 Very good afternoon, everybody. Tom Stewart here. I'm with Liz Trotter. Our guest today is Paul Fassauer. And this is Smart Business Modes. And Liz is driving. Uh-oh. I'm driving. It's OK. I'm driving. Look, I've got my headset and hands free. We know. I probably should see them on the wheelbar. Paul, how are you today? Doing good in a lot of meetings today. You have. So this is a great way to wrap up the day, hopefully. Or you still have work after this. It's only two my time. I might do something afterwards. Hey, Denny. Hi, Denny. Yeah, so Tom, it's only two o'clock. It's a fall sign. We should probably, we've got one of the people that is out and about all the time talking about his business. And yeah. Nope. People don't really know a lot about Paul. Maybe give a first rundown about where he's from, what he does, who he is. Paul, we'll let you run with that. You can go wherever you want to. Just introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about you. You know, life back when you had a real job, how you got into this business, and your experiences since then. OK, so I started out in the restaurant business and did that for about four years when I was young. And went into the furniture business after that, started out in the warehouse. And I had the desire to become a salesperson, because I saw what they were doing. I saw them talking to people, and they would get them to buy something. And they'd make a bunch of money. In my mind, it was a lot of money. What were they selling? Furniture. OK. So I was watching them do it for a couple of years, and then I asked to move into that. And they had tried that before with warehouse people, and it never did work out very well. But I decided I was going to try it anyway. I'm not a super, super people person, but I did what I had to do to learn what I needed to, to start selling furniture. And it was straight commission, so I quickly learned what it's like to not make any money when you're not producing anything. And so that's where I got comfortable with that idea. And I was also going to college as well, part time. It's a certain point. I decided to slow down a little bit on work. And so I got a job at a janitor company, and my job was to just hire people. And that was my only job. And my job was to hire two people a week for probably the worst job out there, part time in the evening at minimum wage. Minimum wage was $7 an hour at the time. And so it was a very difficult job. And I would talk to the owner every day, and I started to realize I liked the owner's job better. I thought my job was probably the hardest job in the company. That's what I felt like. And I was like, I would rather just do what he's doing, because I always thought, no, I'll never be the owner of a company. I wouldn't be able to handle that stress. But anyway, that's where I started to get this mind shift that, oh, maybe I can do the same thing. So while I was there, within a year, I was credited for fixing their hiring problem. And it's because whenever I was sitting there waiting for people to show up, I was reading the manual on hiring. It was a franchise. And it had all the answers right there, and they were not doing any of them. So I decided to implement some of the answers that were sitting right there. And it transformed the whole thing. And I was able to replace myself with somebody at actually a much lower wage than what I was making. So that's what happened there. So they had a manual that had a procedure in it that actually worked if anybody bothered to read it and do something with it. Yeah, and it wasn't, yeah. The answers were all right there in a manual. And it was a franchise. The franchise had all the answers, right? There was some successful franchises. That one was a little smaller. And so I took what I read there and I implemented it into their system. And I think that's also when the owner of the company said, you know, you could own your own company. That's when the light started to come on a little bit with that. So I decided to start a house cleaning business. Probably the last month I was there. And that was in 2001. And we named it Dirt Busters House Cleaning. It's the same one that we have now, Phoenix Area. And grew it to about half a million, probably within about five years. So I wasn't one of the fast, like didn't grow it super fast, but I was satisfied with it at half a million. The business model that I had, I didn't really want to grow it past that because it already felt like a lot of chaos. So I stayed at that 500,000 annual for until about three, I think it was three and a half years ago. Yeah, about three and a half years ago. And minimum wage came along. Minimum wage hike came along. A higher minimum wage. Yeah. And I was like, okay, well, I'm at half a million. When this happens, the business model is not gonna work very well anymore. Our technicians were already not very satisfied with the job as it was. And we were gonna have to deal with all kinds of issues. Things were already costing too much for the company as it was. So it was gonna cause a big problem. So I went looking for answers to that. And I went to an AR-CSI meeting looking for that and I found it with a CBF. So the CBF model actually fixed that whole issue. Debbie Sardone. Debbie Sardone, yeah. So I watched all that stuff for about three weeks and I was like, I implemented it. It took me a year to take our company from what the model that it was to the full model. So it wasn't just CBF. So it was CBF was the model that we're using. We also automated some things. We also simplified a lot of things that were creating chaos all at the same time. So everybody was angry for the whole year. The employees were mad, all these changes. Customers were mad, all these changes. But we got through the year. We weren't trying to grow at all but we ended up growing like 5% that year. So I mean, it wasn't terrible. We probably lost 30% of our clients through all that because they just didn't like all the changes that we made. And what year was that? I was actually trying to figure out what year that was. And I think it was, I think it was three years ago. Okay, not that long ago. Yeah, I was trying to find the exact date. So anyway, I spent a year fixing the business model and then I was like, okay, now I have an advantage over all of our competitors. Minimum wage is no longer a problem. So what did you do to address the minimum wage issue? I mean, you automated some things, changed some procedures. Did you increase your bill rate to deal with that or did you just become more efficient and more productive? Yeah, we increased our bill rate. We also became more productive which in turn allowed us to increase wages. And that's all part of that CBF model. So that was a huge help, gave us a big advantage over our competition. So that was after a year, it was all implemented. It was January of the next year. I wish I knew what year it was. I think it was probably three years ago. I said, so how is it guys? How is it running the company now? They were actually afraid for their jobs. They were like, this is so easy. I don't even know if you really need us that much. I mean, they were really nervous. And I'm like, no, that's not the point here. It's like, if it's that simple and that easy, why don't we, let's start growing it. That's how that happened. And so I, from there, obviously kept going with the model but also had to figure out some marketing stuff. So I think that was the next issue is like, we've got to bring in more leads. We've got to make more sales. We've got to fix our sales processes, all that. And so once that, once we got those things worked out, it was pretty easy to scale up to a million. I say easy, it was hard yet, it just kind of happened pretty quick. I think it took us from January to about, I think it was August or maybe it was September, we were going to be doing about 78,000 in a month. So we were scaling pretty well, pretty fast. And should I, do you guys have any questions or should I just keep going? No, you're good. If anybody wants to ask Paul questions, go ahead and hit us up in chat. But this is good, keep on going. So I should probably mention some other things about what I did with marketing. I don't want to take credit for stuff because a lot of the stuff that's happened to me has just been all the people that I've surrounded myself with. So for marketing, I hired a really good SEO AdWords person, which is Paul Dumas. And then I also took classes with Jonathan Potatnash. I don't know if you know who that is. Oh yeah. But he's got lots of classes and lots of marketing classes. And that helped us get to that next threshold, which is the million run rate. So when we hit that in about September, we were about ready to, I started to feel like I was becoming an office manager. I felt like I was getting sucked back into the company. And I had gone at that half a million rate for like 10 years without doing the day to day. And it started to feel like I was getting sucked into the day to day at about that size. So I decided to hire somebody that can, kind of at the next level, kind of an executive level person, way before the company can afford it. So I just decided to do that. You were making an investment. You knew where you were going and so it was an investment. And I found somebody within about a week and a half after looking for somebody and I put a salary in that the company was just outrageous for the company to try to do it. But we did it anyway. Found her, name is Spring. She came in and I told her what the priority was. I was like, you know, she basically knew the company couldn't afford to hire her. I was like, we need revenues, revenues, revenues. And so she went right to it. So she knew that she needed to generate more revenue to pay her salary basically. Yeah, so she focused. Well, she asked me what are the focuses and I said, obviously we need revenue, right? So she figured out how to make a sale and how to close the sales. And she basically just answered the phone as much as possible. And she also asked, what's the other priority? And I said, one-on-ones with our technicians. I don't know that we've been, we haven't been paying enough attention to them. We need to see what's going on with them, you know? And that's how it all started out. That's to find out what's happening on the operational side. But she was also building the revenue. At the time you hired Spring, you were north of a million, but somewhere. Well, we were running it almost a million. Okay. Thanks, Matt. And then by the end of the first full month that she was there, we were close to, we did a close to, actually we did over 100,000 that month. Okay. Because we had the leads coming in for like a much larger company. We just didn't have a sales person that was a good sales person in there. She knew how to sell, so. So when you hired her, what did your overall leadership team look like? You were still involved in the business and you had Spring. Did you have other people working in the office? Yeah, so when I was running it at the 500 annual rate, I had two, basically two office staff that were sharing everything. That's what it was. I think at some point when we grew a little bit bigger, we were like, maybe we should split the duties up a little bit, but I think it kind of naturally, somebody ended up, Maria ended up doing more of the schedule and Debra ended up doing more of the sales. So I'm gonna give names just to. So, and Debra did a lot of the repetitive things that needed to happen and Maria did more of the day-to-day. Maria was probably kind of acting as an operations manager. And I think Debra was more on the front end. Now that I think about it a little bit more. And so I had those two in place when Spring came in and came over them. So they were working for Spring when you hired her. But Spring was like primary like answering the phone and she was like doing your estimates and your sales? Well, she knew that we needed sales. So she was also kind of getting to know the company at the same time. This is the first month, right? For the first month, she was getting to know the company but she knew that we needed sales. We needed revenue. The company when it was at that size was running just fine. So there wasn't, she didn't have to go in and fix a bunch of stuff. It was running pretty well at that point. Did you have a final, Paul? General manager. General manager. I missed that. Okay. So did she have like P and L responsibility? Did she know what your like costs and profit was on a month-to-month basis? Yeah, not only to a certain amount because I've been taking care of that part of it. But yes, I mean, she's always, she was always very concerned about what things cost but she was wearing a lot of hats and that was just one additional hat that she didn't need to wear because I would just automatically staying on top of it. I found out later that, hey, Paul, you should probably not be the one that's doing that but that's just one of those things that I just recently am starting to hand off. So it just naturally is one of those things that I watch is the money. I don't know. I'm thinking that watching the money is kind of a really important piece but you're thinking you wanna pass that part off now? Yeah, so now we have a, we call her office manager bookkeeper. So she is a bookkeeper but she's also has the office manager role and I'm handing that off to her over the last couple of weeks. So yeah, that's a new one. So adding spring was huge because we just basically took off from there and it just, we just kept going. There was no stopping us. I was like, where are the bottlenecks gonna start hitting? Cause we were, we would see like a little problem crop up as we were growing but we would attack it really fast and knock it out and we would just, we just kept doing that as we grew more and more and more and we were just always wondering like what's gonna, you know, I was always wondering so I knew bottlenecks were eventually gonna start happening somewhere. I just didn't know where that was gonna start happening. So it was very, that was a very interesting thing to find out. Let's talk about the growth process a little bit though because you explained you worked with Jonathan and you hired an SEO company so you were able to generate leads, you hired spring, so then you started converting those leads was spring the primary reason behind that? I mean, was she doing most of the sales herself or did she build a sales team? How did that evolve? She built a sales team. Okay. Yeah. So I missed the, the genesis of hiring spring, how you found her. I hate to make you repeat that, but please. Craigslist. I'm Craigslist. Yeah. Awesome. And you found the right person right from the beginning. You know, there's a lot of people in this industry that have efforted to do what you've done and wound up having to make that hire more than once, several times. Repeatedly, yeah. We did that with the operations manager. Okay. Yeah. So did you do anything different with spring? Did you just got, did you think you just got lucky was what do you attribute it to? I don't know if, I don't know if it's lucky. I mean, I guess you could say that it, it's kind of hard to tell, right? Like if she hadn't shown up, what, what else, who else would have, I feel like it's lucky that I ran into her and that I felt like the company should take it on when I did. And even without interviewing a lot of people, I just knew that she was the right person or I felt like I knew she was the right person. And I think culturally, she just fit everything that I was looking for. And that's why I decided to hire her. So. You know, it's funny. We just, I had a meeting with Debbie last, I spent like four hours with her in Texas last week. And one of the things we were talking about is that when you're looking for some of these key positions, it's really important to be looking for a cultural fit first. What, who, who is it that you're going to need in order to fit the culture and who are you? You need to know who you are and what you need. Who's going to work really well with you. Otherwise, you're going to struggle. So it sounds like you kind of did get a little bit lucky, but that, that you found her, but I don't know my experience working with people is luck only takes you so far. And you have to make it work after that because nobody's perfect. I will say this too, that we've been lucky to find all the other team members that we brought on as well. So we have an amazing team of office staff. So that's actually part of my story too. That's the COVID story, which is that was our, that was one of our biggest competitive advantages was our, was our office staff. Our team was amazing, not just spring, not just me, not just anyone person. It was our whole team, the way we worked together. I think was why we seem to do just fine. We actually grew through COVID. So. Yeah, I think that might be even better than just fine. I think that's what we call. Yeah. Well, it doesn't feel fine. So that April, when everything was shutting down, we lost half of our customers, like, you know, like probably everybody else. Some, some of us lost all of them, right? So yeah. So it was, it was bad for a month. And then we started to come out of it afterwards. So. So nice. Well, it's longer than a month. It was, it was a couple of months, obviously. It's gotta be at least two. What's that? It's gotta be at least two. Yeah. That, that May was also not great. That was not a great May. You know, you, when, when you are talking about, so I'm glad you're here on our leadership week. This is really fortuitous for us that you're here on this week, because something that you've said a couple of times is you were lucky and then we were really lucky with our office staff. When I hear somebody talk about that much luck, I, I really doubt that it's really luck, that you're doing something, that you are creating this environment of luck, if you want to call it luck, but you're creating that somehow. Do you know what you're doing? Is it intentional? Are you just maybe natural in this role? Can you talk to us a little bit about that? Or does it true? I've heard that the definition of luck is like when preparation meets opportunity, so it's... There might be, yeah, I'm sorry. No, you're, you're, you know, being able to identify when you're lucky, being able to identify opportunities, I mean, when they present themselves and them being prepared to do something with it. Yeah, you gotta be lucky. Lucky certainly helps, but being able to recognize when it's happening and knowing the right thing to do with it. It's a lot of people that have opportunities to be lucky and miss those opportunities. And you seem like it's, I doubt if you miss many opportunities, Paul. I hope not. It doesn't seem like it. It seems like you grab onto them, but it seems like it's kind of natural to you, because you don't seem to recognize what you're doing as much. I think there's might be, I think, so I'll go back to my previous experience working for other managers, and I saw something early on that I didn't quite understand, which is why are these managers so mean when they don't have to be? Yeah. They could actually be nice and get actually a better result. And I was like, I didn't understand it. These are intelligent people, I think. They seem like they're smart. How come they don't know that they don't have to be like that? Yeah. And maybe that was a natural thing. So you're right. That's actually something that I missed. That was something that was also brought on at the same time as the CBF, which is the core values. That might have actually come a little bit before, and it might even been a, did you ever do a class on core values list? Yeah. Maybe you were the inspiration for me to really think about that and get that incorporated into our business. And I read that book, the Zappos book, and how everybody followed the core values and how big of a deal that was. And I was like, I need to get that stuff down into writing, and we need to actually start operating that way. What are the core values that we care about the most? Liz teaches classes on core values. She sells core value cards that... There we go. That was about core values. Yeah. Yeah, so it is about core values. It's, so the core values that I have come natural, but bringing it into the company... Yes. Sort of happened automatically in a way for our office staff, but then it didn't go down to our technicians because I don't know how our office staff were treating the technicians, because we weren't talking about, what are the core values for the company? And who fits into that? What are your core values, Paul? So we just changed them, we just simplified them, and so I should know those off the top of my head. I'll tell you what automatically comes up, and it's probably not worded this way, but it's being a kind person, which is all part of a great working environment. And that's the main one. That's probably so, it's so important that the other ones are, you know. Some. Not, yeah, not as important. So they are though, like one of them is constant improvement. I don't think it's worded that way, but that's an important one for our company in that you do have to constantly improve yourself. And that might be on a personal level, it's a professional level, because what'll end up happening is if you stay the same in our company, the company will outgrow you really fast. And then what? So whose fault is that gonna end up being if we don't tell them, hey, this is part of our company, this is one of our core values, everybody knows it, so it's on them to make sure that they are constantly improving so that they can stay with our company. And the people that we want with us enjoy that. They're glad that they're, they're glad that they're working for a company where they have to improve themselves. They want to grow their skills. Do they do it on their own? Like off time, do you encourage them in some way? You said you read delivering happiness and they have a lot of stuff where they actually support the people and do a lot of things to help with that. Do you guys do anything like that? Do you just continuously changing and growing and they're keeping up or not? There's a little bit of that where the job just changes and grows and just they grow through experience. And if they start lacking in a skill, it's kind of on them to say, hey, I need some help with this. I need some, and that's where spring is there, I'm there, but we are gonna take that a step further. We're at that size where this is starting to become a very important thing where we do have to focus on it or it will start causing us a big problem. So right now we are doing traction. I don't know if you've heard of it before, it's a EOS system. There's a lot of education that goes along with that, learning how the whole system works, getting everybody involved in it, using it. It helps organize the whole company. That's what we're working on right now. We have a coach for that. And so the coach is helping us through that as well. But I could see, bringing in coaches for all kinds of things in our near future. So how do you implement something like that in your company with, typically running a cleaning company as you show up in the morning and there's a lot of things going on and phones are ringing, it's kind of crazy. A lot of us find it's difficult to make blocks of time to engage in strategic initiatives like implementing EOS or any type of other training. How do you make that happen? If you hire a coach, they have all the answers. And so you don't have to spend a whole lot of time trying to figure that out. I tried figuring it out, because that's the way I'm built. I feel like I have to take in a lot of information all the time. But I'm learning that that's not the best way to do things all the time. And trying to do something as complex as traction on your own is just not, that's not the best use of your time, I don't think. So practice can save you time. It should save you time because if you're not doing traction, you have all this communication happening in your company from all different directions and it could be chaotic. Traction helps organize all that stuff as you start to implement it. And so if anything, it should save you time. I guess that's my answer to that one. We have a question, Paul. Millie, I would like to know who's your coach. Oh boy. He's gonna eat a lot of... Jeremy McCliver. Want to tell? No. I don't know if that, so he's a coach for the other coaches in traction. So he's... So basically you go to the EOS website and you can find coaches there. You can get a traction coach, really. I recommend getting somebody local so that you can have your meetings in person. So you have quarterly meetings, you have annual meetings that are with your traction coach and then you have your weekly meetings that are just gonna be inside your office. So yeah, that's actually what we recently implemented this. I'm trying to think of how long ago. I think probably six months ago we've been getting pretty involved in it. Tom, can you post the EOS website? Carmelina, we can probably post a website here for you. Yeah, here's the website. I'm guessing somewhere around here, here's like resources, they've got speakers. I would think somewhere on here you could find their coaches as well. I'm sure you can. You should be able to. If you can't, Carmelina, I will hit me up and I can connect you with where we usually send people for EOS coach. I thought it was on that site though. I do know the EOS system is, I have heard it's okay to start when you're at the one million run rate but it's really best if you have some executive level leadership in your company. So it might be that it's more effective at a larger site. I don't know that, see, we didn't really need it until now. Like we didn't really need it to get to where we're at. So when you say executive level, explain what that looks like in your organization. Yeah, this is an interesting thing. It's, so traction kind of helped us figure out the difference between executive level person and what you would normally find. Like maybe somebody that helped you grow the company from the start. So you have task oriented people, which there's nothing wrong with that at all. You can have some people. What's that? We need those people. Yeah, we need lots of those people. It's funny, my CPA does my tax return and he's always had my occupation as executive and I never even really understood what that was but it sounded cool, so I went with that. You're probably an executive level guy, Tom, I would say. So yeah, it's the, if you can manage people and manage systems and create new processes and you can do them all well, you're probably at that level that I'm talking about. It's just, it's a, it's basically, you're on a team of people that are operating the way the Traction Coach described it in the same ball field or something is the way he described it. So if they have an idea, you can basically, or they have something to say, you can basically give them the answer without coaching them because they don't need to be coached. Like they probably know more about what they're talking about than you do. Hopefully. So, well, that would be the idea. So if you hire an executive level person to run your office and your books, hopefully they're better at that stuff than you are. Right. And then if you have a general manager that's managing your people, hopefully they're better at managing people than you are. And it just, it goes on. And if you hire a sales manager, hopefully you hired somebody that's better at managing sales people than you are. Yeah. And so then you have this team of people that are better. So they may not be better than you at everything, right? So as an owner, you might be like a jack of all trades. Like you can do all these different things pretty well, but maybe not at their level. Maybe not. At some point you need people working for you that are better at you than some things than you are, you weren't going very far. Yeah. So you're describing people like, you're describing people that you can give, reach some consensus on, these are our goals, these are our objectives and they're able to implement without you having to be prescriptive in terms of here, let me tell you how to do your job. Right. Right. So it gets to the point where you need people in each of those departments to run those departments or you get pulled into that department, pulled into that department. Left, right, there's always something falling apart unless you start building, you start adding these leadership people to your team that can just manage it. They know what to do. Did you already say you might have all I was walking? Did you already tell everybody what size your business is today, Paul? How many people you have different levels? Did you already go through that? No. Well, we haven't. Okay, well, that. We're saving, that's kind of a punchline. We should probably share that. That will put a lot of things in perspective. Oh, okay. So I just looked, this month were our annual run rates at 4 million. And I think last time I looked at the number of employees, we had 65. And then we have, I think, between five and 10, we call them freelancers, but they could be called contractors that also work in the office. Oh, that work in the office. Okay. I was curious about that. They're not in the field, though. They're all employees. Okay. Okay. So in your office, though, you have some freelancers, like independent contractor type people. And? Some. Some. Some live in other countries, actually. Oh, okay. So some virtual assistants and that kind of stuff. And can you tell us a little bit about your breakdown? I know Traction is really, really good about identifying your role and what you do, what your role is, and people get really good at their role. So can you lay out for us a little bit for you and your company, especially since there's so many of them, what they're doing? I'm the visionary. So I'd be at the very top. Underneath me, Spring reports to me, she's integrator. So now we're talking about what you do, right? Not what your title is. So she's an integrator. So she integrates all the departments together. I would say she's actually not even quite in that role yet because we just started filling in that leadership team. So she's still filling in some of those departments that are not filled yet. So she's still kind of patching things up and somewhat doing the integrator, but she's going to be hopefully full integrator within about a month or two. Oh, nice. And then under that, we have four departments. We have the office manager that does the bookkeeping, operations, which does all the back-end customer service. We're looking for a hiring manager. We want that to be a whole department. Especially now. And then sales. So the cat normally never, yes, I have a cat. Doesn't even cover my lap, only when I'm on a live. This is an animal-friendly show. We're all about that. You haven't seen my cat's tail flop by yet? No. Yeah. Yeah. She did it a couple times. Yeah. And then we have a sales manager that manages the sales team. So it'd be the sales. And there's a little bit of marketing in that particular department, and as far as she's going to be managing the lead generation. She won't be like a brand marketing person because we don't need that at this point. Our marketing is doing pretty well on its own with the help of Paul Dumas. I gotta shamefully plug him again. He's been super helpful in that department. When you say office, and you mentioned the bookkeeping, so I guess that's payroll that side of it. Do they get involved with anything related to customer scheduling, customer service, or is that all under operations? That's operations. As well as directing the activities of your cleaning professionals? Yeah, so the operations department manages the field technicians, manages the field manager. So we have different titles. Could be called technician manager. Then there's a field supervisor. Then on the other side of it is the scheduling department. So we have a scheduling department as well. All that falls under operations. So from a management standpoint, a leadership team standpoint, operations is your biggest department out of the four. Yes. Yeah, and I was talking to our traction coach about that, and that role is basically equal, equally as important as the integrator, or just equally, this responsibility is basically about equal, even though the operations manager report to that integrator. Because that is a really big job. That's a big job. It does take a lot of skill as well, and it's a harder skill. People need to come to that role with a little bit of innate talent and ability to make it easier to manage. It's not an easy role at all. So you found Spring, you hired her from a Craigslist, at what experience did she have before coming to your organization? She managed a massage studio, three franchises, I think it was a total of 100 employees, it was between 50 and 100 employees. She was way over qualified, and that's what I was looking for, so I was happy. So that's been, that was her experience. She had longevity there. She basically moved herself her way up through the company. What's that? Sorry, Paul, I didn't mean to cut you off there. I'm so excited to ask my questions. Oh. Why didn't she want to come to you? But your own words, she was over qualified for your job. It was probably partly the salary, but I think she just, we had, she said that was the best job at, or that was the ad that she noticed, and there was nothing special about it. It was just the best. It was a thing that looked the closest to what she was looking for. And then when we met, or when we talked over the phone, I think you can just kind of tell that your core values are lined up. Sometimes it's pretty fast and easy to figure out. And then I guess as we just, we went through an interview process. I think we did four interviews. I think by the end of it, we both knew that we're, you know, on the same page. Same page. Yeah, I mean, I think asking her would be a little bit, she might have a different take on it. So, you know, you're basically asking my next question. So my next question was going to be, if I was to ask her why she came to work for you, and what it is about you that makes you a good leader, what would she tell us? Do you think from her perspective? I don't, I've heard her say some things before, but that would just be embarrassing. We'll pretend we're saying. It's just us, Paul. It's just us. Come on, you can tell us. Because those are the things people need to know, Paul. Those are really the things that people need to know. The stuff that you're doing that, you know, nobody really knows what to do. And there aren't a lot of businesses your size, just a regular guy, not a normal guy. You look like you sound like just a normal, regular guy. Here you are running this really great residential cleaning company. So really we need to know, you know, what is it? I just think as you, as you start getting to know each other, you also, I think she just started to see that I, I didn't want it to be like the other jobs that she might have had. I don't want that for anybody. I don't want, I don't want them to be on call on the weekends. I want them to go home and have a life. I want them to have that work-life balance. I don't want them to work lots of hours. Like, I think just through all that, she had a, she said it all completely different way. I don't remember exactly what it was. It was a, it was a nice compliment. Yeah. We need to ask her. Yes. Like think hard. I'm glad, I'm glad I can't remember right now. Texture right now. We've got 15 minutes. Right now, right now. Why don't you, why don't you call or we'll get her on the show with us. We can ask her. I'm sure that there has something to do with the kindness that you're a kind person to work, work for, but I'm guessing also that she works with you. I'm guessing that it's a piece of it. It's a big difference working with somebody versus working for someone. Yeah. Yeah, so we do, we do operate like a team. Now that you said that about the kind, right? I think, I think, you know, probably most people that have worked for any, but I mean, probably most companies that you work for, the owner just aren't nice. Yeah. They're just not very nice. And yeah, I mean, it could be as simple as that. During the interview process, I also, now it's coming to me. I also, I talk about our core values. I talk about the vision for the company. Here's where we've been and here's where we're going. And if they buy into that, tell us too, where, where, what's your vision? Where are you going? Well, they, they, I had a vision for the company that was, that sounded crazy to people, but now they, so during traction as a team, you, you set your vision, right? Well, they came up with something bigger and it sounds absolutely nuts to me, but okay, I'll say it. So, Good job, Paul. This was my team. It wasn't me that said this. Okay. They want, they want us to be a $25 million cleaning company, one location, nice. The Phoenix area. And I think that goal is in about, I think it's 10 years, 10 years from now. What can happen in 10 years, right? Yeah. Oh my goodness. Yeah. I love that for a ton of reasons too, because that gives a lot of hope to a lot of people out there that are like, you have to have multiple locations. You can't do it from one location. $25 million, one location. That's, that's saying something. I know Phoenix is a big area, but it's no thanks something. There's a lot of cleaning companies there too. I would like to keep it as one service as well. Yeah. Yeah, that is awesome. House cleaning, light house cleaning, recurring house cleaning, I don't want to, I don't really want to do anything else. Going back to your organization for a minute, you mentioned that your operations manager is right up there with, with the spring in terms of importance. What background did your operations manager have? How did that person find themselves in their position? So that's interesting. Cause we just promoted her into that position. So she started out as a technician. Oh wow. And over some time, she said something to the office. She's like, I'd like to work in the office. So we moved her, we called her title assistant field manager. And so she did that for, she was doing that for quite a while. And we were looking for an operations manager. So we were running ads and hiring people for the operations manager. So during that time, they would come in, these operations people that we hired and they quickly just, we find out they don't, they're not going to work out. These are highly skilled people coming in. They can't do the job. It's just was blowing our mind. How is it that some, that this person who can go around starting huge department stores and run the whole thing and do a good job and get great references, have this amazing job history and have all this talent. How come they can't come into our company and do it? They didn't have the skill set. It was, she was the craziest thing. And I think when she was seeing that, she was like, basically kind of helping them out and kind of running circles around them. She was like, I could do it. I can do that job. So, but I mean, these were successful people that you vetted. So what's the secret? What is the quality or skills or talents that one needs to be successful in that role that maybe isn't obvious? Cause you, I hear this story. I've seen, I've lived it myself. And what do you need to look for in order to find somebody who can really be a great operations manager? That's actually, I can make some guesses here. Cause I actually, yeah, there's some sensitive things that I could say, but I don't think I have a complete and total answer to that. I will say, I think it was hard for somebody to go from where you can see everything physically right there in front of you to come into this big company that you walk into our office and you're like, there's no noise in here. It's quiet. There's like two people in here. Why is there only two? Where's the company at? Like, what's- Where is the company? Making that mind shift was just, I think just too much. And there's a lot of technology involved with what we do at this level, right? So it's, we have to have it. We have to have technology and we have to know how to use it. We have to know how to operate from it. And if that's not what you're used to, that's a big, that's a huge change. I don't know how long it would have taken them to adjust to it, but they were, it was not gonna work. So is that something that you're looking for, for like spring? Is she strong on the technology side? I think our staff has to be comfortable with technology. I don't think that they have to be techy, but they have to be able to, they have to be somebody that can, you can give them a software and they can just figure it out. Okay. For the most part. Like your operations manager who rose up through the ranks, she just, She can figure things out. So she's at that level where if she doesn't know something, she can figure out how to do it. She'll get the answer. Can you talk to us a little bit about the technology that you use in your company? Tom, Tom preaches on technology all the time for our business. I was wondering if there's gonna be an opportunity to bring this up. Oh, good. I don't know if you know this or not, but during COVID, I had a little extra time because we were just shrinking at that time. There was a month or two there where we were shrinking. I'm like, okay, there's... That's why we're here, Paul. If it wasn't for COVID, we wouldn't be here. Yeah. I got some extra time on my hands. I had met Libby Dilution or I had heard something Libby Dilution had said six months prior to that. It was at a CBF event. And she had this amazing idea for... Is Libby another cleaning business owner? Woot recruit, Tom. Woot recruit. Okay. Libby's Woot recruit. So you're Libby's, okay. I know the story. Yay. Yeah. So she had this amazing idea and I was like, your idea is absolutely amazing. It's... Nobody else was reacting the way I was. I was like, did you guys see what she just did? You don't have to do anything. It's just simple. It works. It's like, it's amazing. And nobody else reacted that way, but I just remember like, that was like the most... One of the best things that I've seen. Oh, that's a terrible whips. No, can I cover that? No, I'm just kidding. We're gonna work on that website, but anyway, I thought the idea was amazing. What's with his background? Is she a cleaning business or did she built this platform? So she had the idea. She built a system that did what we do now to a point. But what happened is, is I took the idea without her knowing, I had talked about her to her about this. And I was like, we had talked about, let's make something better. Let's do something with it at some point. But I had decided I'm gonna take what she did and like take it to the next level. So I built it out over a few months. And then I texted her and I said, guess what? I think I have something that's like a level from what you were doing. It's still that same amazing idea. And I think we can duplicate it really easily. And I said, you wanna partner up? And she thought about it for like 10 seconds and said, yes. So anyway, yeah, so that's how we recruit came about. But anyway, this is one of the reasons why we did pretty well during COVID as we had this tool here. So I do blame it partially on that. It was more our team, but this was also something that made a difference as well. We just had this advantage that was super helpful. So in like 30 seconds to a minute, do you wanna explain what recruit is and how it works? Yeah, so for the business owner, we have different plans, but there's a particular plan where your screened applicant just arrives at your door and they've already filled an application, they've already been screened, they already know some things about your company. And now all you have to do is the interview. Okay. I'm gonna add a little bit because Paul, I see that you are very much a understated guy and don't like to blow your own horn. That's obvious. No, recruit is amazing, y'all. So they do things like, they have videos for your company. They can modify the videos. So we recruit has videos that go out and explain about your company. He's in Phoenix, Sarah. Hey, by the way, don't move here just because I'm in, just because you hear how great it is over here. It's already enough people moving. You won't like it. Just kidding. It's too hard. There's, there are a lot of people I know moving to Phoenix. They say it's dry heat. Don't believe it. Yeah. There's nothing great over here, guys. But y'all, the thing about WootRecruit is everything is automated and it's simple for the applicant. So it's very easy for the applicant to go through the process and feel like they know your company and you get a higher level of candidate. We just started using them and we are already getting better people and we've hired five out of five people that have come to us from WootRecruit. Dang. How, that's not, that's not real. Not normal, is it? No, no, it's really not. So, I don't think- I don't think what we have even exists. However, I do see some people cropping up that are start, you know, they're trying to copy us and stuff. So, but I don't think it exists. I don't think this exists anywhere else. Yeah, I think there are some different types of things but what you guys do is unique for sure. Yeah. What you're doing is unique and the price is so very reasonable as well. Oh, you need to be charging Liz more. Yeah, so that's what I've been told. No. Ginger Whitson, she's like, you're not charging enough for that service. But we're grandfathered in, Paul, we're grandfathered in. Yeah, you're already grandfathered in. So it's all about it. That's right. We'll go straight to the website and raise the price right now. Well, we are almost out of time. Are there any other, you know, were there any questions we should have asked that we didn't get around to or any other last thoughts you want to share with us, Paul? Liz, you got one? You got one more? I feel like we could out for like an hour. I've got tons more. Well, we isn't like that we won't be back doing this at some point in the future. Maybe Paul could come back again. Hey, it's my first live and I wasn't terribly nervous. Oh, is it? I think it's my first live, yeah. Oh, yeah, I would never. I was a little nervous, but not too bad. This was awesome. This was good, you know. Please come back. Tell everybody you'll be happy to come back. Happy? I might come back. Okay, very good. We'll take that. We'll take it. Very beautiful, Paul. We'll take it. All right. Well, thank you so much, Paul. Really, we don't have a lot of people that will come. Well, I mean, everybody will come on that we invite them, but there just aren't a lot of people of your caliber. I hate to say it, but to be able to bring on that can share some of the bigger things and deeper, deeper information that people just don't have a chance to hear about. So we really, it's super helpful for us. I hope so. Awesome. Well, what is today? Is today Wednesday? It is Wednesday, Tom, August 25th. We are done for the week, aren't we? We are. We'll be back on Gavin's birthday. Which will be next Monday at five o'clock Eastern. That's right. Paul, many thanks. And seriously, we are looking forward to having you back again. And if there's anything we can do for you, Paul, you let us know. We'll do. We're here for you, Paul. We're here for you. Take care. See you Monday. Bye-bye. All right, bye. Bye.