 So Jonathan, I'm going to do it here. I'm with Liz Trotter. This is Smart Business Moves. Liz, how are you? Hey y'all. Hey Tom, well, since we are five minutes late today, I bet you know. Shush. Okay. Still getting back in the groove. I mean, my goodness, the last three weeks has been kind of like a whirlwind. Yeah, well, more so for you. Well, actually, I guess not more so for you than me. I was going to say more so for you than me because you just did MCA live too. Right, but you gave up two full weeks. You gave up foundations 2.0 and I was kind of on the sidelines with that. Yeah. So we are finally starting to get, I'm starting to get my feet back under me a little bit here. It was kind of tough for a while though. I was like, and actually I'm lying. There are people out there right now that heard me say that. They were like, what is she talking about? She still hasn't gotten back to me with that thing I need. So yeah, sorry for those of you that haven't gotten you your thing yet. It's coming, I swear. I swear. So are we going to have a guest today? Tom, what's up with that? We're efforting. We're efforting. The topic today is digital marketing and we got a pitch hitter coming in. Matt's gonna be joining us here like any minute. I just saw him pop up. Okay, so I have a really pressing question that everybody wants to know. Inquiring minds. Is it pitch hitter or pinch hitter? Like in a pitch. P-R-N-C-H. Yeah, yeah, and so they're like get filling in in a pitch. Yeah. That makes more sense. People say pitch all the time. I thought you just said pitch. I probably did. Okay. Okay. Does it mean that's what you meant? No, it doesn't mean it's right. So I see Matt's kind of coming. He had shoulder surgery, you said, Tom? He did on Monday, actually. He had a pickleball accident. Oh, goodness. You know, it's a high kind of sport. Well, is he doing okay? I mean, it's only Wednesday. Oh, yeah, we were in a meeting yesterday and he was a little drugged up. He was entertaining, actually. This is gonna be fun. Well, I hope he's on his little pain meds again today. As always, we're recording this. So we might have some good stuff here to use in the future. Well, I'm hoping that whoever is editing these podcasts knows to edit out the first, like 32 minutes of this one. Because it's not looking good so far. Worst of both? Well, maybe we should say why we are... Let me just hit add and see. Hey, Matt, can you hear us? I can. Let's see if I can get one of my... Oh, I got a microphone to work here, or a camera to work. Austin. All right. So where you been today? I've just been in my bedroom just recovering from shoulder surgery. I got this little pain pump thing going and... Oh, is that what that is? Yes, it keeps half my body numb, basically. So soon as the medicine runs out on this, then we'll be having a different conversation, I think. This thing, if they offer you one of these things, if you ever have surgery, take it home with you. I don't know what it costs. It does not matter, it does not matter. Don't really care, huh? I don't, because I've had orthoscopic surgery before, and it was much worse than this. Like this was tolerable. I was the next day, I was feeling pretty good. Wow, very nice. So it is the next day, it was yesterday. Wait, no, no. I'm two days out from surgery now. That's the men's talking now. Yesterday was the first day out. I was sharing with Liz that you were in a meeting with us yesterday, and you were lightly medicated. Let's just, let's go ahead. Yeah, my wife is calling me to take more. She's like, go take another one. I like that stuff. Well, Tom, I don't think you really want to get into conversations about how people sound when they're lightly inebriated. No, no. It's like, no, no, I don't. We'll move on from that top. Cast right on by there. I'm pinching in for somebody. What are we talking about today? I guess I'll do my best. Growing your cleaning business, using digital marketing. It's kind of a sighting time. I guess there's a lot of things that are changing in marketing and just technology as a whole. And we might be able to get into AI a little bit. I mean, we can. I had some really cool conversations around this stuff today. So Vlad Stanka is the developer for my website. And we were just talking about how to pass UTM codes from our websites, so to Made Central, to our production management and sales software. I feel really bad that we're not even one minute in and I already have to stop you, Matt. No clue what UTM comes in. I'm gonna explain it here. I'm gonna explain it. So it's just a unique identifier for your marketing sources. And Made Central allows you to capture that on your lead forms. And so we're actually gonna be able to set up our website that all traffic, we can identify where it came from and then pass that directly into Made Central through those codes. We were talking about chatbots today with AI and building tools to teach chatbots about our businesses. Vlad and I were talking about that. There's a whole lot of crazy things going on right now that are gonna make our businesses, you know, I think... You know, the impact, I mean, we've seen how technology has impacted the industry over the last couple of years. A lot of things have changed. I mean, we're just getting started, right? I think so. I mean, just the data component has been big. You know, our companies are running our management processes on more solid foundations of KPIs that matter. I think that was one of the first things that kind of started to happen. And that led us to be able to make bigger investments in our business because we could create predictable outcomes of what's gonna happen. If I put a quarter in, am I gonna get a dollar out or am I gonna get $2 out of that investment? You know, you've talked about predictable outcomes quite a bit, Tom, in terms of what the stock market expects from businesses and how they treat them when they don't create those predictable outcomes. And you know, we had a meeting today. This isn't exactly marketing, but I think it's really cool. We've been working really hard. It made central in terms of cleaning up and normalizing all of the support articles that we have. And there's over 600 of them. And there are chatbots, basically, that will once we're getting close where we can actually run all of that through an AI tool. So rather than asking a question in support and getting a half a dozen articles, you know, presented to you, it will actually take all the information in all of those articles and give you a more specific answer the way that chat GPT does. So like a conversational answer or instead of just links, that's interesting. That's, I think, you know, five years ago, I built a chatbot where you could go through and it would present them like tree branches, like pick it, you know, it was like pick a path, basically. But that's a far cry to what we've gotten to at this point where it's in conversational language versus those kind of like tree branch chatbots that we're kind of used to. So you were talking about your discussion with Vlad and how basically lead source attribution and other pieces of data could be passed. And basically, I guess it's embedded in the URL that's in all of the browsers. So how are you using that? And so made central, we're gonna basically, it's not a form that's custom to made central, we're building a custom form, but we can post what's called posting data to made central or we can put it in the URL and made central can read certain things in the URL when you're creating leads. What it really all comes down to is when somebody, when I'm spending, you know, I'll be forthright. I think we spend about $3,800 a week on AdWords and we're spending that much money on AdWords every week. I wanna see that in made central as well and not just look at it in analytics and other tools. I wanna bring it into my main production software. It's never gonna be 100% accurate because people will see your ads and they'll go do other stuff and then come back 30 days later. So analytics is a little bit more accurate because they keep a little cookie on their computer, a little piece of digital information that tells them that they came back, but that's less and less accurate these days. Most marketing systems are only allowing cookies for like 30 days. It used to be you could track somebody for six months and now most marketing companies are like 30 days, you gotta figure it out in 30 days. So what you're talking about, I guess the fancy term for that is attribution. Yeah, so why do I care? You know, you're gonna spend a lot of money to grow your business. And I think just having a better understanding of what courses are creating value and what it costs to acquire a customer from each channel and really how much you can afford to spend on that. One of the lessons I kind of learned from you two in Foundations was the idea of you can spend gross profits, not net profits to acquire customers because once you've basically hit your break-even point, you can spend whatever your gross profits is, you could spend that on acquiring a customer. You wouldn't wanna spend all of it, but the companies that can spend more will grow faster and understanding that relationship of, if you're getting a customer that's worth $6,000 over the lifetime of a customer, you might not wanna spend the $3,000 in gross profits to acquire them, but you sure as that can spend $250, you know, I hear people get really scared about spending $100 on acquiring a customer. You know, you can spend more than you think if you have the data that tells you you're keeping your customers for a certain period of time and they have a historical value, but even that's not even 100% accurate because a lot of your customer churn happens in the first 90 days. And so even tracking that is becoming really important like by source and by how quickly they're churning by source, by, you know, a lot of different metrics that we're starting to capture and made central and create reporting around that. We're not quite there yet, are we? We're close, we're close. A lot of the marketing obviously is digital marketing and a bigger and bigger part of the digital marketing is paid marketing. And like AdWords, you're just bidding against, you know, key words with your competitors. And the more you know about the lifetime value that you're gonna get out of a lead that comes in through that marketing source, the more accurately you can bid and you don't wanna spend more than what you can have a negative return on your investment if you spend too much. But if you know what your lifetime value is, you can bid more than what your competitors have the stomach to bid and get a lot more leads. And I think I see the bigger companies doing that. I see the companies that are doing this well, that's one of their strategies, the ones that are growing the fastest. Yeah, I think that's fair to say. I mean, I didn't learn this in a vacuum. I've been watching other industries in particular, HVAC. They seem to be a couple years ahead of us in terms of adoption of some of this stuff. Plumbing companies are starting, they're a little bit behind the HVAC and the electricians. But you kind of see some other home services and the amount of ad spend that's going to AdWords and other things versus, I'm not saying SEO doesn't work, it's just not gonna bring you enough business to grow at a rate that you could, that you could achieve a chance. And there's print mediums that I think, direct mail still works, if done well. You can bring digital into that with QR codes now. People do QR codes now. I remember when QR codes were introduced, a dozen years ago, we were all like, what do I do with this thing? This is, and then COVID, we all figured it out. And the iPhone made it easier when you could just point your camera at it and you didn't have to get a separate app and all that. So that's, so you can actually have a unique link for your marketing channels for print medium and other mediums as well and embed those UTMs, those tracking codes, like I described, and those tracking codes can be passed in to other software systems you use. So you're tracking, even in good old-fashioned print medium, you're still using digital tools to make sure you're getting a return on your investment. We were just talking about that today in one of the circles. Somebody is using EDDM and a lot's been a lot, sending out, I feel like this can't be the true number, but I'm pretty sure he said 4,000 a day. 22 cents a piece. He's paying less than that because of the bull. He prints them himself and he's getting great return. When you say printing himself, I mean, that's costing him something. Yeah, but it's pretty cheap. He showed us the printer. I'm sorry if I'm blowing you out of the water here, dude. The printer he uses is like a $1,200 printer. He gets whatever the fancy ink is and the good paper stock. He has a great source for the cheap card stock and yeah, his numbers were... All that stuff's a lot more affordable than it used to be. I bought a... Think about 4,000 a day, though. Yeah. Some human being is feeding those things through that $1,200 printer at some rug. It must be a week. I can't believe that it was 4,000 a day. But it would be $720 a day, roughly. That's not out of the question for some of these larger companies. I mean, my marketing budget is in the 30s now. It's not quite, you know, I have no single channel with that kind of spend, but my AdWords is close to that. So it's possible if he's proven that channel and he's over $2.5 million a year, it's possible. So printing it on like four up card stock that maybe is perforated and they're kind of ripping it apart, but... Nope, eight and a half by 11. Okay. Yeah, no printing anything just... They need to take some... The EDM is really... The postage is really inexpensive on it. And I'll tell you, I bought a printer from my office. It's a... Not for that kind of printer, but to make posters and things like that for communicating with my staff. Because I was sick of spending $40 or $50 a poster to print because we do a lot of contests and fun stuff. And it was like 800 bucks. And I figured it wouldn't take long to get a return on that in terms of doing creative things, doing large format prints and things like that. So we could do 24 by 36 inch, or really as long as we want, it's a roll printer. We could do banners I guess if we wanted to. It's a plotter. Yeah, plotter basically. And the cost of it was $7.99. And that kind of printer a few years ago would be $5,000. So some of this technology and marketing is coming down where you could do some of this in-house. I mean, someone was asking us last week about the badge printers that Tom and I have in our offices. And those are a little pricey, but they last 10 or 15 years. And you could print out digital badges, but you could also use them for marketing pieces in terms of creating gift cards for your customers with unique codes on them and mailing those out. We do a lot of kind of hand marketing too. Like it's not all digital. So like when a customer cancels us, we hand write them a letter and thank them for their business and send a little card with that. We set a ticket to call them in 30 days and we manually, the digital part is that it comes up on our dashboard and tells us to call them, but a human being has to do that. And we're seeing a great return on investment on that. I mean, that's bringing us 10, 12 new, 12 return customers every month. We're bringing back a quarter of our lost customers. So we're close to 900 customers right now. And so we're going to lose some and we just need to put forth that effort to kind of get them back. And that's kind of manual, but the tracking part of it's digital. We're doing some digital parts of that with KEEP too and automating some of the touch points in terms of emails and text messages and things like that. But I still think your phone is a great weapon for forgetting all the people. It seems like it's even more now. People are just so nervous about the phone. They don't wanna pick up the phone. I don't know if that works against us in some ways though when we're trying to call people, but when I get a call and I don't recognize it, I don't pick it up. Do y'all? On my mobile, never. Yeah, I don't know. That's all I get, so no. So one way that we've kind of prefaced that is, is that we have the same number. We set it up that the number that we text from and made central is the number we do outbound sales with. So every single time that we're reaching out to a customer via phone, we've already interacted with them via text message. And if they've replied to it and Twilio is sending out what company we are, it's showing up in their caller ID because of the interaction. So you can do some things to do that. Let's start a question. Do you wanna go through a formula, Tom, for her? Sure. Or the other thing, sometimes we will text them before calling and saying, hey, this is Tom from my cleaning company and we wanna, I'm gonna be calling you in a minute to talk about an awesome offer. So how do you calculate lifetime value? We can, let's do a deep dive on that. First thing you wanna know is what we would call a court. What are the court KPIs? Is what is your monthly recurring churn rate for customers or monthly churn rate for recurring customers? And just to keep it simple, the way you do that is you count the number of recurring homes that you lose in a month and you divide it by the total number of homes that you have. For example, if you, over the course of a month, if you lose five recurring homes and if you have 100 recurring homes on the average over that month, you would take five divided by 100 and that would give you 5%. So 5% is kind of like an industry average. The main central average is like 4%. Interest is a whole, I think it's closer to five. So once you know, and that's an important number. Every house cleaning business should be tracking that know what your churn rate is and when it starts going up, you're having quality problems or something's happening in the economy, something's happening where you're losing more business than normal and you wanna take some action to drive that number back down. That's a red number in the main central world meaning that you wanna make that number go lower. So once you know what your churn rate is on a monthly basis for recurring homes, if you take that number and divide it into one, in this example, if I take one and divide it by 5% or .05, that gives me 20. 20 is the number of months on the average that a recurring customer is gonna be with you. So if you take your monthly churn rate and divide it into one, that gives you the average number of months a recurring customer is gonna be with you. So if I know that 20 months in this example is how long on the average a recurring customer is gonna be with me, the question is, well, how many times do I clean that home in a month on average? Say the average is two. So that would be 40 cleanings on the average and say the average bill rate for your company is $150, that would be $6,000 in revenue over the average lifetime of a customer. But that's really not value, that's revenue because you've got costs associated with that. You've got what they call cost of goods sold or variable costs. And that gets into a metric, another key, a core KPI, which is payroll to revenue. And that's a red number, you wanna keep that low, but let's just say your payroll to revenue is 50%, which means for every dollar you bring in, 50 cents of it is going to cover the cost of the people who cleaned it and the other 50 cents goes to you to cover fixed costs and eventually profit. So if it's 50%, then you would take 50% of the $6,000, giving you $3,000, that's really gross profit on average you would get from a recurring customer. And you could argue that would be the average lifetime value of a recurring customer in that example. And I have a, well, I have it somewhere. I was gonna say I have a spreadsheet that we could share and kind of go through, but maybe we don't have time for that on today, but there's a group. Oh, we've got plenty of time, Matt. We gotta kill, we gotta kill some time here. Of course, stop it. No, we wanna bring useful information for the next half hour. Let's, let me present something really quick and I'll share this screen because I think this is a, this is an example where you're kind of bringing it all together and I've got some tabs open that I'm not making this easy for myself though. So here we go, I found it. So this is growth model based on made central, but I will freely admit that I've made some changes to it a little bit to make it kind of customized the way that I use it. So Tom talked about the bill rate per cleaning. That's definitely really important. And then the cleanings per month per home, mine is lower than two. So, you know, we have more monthlies and things like that. And then the attrition rate, I haven't set it five. We're really not that high. So I'm just assuming like worst case scenario here we're closer to four, but you know, let's, you know, I'm playing with worst case scenario. So if I scroll down on that a little bit, I guess I need to go over to that screen and actually work with it. If I scroll down here on it, it kind of calculates in this spreadsheet that my average lifetime value is 6,105. Now that's at the starting point. If I actually put in what our actual turn is, which is about 4.2, still not where I want it, but it should recalculate that. And then you can see that it goes up quite a bit. And so companies that manage this really well, I have a peer, an industry peer that's at like 1.5%, maybe 1%. And he manages this really well. And so his lifetime value is $20,000. He can spend whatever he wants on marketing to get a customer. I mean, he can, I don't know that if he were really growing aggressively, that he could do that and maintain that turn rate, but you know, he would need to monitor that. And I wouldn't suggest spending 10,000 to gain a customer, but you can see that the value changes with how well you manage your turn and a few other metrics, especially the two other that actually have the most on it is the bill rate for cleaning and then how many cleanings per month. So getting more high frequency cleaning obviously helps this as well. So, and not, you know, not that we totally, we don't wanna take, not wanna take monthlies, but they certainly drive that number down. And they also probably also, you know, this also model is including another number that Tom didn't include, which is also our skip rate, which is atrociously high. That's also driving this number down. So if this was lower like 10% instead of 15, my value of my customer would also increase. So I'm including a few other numbers that Tom didn't mention, but the general idea is the same. You can model this out and really see, you know, what the lifetime value is of your customers and really kind of see where your profitability would be to serve and to gain those customers. So I'm in a unique position right now where with what we're spending, we need to make $250,000 just to break even. But you know, I need to know that, right? Cause we're, you know, we're doing about 290 a month. We don't have a lot of, we don't have a lot of room to spare on that. So I can't just go out and pick a new marketing channel without really thinking about, all right, you know, how, you know, can we afford to lose a little bit of money for a while and grow? Will that channel pay for itself? And you know, where will that be? So this is a tool we use in Made Central. We, we went through this last week when we did the Made Central Live event. If you go back to the other tab, I'm thinking where it says lifetime value. I'm guessing we're talking about gross revenue as opposed to gross profit. This is gross revenue, thank you. So we should probably, you know, make some tweaks to that spreadsheet and call that. Yeah, if you change the payroll to revenue in that spreadsheet, it wouldn't change that particular number. I don't think it would not. It's not tied to that. And this, that is not. So, and I don't even have mine. I don't, I have mine set up as cogs anyway, which includes my credit card processing includes all of my cost of goods sold, payroll taxes and a few other things. So I've, I've, I basically made a couple of tweaks to this to kind of make it more relevant to my company because I have that data. Instead of putting it down here in the operating costs I put it here at the cogs. So Alyssa, thank you for asking the question. That was a softball makes us, it gives us an opportunity to talk about Made Central. Excited to see that you're going to, I'll be going live next week. And, you know, these are some of the fun tools that you can play with. So congratulations, welcome aboard. Yeah, definitely recommend coming to an MCA live. The next one is in August. You know, everyone asks, you know, thinks that, you know, oh, some so and so is doing this, there must be doing something special. I'll tell you the truth. My company was right around like $1.8 million when I, the first time I went to MCA live and then I was inspired by a lot of people, what they were doing. We've doubled our run rate through some of the things we've learned at MCA live. Like some of the tactics that I've learned from Aja in terms of scheduling and feeling more comfortable, like selling to a very full schedule with some of her tactics that she's taught my company and that we now kind of build into the software. That was big. I mean, there were so many little lessons over the last year. Rate adjustments to underpriced homes. Yeah, rate adjustments to underpriced homes, but it's, you feel more confident about spending the money on marketing when you really got your business styled in and you know, to a pretty clear degree what's gonna happen, you know, with some of these metrics and I get it as you get bigger, like it's easier to smooth some of this data out. But in general, the principles hold true no matter how big you are. Tom, did we set that date? I know you and I were talking about it when I was there for MCA live because we were gonna do ARC-C and... No, we know the week. We do the week in August. The week in August. So people can go ahead and block that out, but... I think it's the week of the 20th, right? Yeah, the 21st is a Monday. So it's the week of the 21st of August. And as with a lot of weeks, there's five weekdays in that week. And there's gonna be some type of activity going on at the Made Central slash Castle Keepers headquarters in Charleston, South Carolina. We're doing an MCA live event. We're doing an ARC-C regional meeting. And Liz, you're doing a program. What's the title of your program? I'm doing employee life cycle. Oh, yeah, that's an awesome program. I know that you've done that a few times. And that is well received. Yep, so that's gonna be a good week. I need to make sure and talk with Erin because we never decided if we wanted her to do the front end or the back. Yeah. That's what we're trying to figure out. We'll get to that. You know, that's a good talking about ARC-SI. There's a couple of things coming up too where you can kinda, you're welcome to visit my business and then there's another Made Central user who's also part of the CBF community, cleaning business fundamentals, if I'm getting that right. She's part of that community. And so that is gonna be what? April 27th, Friday, April 27th, the ARC-SI event. 28th. What's that? Friday, April 28th. Friday, April 28th. And then the 27th, we're hosting a, we're calling it a discovery day. Although we're getting pretty close to sold out on that, we've only got two or three more seats. So if you wanted to kind of have a little bit more deep dive into what we're doing at Better Life Mades, instead of just a tour on Friday, you'd probably wanna register for that. We'll drop some links, I'm sure, before this is up. But... That's a good idea, Matt. We can do that. Yep. Yep, we wanna probably put those in the chat somewhere. I can't type, so you guys are gonna be... I'm on it. I'm on it. I'm gonna, I'm working through other people for the next six weeks. I shared before you got on that you suffered from a pickleball accident. Yeah, yeah, well, it's a long, it's a long-term injury that I just aggravated for like the last time that I was sick of putting up with it. So, you know, you hear people talk about, oh, you know, like my shoulder dislocates and I just pop it back in. Well, I've been doing that for a long time, but it's never like, it's never like just like as simple as that. It is a excruciating event every single time that that happens. And you're breaking a little piece of bone in your shoulder every time you do that. So, mine was pretty much just worn down. So, I got a little bit of a rebuild. I'm gonna, I'm rebooted for the next 20 years. I'm gonna stick to, I'm gonna stick to swimming and, you know, I don't wanna say cycling because it's funny, we were, right when I injured the shoulder, I had a friend of mine. He works for Made Central too. He was my training partner for an Ironman and we were on bikes. We didn't even tell the story. He'd seen me crash a bike at about 30 miles an hour. So, somehow I managed to come out of that without much more than some scratches. But, you know, I'm gonna probably take it easy on some of the stuff because I wanna actually be able to function into my 80s and not be too beat up. So, I'm gonna start taking it easy a little bit. Mark, Mark, Matt, swimming isn't gonna hurt you. Yeah, hopefully not. Yeah. I think some of this repetitive injury is from swimming too. So, I'll do some breaststroke and let a less overhand. So, yeah, it's, pickleball was the last aggravator. I was diving for a ball on a hard core. I don't know what I was thinking as I did this move, but I'm like, this was a good decision to go after a ball. I should have just let that ball pass. You know, competitive people, it's hard to reel it in sometimes. And that was a mistake that was very painful. Well, you know, back to AI, this is a weird way around AI, but I read, I read, oh, I can't remember which one of the magazines, Fortune, or one of those, how they're expecting that AI as the more that people use it, the more injuries that they're going to see in people. And the reasoning there was that people are doing a lot of things artificially and they're training their brains that they are much more capable than they are. And they're, they have this idea that they can do a lot more things than they can. That's an interesting take. I could see that. I could see it too. And you saying that just reminded me of it. I was like, oh, maybe that's a version of that then. That might just dive and not be heard. Hopefully we don't have to decide, we can like, you know, do surgery on ourselves and like watch an AI video on how to do it or something like that. But yeah, that's interesting. I think AI, we can circle back to it all day. I mean, I'm really intrigued by the chatbot functionality and the way we can serve our customers with it. I'm gonna, like I said, I'm gonna start feeding a lot of my company's documentation into a chatbot that's gonna be an internal resource for my people initially to train it. Like so when a customer asks a question, like what cleaning solution do you use? It's gonna give them, they'll put that in the chatbot internally in Slack initially and it'll give them an answer. And then once we feel confident that it's pretty well-trained and that it's not, you know, being malicious or doing anything that we don't want it to do, then we will turn it over into a publicly-facing chatbot. I'm a little concerned to do that before some good amount of internal testing though. Well, I mean, what are some of the worst things that could happen, especially if you preface it with, you know, that you're doing some testing? I've seen it do some things that are kind of on the side of racist and kind of on the side of not intentional, but, you know, like almost ignoring that, you know, there are differences in people. It's hard to explain, but there have been a few instances of it doing some things that are less than intended consequences. So I want to make sure that before we put it out on our website publicly, that we've got all that dialed in and we're confident that some of those bugs have been worked out, but it is, it's still kind of stupid. Like it's really smart technology, but it's like a child and it just knows what it's been told. And so if somebody taught it something evil or wrong, it would, you know, put that into its... Yeah, so I don't think that's intentional, but I think that people have proven that it can be a little bit less than ideal sometimes. Have you read anything about that, Tom, of any kind of unintended consequences? Oh, yeah, you know, there's, you know, bad information, there is information that's not, you know, certainly not professional and represents how you want to be presented. Sometimes it gets a little bit argumentative and confrontational, you know, there's a, there's some refinement that, and there's different engines too. I remember reading some things about Bard, which is the Google, the Alphabet AI tool. And actually Microsoft kind of ran into this too, when they were implementing chat to GBT inside of Bing that they were basically being rude to people that were trying to use it. They had to quickly make some adjustments. Yeah, I think that, again, it's not quite 100%, but there's a few tools. So Bard is one, Pascal is another. You're gonna start being able to layer them together here pretty soon with, you know, feeding different engines with different models. I've been playing around with chat to GBT, basically it's about five cents per thousand words that you teach it. So you can teach it about your business, you can teach it about your tone of voice, about your culture, how you talk to people. You're gonna train it to do things your way and like the way that you would want responses to be the tone of voice, the, you know, the level of professionalism. So it's gonna take some training, I think, before it's fully ready to turn loose. But it's gonna change the way that we do business. It's gonna change how we interact with our customers, how we interact with our team members, that's how marketing works. Yeah, I'm thinking a lot of us that aren't selling online now, because we're afraid we won't be able to give someone the right answers or things like that. A chat bot that's been trained on our business and our policies and procedures. That is, that's gonna be closing more deals for us at 24-7, I don't say this to like say that we're right and we're getting, somehow we're getting the online sales right though, because over 35%, almost 40% of our sales are online at this point. And some of those that are counted as online they might have called our office, but made Central sends them a quote that still digital that they, maybe they talk to someone in our office, but then the quote is digital, they click on the link and it opens up a website and they finish the booking later. So that's being counted in that number too. So I'd have to kind of back those out if we wanted to get a true kind of like first touch attribution that they only got a lead quote and then the sale from the system with no human interaction. But it's more than, more than it was a year ago and it was certainly more than it was three years ago. It was probably 10% of our sales in 2019. Now it's very, I'm excited about some of the things we're doing internally, it made Central with, can I share a time about the new customer portal? Go ahead. We're building a customer portal that we're putting a lot of thought into it, humanizing it a lot more. It's gonna do a lot for marketing because any lead that interacts with your website now and made Central will have a customer portal. So you can actually send them an invite link to that portal. You're gonna eventually be able to have them book right from that portal, see their upcoming jobs, interact with that in ways that they haven't been able to prior to now in any one tool. You're gonna be able to place promo codes eventually into it but it's gonna be pretty wild what it can do. It's a lot more beyond that where it's really focusing on the human element, like putting your text forward in it, reminders with the text, pictures and bios and things like that. The ability of the app and to rate service internal to the app. So let's think about this though. This is a couple generations of the app away. So now I'm really talking about in the future here but think about this, if that app eventually becomes instead of a web browser, which the future holds that it will be a web, it will be a native app on a device, when you wanna push a promotion out to a customer, you'll push it out as a notification in the app. You've got the level of opening the app with email and text messaging now. The ability to stay with them right in their app is gonna be huge at the new marketing channel. So that's a couple years, that might be a couple years away Tom, I'm thinking kind of a little bit farther out there. But no, it's gonna be, you know, Search is going to be something different than plugging in a keyword and getting, you know, here's 10 cleaning companies in your area. You know, it's gonna be more customized and more of a direct answer rather than here's just a bunch of pages you can click on. And how we compete in that world is gonna be different. You know, SEO is still gonna be a thing but I believe it's gonna look different. I agree, I think so. I think, you know, I know, you know, if everyone came on here just for a digital marketing chat, I hope we covered what they were hoping to get and there's certainly more. If there's any other questions we can dive in the last 10 minutes, but. Well, you know. I have one more thing that I'd like you to talk about, Matt. You do a really great job of re-marketing or retargeting or whatever. Is it called re-marketing? It's both, I've heard it called both retargeting and marketing. Okay, I know that I see you all over the place, right? I'll be on Facebook and I'll see an ad for Better Life Mates. Can you talk a little bit about that? I know a lot of people are interested in that. Yeah, so basically you're creating different audiences with your different marketing channels like Facebook, for instance. And one of the audiences we create is website visitors. Another audience we might create would be people that have watched one of our videos for at least 10 seconds. So we'll create different content for different things. We have some retargeting that target people very specifically that they filled out a lead form on our website, but they did not finish a booking. So then we'll try and send them like a more specific target, finish your booking. But the idea is that that is not dead. Like just the attribution windows are shorter. Everyone talks about like iOS killed that. No, iOS just shortened the amount of time that they're allowing cookies to be used for marketing purposes. It's 30 days now is typically the window. I'm still seeing the window. What's that? I'm still seeing that. Yeah, so if you go to my website, Facebook will still know if you're, even if you're on an iOS device that you were there. So that's kind of scary. And I do think the devices are listening to us. Like I was talking about something very like a tractor or something like that with somebody that was, he's in my EO group and he owns like a farm as a side thing. I'm like, how would I get tractor ads basically? That's the only, you know, I might have typed something else in, but I swear it's the only thing that was discussed was just a conversation about this guy was buying a tractor for his farm out in, you know, someplace in Missouri. And I started seeing tractor ads. I'm like, yeah, they're definitely listening to us. I mean, it's the trade-off that we have for all this technology is that it is used to market. And it's, you know, it's good and bad, I suppose. I mean, as marketers, we're able to get really granular and really retarget people that have shown interest in what we have. The other thing is you can do is beyond that 30 days, you can have retargeting lists that go on forever, like your email lists or your past customers, all of those can be uploaded into your marketing channels and you should be retargeting them forever because they've already spent money with you. A lot of them have already spent money with you if they were a past customer. I think Olu talks quite a bit about this, about what he's doing with outbound, just, you know, dialing for dollars, but it's the same principle with digital. With retargeting, with using, you know, email automation like Keep and other tools to kind of stay, you know, just front and center in front of your audience. You just need to not forget about you and maybe at the right moment, at the right day, they'll see that. And those are so inexpensive. It's fractions of a penny just to get, you know, a view. So typically like the cost per thousand views for that kind of advertising is maybe a five bucks. It's, you know, for retargeting, it's very inexpensive. So in the five minutes or so that we have left, let's go ahead and talk a little bit about some of the events that we have coming up at the end of the month. And we're gonna share a screen. Those links. And the first thing we have coming up, and this is gonna be Thursday, April 27th, is a discovery day. This is gonna be at your office, Matt. Yeah. This one is gonna be a little bit smaller group, where we're gonna kind of do some case studies on how we've used Made Central to really have some explosive growth. And I don't know, maybe it's not explosive growth, but we're growing 40% a year for the last three years. It's repeatable and it's, you know, much more I'd have to really be committed to spending. Most cleaning companies would be excited to have that. Okay. You know, so we're gonna dive into that. We're gonna look at some of the things that we're doing. Look at, you know, Made Central, but also processes, management, you know, management tools that we're using and some modeling to let us feel confident that the choices we're making are effective. So that's gonna be a deep dive and I think that'll be really effective. It's gonna be especially effective though for someone that's not quite on Made Central because we're gonna talk about a little bit, you know, it'll be probably a little bit geared towards somebody that's exploring Made Central and that's not quite convinced that they're ready for it or it's the right tool for them. So we're looking at a picture here of some very large monitors you have on your wall. Yeah, it's hard to see scale there, but that's 14 feet from end to end of monitors. Oh, wow, those are two 85-inch monitors kind of inspired from the dispatch boards of Tom's office where we've got different views up of job scheduling views, team monitors, sales KPIs. The one with all the employee pictures is not in Made Central. That is another tool called Vibe, which is free. You can create whiteboards and we've used Vibe to kind of create our employee whiteboard, but yeah, mostly. And then we also sometimes have the weather up here and a few other things that are kind of going on. This is sales KPI report. So even since then we're closer to 900 on the customer account. So from when this picture was taken till now and we've driven our cost of goods sold or payroll to revenue, below 39, we're at 38. So I see some improvements we've made even since then. Yeah. And that's just a mock picture from the test environment but kind of shows you can create a lot of density with Made Central with the mapping tools. That's really been big for us with, you know, I know you guys had Debbie on last week and I will say, you know, the solo model allowed us to create a lot more route density than we were able to complete with teams and really increase our productivity and efficiency. And we've raised our average to about 390 per employee per day of what we're building. So again, we're going to talk about all that in St. Louis and we've got a couple of comments to talk about. If you want to know what about Made Central this is that Thursday afternoon from one to five and it's free, it's free to attend but we ask for a $100 deposit because we don't want people signing up and not coming but if you show up we'll give you your $100 back. That's how that works. So if you're serious about going go ahead and sign up make your $100 deposit and we'll give you your $100 when we see you and that's Thursday which brings us into Friday which is the regional event. Yeah. And where is this being held Matt? So there'll be tours in the morning for up to 50 companies. So I will say it's getting down to the wire of how many companies can do the tours. So if you want to come I think there's less than a few spots left. So they're going to split the tours into two groups and do tours of my office and then Stacey Weiland of Green Angel is also going to be touring her office. She's got also a very successful business. She's on Made Central. She's growing fast and she's literally across the street from me. We're like competitors and like we're separated by a four lane road. She's on one side, I'm on the other. So will we be really like walking out the front door of your office, going across the street and going in the front door of her office? We're gonna have somebody with a stop sign walking you guys across the street at the crosswalk. Yeah, it's that close. That's awesome. Crazy, it is crazy. So the cost of this event I guess is $149 if you're an ARC-C member and $299 if you aren't. So if you're on an ARC-C member, first thing you wanna do is sign up, I'm a common member and then attend this at a meaningful discount. And there'll be education from 12 to five, I believe, and then there's gonna be a happy hour from five to seven and I'm sure people will socialize and stick around. And then there's one last event that Sharon Tinberg is hosting at our office too which is gonna be a training day where you can dive into the details of how Sharon uses her technology and her training system to create repeatable systems. So that one should be really useful as well for a lot of companies, for wherever they're at in their business. There's a lot of value in terms of the amount of cost to good soul, the amount of direct labor you can save by embracing some of the techniques that she teaches. So if you're kind of wondering, do we have an opportunity to improve our cleaning procedures to improve our productivity and lower our payroll to revenue? This would be worth attending and it's nine to three on Saturday and registration is open for that as well. And if you're an ARC-C member, it's only $49. Yeah, I see that to be like kind of like a little sleeper deal kind of it's, I mean, even if you don't embrace all the ideas that someone has to share, if you can get one little nugget, $49 is... Oh my gosh, so amazing. Go ahead and drop the link. I've already dropped the link to the main central discovery going on Thursday. I'll drop the link to the regional event on Friday and I will drop the link to Sharon's training event on Saturday. And with that, we're at the top of the hour. We made it, we got through. Matt, thank you. Why don't you go ahead and give yourself another hit off your pump there? You've already... Yeah, yeah, I'm up in the neck here. It's almost, it's down to the last, it's got a little countdown of how much is left. There's just enough to get me to the morning and then I gotta take this thing out and see how I really feel. So that's the scary part. Don't worry, you'll be fine, Matt, you're tough. Yeah, I've done, I've had a little bit of orthopedics before. I'm gonna, hopefully this is the last one for a while. I need to pick sports that are easier on my body. Tom and I have been talking about that. We need to make sure we last a long time and run in marathons and do an Iron Man. That was stuff for when we were a little younger and baby. Oh, you turn me on to a book in terms of, how to be active when you're a hundred. Yeah. You know what the first thing is? Live to be a hundred. Ah, ah, funny, Tom. No, it is, but then there's a lot of other things too. All right, but I have one on one I gotta get to. Okay, well, Matt, thanks so much for stepping in. We'll see you guys next Wednesday, five o'clock Eastern. Bye-bye. Bye.