 Maybe Good afternoon everybody time Stuart here with Liz Trotter. This is smart business moves. Hello. Hey Tom My we're having fun today, aren't we? Oh my gosh, so always party I Saw your I went and watched your Facebook live with Matt last week on Thursday Looked pretty good. Lots of good information. So that looked like it went out went well A lot of moving parts, you know, I saw something today in a Facebook group where Somebody was asking the question of what are you going to do with your PPP money? And there are a lot of people chiming in with all kinds of ideas and Matt was in this group and Matt You know Said well, I'm going to use my PPP money to pay payroll For the purpose that is intended to be used now the money I save in its place I might do this or that so One of the things we didn't talk about Thursday, but it's really important when I make sure that we're using the PPP money the way that The SBA wants us to use that money That is what it is, right? It's not a gift For payroll protection plan Right. Okay. Hey check. Yep. Hey check protection plan Yeah, it's protecting the paycheck of the employee. I used to get confused. I'm pretty sure it's paycheck. I Believe you. I just thought it was payroll for some reason. I never We think about payroll, but you're gonna get more votes if you Protecting checks that that makes perfect sense. That's very logical. Yeah, good argument for paychecks um I've been Slow to share this I think and if I've already shared it just correct me and I'll Move on The other last week, I believe may even been the week before last it's all a blur. We were Working on Guess what how to lower your direct payroll to revenue but we were looking at it from a hiring and training and onboarding standpoint and you had a spreadsheet that showed an exhibit it showed The reasons that people leave over various periods of time and I was That I was to put that in the resource library as a download Did I ever share this? I? Don't think so. Okay. Well Here it is and if you click on that it'll download the document for you All right, so Robin if you're here Sorry, I was a bit slow on that, but it's there now Actually, I actually did it about a week ago. I just forgot to tell anybody Well, if Robin pops in today, I'll make sure and tell him he can hit one of these lakes Yeah, he just thinks you're ignoring him. Yeah, well, yeah Yeah, I Just didn't remember to tell anybody You know he may have already found it because he's pretty resourceful guy. It's been there for for for about a week I believe yeah, so what else is going on? What's going on in your world, Liz? Same old same old around here Just you know first first day of February kind of freaking me out. January is already We're already what a third of the way into the quarter So We have been working a lot in groups on trying to Get some alignment between what we're doing today and where we want to be in a year That is so much harder than people give credence to know people are like I say what my goal is that I'm just gonna make it happen Oh It's not so easy So we do that on on Mondays. I can you know that already on Monday chicken But just every single Monday I Would say at least half of us find ourselves like what the heck am I doing this crazy stuff? Because it pops up What do they call that the whirlwind like in the full roll in the discipline of execution. Yeah, that's what we call it the whirlwind Yeah So it's easy to find yourself there Yeah, I mean, but it you you you kind of like I'll Roll over and look at my you know before I get up in I'll look at my phone to see what you know came in You know the night before and it's like Crap, I didn't want to this wasn't this wasn't part of the plan. Yeah, not part of what I was gonna do today Yeah, well and sometimes, you know urgency a lot of times will trump what's important so That's okay But I think it's really important that people remember That if you let urgency trump importance too often your company is sliding backwards You're doing the urgent and you're not doing the important you're not getting the important stuff done So we're talking to one person today and We uh, we're talking about how So do you do realize that you are, you know, we're a little bit blunt in some of these groups Do you realize that you actually run a Residential cleaning company and she's like yeah I was like so did you take special classes for your firefighting abilities like How did you become a firefighter then? She's like oh Because you know, it's tough. Uh the whirlwind can grab you and Just Suck you right in Happens to me and you know, you know the thing that kind of makes that insidious is Here at the moment when the whirlwind hits you then The best bad option you might have is to jump in and deal with the urgent yeah But you know In order to fix that you have to plan And it's like okay. Well, what do I need to do to make sure that a month from now when that happens I'm not the person putting the fire out Yeah, oh or ideally that fire doesn't exist Fair enough. Yeah, ideally that fire goes away and you know, we we got we took the matches away from the child ideally, but You got a you know, if there is no other alternative then for you to deal with the the the urgent You also need to say well, I need a better plan. This is what we want to be doing moving forward and You have to come up with your plan When you're not in the middle of it. You that's not the time to come up with your plan That's another mistake that people make is while they're in it. They're trying to Start a school Yeah, it's not time to solve the problem when you're in it because your brain isn't in the right headspace for it You're you're not actually able to think strategically you're thinking from a place of oh my gosh The house is burning down house is burning down and not your best plan So coming up with plans for what you're going to do next time is oh helpful I don't think people recognize how how just really really beneficial it is but I I recommend that people just keep a list of those We have different names for them, but um those lists of things that you know That are common problems for you common hurdles common Just we'll use hurdle for for a good word and When that hurdle pops up for you, what are your solutions? What are your go-tos? What can you do? How can you fix it? So hey starlene. Oh, it's been kovat week for you I'm sorry You personally or you in your company. Are you getting hit with a lot of kovat? Either one is bad, but Yeah, I guess to be fair. I mean that's an example of like world wind that you know, sometimes it's just not You know, there's you it's kind of like hurricanes in real world when some sometimes it's just a Active nature and you just kind of have to roll with it and do the best you can Yep, and so the the objective is to Not be in the whirlwind too often If you find yourself in there a lot Too often more often than you'd like to be in there then, you know, there's some systems And operations problems that need to be addressed And sometimes that's self-inflicted and sometimes you're there because that's where you want to be I mean Some level depending upon the nature of the immediate thing that the urgent thing that you're dealing with You know a lot of times if you have a great disdain for that urgent thing that that that that that immediate thing that that that you You find a way not to have to do it too much. It's the things that you know Certain types of problem, you know, you might like fixing certain types of problems You might be good at it That that's a real problem if you're really good at fixing certain types of problems You might be creating those problems just so that you can jump on in there and Rescue yourself Me too recovery of his manager and tech cap poet. Oh, I'm sorry. Okay. It's employee customers. Everyone's okay and understanding yeah, I'm really happy that everybody is so understanding still these days because You know, a lot of people are still not in the mindset that it's like around Um, who was I talking to? Sarah Sarah Mitchell, you know, uh, phoenix is supposed to be like a huge hot spot around the whole world It's like big And she doesn't know one person that has or has ever had coded What no Well, that's what she said. I mean you call her a liar. I'm not gonna Well, I mean, you know, and she might mean that she personally knows them versus You know, like a facebook friend or something like that, but she doesn't like personally know anybody in her life that Uh has covet or has had it? I was like, wow. All right, and that's in phoenix so A lot of concern about some of these variants that are coming out that are Spread more easily and possibly or more more deadly if if you will and I guess especially I was reading something the other day about one in brazil that they're particularly concerned about and You know they're talking about the peaks and valleys and I guess the are not factors actually going down in most states I mean, it's still at a high level in terms of the daily spread But it's not still going up. It's kind of flattening out but there's a concern that was some of these variants that it might might take off again and We're getting slow. We're a bit slow at getting the vaccines out and The longer that takes the more Opportunity that the virus can get out there and these are these are these variants can spread So Yeah us too susan, that's our situation as well Um, but the one thing that is kind of nice. I don't know if you're dealing with this as well susan national We are not as panicked now At least in my company Our people would tend to panic if they found out that a client had cobit It'd be like I don't want to go back, you know, like even two weeks just felt like I don't want to go in there But now everybody has a a much better um, I guess um, just a feeling around a feeling of safety around Managing it knowing what to do and those types of things. So that psychological safety piece is really really important Especially for our technicians So our cleaning professionals. So I'm happy about that We're gonna realize it's 215 We should probably get to work. Just see we didn't Tom and I didn't see each other over the weekend either. So we're just chatting catching up Okay, so take it from the top. We're Still talking about red numbers and green numbers and the red number. We've been focusing on as a loaded direct Loaded direct payroll to revenue Try to get that out And as a recap you can do that by making the top number go down the loaded direct payroll and making the revenue go up or a combination of the two Making the top number go down the labor load. We've we've talked about All the action steps that we can take in order to make that go down I think that we learned some things they are reducing training expense was spent a fair amount of time and This resource here and cleaning business today. You can download can can help some with that And we started talking about productivity and we're going to be talking about productivity and efficiency and these are a couple of metrics that are basically telling you how much value you're getting out of Your your your direct labor if you will Um There's this concept it's like another concept and You know, well, this doesn't like it when I use it because it it's it's not a Be nice there was a planer way to say it but it's called return on human equity You know, are you how good a return? Are you getting off of The people in your your your payroll and if you think about this um There's some companies that can make a ton of money with a really small payroll Some of the tech companies do that, right? You know, um, I mean amazon and google they hire a bunch of people But relative to the billions of dollars that they generate in revenue Their return off of every person that they hire is crazy high I should do some research and actually share that But it's a whole lot higher than somebody that's in the service business. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely How about y'all everybody understand this idea of return on human capital? I think if you think of it In terms of return on investment, it's a little bit easier to um So you you because we're all really familiar or most of us are pretty familiar with the ROI term And so we know that it's how much money are we getting back for the investment that we're putting out So this the same thing with what tom's talking about is their return on human capital Right, right. That's the proper term. I said that wrong. It's so return on human capital Okay, and so that just means what's the return that we're getting off of each person's Work that they're doing and so I think that this is really useful for everybody to be able to think in terms of It's just uh, it's a clunky concept and it's a clunky A clunky term, which is why I don't love it when tom says it because we don't have a better term But it's the term that is bandied about and that everybody knows so so When you're when you're looking at your business when I say looking at your business, I mean Yeah, I want us to try to visualize like when you're when you're at your office or actually You know have your your your employees in front of you doing things that they do be thinking about You know what that's costing you and what's being produced And you know, what is the amount of revenue that's being generated per labor hour? What is the gross profit that's being generated per labor? What's the net profit as which is really the the ultimate ball that's being generated Per hour per salary dollar per per full-time equivalent, which is a fancy word for You know somebody working 40 hours a week out of the people to hire You know, what are you getting in return for that? and too often you know, we've got a lot of Lost opportunity a lot of lost productivity a lot of lost efficiency and that's that's that's that's where we're going with this because if you manage productivity and if you manage efficiency you'll be able to Generate more profit Offer the work that's being done because you're going to be getting more output with less input And nowhere in here is it implied that you're going to be cutting people's salary or anything like that But what it is what what we are implying is that we want people to be able to produce as much as they can because Especially now more than ever you're going to be hearing more and more about Living wage and minimum wage and doing like a national $15 an hour minimum wage So if you're at someplace where minimum wage is already $15 an hour, well, that's going to go up too I would presume And nobody cleans homes for minimum wage So if the minimum wage is 15, then you're going to have to pay more than that because there's Easier jobs out there now for $15 an hour than than than cleaning homes, but it's okay to pay people More if they're worth more if they're producing more and that's really kind of our role as business owners Because I'm going to go back to the beginning of this I do want to put in one little point here tom sometimes when people Are talking about this what we hear is you got to drive harder on these people you got to be meaner you got to push on Really, you know their job is Going to be more difficult because you're just going to be like on them on them on them But that's not what we're talking about There are other ways much better ways To help people become more productive than just Driving on them, right tom? Absolutely. Absolutely. We're going to be sharing those because At the highest level we started off. This is one of the first concepts we talked about if you're profitable you're able to Create better jobs provide better service and build a better business and that's kind of a virtuous circle. It's they're You either have all three or you don't have any Okay, the only way that you can have one is to have all three And part of our jobs is to build Better jobs for the people that work for us and part of that is making sure that people are being paid well And you can pay well and still be profitable If you're helping Your your employees your especially your cleaning professionals be more productive If people are worth more people are producing more you can pay them or that makes sense, right? does although I just I want to make a real quick note To talk with you about Tom, could you go back to that slide for me real quick? Sure That spell something wrong? No, no you did not I didn't look if you did. I don't think so All right, I'm good So Let's go back here We all know what productivity is right a loud time divided by actual time We So what what does that mean a loud time divided by actual time Tom You might have to give a reminder of a loud time because that's not a common term A loud time is the time that You estimate it would take to clean a home It's the amount of time that The normal Worker the normal cleaning professional in our world we're cleaning technician Would take to clean that home normal Is normal the same thing as average? Yes. Okay, so if you had you know like 30 cleaning technicians clean that home some of them fast some of them slow And they're all meeting the same scope of work and getting the same outcome If you averaged all the times for those 30 people to get an average that would be considered the normal time so Pam is saying that it's also known as job ticket hours You can use that that is that is that is a Sononymous term. Yes Okay There's a lot of different terms for this that you'll hear out there Um, I hear a time goal I've heard um, oh, what was the one I just heard today I don't know another one today I don't know what the other one is I appreciate that because they're they're they're one of the same thing you can use those interchangeably so If I clean the home in less time than my job ticket hour time or in our case the allowed time And take the allow time and divided by the actual time. I'm going to get a number greater than one Which is good. We want that number to be as high As it can be as long as the scope of work is still being met At some point that number could get so high that the only way that it could reasonably be that high is somebody's kind of cheating and not following the scope of work and You know, if you start, you know, you don't want to reward people for having a really high productivity and but they, you know Get a lot of Yeah So there Have that balance But we kind of showed here if you got like a loud time with three hours and an actual time of two and a half hours Then you'd have a productivity of 120 3 divided by 2.5 If you had another cleaner another the same house rather with another cleaning technician Who took three and a half hours to clean it then three divided by 3.5 is 96 So obviously if they could beat this to get the same scope of work, you'd rather have Cleaner a do it in two and a half hours as opposed to cleaner b do it in three and a half hours because cleaner a is being more productive they have a higher productivity Number and you're getting a better return on that human capital You're making generating more revenue per hour with cleaner a You're able to pay cleaner a more money per hour because Cleaner a is generating more revenue per hour Can you show us some of that tom? Can you show us what this means? To our bottom line. What what does net profit look like? If if everything remains the same But we have someone that is 120 productive versus somebody that's 86 productive cleaning the same home What how could that you know, what does that look like to us in terms of money? Okay, I don't know. We'll see if we can figure it out. You're really good at at throwing this stuff together And the reason why i'm asking this you guys is so that you can sort of have an idea About how this impacts you a lot of times we're like Yeah, but you know, he's a little bit slower, but he does such a good job And you know, what's it really cost me a couple of bucks? It's not that big of a deal But i'd like tom to be able to show you how it really is actually a big deal Each individual house might not be a problem But if somebody has an overall productivity rating of 86 and somebody else has an overall productivity rating of 120 In a in a week that can be a lot of money I guess an example of this would be say we've got A house mr. Jones's house and It has a job ticket hour four and a half. Okay So Let's think about this a little bit. I'm gonna make certain a couple more columns here So what would the bill rate be? The total bill Total bill would be four and a half hours times That right we'd be charging two hundred and twenty five dollars. Yep Let's see if I can do that. Okay, so Let's go back up here to cleaner a and cleaner b where cleaner a has a productivity of 120 percent and cleaner B has a productivity of 86 percent so we know if We take cleaner a and clean this home at in the cleaner a works at 120 percent Then cleaner a is actually going to take 3.75 hours to clean this home because We're taking the 4.5 hours and we divide it by 120 So this would be actual time Okay, and I'll move Cleaner a and cleaner b down here just to make it a little easier to say Um How potings are but they're giving you cute little emojis And I'm going to put this over here too Likewise cleaner b Works at 86 percent. So if I take my 4.5 and divide it by the 86 that gets me 5.25. Okay So let's just get rid of this for a minute um Depending on how you do payroll kind of determines what's going on, but just for sake of this Let's let's pretend you have like a you have like an hourly rate that you're paying And what you're in list list. Let's make a little more real. We want to do our loaded Oh We'll start off by saying that our loaded direct hourly rate So we're paying $15 an hour and our labor load is 20 percent. So that's another three dollars That would be $18. Okay Yep You guys with me Everybody following along give me a yes if you're following along or I know if we left you back there a while ago I think it's looking pretty good so far, Tom Okay, so my you know total loaded pay Would be $18 an hour times That or $67 but on the other side with Be it would be 94 dollars So and right here we're just talking about one house Tom, right? This is just one house. This is just one house so remember loaded direct payroll is what we call a proxy for gross profit excuse me for for For our dogs cost a good soul And the formula just to remind us is revenue minus cost of good soul gives us gross profit and Uh out of our gross profit, we have to pay our operating expense So we subtract our operating expense from gross profit to get our net profit So what we're going to do is show what our gross profit was off of each one of these jobs And hence our our loaded direct payroll to revenue number our gross profit This is where I miss having a lot of audience because I could ask the question and people could tell me We we all know it would be what did we say our revenue, which is 225 minus Our cost of good sold which in this case is our total loaded pay Does remember the proxy 157 And I got to put a little dollar sign there so I can cut that over And over here with our slower cleaner It's only 130 dollars So if we want to know what our um Did it the divide so that that 27 dollars between there Is money that we are basically given away for every house that they used to this person cleans Our loaded direct payroll to revenue is this number divided by this number Yeah, might be getting in the weeds here a little bit Tom No No, um as far as understanding trying to keep all of these terms and numbers in people's heads All right, so explain what you're talking about right here talking about here On this case with your cleaning professional is working at 120 percent you're able to Actually have 157 dollars left over From this 225 dollar job to Pay your fixed expenses and then once that's taken care of that's basically profit set another way 30 cents out of every dollar is going to pay Your your your cogs your variable cost another 70 cents is going to cover your other fixed cost and profit You can make money really fast that way Am I am I losing people? Um, no Here's here's where I think we're still missing a piece for a lot of people so, um We have two things that we still want to show So if we are making 27 dollars off of every Additional dollars off of every house That an employee cleans for an entire week We can see and one employee usually can clean two houses a week um, we can Tom will show us how much money we are actually just sort of letting go By what those with 10 houses, right? So we very know it's 27 dollars times 10 is obviously $270 a week That we're letting go that that adds up really fast That's over a thousand dollars a month that this employee is Um costing Costing you that you could be making that you're not making now. We are comparing That higher productivity to the lower productivity So it's not exactly the same as if they were meeting it exactly on time They would still be losing half that though Five five hundred dollars a month So that's still a good chunk of change. You probably don't want to be getting rid of All right, and then one more thing that I think we're missing here Tom is the A lot of times when we're when people are talking about um ldpr They're they ask the question. What should the percentage be? And a lot of times we'll say that you know If your percentage is somewhere in the 40 to 42 range you're doing pretty well. You're doing okay And so right here we have 42 percent on cleaner b So can you explain for everybody why That's not the total number. That's not the because we haven't added in the efficiency piece and Um the all the other pieces why that persons ldp are just for this one house Is 42 percent, but there It's not it's not for the day. Yeah, it's not for the whole day and definitely not for the whole week So But if you're just looking at it on or per job basis, this is what you were really really going after I think was the amount of The amount of actual profit and this is like this is just to go straight down to the bottom line That you made off a cleaner a as opposed to cleaner b is the difference between this 57 50 and this 30 50 It's $27 But take this $27 divided by the t25 is what we bill for the job. That's 12 percent So oftentimes we talk about what is your net profit percentage, which is net profit divided by the total revenue the very top number Excuse me very bottom number on your p&l divided by the very top number on your p&l And you know that can vary Based on a lot of things but for a lot of companies if that's 10 percent, you know, they're they're doing pretty good I mean some of the most profitable companies in the world that number is a whole lot smaller than 10 percent But they've got billions and billions of dollars on that top line But for house cleaning business, you know, a lot of people feel that 10 percent is is is kind of the starting point Well, you just doubled it because this is this is an additional 12 percent that would go on whatever your you know your your net payroll, excuse me net profit percent would be And for those of you that are working on how to improve your net profit This is one of the really important things that you have to look at. Pam has a good question here, tom Once she says her slower cleaners always have excuses as why houses take too long. How do you manage that? So do you have any insight for pan? I have a couple of things Always excuses for why the home takes too long Well, I guess it depends what type of systems you have in place. I mean if you've got the If you're tracking The amount of time it takes them to clean every home And comparing that to your job ticket hour or your your loud time You'd be able to say that, you know, why is it that? You know, this is kind of a trend that we see from home to home to home You know, this isn't a one-off if somebody is typically 120 percent They have this one home that comes in at, you know, 80 percent Then, you know, a lot of times excuse might might might carry some weight But if they're always slow, then You know, I mean they might have an excuse, but it's uh It's a it's a not-conforming issue that has to be has to be resolved So another Another thing Pam is I think that uh, you used the word excuse really well in this situation If if like in tom's example, if it's a one-off or it's one home Then maybe they have a good reason for why this home was off But their overall average is like cleaner bees 86 percent if their their productivity is at 86 percent Then now they become excuses because now you're just trying to excuse away Your lower productivity So the the question changes when it's an excuse versus a reason a one-off You might have a good reason and the the answer can change that but if the question is around Your overall productivity now That the question is different and the answer is also different because it's really hard to say for someone to give you reasons for why Every single one of their houses Take them longer than the other team or the other person or the average Whatever that is. Does that help at all? hoping it does Let's see Ernie, but if you are grossing only four hundred thousand dollars a year and profit is only 10 percent or 40k Yeah, I can't go down further Then what Ernie is saying That's it. That does make that you're right. I thought there was a comment there That that makes a huge difference. You're right Ernie I mean, if you have a if you're making $400,000 a year and your profit is 10 percent you bring home 40 grand or 52 percent and you're going to bring home 52 grand You choose right so And that's actually remember this a little bit different because we're only talking about the productivity in the homes Because there is still that efficiency factor On our team homes first time cleans and our larger homes Some cleaners would rather not work with them and that's starting to cause problems. Okay, and it gets really sticky Yeah on our team homes first time cleans and our larger homes Some cleaners would rather not work with them and that's starting to cause problems well, especially if they're getting paid job ticket hours or commission Can't really blame people for not wanting to work with the people who are not productive Right, they'll say she's too slow. I end up doing I'm sure we've all heard all of these things I end up doing the whole house and all she did was one bathroom or one bedroom or whatever the thing is, right? So can't really blame people if they really are Um more productive than the other person, especially if it's a huge margin like tom was showing 86 to 120 percent um, so you know, I would say for you if you are tracking productivity And you can say with some reasonable amount of certainty. What an individual's Um productivity is and I think tom you said it takes 30 Right at least 30 homes at least At least 30 homes to get a reasonable Uh productivity rating on somebody Then but if you're doing that and you can see that somebody is Routinely sitting at a lower percentage. Oh, oh tom for the record. What percentage do we want? In terms of productivity Yeah We want it to be You know 100 or more as high as possible But we don't want to we don't want to falling below 100 percent Yeah And you know the the whole idea here is a concept called continuous improvement it's like What do you you know regardless of where you are it's kind of like losing way, you know, you are where you are And you you have a goal But you know, can you make progress there? Really, it's not like losing way. Excuse me because is there really an optimum productivity? There's always an opportunity to get better, right? So you're in 20 percent, you know, you saw Am I just as good as I can be or do I need to continue to work on my game? So to speak to figure out, you know, how can I maybe achieve a higher level of quality and maintain my productivity? I mean, there's always something that somebody needs to be working on right And and and I think the key there, tom is we we just got to keep in mind that productivity goes along with it It doesn't play by itself Um, got y'all continue tracking to see how she's doing on average with the 30 home average I think she slows down subconsciously on group jobs because those jobs have been right on Well, there you go That would be a great piece of information to have that she's less productive on a team than she is as a solo So that gives you a good piece of information a good piece of data Tom works for the other person's claiming more house I don't have to work with card. You know Yeah, and a lot of times people do this Not not intentionally But they just relax a little because they feel like they have help it's like Ah So they they probably don't even recognize that they're doing this a lot of times You know where you really see that is say you typically work two person teams and you put a third person on that team And you hear this time and time again, you know, it's like if you've got Six allowed hours and three people excuse me two people can clean it in three hours Almost without exception three people can't clean it in two hours There are exceptions Liz and I know that you've got some some tricks up your sleeve to address that But for most house cleaning companies They'll tell you that that third person lowers their productivity And most people will tell you if you put three people in a six hour house It took two people three hours. It's going to take three people almost three hours Maybe two hours and 50 minutes two hours and 45 minutes They shave a little bit off but nowhere near what they should that's very very common That's that's so and That's again human condition So you you you actually have to manage that strictly and stringently But we're going to yeah, we're going to we're going to explain that here on on on the slide You know, let's so we we understand what what productivity is and how we're measuring it and How how it definitely can impact our costs and our our profitability How do we improve productivity? And and i want to start with training We've got several things here training the equipment and tools that we use are are important Don't have the actual procedures, but but work methods themselves is important. I mean that's part of the training um performance pay Making sure that we're setting expectations and creating accountability and if you think about the three person two person team All of this fits into that If i've got one person working by themselves teamwork really isn't an issue, right? I'll get two people together then You've got to figure out who's doing what right? Yeah, what products are we bringing in how are we over what who's checking on work? There are a lot of things to consider The third person though it starts I mean it The more people you add to the team the harder it is to get everybody working productively because there's just More moving parts and more coordination that has to take place Definitely have to have stronger systems. You you just can't throw another person onto a team Uh, I guess you can but not in mixing money money You got to be really careful and you're also going to be dealing again with efficiency if you have five people So you couldn't really working on all of that stuff I I I wanted to point out one more thing real quick here Um Tom up at the top. You have training you guys probably notice that we hammer on training a lot Training is just such a vital piece Of everything that we do in our service businesses and not just ours y'all The vast majority of service businesses Really need to focus more on training and I'm not sure that training is exactly the right word because a lot of times people think of training as That that thing that happens in the beginning of the job when you're first When you first get to a job and you get this initial training But training is more than that. It's education. It's um increased increasing your your level of of knowledge and productivity and efficiency and and learning how to do things It's more about like learning and absorbing information or something But we use the word training because it's the word everybody's familiar with and It it really is critical to so much of what we do and how we make money in this job Yeah, I mean it's definitely a cornerstone of how we improve not only productivity but performance On a greater scale because You know if you're a cleaning professional, there's you know In our world, there's four metrics that that that they own one is attendance The other is their quality scores A third is their productivity and a fourth is their efficiency And you put those four together and you might have others in your business I mean, you know, you can score people on how well they embrace your core values I mean it's me in different ways that you can come up with ways of scoring but You know for starters if if you aren't creating, uh, you know setting expectations accountability on those four I don't think it's it's it's balanced. Um See some people put it like a heavy emphasis on quality and that's that's great But that's not the only thing you can have excellent quality is still not make money We send that more times a week out, right? So we see more more people having problems with Their profit margin That have excellent quality than people who don't so that's very telling because normally the higher quality A company has the more money they should be expecting to make but quality all by itself doesn't solve the problem But you put more measures Yeah, you throw this four measures in there and if you're you're driving on all four You know you're gonna Your eyes of of being profitable go up greatly So we're going to talk about training, you know a lot of times the example that that that was given earlier, um, where You know our slow people always have excuses Um, I've seen I've seen cleaning business owners Jumped the conclusion that well this person this this cleaning technician is just slow like it's a It's a chronic affliction that we can't do anything about it. Um Can we talk a minute about talent versus skill and how that fits into You know, how do we address that slow cleaning technician? Sure. I'd love to hear what you have to say about talent with regards to productivity Tom Oh the definition of talent we've talked about this before is kind of the God-given aptitude that somebody has to do something um michael jordan is a more talented basketball player than I am and All things being equal we could practice and work the same amount of time and he's still going to be better than I am um We're skill is What you you it's basically what you do with your talent and In practice and study and working to become better skills can be learned where talent is is kind of what you you you Are are given And skill is also what you do with your not only your talent, but your lack of talent So how how you how you work with that? So speak to us about that in terms of productivity Tom instead of basketball So, what does that look like? Let's let's let's think of it this way Talent times skill equals performance You got some cleaning professionals that work with you that work for you You might just know They don't move as fast or maybe they don't have the same amount of stamina or strength or Whatever you might be talking about those would be the talent part, okay But regardless, I'm sorry the part that they come with naturally that they didn't have to work on to get They just automatically happen right But regardless of where you fall on that spectrum It's almost i'm i'm picturing like a a graph of the next on a y axis and You know the more talent you have in the harder you work at developing your skills the higher level of performance You're going to get But maybe you aren't the most talented. Maybe you're not the most gifted cleaning professional out there But if you work at your trade and if you work at developing your skills You can still improve your performance and you can still improve your productivity So I have a I have a really good example for this so I had an employee she doesn't work for any more she worked for us for about six years And she is what you would call the slowest person on the planet She just moved so slowly It was like she's never going to be able to be it's just never going to be able to be a productive house cleaner Is this just never going to happen? but She worked for us for six years for a really good reason Because what she learned how to do is to move very very slowly and efficiently she had no wasted movement at all She never did this ever Instead she did this Always and every movement that she did she moved very slowly She covered twice as much space. She never overdid anything And because of that she was one of our most productive people And she was always my My my little poster child when people would say I don't want to work with somebody because they're too slow I'm like, well, they just need more practice like Ernie said And they need more experience and they need more tools how to be able to Be better and we're going to time Rachel We're not going to tell her that we're timing her on a kitchen that we know takes everybody else 50 minutes And let's find out how long it takes Rachel the slowest person in the company And of course it would take Rachel 45 to 50 minutes so Um, I I think that that's a perfect example Is an excellent example and you know Ernie is making a point that kind of kind of picks up on that that You know skill and talent Certainly the that the skill can improve with experience And this particular, you know cleaning professional you're talking to I'm sure that You know the speed at which she had after she'd been with you for a few years was a lot Higher than what it was when she first started Yeah, and also once she started doing it it was so smooth It would a lot of times look slow to people, but it wasn't slow It was very quick because she was getting so much work done But when she first started I'm guessing that she was one of those people that you guys were having a discussion I don't know if she's going to make it or not I don't know if you can ever get her to the point where she could be productive enough to to carry her weight Yeah, zero talent. I would say when she first came to work for us, she had zero talent I don't know that she had ever cleaned anything in her whole life. She would just hold the cloth wrong It was like she did everything wrong She couldn't really she never remembered to look up and look down You know naturally when you're cleaning we we tend to Want to clean all of the things in the space that we're cleaning she didn't she cleaned pretty much between her forehead and her hips Anything that was in that area So so the point is regardless of how slow someone is They can they can be faster. They can be more productive. Yes, and they can I do want to say one thing because we House cleaners we business owners have a tendency to over invest In people sometimes Yes, every but I think almost everyone can be taught the skills Of residential house cleaning and they can be more productive but sometimes that that investment Might be more than you want to put in more than you have time for more than You can afford Oh, maybe maybe especially if your company is smaller you might not be able to afford the Time the resources that are going to have to be poured into this person to build their skills Some problems I'm going to say I don't want to say can't be fixed but From a practical standpoint, you shouldn't try to fix them. Yeah You're you're you're better off as a as a business owner as a company To shake hands in part ways absolutely You had to come up with those with those numbers yourself. What are those time frames? What are those benchmarks? What do they have to be able to do? To to make them worthwhile now what I can say is with this gal that we had She had so many amazing qualities that we really wanted in our company That we were willing to invest in her it ended up paying off for us because over the course of those next six years We did make a lot of money from her and she was a great role model for a lot of other people and she taught she just She had the skill She could show people how to clean. It was ridiculous. So we made money, but I don't know. I wouldn't I wouldn't do that with everybody. No But let's think about you know, we're talking, you know About attendance if somebody has excellent attendance and if their their quality is really good. They're slow Um efficiency we haven't gotten to yet, but you know if they've Fit your company culture and if they if they bring something, you know We have this term we call talk about, you know our our cultural cultural DNA, you know If they make your company better from a culture standpoint, you know Sometimes it's worth, you know making the investment to help them develop their skills So they can you know at least get to a level of productivity that that that warrants the level of compensation that that you're going to want to give them Yeah You know, there are the four things that you really need to be tracking And if somebody is heavily lacking in more than one area, I really look twice I really look twice at whether or not we have the resources that we are willing to pour into this person This there's more that I will certainly, you know add to this tomorrow, but another Time I just saw the time Okay, well, you'll have to come back tomorrow because this was going to be an awesome point Do you want to just type it in there? I want to talk about methods And this is basically just the industrial engineering concept of doing work design in a way to help people be more productive And there's a lot that goes into this and we're going to talk about there's a difference between motion and movement if you will and shortest distance between two points is a straight line and There's a lot of a lot of concepts that you know go into this and it's You know, it's it's akin to some of the work that You know is done in the in the area of speed cleaning a lot of those same methods go back to to industrial engineering techniques And we'll we'll pick up our discussion tomorrow and talk about that in terms of how you can help your What less productive cleaning professionals improve their speed? Just give me a favor and popper in these last comment on the screen before we Before we go Yeah, smaller the company more important that culture for this that is so very very true Uh, just want to make sure that we hit that point before we sign off your account. Yeah, that's uh Good, we'll be glad to see you tomorrow. Just saw that my two slowest were under time and I'm moving today We're trying your technique and put them together and it worked All right All right If I don't speed up, we're never going to get out of this house Sometimes that works We'll see you tomorrow