 Hey, good afternoon everybody time steward here. I am with Matt Ricketts, and this is smart business moves Are you today? Good just watching the stock market go crazy from Friday to today I don't know if anyone else watches that but it's been a wild ride out there it has Everybody thinks that you know the Bullard came out for one of the Fed chairs not the chair One of the governor's came up Friday and said some things that made it sound like interest rates were going to go up and the market tanked and Everybody's convinced themselves that it was just static and interest rates are going to be low forever and the feds are going to be buying securities forever and I'm not so sure It's not good for the market for them to keep buying all these housing You know, you know these housing security bonds that are like these bad securities They're buying them like 40 billion dollars a month. Yeah, that's that's artificially Creating this this this market other thing, you know other thing really the that I have noticed though is Lumber prices are coming back down there. So you look at lumber futures. They're kind of back to Not pre-pandemic levels, but not in the stratosphere. So supply and demand works itself out So, you know, these in fears of inflation are real, but it's going to be tempered by the other part of that though All commodities are falling pretty pretty hard But a lot of that's tied to the dollar because the dollar has gone up. So Up in in regards to our buying power and commodities are declining So those are directly correlated. They when one causes the other But what I'm wondering though is everyone's worried that inflation's, you know, usually usually the other thing happens is the Buying power of the dollar goes down in an inflationary environment. So I don't know the answer to that. That's a strange When everyone's worried about inflation or hyperinflation The the opposite should be typically happening. So we're not economists. We don't have to think too hard on these issues It's fun chatting about stuff that we Know just enough to be dangerous. Yeah. Yeah, that's I mean so but As far as how does that help our businesses? I'm seeing really great trends in my business I had three I netted three new hires the start of this week. So my available labor hours this week went up about 25 hours per week roughly of you know, new hours that I can sell and of you know cleaning hours and That's that's a big improvement. I don't know if you're seeing any numbers like that in your business You know Extra availability that you can sell anything like that. We are we we are starting to Build our work for us back up to the point where You know, I can I can say that we really aren't supply constrained at this point We have the opportunity to add new business which is Something that we couldn't have said said a month ago Yeah, I mean some policies that I'm having you know that I put in place during you know the last few months to kind of constrain demand have been Um not well received by my customers Some of my monthly's don't like the fact that we're charging a skip charge for monthly's if they skip a cleaning Even if we explain to them that it adds 20 minutes extra. They're cleaning next time You know $20 is is just you know the way that we're kind of justifying the extra time that it takes That's not been wildly popular. I can tell you that uh fees and those sort of things haven't But they put a lot more revenue in our in our pocket that like and has we're trying to change some behavior um from from our customer point of view is like You know getting them to understand that that if they want better outcomes for their cleaning That that consistency matters on their end too and keeping their schedule. So, um We're we're actually reducing our skip rates. Even though we've you know had some pushback from that That's helping. Um, you know not having to sell so much Because our skip rates are coming down a little bit. We were almost at like 14.8 percent Do you track that number your skip rate percentage? Oh, absolutely. I mean, it's it's in the software It's it is and so so if you aren't tracking your skip rate, um, you really need to find out like how many percentage of your jobs and how much revenue that that that is Prior to prior to covet mine was around like six or seven percent and I thought that was awful I was like, how do I get this down to like two or three? I wanted to get skip rate down now I would kill to have a five or six or seven percent skip rate I would be I would be dancing in the streets if I could get back down to that level I don't I don't know where do you know where you were before all this we were Traditionally like over the years our skip rate has been a little bit high about 11 percent. Okay Okay So, you know, I I hear people say that 10 11 percent So we had really worked hard on ours and got it down to seven percent and part of that was Prior to covet we had these skip fees and things like that that that the software automatically does so it's uh You know, it's definitely all relative, but I would like to get mine back down to Lower than 10. So we're working that direction. That's important. Um Sales are going well. Are you uh, I'll get your toms off for a moment It's just me so I'll tell you sales are going sales are going in a good direction um Seeing a lot more leads come in And and starting to have the people to sell them to like having the employees to sell them to so That's been a good trend. We talked a little bit about sales today We've been talking a lot about marketing But the topic for the month is sales and marketing and I'm like You know, I'm definitely into the sales data That journey of a customer and and you know, you know from the point they become a lead So you quote them till you turn them into a customer Um, how does that journey work and and how are you tracking it? and you know, there's a lot of times when You don't have enough business. You don't have enough homes to clean. You don't have enough work to keep You know, you're available workforce busy and I think for a lot of us and I've seen this in the coaching we do the first assumption is We need to be doing a better job of advertising. We need to be marketing more We need to be spending more money to fix that problem and Sometimes that's true, but more times than not I found that It's the sales process is really where the opportunity is being missed. You don't need more leads. You need to answer your phone Do something with the leads that you have Yeah, I mean so I mean we have such a dominant marketing position in my marketplace I mean, I probably could be argued to be overspending Because I want I want to be no, I want to be found first I want to you know capture all the leads at least get into my website Be able to market them on facebook and show them a pixel You know, you know an ad based on their activity on my website. I want to be able to do all those things but You're right like if you don't if you don't have a follow-up process for a lead if you contact them one time And you call it good Chances are that's that's a waste of money. I mean I can tell you personally I'll tell you a story Tom. I have I have a relationship with a local dealer where we buy a lot of our like our tweet is from so we have fleet Still even through covet. I saw a floppy um I had a relationship with another company called ewall. They're great. They're out of Wisconsin though And this local guy just kept calling me and he's like matt. I want your business And he must have called me 40 or 50 times and I didn't call him back He emailed and you know, most people would find that annoying. I found it endearing I just wanted to see how many times this guy would would call me before he gave up and he never did once a month without fail He called me so after a couple months of this I was like I called the guy back and his his nickname his bones used to be a pro baseball player for the cardinals So I was like I was like look man I'm like I kind of it was kind of a game to me to see how long you would You would reach out and I and I've kind of you've shown me that you are committed So I can appreciate that like I want to I want to find out a way to do business with you Now I'm I'm a weirdo. I kind of was just kind of tracking it You probably don't like aren't it geared by sales people calling you like that But for me, I was like this guy wants my business like he wants to do business with me I was impressed. Um, I don't know if you ever had that experience. Sometimes most of time we're like god will like stop calling me Right, right, but So you eventually returned his call at that point was he able to like earn your business? Like yeah, I have at least six vehicles from him since then. So yeah, I mean we're doing business and Um bought my personal car from him and I don't you know, I don't haggle with him He always gives me like like look he's like this is the price that I'm going to give you You might be able to find one or two percent if you were to go beat around beat on the door from somebody else This is a fair is a fair price is the way we do it We're not I'm not trying to beat you up on it and it's true Like there's really nothing left there would be nothing left for me to go around trying to Save a dollar here versus just giving him the business I'd gladly pay him an extra 200 bucks if it went directly into his pocket um for just the haggle free experience of The way that he's the way he does business with me. So yeah, man I I recommend, you know, it's lufus toy out of st. Louis if I have any st. Louis listeners on uh, the guy's nickname is bones everyone there will know him and You know, he's he's fantastic. So how do we find bonds? Just go to lufus.com and go to look look at their toyota dealership But my point is though, you know He got my business because he didn't give up and he had some sort of process that reminded him To call me a certain number of times and there may have been a point that the software stopped But this guy I think he went beyond above and beyond what the software told him to do I think he just was like I see a guy that owns 16 cars How do I get this guy's business because he's going to buy a car Three to four cars a year I mean, I'm not a huge buyer of cars, but three to four cars a year He's smart enough to know that like the average person buys a car Once every four years every five years. I don't know what the number is. I'm just guessing um, and maybe it's a little more than that nowadays because of leases and things like that, but um He recognized I can I can eat four or five times a year off this guy at the like if he's growing, you know You know one thing that we forgot to mention when we we started today was something is different Today on smart business moves, but I can't put my finger on it Somebody's missing Yeah, something's just Oh, it's liz liz isn't here today. Yeah anybody here miss liz. Where's liz? I don't know how to use the comments you got liz here. We're out of luck, right? So nobody knows where liz is Yeah, we Liz is liz is in las vegas goofing off Probably that's where all our audience is they're all watching liz live right now doing It's true. They might be watching us liz is in las vegas with a bunch of cleaning business owners She's with her mastermind group. Oh, that's is that that's probably not confident. You think it's comfort No, that's not comfortable. So I think people know they're gonna be on the show for a minute on wednesday and and uh A lot of those folks are so liz has a great mastermind group. I would say I mean You know, I would say it's a level up like for most people the kind of people that you're working with the thinking that goes on in that group Um, she's adding value to people's businesses. So it's it's good stuff Absolutely is you know, it's uh It's accountability, you know, we can talk about you know, you can know a lot of stuff and read a lot of books And kind of figure stuff out. But you know, it's the action. It makes the difference is doing something with it Oh, here's robin. So Robin you're not uh in las vegas. I take it Yeah, the accountability piece is tough though because I mean, I think that's why a lot of us wanted to start our own businesses and like we're a ceo of our own business and We get to do whatever we want and that's good And then it's bad right because He's holding us accountable for our decisions and like doing the things we said we're gonna do So I find a lot of value in that in fact, I mean, that's why I really like working with you on on made central And then, you know, we actually have we you know, we have An accountability system between each other and like, you know, I have goals that I share with you It's weird because I haven't had to do that in a long time But um, you know, it's it's definitely pushing me forward to like You know be the best version of myself that I can be So as much as I like to run the show, it's kind of interesting to be You know in a team role again and having goals that we're all sharing working towards so it's uh You know instead of being a black box and you know every decision you make is just Whatever you decide today, you know, we're documenting it processing it and putting it through filters of like how does this make everybody better It's and that's what these that's what these mastermind groups are really all about so You're in an environment when you're in an environment where at least one other person is pushing you You're gonna do better. I don't care if it's You know A trainer from a you know exercise standpoint or business coach standpoint or Any facet of your life if you got somebody pushing you you're gonna do more than what you would on your own Yeah, in fact, I need that right now. So I had a coach when I was doing Ironman and I signed up for um For doing the new york marathon through uh this so quarter email research foundation, which I'm involved in Um, I got a you know, it's really hard to get a new york spot to qualify for I couldn't qualify for it in my entire life It's like it's like a three-hour marathon or something like that Like I couldn't get a qualifying spot But I can I can raise money for a charity and so I did I'm doing a charity spot this year And that's going to be in november And so I got to start training So I'm going to go back to having a coach again because that really helped me when I was doing the Ironman training Of just being like, you know It's it's software based and the coach mostly interacts with you through the software, but it's like You know job goes green, you know, he can see what you did And you know the only person that it really matters to is you again, but it's funny how having somebody else looking at what you're doing Does change your behavior a little bit. It's it's very funny No, so when it's cold or it's raining or you want to sleep in You can't get away with it because there's somebody going to call you out on it Yeah, five a.m. Five a.m. I you know, uh, I got a new watch for uh Father's Day. It's a new uh training tool and uh, I need to set the alarms for five a.m. Again and start Start running again. I've been hitting the pool, but I hate running and I don't know why I sign up for a marathon, but It's good, you know, it's good for the charity It's really a cool experience to do but I really like the least favorite part of doing an iron man was doing the running Like I'm a really solid bike by slickness. I grew up with, you know, some swimming background. I'm a really pretty strong swimmer Um, you know front third of the pack in both of those sports and then a back third of the pack in the running part of things like so it's uh You know, I'm not that necessarily Looking forward to the action of doing the new marathon It's the experience of being part of this community raising money and doing it So it you know But the coaching part of it the accountability. I totally agree Everyone should consider having a peer group. That's kind of what we're doing. It made central is creating this academy Where we're we're building a lot of that out I think that's going to be an exciting thing that we're that we're doing. We're having a user event in october Um, if you're you know, if you're not on the platform, this is really a cool thing We're going to do is I I haven't don't have it all planned out and mapped out But I want to match users up and create some accountability groups while we're there And um, you know, if you if you're a user on the software and you're watching today, um, you know Help me figure out who that who we should pair people up with and create some accountability groups I think that's going to be a really cool Thing that people can walk away from the conference and have a peer group That uh that they work with because me and tom and we have a couple other people that we master mine with And it's it's incredibly helpful in our in our businesses. It got us through kovid created some sanity yeah, and you know, there's So much in our day that you you know, we just You can't fully execute on everything that you want to execute So you have to pick your battles to begin with And we talk about technology and what a big competitive advantage technology is Um, a lot of times we invest in technology and we don't fully use it Sometimes we don't use it at all And you know part of the accountability from a homemade central perspective would be You know tracking how we're using the platform that we have available to us and executing From within the platform because there's a virtuous circle there if you use the tools that you have to the extent that You know fully utilized up you're buying yourself time You're creating the opportunity to execute all more things on a larger scale It's just getting a job at That's a good. I mean, that's a good point and there's so much data that we could help people like, you know Utilize the software better on that's a great great point. Like, you know, are you using this? Are using your scorecards? Are you using? You know, are you using this feature using that feature because there's stuff That there's stuff in the software that I would guess that maybe only 10 or 20 percent of the users are using Um, and maybe we should look at a couple of those things today. So like one of them might be campaigns um, I can share my screen here in a second and Figure out where I can do that so um Yeah, so from the point of view of uh, you know the sales process we're talking about follow-up and and things like that um You know, we have you know a lot of automated processes in our software that that allow you to create You know tickets and follow-ups We've got a few people that we need to still follow up with but you know Uh, some of this is they've replied to a text, you know, there's a ticket open Um, you know second attempt we need to call but there's there's two levels of of automations within made central one of them is just really simple of How many times are you going to contact this person, right? So if you don't want to set up campaigns at made central You you decide that you're going to contact every lead if your bones you decide you're going to contact them 50 times Or if you're if you're a normal sales person I think I think eight to nine is a reasonable number and that sounds like a lot But that's not all phone calls Some of that might be you're going to just shoot them a text and say hey Are you are you you know still looking for a for a person to clean your house? Some of it might be an email if you have automations, you know It could be many more contacts than this because you don't have to do it But but right off the bat if you don't want to set up automations within made central You don't want to build the campaigns out things like that You could just say I want to contact every person 10 times How long is it going to be between contacts and when does this drop off and then So the difference in these two lines would be Someone that's a lead that you've never contacted and then someone that's a quote that needs follow-up And to close that to close that sales that's the simplest thing that you could do Within made central or with any with any sales process If you if you don't at least define how many times you're going to contact every lead You don't have that defined today Write it down. How many times are you going to contact every lead? How many times are you going to follow up on every quote? I think everyone that's on the show should Everyone that's on the show Should decide that right now if you don't have a number. Do you think so Tom? Like just that's You know, there there was a time and I don't hear this as much, but you know there's a time when You know people wouldn't that would dance with their telephone and you like if you just answered your phone It was a competitive advantage Now more and more of the leads and in actual quotes and even booking jobs is all online now Every, you know On a month, but certainly you look at this like on a quarterly basis It looks like more and more work is starting to to to shift, you know online completely But what do you do with that once you get a lead and are you following up with it? Do you have a systematic process to turn those leads and Into business being right now or if it Wines up going stale and not being able to convert it right now I have some type of drip campaign where you know, at least they're sitting in a newsletter staying in front of them You know if you don't have have processes to do that you leave the money on the table Yeah, I think uh You know that is 100 what what we Have determined to be the number one reason that we are such a strong sales organization is that You know a we we get back to people within one hour of them creating a lead during business hours Like we so you we have standards of contact rates, right? So within one business hour every lead is contacted Okay Um, and then they go through our then they go through our automation process as well So so when a lead comes in it creates a ticket and tells us to call them right So first attempt to call lead we actually don't even call them the first time what we do is we send them a text It says hey, this is katie from from better life maids I just want to know if right now is a good time to contact or if right now was a good time I could finalize your quote and give you a little bit more information And uh, make sure your price is correct. So you're preff. There's a few things that's going on there first off Your first off your your if they if they reply back to you Um, you're making it easier and easier so your stuff doesn't get filtered out through spam filters on The iphone and other things like that. So you're kind of prefacing that The second thing you're doing is you're going to call them and they don't recognize the number they won't answer Right. So that that kind of that kind of helps two things, right? So then they recognize the phone number So then they know they're expecting a call from you. You're respecting their time and you're showing them Hey, you're appreciative of the fact that you don't want to interrupt them with a phone call So then they they kind of respect that and be like and then you know It typically starts a conversation and they might just be like, oh, it's better for me the text right now And so you can have a text conversation. You can't close a sale on a text typically But you can at least keep the conversation moving. Um, you know we actually, um We actually don't do any email automation from leads until uh day three So because when they when they fill out a lead on made central Something automatically went to them anyway. So they've already gotten they've already gotten an email with more information about the service that that happens automatically Every user on made central has that feature So You know your lead function on your website should have something that goes to them automatically Telling them what to expect and that's what our first email goes as is tells them what to expect Is hey, you could get a final quote on made central or on better life maids.com and you could get more information right there Um, if you're not ready to do that though, uh, you can get more You know, we'll call you and give you more details About how everything works and give you better pricing than what's not better but more accurate pricing than what's online Once we have a little bit more details on your home So we try and again we say call here, but typically even the next attempt is a text message again Um, we're kind of really big on just trying to not interrupt them as much And let them choose whether they want to you know reach back out to us Um, we will call them on the third Uh, it'll end up being day four So that'll be the first time we actually pick up the phone and rank them Um, usually the text messaging really works really well And then after that it just kind of goes into email Right like you know telling them more about your service um Another email just something simple Um, you know a lot of our emails are just really simple like hope you're doing great want to check in That's it. You know personalized Um Here's a long-term nurture email Another long-term nurture email with a with a customer that gave us a video referral And then just again, you know, maybe two months late, you know, maybe two months down the line Here we are and just like hey quick question. I don't think I think maybe it's 30 days out I have to add up all the timers and And tell you how long it is but this email here quick question Um does really well for us and this is pretty far down the pipeline So the idea is to have like a standardized process that you're Trying to squeeze as much value as you can out of every prospect that you have Yeah, I think that's exactly right. So I think You know, I talked about first off have like a minimum number of times that you're going to contact them Even better have a have have it structured out on a spreadsheet of this is step one This is step two. This is step three Until you get busy enough if you've only got, you know, three leads a day You're only dealing with that you could do a very manual process. You've got the time I mean, we're dealing with you know, 30 or 40 leads a day Um If we didn't have automation in place, we would go crazy even three leads though if you stack that out over a week That's 21 people that you're in contact with at any one time That might be a little bit more than you can manage even with, you know, just a spreadsheet You know could be challenging but This is fairly I mean This is automated the emails go out automatically and the calls that you're making or the text you're sending the Tasks are being created. So you're really putting them in front of somebody and they know that you need to make that call or text today Yeah, so that dashboard we started on will tell them what they need to what they what's what's up for them in queue to take care of so if you have You know if you have sales people like they they kind of live in that in that dashboard, excuse me in that dashboard and then You have, you know sales kpi is to kind of measure How they're doing in their sales like how many sales they're closing Um, you guys are looking at my sales for the week so far when this pulls up live You'll know as well as me. This is the first time I've looked at this week. So we're already negative three not good. Um I may we may not be as available as I thought so Um, but you know so far for the week we have zero sales Other than one one time. So we need to up our game up Quickly we have some data there that we'd look at so, you know, we look at it a bigger at a bigger view to get a better picture Um, you know scorecards that have gone out Who we have as new customers recurring any customers that we've you know gained or lost and um You know then this is really what's important to me so This is going to tell you Leads that you've gotten so far this week How many of those leads you've gotten a hold of and given a quote to and it's early. So these numbers are a little skewed uh, normally, you know, how many sales recurring and how many sales one time and then uh Really the biggest thing is how many leads turn into recurring and how many turn into one time So for me with the volume of leads that we want I want this total number here to be around 25 Um, but your number is going to be is going to be higher I hear people tell me that that they That they uh close 100 of the jobs that they quote, but if you really look at your funnel There's a couple there's a couple problems with that and we both know what they are Tom But if you look at your funnel and you look at your leads What they're talking about is if they can get an in-home estimate they're going to close at a very high rate However, how many of those people Decided to invite you into their home to do that in-home estimate And then really if you're closing 100 you're probably price wrong anyway, and then how much of that time Are you spending you know traveling and and you know going to those homes? I'm not saying that in-home estimates aren't effective I'm just saying at scale at the size that I am it would be very hard To grow at any significant rate Trying to do in-home estimates I'm just going to pull up maize data And the percentage of leads that you quote a lot of that has to do with the quality of the lead Where that lead came from Yeah And one thing the software doesn't you know what it's doing is it's only talking about people that you actually got on the phone Because the stuff in yellow is stuff that's happening Over the internet So it kind of skews your numbers down a little bit because it's just talking about what your phone your internal sales do Your external sales Automated central your your your quoting and your online booking are going to become for me I mean it's the equivalent of I'm going to pull up may but I'm going to guess that our online sales under normal circumstances if we have full availability Would be very similar to To what my internal people do it's it's very high. What about you? Do you use your online quoting and booking? You know similar numbers to your internal or is it still pretty much? more more shifting to that's being a larger proportion of Lead capture as well as quotes and sales um I think I think there's a consumer preference to being able to go online not having to talk to somebody And and and book a job in an automated way Yeah And only a complete opposite spectrum without robin has a question about when do we decide? You know, how do we decide to do an in-home estimate? um I guess it depends on what your You know service delivery process is, you know, some companies don't even do in-home estimates We currently don't we haven't for a long time I know of some companies that do like as a as a they lead with that and I know other companies that situationally will I can't say that we don't situationally we might but it has to be a high value uh, you know client or prospect that Would uh, it would represent a lot of revenue. Um, yeah Are you mad? Do any? We won't even for commercial in the left because we have a good phone commercial process too Unless they're talking at least three services a week It's kind of what I look at as kind of it probably makes sense to get out there and really get this right Um, you know, so yeah repeat business only um for me Yeah, for me repeat business typically three visits a week or more and we'll send somebody out there to really make sure we have Uh, the relationship started and and that's going to be almost just as important on those high on those high value sales You know if it falls under the category that we call resumersal if it's a property management group something like that We might go meet with them because their needs might be a lot broader than even what they're talking to you we can flip it around in terms of Just giving them a quote if you will to turn it into a sales opportunity to explain The other opportunities and other things that we can do for them Yeah, so I pulled up my main numbers because I know my main numbers are better than my june numbers Uh, so we we had 19 Recurring bookings happen right from our website We never talked to those people before they booked or maybe we did because we actually send them out a quote After we do a phone sale with them and they can click a button I guess from that quote and finish their sale themselves But they self serve the final mile. How about that? They they picked the time they picked they picked the date And they put themselves on the recurring schedule We'll follow up with them and make sure they understand how everything works But yeah, they did they did a little bit of work for us and and you know close the sale And we must have done a good enough job selling ourselves through either reviews or Or other means to get them to go that uh, that final mile there. So um, yeah pretty Pretty solid month with a net gain of 14 customers And then this number here is how much extra weekly revenue we produced by the end of the month So pretty solid month. Um, what is that about $65,000 additional just off the top of my head? Roughly Yeah About that's a lot of you know, that's just uh Like in a month. So on an annual basis 71 Yeah, 71 000 in annual additional revenue just from you know one month So you keep stacking up months like that and you're you're you're doing all right, you know, that's sort of um Our goal is to net 10 customers a month, you know until the end of the year to kind of get back to uh Uh, we won't be at pre-covid levels as far as number of customers But as far as revenue because of the increases in prices and some other things we'll be back to pre-covid revenue levels Based on that net gain of 10 customers a month So Back to uh this so we can kind of see these numbers in action This was pretty low here 16. So we talked a little bit about Um, you know quotes. We had 361 quotes or leads. I'm sorry There's just no way that if I tried to book online estimates and and get to 156 houses And give them prices and that's just over the phone. Who knows how many we did over the internet I'd have to look at our I'd have to look at our uh, uh, you know our internet data To really get that number But there's just no way to get in that many houses in a month I I would have to have a full-time sales team that would be very expensive. So Um, do you kind of agree Tom? Like I just think it would be it's not scalable Like at a certain point to keep doing on to keep doing in-home even though they're very effective um I guess it depends I know some people have built very large businesses on the model of doing in-home estimates I mean you have to be committed to it. You have to make an investment in it I think part of it depends upon what market you're in the the type of service you're offering um, we've been Across the spectrum on this um So I mean Six a day though, maybe six a day of these, you know, so you're kind of capped out at 30 per sales person per week Right. Yeah. So, I mean maybe two sales people could do the lead volume and quote volume. We do two external sales people could um But I only have three. I only have three people working in the back office of my company um, so I would have to make a significant investment in You know in-home sales representatives figure out how to compensate them in a way that that is very much attractive to that kind of employee So it doesn't work for me, but I get your point it works part of it part of it I think really depends upon how you position yourself in the market though because there are there's a segment of the marketplace that Is violently opposed to an in-home estimate. They don't want to be bothered. So It it really depends on your brand and how you've positioned yourself. Yeah, I agree So if you're going to do an home estimate, you need to make sure that you're Your marketing and your your branding and the message that you're putting out into the marketplace Is attracting the people who want that Yeah, that's all true That's great. Um So Just for reference though This is just people we got on the phone. So this 56 number here If we included both of these two numbers 12 and this so another 31 Um Our close rate is right where we want it to be at 25 percent total When you include the online so that's that's about right where I want to be 25 percent based on my um historical data of like what our what our lead to uh sales sales percentage has been historically so Yeah, we're last month was was solid I think that we could have done even better on phone sales had we had More staff so anyone in the chat anybody seeing good trends with that we talked about when we started Um seeing some positive trends with your staffing. I said when we started I think we had three new people start this week. So more availability for us to sell and bring on new customers Yeah, it's up in the chat. Let us know are things loosening up a little bit Are we able to hire people you hired how many people we had three three net three So three made it through training last week and our are we are still with us We're three higher than we were last week and they showed up today and started and you know we're we have 25 or 24 more hours of available labor to sell every week as of now so Um, we netted I think we actually may be hired Four because we might have lost one. We I think we did lose one employee as well. So, um, you know, it's still tough but seeing seeing some uh Some improvement there. So But there's no way we could do what we do with this volume of leads if we did not have a process to run through them and then a process to identify which ones are like the most valuable really too. I mean One thing that we're really focusing on is is really selling more to weekly and bi-weekly customers right now And you know with monthly's even though we may have spots for them Really wait listing them until kind of the end of the week and then following up with them before we confirm Any new monthly sales? I mean that's kind of not Ideal it'd be it'd be a more seamless process to tell them. Yes right away Well, we're finding most of them haven't found anybody else Anyway, so we're really trying to focus on weekly and bi-weekly sales And then You know if if we didn't hit our goals for the week We'll come back and fill out some monthly's and sell to the people that are we basically wait listed And then I guess you know another dimension of this is going back in mining former customers or one-time jobs and I mean, there's there's so many pools of Potential candidates that we have available to us if we have the tools in place to prospect and mine Yeah, that's a good point like every single customer. That's a that's a one-time job For us. There's a report we run Um, basically I think it's just first time in report something like that. I don't know. Is that what it's called? um First time in jobs we run this every day and then we follow up with each one of those those customers by phone Uh, just to make sure everything went great even though they got a survey even though, you know, there's some automation following up with them Um, we check in with all of those first time in jobs Make sure that the job that that went great and then if especially if they haven't signed up for recurring work We definitely try and sell them on that process of Of coming on to recurring service Yeah, and you can build campaigns looking for like former customers and Sort it out by you know job frequency and the amount of you know, business. They've done with you in the past There's a lot of different ways to To to you know, kind of put people in different buckets in terms of you know How much value do you place upon them as being a prospect? Yeah, you can sort out a lot of that stuff under campaigns and made central or any tool really but Yeah, you could look at customer campaigns or job campaigns and really sort out people based on You know, whether or not they have any future jobs all these different frequencies all these different, uh Um all these different, you know, whether they're residential When was their last job how many jobs if they have zero in the future? Especially, um, you you'd want to really look at them if they have no jobs pending basically So yeah, we do a lot of this stuff. Um as well and then Markets them based on on a lot of these factors. Good point So robin is saying he's giving more candidates, but he's focusing on retention to manage demanding growth and You know retention is huge You certainly don't want to get a situation where you know, you've got a lot of turnover and you're having to hire multiple people to fill the same position because a lot of times that's what we find ourselves doing that We've got a stable workforce, but you've got those last several positions that you need to fill and you have to hire You know three five ten people sometimes to fill those last, you know a couple positions So if you can retain the people that you're hiring You can make a lot more money. I guess it's a short story. I agree and I think that those people You know, if you will look at one more little stat here, um But if you look at your employees your long-term employees are more productive They can clean more per hour and they can generate Way more money per hour than somebody you just hired. That's just a fact. So if I go over here Um on this column here and I look at how much revenue per clock hour My employees produce I mean, I have employees producing 65 dollars per clock hour And their productivity is like 150 for residential on paper. That doesn't sound great. Like maybe they're skipping things But their survey response rate is 97 You know, there's I'm sorry. They're their average score of their surveys, you know So we you know do surveys on every cleaning and their response rates 45 percent I mean, they're they're killing it and they're making me, you know, good money. They're making good money for themselves Because we pay we pay a commission type structure So, you know, this employee is making over $50,000 a year 40 something 40,000 a year Because they end up this employee ends up generating over a hundred thousand dollars a year funny By the end of the year not many employees are going to do stuff like that That's going to be a rare person But I told Tom about about this employee before I'm like we need to find out how to find 10 more of her And then we just have a business with 10 employees Because the work that she can do is like the like the work of like 20 employees You know, like if I had 10 of her it'd be like the same as 20 of some other people It just it's phenomenal how how much more productive she is You know, then your worst people especially like the bottom Of your of your employee list as far as productivity and efficiency And some other metrics that you'd want to measure against so robin you're right on man Your long-term employees are worth so much to your company and and having measurements to be able to reward them And that gets into other stuff we've talked about like, you know paying them in a way that rewards productivity is really important paying for performance In some way is really beneficial to keeping your rock stars So this is a part of the theme that we're going to be carrying through the the balance of the month, you know sales and marketing Um, we have a pretty cool guest lined up for for wednesday matt Who are we going to have with us? uh Cory box of drive social media, so um, you know really You know focusing on facebook and instagram strategies that you can put into practice in your business And did this guy is this guy is a killer like he came on at drive social media When they were just a tiny little business. I was one of their first customers And uh, he's helped grow them from 800,000 dollars a year to over 20 million dollars in annual revenue Um, so that's a you know nice little nice little business. I think we'd all like to have that kind of growth, right? uh, Right. Yeah, so uh, so, you know, Cory is not just you know a practitioner in the sense of You know facebook and he's like an analytics guy He's he knows he knows a lot of it because he came in on the business in the early days He was doing everything, but he's really like a business development guy and um, kind of really Really visionary in like his ideas about about growth and relationships and relationship marketing So there may be some other things we get into other than you know, just facebook So really excited about uh about uh, Cory And and you know, there's a lot of people out there that do seo And you know, it's not too hard to find people that will like manage your ad words and and you know, some of those other Uh paperclip activities. It's really hard to find people that even want to do your social media Why is that not because It's not said and forget you have to constantly be reinventing the copy You have to be reinventing the imagery It's tough. I mean even I so I run facebook ads for made central And I'm always in there looking to make sure that our ads aren't going stale that people haven't seen them Too many times and then they just stop being effective Um, you know, maybe you're seeing our ads if you've been to our website because we do Um remarketing where we want to you know, show you some of the cool things we have going on So go to madecentral.com and that way you can see some of our ads and get some of our downloads Uh, but you know the the cool thing is Um that if you do it, right It's about the cheapest way you can drive traffic to your website. I mean, you know You know the the gold standard of of a click on a website is about a dollar a click and you can do it for less with uh I mean really it's it's way more expensive with that than that with ad words nowadays I mean, you'll you'll lucky to be paying ten dollars a click um with ad words so, uh Facebook is really inexpensive if done, right But the part that costs the most money of that is so the clicks are cheap But you've got to invest a lot in creative so people people get that mixed up is like well You know, you know, it's it's it's cheaper in this way, but then you've got to invest all this So probably dollar for dollar Um ad words may be about the same price but you know, um I like facebook everybody's on facebook and um Not everybody but most people are on facebook at some point during the day And you you can catch them at the right moment and re-engage them very easily um On a platform that they're already using Anything else you think that we would uh want to cover today matt. Yeah, let me just go um, let me uh See if I can figure out how to Go to madecentral.com. I just want to show everybody What is coming from made central so we have We have a new tab called academy so Right now there's a few things you can do here So this is going to grow, but if you know, we're going to create a document library for you to have resources things like that Right available to you at, you know, your fingertips We talked about a little bit about community to start with and about, you know, creating, you know, pure groups We really want to create an engaging user group. So if you want to join our facebook group Definitely click here and then add all of our events to your calendar. So um We have a calendar down below here And we're going to put on a few more things here. So the smart business moves is on here to start with Um, I'm going to start committing to doing two webinars a month on thursdays So I've got to just kind of get my cadence down for that with the You know fourth of july holiday coming up I want to make sure I figure out the best place to start those up But uh, you're not going to want to miss those either myself or tom or one of our really smart made central users Is going to be teaching something not necessarily about made central But about maybe the way they're doing something in made central that's helping their business grow It's going to be applicable whether you're using made central or not and we want you to make sure you make all those So make sure you go to made central dot com and subscribe to our calendar So you don't miss any of those webinars. I think that's going to be the the big takeaway is to get on the calendar I will put all those webinars on there for you and you will not want to miss those they're going to be Uh very powerful information well, um Wednesday, we're going to have another not a guest but a regular who's going to be joining us Do the remote I guess is uh, the way that you would say it in the industry Liz is uh, going to be here with her mastermind group and they're going to be dropping in For a little bit and kind of give us an update as to what's happening in las vegas um hopefully They'll be mindful that we're live streaming and they'll Pay me down a little bit. God knows what's really going on out there. Um I I think that's going to be exciting to actually see people getting together again Like how cool is that that we actually are to that point? I I didn't know we'd be this far It's pretty wild like, you know We're gonna all get to go to maybe we'll all be together in vegas in the fall if you feel comfortable I'll be there Um, you know, I know tom you're going to be there. It's made central team will be there Um, I can't wait to to be in person with you all and do a live event. So liz is kicking one off I think that's really cool. I'm excited to see their energy levels of being all together There's something about being in the room together. That's just you know, very powerful that we lost out a little bit on this last year So that's a long time. Yeah Yeah, 14 months we're all kind of itching to get out there and you know get back together well Anything else matt? I think we ought to call it. We don't need to belabor anything else. It's good good show. Good questions We'll see you guys wednesday. I'm excited dude. Cory's gonna be great. You do not learn this that show Yeah, we'll be uh, you know doing this on the same, uh, facebook page that you're uh joining us now or YouTube wherever you might be. We'll be back here Uh, same time wednesday five o'clock eastern. Um, thanks for being with us today. We'll see you wednesday. Bye