bonus figure at that point which gets you up to your commission rate Well, you know, we're we're approaching the top of the hour brand and so just kind of kind of Tied this up put a bow on it If anybody in your audience wants to take a closer look at hourly iq. What's the best way for them to approach that? Yeah, well, thank you again for having me on it's been a pleasure Basically, if you head over to hourly iq.com, it's really straightforward in terms of There's a calendar link and you can book a demo We have set up a special discount code for your listener. So it's smart moves 50 and that will basically Bring on a discount that's forever and it'll deduct The the fee by 50 dollars per month forever So it comes down from 149 to 99 dollars a month And like I said, this stuff's massive, right? This is usually our biggest expense in a home service industry is paying for your labor And you you chances are don't have an idea of all the things that are happening in the background It's just too chaotic. You're wearing too many hats right where this just slows it down And it presents the information in a very easy to metabolize fashion so that you can be the best mentor the best leader And the best operator possible This is this is awesome brand and thank you for the discount code. This is this is cool. And um, so it's smart moves 50 all that's correct. Yeah, and if it doesn't work just book a demo Keith is our lead developer He's in house. He's awesome and just mention it at that point too and we'll make sure you're you're taking care of okay Just curious It's it sounds like it you're constantly working on this and making it better and you mentioned that, you know There's a lot more on the on the roadmap that that you haven't got to yet Do you do do you integrate with any other products that are currently out there? That's that's so what we're currently in in terms of our development phase Which we have a facebook group that's basically following our our design journey as we go through it Our development journey rather But basically right now we're just getting towards the end of the phase where We're developing a mobile app that it'll be employee facing So when I showed you that input requirement, basically it'll give them the opportunity to clock in and clock out and that information Will be ported over and basically that that level of input will not be required to be done manually the other cool thing is Part of that functionality will allow you to then see on a map view where each of your employees are are located And the next phase is apiing with crms. So that's that's where we're headed next So we've been bootstrapped the whole way We were initially just scratching an itch that we had inside of our own business And it's become a product that you know again is helping a lot of people to grow faster and make more money on their own own level there Cool very cool So You know if you aren't using a performance pay system you know, I can tell you from you know my experience and In the industry and you know, I've done a little bit of coaching over the years as well and worked with a lot of house cleaning businesses and pretty much without exception You're going to get better results. You're going to be more profitable You're going to be creating better jobs if you have a well managed performance pay system If you don't have one if you don't have that can I can also tell you You know brandy you were talking about you can kind of you know do it, you know done is better than perfect. That's true trying to Do a well managed performance pay system without having some type of technology to to automate it is Is arduous. You don't have to do that. It's 2023. There's better ways If you don't have one, I would certainly encourage you to take a look at what brand is doing here. This is Honestly, I didn't even know about the product before we met an hour ago, but I thought this is really cool. This is really cool Well, thank you. Thank you Um, so we are at the top of the hour Any any last thoughts before we call it a brand in I I just kind of go back to where we started right go back to what is your y And if your y is working hard and tediously and endlessly in your business, you know And that's where you find yourself currently then keep doing the same things you're doing Right if you're looking for other things in the equation then go back to the drawing board and uh We have a miraculous ability as entrepreneurs to change the world We also can potentially have full control over what's inside of our bubble, right? But it takes that little bit of reflection and that intentionality to get yourself to that point So those are just my my final words of advice And I guess the other part of it that I should probably mention if you would like to work with Brandon on a on a on a more, you know Closer ongoing basis. I presume you could be available as a as a coach as well Yeah, and there's plenty of other coaches We just had nine new ones that were on boarded and it's just a very high functioning high caliber bunch Not only with respect to the coaches, but also the conquer crowd in general I had the honor of being in clear water beach florida at the beginning of january and You know, that was the summit for conquer and it was uh, it's astonishing And you're in the right sandbox to grow fast in that uh that area and I I can second that I've uh I've known some of your coaches for for many many years and uh, you know from top to bottom you guys, uh or class at so um You know brand it was a pleasure. It truly was and I appreciate you sharing with us to sit here for the last hour Um, we are at the top of the hour however, so we're going to go ahead and call it a wrap for today This is smart business moves. We'll be back uh next wednesday five o'clock eastern time until then you guys have an awesome week Take care. Thanks everyone