 Hey, good afternoon everybody Tom Stewart here. I'm with Liz Trotter. This is smart business moves Yeah, what is today? Today's Wednesday? February 17th. Yeah, I don't have any feelings like it's some weird day that I don't remember Like I did yesterday Anyway, we had to wait until somebody got on the call that told us what it was I don't remember what it was Fat Tuesday Yeah When you search for it, they didn't even show up. So Well, I was looking at this day in history. So it was it was looking on the 17th of 16th of February, which I guess every once in a while that happens to be fat Tuesday Hey, didn't eat So next year fat Tuesday will be some day other than February 16th ISO It'll be February 18th or 16 Year, you never know All right, so are you guys ready to hear more about Client loss. Hey Debbie Susan. Oh, I harassed everybody Monday about not saying hi now everybody's saying hi. Yeah, I like it so much better I like knowing who I I when I'm talking to people. I Feel like I give better information Then when I'm just sort of talking at the screen No, and Tom, I really give less information if it's just you and me Yeah, it's not even not even worth trying is it not at all I I do want to share something really quickly here While you are pulling up because I see you efforting to do something over there In the professional house cleaners group there was a question today and The question was I had this customer that an ex-customer. I had to cancel her Because I fired her because of a bunch of things and I can't remember what all the reasons were Some of you are in that group. So you will know which post I'm talking about and She said that the customer then called her and said hey my new cleaning company can't get my floors as clean as you can Would you mind telling them what you use? And she said what would you all do and at the time that I saw this post They were over three hundred and forty comments, which is a lot of comments. It's only been up for like four hours sorry about my cats move it Olivia and I I Scanned through those getting to the bottom to the top and I only saw two posts where people were saying that they would be willing to Share whatever they do on the floors And I just wanted to point out to everybody that the reason I'm bringing this up and of course my post was the opposite and I wanted to point out to everybody that that's what we're doing here. Yeah We're here on this call every single day I guess not a call this Facebook live every single day because we really care about our industry and We we are here to be able to help you guys with what you want to Do we want you all to be better? We want all of us to be better What I what I put in that post was a high tide raises all boats Meaning that the more we all know the more we all can charge the more respected. We are hey, Brittany The the better it is for all of us and I didn't really see a reason not to share What what we do they share in that group all day long. That's all they do in that group is share their best To tell your former client how new cleaning company should be cleaning her floor Yeah, what are what are her tips? What are the the gala and the that was posting? What are her tips for cleaning floor because she always did such a wonderful job Yeah, anybody suggest, you know, like abrasive cleaner or something that would force a lot of people said, you know Tell her just water tell her it's your grandma's secret. Just ignore her Tell her you use a really strong acid Tell her, you know, we bleep the pneumonia. I mean they they gave tons of of Advice around the idea of Basically the idea of don't be helpful We all know here that you don't put bleach and ammonia together because it creates a poison gas that could be very Deadly so no people people by doing that. Please don't ever do that. So if anybody ever heard that Don't mix any chemicals together Yeah, good Tom, I don't think I ever told you about my mother-in-law doing that and she killed her own parrot Did I tell you that? No Yes, the canary in the coal mine in this case. It was the parrot parrot. Yeah, really really did kill her own parrot Yeah, mustard gas, right? so anyway, I just wanted to point out that That we're here every day. We're helping you for no other reason than We want to We want to help everybody. We really want to help our entire industry We really believe that if we're all running our businesses better spark Then we will all be better off. So just Because at the point is it's not just about Liz and I Helping everybody. It's like everybody here needs to be helping everybody. Yeah, you guys too Right, you're learning a lot of stuff. You have also you have a lot of information already Look how many times you guys have posted stuff. We're like, oh, that's genius. Yes, that's awesome You we all need to be sharing and we all need to be lifting each other up and and doing that and Helping each other our fellow cleaning business owners the the better one of us is the better all of us is Yeah, we were I mean We've got work to do here, but we're just talking the other day about You know this can be running it owning a cleaning business can be a miserable existence sometimes This is a hard hard job and it's a hard industry and for a lot of people it can be Really alienating really you could not feel good about your job And you can feel even like it's even harder and where do you get training? I mean, what an awesome opportunity for this woman? I said, it's an awesome opportunity for you to become the expert in your area in your town your city Yeah, you know what he cleans floors like you do Mary It's it's always an opportunity when someone needs your help It's not gonna be a whole new gig really You know, maybe I'm not cleaning everybody's homes, but I'm you know, you got your own cleaner your Will work with your cleaner to help them meet your Your your your expectations your scope of work My recommendation was that she even say Of course, absolutely. We'd love to help them We also have a wonderful training program that they might like to go through. I mean For for for some fee you basically go and work with them and show them All the things that they need to do to know to clean your home the way that you want it Yeah, I'll teach them sure I'll do a quick phone call and give them some Some information, but if they want more information I can I'm readily available for a fee. I can I'm happy to give them, you know, charge them 65 dollars for An an hour long coaching session if that would be helpful How much you can charge him for your cleaning? What if you could get more for answering the question about how to clean floors? So hey leslie Thanks linda. All right, so I don't think my response is popular Or well, you know The whole idea is to try to help each other help the industry Yes And and really all the stakeholders, you know, it's it's you know, we're You know, most of the people on this call thought all of them on and run their own cleaning businesses But it's also making good jobs with the people that work for you and it's also about You know, honoring the trust that your clients place on is a lot of people put trust on your your your your clean professionals trust you Your or they should, you know, if we're doing what we're supposed to do they do and your clients trust you We need to be trustworthy and we need to take care of all of them and that's really what this is about as well Yep, we got to help each other do that So enough of that for today. Can we talk about that again tomorrow? Maybe Oh, we probably won't need to well, let's see how many posts it gets after today, right? Yeah, we'll see we'll see Were we here yesterday? We were here yesterday, right? Yep. We sure were Tom And did we share yesterday that your market analysis? Workbook was in cleaning business today Say it again Did we share yesterday that your uh market analysis workbook? Is in cleaning business today for a download? Yes, you did Oh for the sake of being redundant, I'll do it again. Um If you go to cleaning business today forward slash you can just type sbm. I'll drop the link here How many there is a time that every day that we have a resource we can't kind of slack on that we've Yeah Well, we've changed our format a little. I mean we weren't spending so much time talking about KPIs either and I think a lot of people are getting a lot of value from KPIs. So That's that's what I'm hearing. So well, if this is helpful, we can talk KPIs for a long time Okay, so uh this link here if you click on the Really a lot of what we call and it is 49 pages long It was Don't hold that against me y'all And you don't have to fill in the whole workbook either y'all that's just um It's made so that you can do multiple you can call multiple companies and you can get Different quote or you can get three different quotes from multiple different companies. So it's just um It's made so that you can you can do a lot with it, but you don't have to All right, we were talking about Yesterday the whole idea of the golly day. We said attrition, right? Did we change that? We did lost rate Yeah well I thought we did so when we got off the the facebook live you changed it again, right? Yeah. Oh, I don't know I think I just copied the wrong slide I'm glad Cindy. I'm glad you're getting um value from from our facebook lives So what's the point we know who What's it really cost us when we lose a recurring client? I guess maybe is is the question that we need to answer Does it really matter if we've got a high loss rate for recurring clients? I mean we had a model Yesterday or maybe the day before yesterday. It's all a blur that shows what um Your revenue can be I have no idea where that model is at the moment. It's in here somewhere So but More left So a big the big thing that you just want to be able to remember Is that a five percent loss rate? Is much it's a much larger number as your company gets bigger So five percent of a hundred is only five clients that you're losing but five percent of a thousand Is 50 clients that you're losing so it gets harder and harder to replace those larger numbers So the percentage can mess us up a little bit because we're thinking that You know, it's five percent. It's always the same. I've always been able to do that But the number is growing as the company grows. It's just one of those Little things that uh, of course when you think about it, of course, it makes sense But not think about it too and just fall into this place where you're thinking I've always had a loss rate of five percent. It's always been fine so So we wanted to let's see how to question chew tongue. Did you see that? Nope, what do we got here? I know there's some free sexual harassment programs now required in california Anybody have any links for this? I didn't even know about it. Leslie great information. Yeah, I had no idea that they were required Uh, no links currently, but I can look around see what I can find out I know quite a few people doing business in california Let me make myself a little note here That's That would be under Like department of labor, maybe I mean Hmm if it's a required program I can't imagine that they're not going to have some right. They're auditing and finding. Yeah, they're going to have something. Yeah yeah Looking at the yearly loss of our current client is key when considering firing someone So you're like me, right? I'm looking at that number, right? When I'm deciding if I want to fire somebody or not absolutely So this was uh, we were we started building this little, uh, spreadsheet here real quickly just to calculate what the lifetime value is All right, so lifetime value is Over the course of the amount of time that you're you keep a client a lot of times We don't know what our average amount of time is so tom make sure you walk us through that from the beginning again Tom's going to show us that which is super easy. You just got to do it So how much money does the average client bring you for the amount of time that they are With your company that's all the lifetime value of the client means is how much money you're going to get out of that one customer There are one client We've talked about this number here This is really kind of the the focus of our discussion Is the average monthly loss rate per recurring home And we've talked about how to calculate that before do we need to do that again? so you guys um if Let us know if you guys need us to redo that again, or If it's fresh enough or you can go and watch it tomorrow If you want us to do it again say yes, we get enough. Yeses We'll do it again. Just go forward from here though. Tom. Just it started the top and run down See everybody wants wants to do that. We're quick, but let's uh, assume we all know how to get that number um Which is basically how many recurring customers you lose in a month divided by all of the recurring customers you have Okay, pretty easy Tom we've got two yeses here Okay, so we're making progress. That's good. That makes me feel good. So whatever this percentage is You take one and divide it by that percentage So if it's at five percent Then you take one divided by five percent or point zero five Yeah, stop it and it gives you 20 Can you put that little formula Tom over Somewhere like in column D. So they know what that is um Yeah, okay. Thanks Cindy So denny and linda you guys I can talk to you guys in group Since you guys are the only ones that said yes, I can talk to you in both in group About this and walk you through a little bit again It's basically one just divided by whatever your loss rate is You think about this five percent Over 20 months you take five percent 20 times. That's a hundred percent, right? If I have a loss rate of 10 percent That number goes down to 10 Have a loss of 20 and that's 10 months. I know a loss of 25 percent The average is going to be just just four months You have a loss rate of four of 25 percent on your current clients. I'm I don't know You're not business right now I'm not saying that Um But I have seen five Five's not unusual to say Okay So if your average recurrent client is going to be with you for 20 months What is the revenue? How much? Money will that customer pay you over That 20 month period And that's a function of the number of months In this case 20 Time the average number of jobs you do in a month in this case We we said two You're going to multiply that times how much revenue do you make on the average per job for for those clients in this case? We said 150 It comes out to be $6,000 So lifetime value of a customer in this company's scenario would be $6,000 It would not be however much you get from them A year it would not be however much you think you get from them It would be this number if you have a customer that you've had for 25 years, let's say or 20 years Let's say yes, you've gotten a lot more from them But that's because when you keep your long-term Clients you keep them for a long time You still have to put them in with all the people that churn the clients that churn in that first year That come go come go come go and so that's why you want to keep keep the $6,000 as your average Because it's going to give you a more realistic number To be thinking about when you're thinking about letting go of somebody because you don't know which ones are going to stay For 20 years and you're going to have to turn through a lot before you get to that one for 20 years so That's why the $6,000 number is so so helpful So it looks like um leslie's got uh 34 56 a year is her is her um average here but And so lifetime value is helpful because if you can increase your lifetime value if you can take it from 20% Down to 10% move that number for us tom Oh, no down. Oh, so like 2.5 Oh Okay, look at there now your average customer is bringing in 12 grand So you are really wanting to keep this customer And you might try a lot harder to keep a customer that is worth $12,000 to you I mean, I would I mean, I I'm trying hard to keep all of them, but I guess the question though is how do we want to Define value one of the things that we want us to be thinking about is How many homes we clean doesn't necessarily define our success How much revenue top line revenue we generate doesn't necessarily Define our success Oftentimes it's a metric that we talk about You know the idea of you know, do you have a million dollar cleaning company meaning million dollar top line? All that's You know awesome But it's everything that happens below that top line that that that has a profound bearing on you know, you making money or not and We wouldn't have spent a month talking about loaded direct payroll to revenue if that didn't matter so If you've got $12,000 average revenue from a recurring client What is your loaded direct payroll to revenue? Maybe it's 45 percent And if it is Then Your gross profit is going to be your lifetime revenue Time oops Times One minus Your loaded direct payroll to revenue because if you remember We've said loaded direct payroll to revenue is a proxy for cost of good sold And we can go back through all that again if we want to but I think that we've probably I think we beat that little puppy up I'm pretty good haven't we? Yeah, we did Boy, that was a terrible term that I just threw out there. I I apologize everybody That's all right. That was not nice Yeah, I Agreed to me information is so important, right? This is this is why we're doing this a lot of times we think We just need to look at a few different numbers. How much money's in the bank Now I know a lot of people that run their company that way. How much money is in the bank today They literally go and look and see okay. I'm good um, but that's being very Reactive What if there's no money in the bank when you go to check? Hey, so instead we're we're looking for ways that you guys can take control of your business So that you know how much money is going to be in the bank because you designed it that way You created The amount of money that you're getting it's not an accident It's not just happening I mean if you're lucky and these numbers happen to be these numbers you can be making a lot of money For the time that these numbers are these numbers But this one's how this is what happens over time If you aren't making it happen you can't be You can't be lucky forever Or the odds of that are pretty slim if it's just happening by accident sooner or later It's going to accidentally start happening in a way that the numbers don't look so good With one, you know, I always got to throw in my little argument for that though, tom so with one argument for that if you are um running your company in a certain way and you're at a certain size and you're your Knowledge in the way that you're running things might be perfectly appropriate at this size The problem comes in a lot of times when you're trying to grow So if you have a small company and you've been lucky But your natural style of running things is the way that it's just going to kind of luckily And up that way as long as you don't make any kind of material growth Or changes then you're probably gonna you could stay lucky Because what happens though more times than not If you don't change that's fine, but the world around you is changing in the large change the You know the economic forces in terms of what the wages need to be and what the market's willing to pay and All of that will change over time in pretty dramatic ways over a long period of time That look at the minimum wage right now not even a long period of time, right So, you know you if everything if the world didn't change then yeah, you can be lucky forever But the world changes how you know How how you know how the business works, you know, yellow pages really isn't a big deal anymore, right? You know, yeah, we're in a classified ad in the newspaper to find people Yeah, very good point Well, technology You know used to be having a dot matrix printer that you could print out a piece of paper and give to somebody with You know an address, you know, this is the home you're cleaning today a magnet board was was was high tech Yeah Yeah, very good point. So I guess unless you are all by yourself Just paying yourself Then maybe you could be okay We're living in some part of the world that People are still, you know, you know internal combustion engine isn't A thing I don't know. I mean if you if you never raise your rates or anything either Then you you know, if you're still charging right now eight bucks an hour the same as you were charging You know 25 years ago. Well, you can probably still be bringing in money, but I guess there won't be any money at the end of the day Okay This isn't an accident if you notice average revenue per job and average jobs per month those are green numbers on the The big shape that we've been talking about for a long time in terms of red numbers and green numbers, right? What I call the kpis, right? The kpis k key performance profit keep Performance profit performance Profit I do I do key profit performance indicators The key key profit indicators, maybe maybe it's just a k maybe Anywho anyway These two these these guys these two green ones here Are the same two green ones that are You know the average bill rate per cleaning and the average cleaning per month per home And these two red guys here in terms of average monthly loss per recurring home and loaded direct payroll to revenue are You know loaded direct payroll to revenue and the we're used attrition here. We'll change that to loss. I think this is a Graphic I'll change that later But these are four of the kpis on the on the big Calculator if you will so we've talked a lot about the activities around the ldpr and What to do to drive that number down But we haven't talked a lot about the different activities We have talked about the activities for average revenue per job. We talked about price increases price adjustments um I don't think that we've talked a lot about the other ones though Yeah, is that where we're going or we're we're we're we're going to be going there We're going to talk about we really haven't talked about You know how we want to go about Minimizing the you know loss rate for recurring homes, right? Yeah, we have it So that's really that's really where we want to go with this There's one thing I want to point out here before we we go away from this So this is all this is implying that on the average a recurring client Is going to generate you six thousand six hundred dollars in gross profit And if you remember gross profit is what's left over after you pay your your your technicians and your other variable costs so if you haven't Paid your fixed expenses that money goes to cover that but ultimately Once you've done all of that that's money in your pocket. That's profit So you need to be be thinking of it that way that that's how you make money so If you got six six hundred dollars for a recurring client that you're basically going to make as gross profit How much would you be willing to pay in advertising and other things in order to get that client? So that you could have more net profit. Yeah It's an interesting question There's a lot of schools of thought on that the one thing I'll tell you that you need to be mindful of and this formula here I got to wait 40 months to get my six six hundred dollars So If I spent a crazy amount of money today on the idea getting recurring client that on the average and some of them Aren't going to last 40 months some of them as Liz said might last You know 10 20 years and they do assuming You know you asked 10 or 20 years, but um others You know Won't even make it, you know past the first or second or third cleaning a larger quantity of them Want and the ones that do wind up sticking for a long long period of time You have to wait a long long period of time to Get this gross profit back And that's a whole another discussion a whole another calculation and You know you need to to to balance this lifetime gross profit against short term immediate term cash flow issues But just don't go crazy and saying well, you know, this is worth 6600 to me. So I can go ahead and I'll spend You know thousands of dollars in marketing to to get you know these incremental increases in recurring clients because you can go broke that way Does that make sense Liz? Yeah, absolutely just public Information public warning announcement Okay, we talked about controllable and uncontrollable yesterday Yep, it was a good one too. So that was a good discussion. I thought Yeah, anything short of you know death or moving to another part of the contrary We want to Act like and treat it like it's controllable, right? Yeah, we want to think that way because we have a we have a better chance Of saving them if we do then if we don't if we're if we're just automatically thinking that they're not then That they're not Controllable and they're not saveable then we really don't even try at all. We don't put any effort in Well, at least I don't put any effort trying to save the dead guy ever not even one time Not even one minute same thing if they're moving out of my service area. I don't anything actually We used to continue sending them newsletters um Just with the idea unless they asked us to stop Um with the idea that if they ever moved back if they had relatives in the area or you know, blah, blah, blah but we didn't Other than that we didn't do anything to try and save them um And so I guess that's The foreclosure one. I think that was sarah that brought that up yesterday She had the lost job. Look sarah had the lost job. I can't remember who had foreclosure but somebody had foreclosure and We we kind of went back and forth on that and controllable uncontrollable And I don't know I might treat them as controllable just because I'm going to work harder to To get them back even if their house was foreclosed from they're gonna live somewhere So what if when they move into an apartment they need to have a move-in claim? All right. Let's have it be me so What do we do to? Minimize the monthly loss rate per recurring home What are what are the extra steps? What do we need to do as a business to to to do that? So what what do you guys do you guys do a lot of stuff? um recently we just um We had we did a challenge where people were listing 20 things that they do in their business that Stands out right that makes a difference all of those things are some of the things that we do to Increase our retention to keep from losing clients. So an example is Actually, I was going to hope that somebody else would give us some examples anybody got an example there of what you do Samantha's I know she's got an example Got a lot of examples. Yeah Hey, Sam Throw throw out some examples y'all and I know Leslie has a million things that she does she holds on to her clients for a long time too I know So what what are some of the things so I'll throw out some stuff while you guys are thinking or get you on the right track here um You might have a the scorecard You must know of what like you might send out scorecards so that your customers feel like they're being listened to And they're able to tell you anything that's bothering them. Yes, Sam Things that you do to hold on to them to reduce the loss right now I don't let her and she'll just keep on the door Yeah, so um scorecards. You might do quality surveys on quality driven Your program might do it. You might send them out on your own Yeah, yeah quality cleaning absolutely That might be something that you do. Yeah I would clean good. Yeah Yeah What else what else do y'all do how about Some some more things that I know that most of you do Yeah, okay some personal calls leave behind cards christmas gifts Yes, how about reminder? um reminder emails reminding people when we're going to come out Some um greeting cards. Yep We might um have um text reminders in the morning. Yeah, good swag tongue Um Give away disinfectant hand sanitizers. I'm gonna include that in the swag By giving them things how about Specials like Maybe you give them a monthly special Where that they can't get somewhere else. I'm very flexible with my clients, which has helped me Flexibilities awesome. That's a great one Helps me retain clients if a client wants every other wednesday at 11 I'll let them know we're probably not a good fit life happens and I don't run my business that way It's worked well for the last 18 years. Yeah I like flexibility tom. Let's get that in there It's being flexible is definitely something that people do Um, how you manage your damaged items. Is that what you mean by that glenda? Um, don't damage items. Maybe that's yeah, well less damage is definitely Going to um be great. I'm not sure exactly how you How you manage less damage, but I'd love to hear about that more I would I would since we have damage um Yeah being personable good customer service or maybe excellent customer service Yeah, same cards. Yep greeting cards anniversary's death weddings, baby sick. Yes. Absolutely sympathy new births. Yep Uh tom you should put cards in there. They they want those in there. So greeting cards I'm calling for a quality check and to build rapport. I'm yeah, absolutely phone calls that's something that a lot of people don't do anymore y'all and um when It's it's similar to Yeah, we don't make phone calls. So it's easy to think That nobody wants to hear from you. They don't want a phone call from you, but How do you feel when you go to the doctor and you have something and then the next day they call you to check on you To see how you are. It's like wow They really They do care they called me Susan you like phone calls. You are in the minority for sure these days So phone calls is a really great thing to do Okay, trying to make it smaller tom I just ran a contest on my facebook page free cleaning for a year sounded awesome details were Two hours per month for the winner got me 147 new subscribers for my newsletter. All right, so Tell me how that helped you to keep Your people and to keep from losing anybody Cindy was it like very engaging? So that your current customers were like, oh, this is fun and they could refer Their friends to you. How did it help you keep clients? I love to hear more about that Uh, I guess you're a time sore. Yeah, you may be Aren't we all right the the phone call thing? I never liked phone calls I'm so happy when everybody started liking texting you know, we're talking about reducing damage and We don't have to let that happen. I mean there's things it's just like Same thing with safety, right That you know, it's a matter you need to measure it. You need to create accountability. You need to train To you know, the proper, you know cleaning methods techniques products or to minimize damage You need to set the expectation um You get it's just like accidents and people getting hurt at work, you know, we we can Control that I can't say they can 100% eliminate it. But I guess I'm thinking I don't know how to eliminate it How to keep it from happening? So after doing all of the stuff, it's in my mind You are still going to get some damage. You're still going to get some accidents. It is going to happen it's part of the business but um, you're right tom it Absolutely, there are lots of things to do to reduce it which yeah, it's probably exactly what it's a dangerous Mindset though when you go, well these things happen It's kind of like losing clients and is it controllable is uncontrollable once you start going down that path Oh, well, you know these things happen Then before you know it you're giving everybody the license to let it happen more than it needs to Yeah, uh, I I guess that's true, especially if you're It's no different than the mentality with a lost customer That's what I said. I I guess that's true, especially if you're passing on that message to people You know every every The national safety council will tell you that every accident is preventable In reality, that's not true Occasionally the airplane will fall out of the sky and land on you and there's Nothing that you could have reasonably done about it yeah But to go through if you if you if you approach from the standpoint of well Just stuff happens and it's nothing you can do about it Then stuff will happen a whole lot more than what it needs to Agreed I totally agree about with that Who was that that said that let me see I can't even say see Uh, oh it's glenda. So glenda. I'm assuming that's what you meant. So yes good good addition here Uh, I had something else about damage too that I was thinking of oh just how you manage the damage So if you do have damage in your home, how do you manage it? Do you make it easy on the customers or is it hard for them? Do they have to go find the thing? Do they have to give you a receipt? Do they you know, what what is it? How do you manage it manage manage it in a way that makes it The best for the for the client In a in a broader sense managing I hate to do this. We call them non-conforming issues Well, it's a broader content. It could be it could be broken item. It could be You know breakdown and we didn't clean something right. It could have been a scheduling issue It could have been a billing issue customer. So it could have been anything that created a problem an aggravation a disappointment On the on the client side, how do you manage those things? We didn't meet their expectations. I guess is Said said simply Yeah Which kind of gets us back to the definition of quality where you know, it's basically just you know Setting expectations and creating the perception on the part of your client that their expectations are, you know being met Is is the surf call definition of quality? What are we doing to to make that happen? This was something I dug up that might be Interesting might be useful I don't know if I meant to do that or not um Let's see debbie. I make I have my staff make sure to call the pets by their names and show them attention clients love how Love when you see when they see how special their pets are. That's a great one. We do the same thing debbie. I love that You're right. That that makes clients not want to leave you Same thing with their kids, right? I mean don't get too close to their kids, obviously But they want you they want to see that you care about your kids too Um glenda. I personally purchased it. Oh for damage. I used to make the employees pay for it But now I just pay for it out of pocket. I don't make the client client get inconvenienced since they didn't damage it Yeah, that's great. Whatever you can do to make it as easy on the client as possible Makes good sense. I know a company one time that they allowed their feelings to get Hied up in it. So something would get damaged And then they would force the clients to give them the damage thing and they would give them the new one And they would say hey, that's what i'm doing. I'm buying your old one, which In reality, yes, that is what you're doing, right? You're giving i'm giving you a hundred dollars for that broken lamp I'll take the broken lamp. Here's your brand new lamp and I've made you whole But still it's frustrating for the customer Sometimes they want to keep the other thing whatever it is even though it's chipped or it's broken They see it as an opportunity to now have two and the broken one is not that bad. They'll fix it. They'll repair it And so sometimes we can get we can sort of shoot ourselves in the foot because we get tied up in this Yeah, but that's not fair thing Which is what happened today in that thread that I was talking about earlier today, right people were Tied up in this idea, but that's not fair But fairness isn't going to make you money So The the client's version of fair is different than your version of fair That's a hard one. You know the flip side of it. I've got a lot of uh brick-a-brack and ornaments and things on shelves around my house that were broken items in customers homes over the years that were repaired If they don't want the stuff if they're not holding on to it, and they don't feel like it's a bummer that I'm doing that Or if they want to keep it that at least we're going to have a discussion It's like well, what would be what would be a fair financial compensation to compensate you for The insurance terms called diminishing the value Okay, it used to be worth $500 when it was in perfect condition. It's not perfect condition We're going to get it fixed that's going to cost, you know 100 dollars and maybe at that point it's only going to be worth $300 so You know you lost 200 in value and another hundred to fix it So I'll give you 300 dollars as opposed to 500 dollars and you get to keep it I mean those are the things that's the way insurance company would do it And we all love insurance companies. We want to stay with insurance companies really strongly We're like, yes, I love it when my insurance company I feel like they jacked me around and I want to stay with them. Anyway What I'm saying is do you want this broken thing whatever this broken thing is Do you want it enough that you're willing to give up that 6600 dollars in gross profit? If you do you like it that much All right Take it Insurance you want it or negotiate with the customer go ahead But customers really like ease they really like it when you make them feel like they're special That they are one of your favorite customers that they want to that you want them as much as they want you Ideally they would be happier if you wanted them more than they want you And that you showed that to them and you made them feel that way Am I saying that you have to Give the customers all the broken stuff? No, absolutely not. I'm saying it's a way It's one of the things that you can do while we've been talking about kpi's We're talking about all the different things to do you've heard us say many many times You don't have to do all of these things There is a laundry list of things that you can do just pick some Just just do the ones that you can do Do it do what you can do to drive those red numbers down or to drive the green numbers up Whatever it is that you can if what you're doing Isn't moving those numbers in the right direction Whatever direction you're trying to go then do something else. That's that's what the list is for So all of these ideas I don't see an idea on here that isn't a good idea They can absolutely work. Do you have to do them off? Of course not. Absolutely not But you could What you got here tom So really there's a couple of things going on here You know a lot of the things that we're talking about are things that we should be doing on a perpetual basis to create More value In the minds of our customers to be more sticky to have our customers being more more loyal to us And see more value in what we're doing. So if they run into one of those situations where they're having to contemplate Making adjustment to their budget for instance that they're going to be making some adjustment somewhere else other than getting rid of Rid of our cleaning service The other dimension is we need to be measuring the level of satisfaction with each and every one of our clients And that's where we're Measuring you what you mentioned scorecards. We want to be you know doing quality Surveys we want to be tracking those surveys to see, you know Hey, are we getting the feedback and if we are is it good and if it's changing from what it used to be Is it you know getting better or is it getting worse? And if it's getting worse, you know, that's a leading indicator Other behaviors. Are they skipping jobs for instance? And I mean there's behaviors that they do both good and bad if they're referring, you know, their neighbors and friends That's a good indicator So it's it's like you you want to be measuring the health if you will of your clients and be looking for the ones who are falling over into the Into the unhealthy stage and behaving unhealthy skips bad scorecards things of that nature Even worse no scorecard worse than a bad scorecard is no scorecard because you have no You have no opportunity with no scorecard. I mean you do have an opportunity Obviously, you always have an opportunity, but you have a less of an opportunity But there's some people who just flat out don't want to be bothered by that You know I don't do surveys and it doesn't necessarily mean that they aren't happy They might be a client for 20 years and just not give you a surrogate if you allow that to happen Absolutely and all of these things Again, you can do or not do you don't even have to do scorecards You can get scorecards from everyone. You can get them from no one or anywhere in between This is a working question. How often do you recommend sending out scorecards? Our you know standard operating procedure is to send out a scorecard after every job Ours too. I never want to miss an opportunity to get feedback Yeah I I like to send them out every time because you never know when The time is when there's the thing That bothers the customer that they would have told you if they had the avenue to tell you Because maybe they have been fine 20 cleanings in a row and on this 21st cleaning What the heck but it's too hard It's just I don't want to deal with it. It's a hassle. So scorecards Sending them out on a regular basis and um getting responses from people on a regular basis makes it easy On the the more they do it the easier it is for them Then it's easier for them to give What they might consider negative feedback because you I'm sure everybody here knows Not everybody likes to give negative feedback. It's not easy for a lot of people Some of you on this call. No, you don't like conflict You'll be upset about something and you won't complain your customers are no different Have you ever been to? A fast food place and they give you your food and the fries are cold Do you go back in and tell them? Sometimes maybe sometimes no Right, but if they made it easy every single time fries are cold Fries are stone cold today Right if they sent me a little survey after every time I got my food at Jack in the box I would love it if I didn't wasn't in the mood to fill it out I wouldn't and if I was I'd tell them fries are cold or susie at the window was so amazing so When you get the scorecard Back or even if you don't you send them out and and and was i've seen you do this and I mean you're I mean as far as i'm concerned You invented a lot of these concepts at least in the house cleaning industry That you set the expectation with your clients don't you know that you would Get a scorecard back on some regular basis not necessarily every one, but if they don't Meet some minimal expectation. What happens? quarterly so now Recently over the last I would say maybe six months. We have not been rigorous with this because of COVID We know that people are just tired and burnt out and Feeling really put upon so we haven't been doing this in the past. We've always done quarterly You had to respond quarterly if you didn't respond you'd get a call If you didn't respond to the call Then we would tell you that we're going to cancel your service and we give everybody a warning We've canceled two we we dropped two customers now I'm saying that right here in this conversation of reducing the monthly loss rate, right? So the reason why I would choose to to drop customers that don't give us feedback is If I drop them then for something that they didn't do I think it serves me better Then if I drop them because it's summed up somewhere down the road They're dropping me because of something I didn't do because they're not happy with our service So usually obviously People will straighten up and even the people that don't the two that we ended up canceling that did not want to give A scorecard even they were like, yeah, this is too hard for me. I traveled too much. It's just blah blah blah We've had other people they didn't want to but they had a reason for whatever that we would work with Like not in town, you know vacations that kind of stuff. Um, but yeah, we we for us it was mandatory Cindy go ahead Tom wants to know about do we mail them out? We we send them out emails. I think that's pretty much the the most uh Common way or text Um quality driven does both. I think they do email and text Yeah text email and occasionally a phone call if you haven't heard from somebody in a while, you know, that's that's legit, too Um putting a us postal service with a stamp on it. Um I don't know. I think personally. I think there's just easier easier ways to to to get that feedback Um The reason why it went to email I believe is or at least one of the reasons why everybody now does email or text Is because it it was hard. There was friction With the card the customer had to keep track of it for two weeks and they had to remember to put it out there Go ahead Tom. I just had a flashback though There was a time a long time ago that we had put cards that yeah, they were like U. S postage paid I think was what it was So it didn't cost us anything unless they dropped it in the mail and then we paid something to get it back Oh, and that was how That was how we we did our our quality scores, but that was a long time ago Um technology that's it was kind of like what we were talking about earlier We don't have to change but the world around us does yeah, it's it's it's a little bit different now Susan's got a question. This is this is in Sorry, we are top of the hour and these are all good questions here Cindy also would like to see a scorecard. So can we maybe take a screenshot of this? We'll start up tomorrow. Susan Cindy with this information Sorry, yes, we can show you a scorecard Cindy and um, yeah, susan Sorry, we'll talk about adding the information to the qts email. Yeah, we'll pick we'll pick right up on this tomorrow Yeah, we'll be here five o'clock east or take care. We'll uh wrap this uh whole topic up Tomorrow and we'll be moving on to another kppi on monday And think about more things that you do because you do a lot more than just this list Surface guys, we got work to do here tomorrow. Okay. We'll see you tomorrow