 Hey, good afternoon everybody, Tom Stewart here. I'm Liz Trotter. Jeannie Henderson is our guest today And this is going to be an awesome version of smart business moves. Yeah, Jeannie. How are you? I'm great Tom and super excited to be here Well, so one of the things that we're excited about Jeannie as you're combining two of our very very favorite things in This conversation today referrals and tech Yeah, that's right. Tom loves a little bit of tech there. I thought you were going to mention ice cream, but I like referrals and tech as well. That's okay. Oh boy ice cream So Tom, I wasn't on was I not on last week what happened? I think were you not or was I not? We haven't been on together No, you were on with Brandon last. Oh, yeah, that was that was great Brandon Was that was a good show? That was babysitting so I didn't get a chance to see that but because we haven't been on together I'm wondering how are the numbers? Maybe Gina could go find her Visa card and you could tell me about the numbers Gee whiz I have been kind of You know just in a general sense the economy is doing well better than it's supposed to be and You know the the jolt's numbers are still high. There's a lot more job openings. There are employees Interest rates are you know going to be going higher Gosh, that just all sounds so great Tom. I mean the consumer has a lot of money though And and they're spending and it's you know if you're like running a house cleaning business You know The numbers are suggesting that you shouldn't have customers telling you that hey, you know things are tight I'm having to come back and I haven't have you I haven't heard that Have you guys heard anybody saying that they're having a hard time with with the demand side I I have a couple of our clients that are struggling with the demand side. Yeah um More more demand with the customers right now than with the employees, right? Everybody's like Breathing breathing deeply now that the employee pipeline has opened up again But yeah, I do have a couple of customers that are struggling with uh With the client side Bank of america came out with you know some some some numbers the other week and I forget the exact numbers But the gist of is in like over half of the bank a consumer bank account in the us are in bank of america and People have more money in the bank now than they did pre coveted by a crazy amount still And they talk about you know people's debt limits are up and they are relative to where they were like You know not too long ago when when coveted was a thing and nobody was spending money on anything A lot of the money that people got from from the government that went to consumers They really went to pay down debt which is kind of a good thing because it's helping people reload And the debt levels are still a heck of a lot lower than they were pre covet All of that adds up to people are spending money and that's a good thing for us Yeah, that's true. I do like people spending money so All right. Well, I I guess you're like a little bit of a mixed bag I'm like I don't want interest rates to go up anymore. I'm already struggling in one part of my life But people have more money. So, okay, that's good. That's good We're gonna be going up Liz I'm not loving that. Yeah, I'm not loving that. Gotta tell you Yeah refinancing things. It's not fun when Interest rates are going up You have to wait it out. Look here. We've we've got some visitors Hey, Whitney Hey, Whitney Here's uh, here's somebody from from the og haven't seen I can't find my all my comments. So there we go Uh, all right. Oh, that's she just celebrated her 60th birthday. She had a big bash people flew in from Israel Like wow people it was a big bash Yeah, it was it was a big party. Uh, good to see you didn't eat. All right. Well, thanks tom for giving us that that little I guess perk kind of Yeah, it's better especially we're running all running service businesses. So it's good news All right. What what are you gonna tell us to help us grow our businesses even more genie? Well, um, yeah, I mean and that good news kind of flows into this, you know As some of us are feeling that pressure of you know the You know clients feeling that financial pressure and maybe not purchasing as readily for Being some attrition Is everything okay on the sound? Good sound, right? Yeah, that was strange. I don't know where that came from. It looks like tom is doing it It'll be fine now. Okay That's crazy. It's like there was another person in our call alien an alien. Yeah um And you know what we normally would do is increase our marketing spend Um, and then we're spending more for every client that we're converting Um, and I started thinking about that as we kind of saw this economic change coming our direction And one of the things that our team did was we started to double down on Um, basically people we call influencers Or another term for this would be word of mouth marketing or referral marketing And I know both of you Talked to a lot of cleaning business owners all over the place like I do And uh, you know, I hear from people who are just starting out. They'll often say Well, I built my business by word of mouth How many times have you heard somebody say that? Right times and I can count right and I and I actually did in my my early stages as well It was just too new and people would tell everybody and it would tend to be that you think about that as People who are already your clients already your services giving you a referral Right and sometimes we would come up with like a little reward But it's hard as your business grows to keep track of all that kind of stuff And we tend to think that that is a type of marketing and growth strategy for small startup businesses but Our business is you know doing well over a million dollars a year headed towards two million And what we're finding is that people who are not our clients Want to give us referrals They know us they like us and they trust us And they also share our name out there in the community And I really felt like wow we have to have a reward for these people who we're not serving And we can't give them, you know a free cleaning as a reward You know or a discount the next time or something like that we had to break Right These people that like you that aren't your clients. Is it because they're not qualified to be your client? I mean, could they be your client if they wanted to be? Some uh, I know I know people They're they're not really qualified right they they don't like me into that ideal client profile Yeah, like I couldn't also like I I I couldn't work with Jeannie I couldn't hire her to clean my house But I might be happy to give her a referral because I know a lot about her and I would be happy I would feel like my referral had a lot of weight Right because you're you're out of her service delivery area Right, but I know her well I mean, I feel like I know her well and I would really feel confident and comfortable giving her a referral Yeah, we all get those from time to time where somebody moves from One market to another geographic market and we get a call from another arc see member Saying hey, I've got a client of mine that just moved to your town You want to like I'm getting you know one to refer you to them? Yeah, I never really thought about setting that up as a formal rewards program But that would be an example I guess it is one of many examples During the pandemic one of the things that really that happened that was really surprising Is that networking went from? You know these after hours get a cocktail stand around and talk about to a bunch of people You don't know kind of events to all of these online networking spaces that Sprung up and in in my community and I and I've seen this all over because every time I coach with a cleaning business owner We look at their community and what opportunities they have to network and There are groups different facebook groups and other social media groups within communities That are just filled with business people And I started to lean into these groups and there are a couple of them in my area that have thousands of business people in them And I just got started to get to know those people And we would have online networking sessions during coveted we got to know each other and what I found was Suddenly I was getting referrals from all kinds of people who have never had my cleaning service They only know me because I'm a member of the community. I'm very very active And they know what my business stands for I'm very I'm very mission. I have a very mission driven business And so we talk about that a lot And so they know me they like me and they trust me and when someone is looking for cleaning service. They regularly Will give us a referral So this was the impetus for me to say wow, there are these influencers people who are very well known in our community now Who are sending clients my way and how do I say thank you to them and then wow There's probably more out there that I'm not even tapping into And that's when I started looking into growing our referral program And I think you all you know this well and everybody out there who's listening if you're in the cleaning business It's so much easier to convert someone who's a referral When you're selling Right. Yeah, you don't even have to sell them. They're like most people do 70 percent of their they're 70 sold when they call you But a referral is about 90 sold When they call you yeah Basically, they just want to know when can I get my cleaning done? When can you get here? Not when not hot. They want to know when not what be right. Yes, exactly And so if it also makes your sales process Work more smoothly and more efficiently the more referrals you can pour in to your sales process and These people are all around us In our community. They're like my neighbor across the street. They don't want I've known them I'm looking at their house right now. I have known them for a long time And they've never had a house cleaner. It's just not what they do But they give us referrals Nice, you know And I think we all all of us are embedded mostly in our community unless we're Operating remotely, but if we're operating remotely then someone on your team is embedded in the community and is building relationships and so we developed a system to not only reach to our current clients and encourage referrals but to reach out into the community as a whole and Into those influencers just like all the big brands do You know look at the big brands They're hiring these girls who put on makeup and make videos and they're you know Hiring crazy people who almost kill themselves to sell coca-cola or you know Making silly videos on tiktok and things like that people are Are incentivizing influencers in all other industries And genie this is this is like a slap your forehead moment for me because You know, we've been working referral programs for current clients for forever Not once have we ever Tried to even entertain the thought of how do you expand that to the general population? Yeah, and it really is amazing once we started reaching out into the community once we created a formal program around it Made it easy for people to refer us And had a very attractive reward system in place Now people are coming out of the woodwork Oh my gosh We're gonna talk about I'm feeling like tom like Dang, oh my gosh. What? What that? So it's really exciting and i'm i'm making new friends every day because i've got this great program and people want to Want to help them our business grow and we can also incentivize our team members I pay out referral rewards to my sister like Everybody Absolutely tell us about the rewards. What are they? right, so We've put together a system that Makes it easy for people to refer we work with a company called incentive fox and We've we've customized it for the home services industry To create an easy method for people to refer And then people who are part of incentive fox have a dashboard to track their referrals And and then within that dashboard you have the ability to send rewards directly By mail To the referrers to your influencers out there in the marketplace Should we pull it up and look at it would that be helpful? Yeah, would it be helpful to share a screen? Um, yeah, let's see You want to you want to show the one for your your uh company? Yeah, we can show mine. Unfortunately I I feel terrible. I forgot to bring the image of The custom rewards program, but yes, so if you want to scroll down So we have two different types of rewards We have loyalty rewards and that's also part of incentive fox And we have referral rewards. So first it talks about the loyalty rewards and that's that's another Another topic for another day, but um, that's incentivizing our current clients To stick with us be loyal. Um, just like you get points at hotels and Starbucks and walgreens We're doing a program like that But then if you scroll down a little bit farther, you can see our referral reward program Um for referrals And actually I just recently Was updating my site. So there was a really cool picture here of our referral reward packet that clients get and it's gone I'm like, where did it go? So I have to go back and put that in but um, so Anyone can give my business a referral by coming to this page Um, this is uh, this is redeeming rewards. Okay, where it says share genie cleaning if you go down to that part right there That's where the referrals are So clients can share about our business by just stopping here on this page and putting in the refer and refer e information And if their referral makes a purchase of either one time or recurring cleaning They will receive a reward and the reward that I have chosen for my business is a reloadable custom visa card So the visa card is designed with my logo on it It's customized in my brand colors and it comes in this really cool branded folder And um, if they refer a recurring client, they're referring recurring client stays with us a certain number of visits We are automatically generate a $100 visa card. Now people might be out there going wow $100. That's so much money But how much does it cost you to actually acquire a client right now? three Yeah, right $300 and i'm hearing from people that their client acquisition cost is going up right now I know ours has gone up between 50 and 75 dollars per client Just in the last few months and i'm talking to people who are seeing even greater increases in their cost of client acquisition And if you're listening and you're not familiar with cost of client acquisition, that's how much it costs you for every recurring client that you Uh sell into your business how much it costs you in marketing? and uh, and so This does you know, we do have to work in our community to build our brand build our presence to get these referrals But we really aren't putting a lot of money behind this program besides adding it to our website And participating with incentive fox pretty nice So also You're saving time then right there's a lot of time that is being Right you're saving a lot of time and It's much easier to sell these clients tend to buy more. They're more profitable clients They're easier to serve right. They're less of a pita if you you know know what I mean and and they You know your team enjoys cleaning for them more So you tend to attract more of those ideal clients through a program like this than you do through traditional marketing And you can use this to reward your employees for giving you referrals If you're doing a door hanger program, you can use this reward to reward your employees and This program is you can get people who become habitual refers And earn enough to earn a 10 99 Wow Automatically send them the 10 99 if they earn that so And normally if you are You know labeled as a habitual something another it's not I'm encouraging it Wow, okay. So how much does this program cost genie? So we know we're gonna have to pay a hundred dollars for each person that right you have to pay a hundred dollars And so um, but it's a 150 dollar a month subscription to this program Uh, there is a setup fee of a hundred and I think you know, it's 225 to get it all set up and get everything in your system set up Uh, and there are other programs that you can um bundle with it to like the loyalty program There's a social media. There's a like a social media posting program that you can add to it that gets your clients Posting on social media about your business. Oh, nice. There's all kinds of other little things you can add on And uh, you can use you can either choose that customize visa card or incentive ox has Hundreds of national retailers that you can get gift cards Through their program and have those automatically sent to people as well So if you don't want to there is an invest investment to create a custom visa card I don't have that in front of me, but there is a set up Yeah, there's a there's a setup fee to create the custom visa card So if you don't want to go that route you can use these national retailer cards and um But I've also one of the things that's really cool is you can people can use this as a fundraising program for their nonprofits So they can send you referrals um, you can set them up before they start doing the fundraising you create the custom visa card for the non-profit organization And then you give them a custom Uh landing page that they can send people to for referrals And they can just start fundraising for their organization. I'm working with a local food pantry right now who is giving us referrals uh And we're paying out referral rewards to them So you're getting you're activating raving fans who don't even buy your services They just love you because of what you do in the community and what you do for others now granted Your own clients will do this as well. I was looking through my dashboard um, and there's I have a few of those habitual ones already Who have figured this out and they're sending us referrals all the time I'm fine with that It's an opportunity referral Acceptor Yes, yes, please Please send them more. So it's just I want to challenge everyone out there To think about word of mouth marketing again. It's not just for starting your business It's something that you can use to grow your business now. It helps it saves you marketing dollars. It saves you time um And now you have a tool to automate it if you want to but if you don't want to I mean prior to this We just had a google sheet That everywhere referral we'd put it in and we'd track them. Now, of course somebody has to be on top of that And um, but we did that for years Uh, we would do say this is um working for you. Do you have any results that you can share? Yeah, yeah, so, um, yeah, I'm looking at my Little presentation here that I did a little while ago. Um So we want to you you could share your screen if you you wanted to Jamie, um, I'm sorry. I didn't really prepare for that. But um, You don't have to yeah We had, um Whoops, where is it? I want to say we had Our conversion rate was I think we had 58 referrals and we converted 85 percent Dang, I wasn't happy with that number. It's a killer. Yeah, and happy with that That was 85 leads that we really didn't pay for So 85 leads or 85 percent. Oh, I mean 85 is 58 leads similar number Yeah, but you didn't yeah that we didn't pay for But the way you've got the program set up is if the the 15 percent that that didn't take service You don't pay anything on that. Right. We don't pay anything and now they are in our system You know, right? They now they're in our drip campaign Um, you know, we're still communicating with them. They received a quote and as you know A lot of times people who are prospects They go out they try somebody else and then later they come back and they want to buy from you Or it just takes a while You know, a lot of times it takes people a while. They're like, yeah, I'm interested. Yeah, I'm interested. Yeah, I'm interested My house is a pit today. I'm buying Yes, they they do they have to kind of get to a point where they're ready and uh, yeah So we want to keep communicating with those people Now do those people will the whoever referred them even if it's six months down the line? Will they still get the hundred dollars? Yes, I was just actually talking with my team about that today. I was like, I want to make sure That we're on that That and we do have it, you know, we're we're a made central user So we do have that information inside their record in made central So we can see it when we bring that quote back up again You know that they were referred by someone so we want to make sure that we're still doing that And the cool thing too about using an automated system is it also has a series of emails that it sends out When somebody is referred both the referer and the referee receive an email When the reward goes out, they receive an email to watch their mail for the reward. Oh, nice. Yeah and And now you've got your you have a list of people who you know are your influencers Yeah And it's one of the things that we talk about a lot in my coaching program is to find out who those people Are not just in your business but in your community And build stronger relationships with them focus on your top 20. Who are the top 20 people who are advocates for your business? Well, they they self identify through this program And you're able to now use that information to build relationships and you know, we've been doing this for just over a year So it's pretty new But um, you know, now we're building out those other pieces where we can start like a long-term relationship Program for these these influencers and really make them feel like vip's This is so cool. I know I'm like my brain is like Jeannie, uh, you you shared uh this site for me is this Can you share with us what this site is? Yeah, so this is incentive ox. This is a partner This is a company that I am partnering with I am I'm I'm not an employee of the company, but I'm uh I'm I'm a partner Yeah, I'm not a co-owner, but I um, I'm like an agent. Let's say For this company. So I have to you know, disclose that I you know, I do get paid because I help them build this program Is that something that they had? Yeah, but I knew that they had a good platform And I felt really once I got to know them. I really liked them. I I knew one liked So you're going to get paid for getting them some referrals Yes. Oh, oh That that's wow brand new idea Right, right They have a referral program for people like me. Yeah, uh, and um, so um, yes, you can turn your customers into brand advocates, but also Not just your customers. And so that's one of the things that we're really really really pushing To focus on people who aren't your customers and get them just as excited about giving you referrals And I have found incentive fox to be great to work with and um, you integrate it directly into your website Also, if someone just calls and says hey, tom stewart, uh told me to give you a call We can add that into incentive fox so that the automation process starts They don't if they don't go to the website to do it And it's just like you just told them and gave them my phone number We we still add them into our system Cool So have you have you identified genie where you're getting? the bulk of your referrals is it from like your networking groups or Um places that you donate to or anything like that um, I would say So of course the bulk over 50 percent is from clients Yeah, right. They they have the experience to share with others Yeah, and um, and that's great. We want to continue to Reward them for that and then uh, the other people are generally people We just know in the community through business relationships. They might be vendors um, other, you know, just other business Colleagues in the community Associates that we have non-profits we work with that we donate to um Friends and family of course you want to be nice to your friends and family especially They will give you referrals My my sister is a an award-winning referrer. So um, and she does not use our services She's habitual Yes, and They can share this link with you know, their friends and family and um And it's amazing The power of That and once I started sharing out there what the reward was Uh, then I had I had all kinds of people I had so now what I'm getting to this is something really important I think everybody needs to make a network note of this a lot of us when we start out We'll join groups like um, b and i and stuff like that. You know to get referrals But you can create your own b and i with this kind of And I'm sure you guys have done this in your business where you have those business With a carpet cleaning company or a window cleaning company or you know that kind of thing and you kind of give each other referrals Well, when I started putting this out there into the business community what I was doing Those people started coming out of the woodwork So I within 24 hours of one post I had a window cleaning guy in my office picking up brochures to give to his clients Nice um today actually I was in my office and um a woman that I met through this business network Uh, she serves breast cancer patients and we're members of cleaning for a reason And within meeting her within 24 hours. She was in my office. She picked up A bag a packet of brochures to give to the people she serves awesome you know, so um Once people understand it they get really excited about it. Of course they have to to trust us But we do a lot in our community to build those relationships first yeah That's why I was wondering if you get a lot from your b and i groups or something like that your networking groups Because the people do I mean they naturally are going to refer you anyway And they already do feel like they know you so it seems like this would make it even easier and of a bigger benefit to them Yeah, well, and I think we can take a big lesson from b and i and that is to give first The way that you get referrals is to give other businesses referrals One of my best referral partners that I've ever had Was the commercial cleaning company whose office was kitty corner from my office door And he gave me everybody who called him who wanted residential cleaning. He gave They're gave my number to them And I gave this I did the same thing in return because I wasn't doing commercial cleaning So every commercial cleaning Call I received I gave to him We traded thousands of dollars worth of business So there's a lot of referring that you can do without ever creating these rewards just by reciprocating Yeah, so you don't have to go out and buy this program. You don't you know I always want to give value when I talk to people. So I want to encourage you like you don't have to buy anything to do this Right. You want to start this yourself? You don't but you know just for perspective though, it's It's 2023 and technology has Kind of democratized a lot of this to the point where for a very modest fee if you think about what one new customer is worth that more than dwarfs the investment and and a product like this and the What's what's also happening? It's as important to understand is that you're competing against Not only just different cleaning companies, but just you know, anybody that will take u.s. Currency for exchange for for something and difference between Being able to do something or being able to do something at a you know, fairly decent level versus being able to do it at the highest level oftentimes is the difference between Getting incredible results or getting no results. That's kind of where technology and everything that's happening in 2023 and and moving forward is going so Yeah, you can do this on a spreadsheet But if you're going to do it the time In effort that you're going to put into it and the results you're going to get out of it I don't know. Is it too strong to say that if you're not going to get the Best tools out there on the market that you can reasonably afford and this is definitely affordable if you're not going to do this then You might not even want to bob or you spend your time doing something else. That's harsh, but I believe I believe that to be true All right, so i'm gonna play devil's advocate and i'm gonna say that Start if you if you are like, I can't afford it. I can't do it fine start with the start with the spreadsheet Because the idea is sound and if you're not there yet for the tech Then get started and get yourself there sometimes you need to take that first step And it doesn't have to be you either do this or you do nothing it can be okay. You're not ready for this yet Get in there start playing the game and then you're going to quickly we believe or at least I believe That you will quickly see the value How much time and money and effort it's going to save you right I can get on board with that But if you get to the point where you're starting With the spreadsheet and you're not getting the results that you were hoping to get Don't just assume that it was a bad idea. There's a lot of good ideas that are poorly implemented And if you you know if you can make that work great, but You know there's two things one. Could you be making it work better if if you have better tools? And if it's not working for you Maybe you need to to get the the better tools in order to make it work right Yeah, and you know when we started out in the residential cleaning business my husband and I started seven years ago The one thing that we said was we wanted to be the most professional cleaning service in our market area And when you talk about technology One of you know, we were we were probably one of the first people using a crm in our market And I remember the clients just like wow, we'd send them these really professional looking quotes and they're like that Not what I expected, you know, and it We we kind of blew their minds with our level of professionalism our level of preparedness And um, this is just another one of those tools that it's an unexpected thing You don't see a lot of people out there just in the general marketplace Leaning into the influencers in their community. Yeah, and then having A structured program to manage it reward it track it You know continue to promote it. You don't really see that And so when you want to stand out in your community, you have to do something bigger better different And this is one of those things and I remember when I first rolled this out last year people like, whoa Are you serious? You're gonna send me a hundred dollar Visa card? Oh, yeah, I am And I'm gonna be happy when I reload a hundred dollars on it the second time you refer somebody and the third time you refer somebody I'm gonna be happy. I love giving you money for that We want you to be habitual That word is stuck That's a good one for tom Become a habitual refer Yeah, did you mention that there's also Within this platform an option to do like a loyalty program. Yes. Yes. So you can set up a loyalty points program based on a number of visits or dollars spent and We started that program at the same time that we started this program And it's a great what we have found we've used it for is clients can then redeem those points for extra services They can't use it to pay for existing already scheduled service Yeah, but they can use it for add-on service. So recently we had a light schedule back in january So we reached out to everyone who had enough points to redeem for an appliance cleaning Or an extra, you know nice And we we literally filled our schedule with clients redeeming points. Now. Yeah, I wasn't making money at that moment But I was making happy clients Sure and keeping employees and happy employees Yeah, and you and those employees we've spent a whole bunch of money. They're they're More valuable. I'm sorry if any clients are listening, but they're more valuable than a client, right? and You know, so we want to keep them happy and sometimes it's a challenge to do that in january So this has been a great tool in the spring. We're doing a promotion in march Or we did a promotion last march. I think we're changing it up this year, but we did a promotion for a thousand bonus points for uh, when you add a spring cleaning to your regular recurring schedule And I want to say we sold like 50 of them It was it was like crazy. We didn't expect and a thousand points on my system isn't like a it doesn't translate to a ton of money The way that I have my point system set up and you can customize that and incentive ox kind of guides you on that They're they're experts on points So, uh, it does have that there are other things that you can add on a gift card program It's very inexpensive you can add on to this very easily where you just pay a very small fee to issue gift cards It's not a percentage of the sale. It's just a I love that So it it incentive ox also has that and then um, we're also launching a new social media program where clients can post on social media with a trackable link And um, so we're working on some of those things too. So it's a great marketing program kind of you know um Non-traditional and uh, but thinking differently about how we're spending our dollars in our time Well, it's kind of funny because it is very traditional, but just brought brought to the forefront in a brand new more Forward thinking way, right that this is kind of my idea of uh, what they're talking about when they talk about blue ocean strategy Right, you don't have to reinvent the wheel. You just have to make a better wheel You're super sizing it through technology. Yes. Yeah, and um Hey there Layla good to see you um Yeah, and in What the way that we have um done this, you know makes it easy for people To implement it, you know a lot of people So I talk to people all the time and I know you guys do too And I'll say do you have a referral program in place? I'll say, oh, yes, we do And I'll say, okay, you have a referral program in place. Do your clients know Well, I told them when they signed up for service I'm like, well, do you think they were ready to give you a referral before you they ever used your service? Do you think they remember did you ever remind them and a lot of people will say they have a referral program But they they truly never do anything with it. It's on paper only right. Yeah, and they kind of mention it And then they forget to send out their rewards And they're and they're we I see two things two other things on top of that one They're embarrassed Because they're like, oh, I feel like I'm being like real pushy salesy. That's one and the second thing is Yeah, but I don't really know what to give them and how to do it I'm afraid that I'll drop the ball and you know, they're afraid. There's a lot of fear around referral programs Um, and then actually I just let them another one. There's especially small businesses are nervous that You know, like I I'm not going to be able to afford it What if you know, I there's like that little disconnect between but if they're giving you money That's where the money will come from Right if you think of the lifetime value of a client and I really encourage people to number one figure out How much it's currently costing you to acquire each recurring client in your business The average is anywhere from 250 to some people as high as almost $500 right now and And it's going up with what's happening in the economy. So that's one number that we should know Another number we should know is the lifetime value of our clients And that is, you know, how much they spend over the amount of time that they're with you And if a client is with you for three years And they're spending let's just say $4,000 a year That's a 12,000 lifetime value And you don't have to do a hundred dollar gift card You could give a $50 gift card and people would be appreciative of it and it would incentivize them But is it worth $50 to get a $12,000 sale? Yes, of course it is, you know, of course and um, so and if you're spending $250 now to get every new client Why not spend a hundred dollars to get that new client? You know, Jeannie, I'm seeing Companies and I've talked to companies who are using this lifetime value calculation You mentioned earlier that people are paying more Per per customer now than they used to I don't think that's by accident I think the larger companies are figuring out that they can get even larger By being willing to pay those larger amounts and They know that if you've got if you've got good data You can measure what your monthly churn rate is on your recurring customers. You're recurring homes and It's basically you take one and divide it by your your your monthly churn factor And that gives you the number of months on average that a customer stays with you and you multiply that times a average You know price per job the average number of jobs per month and it gives you a dollar amount six seven eight nine plus thousand dollars of the lifetime of that customer and There are really big companies out there that are with confidence are spending these crazy what we would have thought of In crazy amounts of money a few years ago to You know get a new client But it's crazy and they're like these You know multi-million dollar businesses just keep getting bigger by doing it Right. Well marketing does I mean we know that To be successful to get past that point of being a word of mouth marketing business Which a lot of people wear that as a point of pride But you're gonna you're never gonna grow To five hundred thousand or a million in revenue or two million in revenue by word of mouth alone But it can be part of your marketing plan But you will need to invest And if you invest in something like this You're getting the best of both worlds You know, yeah, I agree so so genie Layla was asking if she could do this through you. You're an agent So how how does that happen? How does how does she do it through you? Yes? So um, we do have a link tonight that if anyone would like to Just even book a demo To take a look at the incentive fox program and learn more about it They can go right to incentive fox.com and click the orange book a demo button And just mention my name you can just say coach genie in the comments And you will qualify if you do decide to try incentive fox. There is no contract. It's a month to month program You if you do decide you want to try it you can sign up for it and get one month free with my compliments and we've we've taken the uh the link and we've dropped it into the comments so you should have that and For being able to do it one month for free. What the heck? I mean even if you're fine you do it on a spreadsheet Yeah and um The nice thing about it too is if you it does take a little while if you decide to do the custom visa card It takes like six weeks four to six weeks to get that card created and in place and everything So you have the option to use the national retailer cards on the short term just to test it out because they're available like that Yeah So you can choose some national retailer cards that your clients can choose from as rewards And I can make an argument that they could even be more successful in some ways The customers that we usually work with Um, don't really need money from us. They usually have money. Yes, they always want presents You don't like presents. Yes, right gift cards can feel like presents. It's like money just sort of is like I have money, but a gift card to the coach outlet Okay, maybe maybe I'm maybe I want to go shopping Exactly So I can make an argument that that could be a little bit incentivizing for the people that we We tend to have as customers Right. Yeah. Yeah. So you get to choose, you know, what you think is the best fit for your business And I mean even when we very first started out doing referral programs. I partnered with um, it with at different times with two different local restaurant groups in my area One of them I was cleaning the owner's home and he had like four Italian restaurants And we just traded gift cards and I used those for my referral program and it worked great Yeah, uh, and then, you know, so you can start easily that way Just bartering I had another restaurant That I partnered with it was a chain of locally owned restaurants And they would give me gift certificates that they would print out But they would only make me pay for them if they were redeemed I have a chiropractor. I do that with and I think we have somebody else that we do with that with Yeah, you know, that's nice because you can have a ton of them But the only pay for the ones that they actually get used. I love that. Yeah. Yeah. So Um, you know, you can always start small with a program like this But really what I wanted to come on today is I just wanted people to rethink about referral programs now A lot of people say they have them but very few people are regularly talking to their clients about it making it a part of their regular marketing message Giving their clients and employees reminders about it on a regular basis But then very very few people have I seen reaching out into the community and activating those influencers Yeah, talking. Um, I like to use the song. Let's give them something to talk about right, you know So give them something to talk about And get them excited about it and you'll be surprised How many people want to help you grow your business people love to watch people other people grow Well, you know, and I really like the use of the term influencer Because nowadays everyone wants to think of themselves as an influencer, right? That's a that's a pop word right now So I can see how using that word Is also incentivizing just the word status thing. Yeah, it's status like i'm an influencer. Yeah And status sells too. That's one of the reasons people like to get their house clean It's all about status. So, um, yeah Well, I appreciate you guys letting me share about this It's uh, something that I've been really excited But I wanted to make sure that I've been testing it long enough to come out and talk with people about it But uh, we're finding that people are really excited about it And and I know that this can help many many cleaning businesses Save marketing dollars attract new clients And grow their companies in in ways that you know, they just hadn't thought of before Yeah, and and and I think the point is is is very clear It's like, yeah, a lot of us have incentive programs, but how well is your incentive program working? It's uh A lot of times we build something put it together and we check it off the list and saying well that job's done Let's move on to something else without giving a whole lot of thought is it actually creating what What value might it be creating for us and having it and working at Creating real value with it are all different things. We have a question here, genie. Well, uh, What do you recommend the actual card or I guess the card with the or a gift card or a gift card? You know, I think it really just depends on the business owner Where you're at right now in your business. I like what liz was saying how You know, there are some people who giving them dollars on a on a visa card is not as incentivizing as some fun gift card for You know massage envy or Coats or you know a local restaurant or I mean a chain restaurant because those will all be national retailers That will um those cards will be so either one. I think More importantly is how you talk about it And how you start to treat these vip's you identify your community I think that's the most important part is how you talk about it and that it is a regular part of your plan You never ever stop talking about it. We do a newsletter to our clients a couple of times a month This is in there every time We're always reminding them Our salesperson reminds them on the during the onboarding process and then they're constantly receiving reminders Sometimes we have leave behind cards Uh that we leave on clients counters, you know when we're cleaning when I'm out in the community I'm getting ready to do a Like a an expo trade show in my area. I'm going to be talking about it there Nice. Well, I mean, I don't think anybody can argue with 49 new clients Right y'all you you caught that right she got 58 leads 85 that turned 49 new clients. How much did it cost her $4,900? How much would it cost you tom to bring on 49 new clients? A lot more than that not 4,900 bucks. Yeah, not even close. That's amazing. I You can't argue those numbers. Those are those are amazing And it took you a year to get to that point But that's where you are now Or the clients a month, how fast could y'all grow if you're bringing out 49 new clients a month? Yeah, and I have to say that was in a quarter I'm gonna be transparent, but it was still you know, this program is new and early for us and um, you know, we've been really Tweaking and tweaking and making it look great. And uh, yeah, but still It's clients that we wouldn't have had Yeah Yeah, I don't know anybody that's gonna like Put their nose up at what what is that 36 37? Right. Oh, yeah, I'll take that Right. Yeah. No, we're we've been really happy with the program. We really enjoy working with incentive box and um, I just I just see this um growing and growing and And look at the big retailers And look what they're doing and how much they talk about their clubs Or their vip program or their points program or they're going to dsw or You know Wallgreens our rewards coals cash. I was at Nordstrom's the Nordy club The Nordy club. I thought that was hilarious, you know, but There's a reason they're doing it Yeah, because it works for them and We can take our cue from that There's a lot to be learned from very large successful businesses They've figured out some things and we should You know, we're in school. They called it plagiarism and in business. They call it best practices Right. Yeah And now, you know, it's good to borrow from people You know, we don't like you said we don't have to invent the new this new thing We've been getting referrals since the beginning. Well, let's get really good at it Yeah And do it in a bigger better way. Right. Just you're you're a bigger better company do it in a bigger better way, right? This is time time to move into this century Right. And if you're not a big company, look like a big company. Yeah And that's what we did from the very beginning even when we, you know, before we even had 100 clients We tried looking big I actually remember having people say to me very early in the beginning Is this a franchise like wow, how long have you guys been in business, you know, and I'd be like, oh two years Oh my gosh, you know, but it's because we were very intentional Yeah, and and looking big is like one of the steps in becoming big You have to look big before you can become big Right. Yeah. Oh, wait. Layla has already signed up for the demo there. Way to go Layla, appreciate it Melissa's loving this whole thing too Thanks for coming and listening tonight everybody Well, jeannie, this is awesome. Thank you for sharing with us. Um, I'm getting you back on smart business moves Thanks for having me. Always good to see you guys You want to say anything about arcsy for the last 30 seconds that we got? Oh, yeah so also, um In addition to having uh, our my cleaning business and being a business coach I am the chair of the arcsy residential cleaning council division of issa And so I really want to get everybody thinking about that. There is um, we have the issa show coming up in november So watch for the announcement for registering for that very soon I understand that uh, there's like a big nas car event happening. It's going to be in vegas um, november It's it's formula one. It's formula one actually, but it is formula one. Yeah, so the same thing town No, they're cars. I don't know. I love this room. No No So mad right now Um, but evidently that's eating up all the hotel rooms in las vegas So, um, we really want you to be at the show It's going to be big and great and there's going to be so much great information there. We'll all be there Probably i'm i'm i'm just planning that you guys are going to be there too And um And you know, it's just an opportunity to not only, you know, meet other cleaning business owners meet great Influencers in the residential cleaning industry like liz and tom, but you also, uh, there's so much opportunity to learn Um, I have learned so much at these issa shows the education is beyond belief And it gets better every year. So plan for that If you aren't already a member of a rcsi I um, I encourage you to reach out to me or you know One of these amazing people because um, we all know the value of being a part of that powerful community Yeah, um, don't go it alone. Don't be in the cleaning business out there just trying to figure it out Plug into a community of people who have who share openly with each other We don't act like competitors. We act like a family and help each other grow So, um, there are so many just year-long opportunities with inside of inside of arcsy to learn to train your team Um on you know the house cleaning technician program and various programs that we offer through arcsi But also to train you to be a stronger better leader of your business and learn systems and strategies for your business and member benefits that are Worth more than the price of admission, right? You can you can pay for your membership in arcsy just by taking advantage Of the member benefits and discounts. So it's an investment. It's an investment in We can explain it, but if you experience it, it's it's obvious And you will get your your investment back many times by by plugging into the arcsy community Yeah, for sure And it's going to be a regional event in st. Louis on april 28th as well In that part of the country Um, I don't know if the sign-up is yet for that, but You know, if you're in the somewhere in the midwest, uh mark your calendar for april 28th Is matt hosting matt? Yes, yes, great. So matt ricketts one of our amazing members is hosting that so Um, he's got a great company. You go see yes so much to learn to go see a really successful growing Yeah, a cleaning business in action. It's such a great opportunity. Don't miss that And then we do have monthly just coffee and conversation events and you don't even have to be a member to join those Uh, and you know, so there's something always going on in arcsy to help all of our residential cleaning business owners throughout north america, so Reach out to me if you have questions about that or if you have questions about this referral program Look me up on facebook You can contact me at genie at genie henderson.com And uh, yeah My business website I you got to wrap us up tom. I have an appointment in one minute Well, we are a little past the top of the hour. We're in overtime, but You guys have an awesome rest of your week. We'll be back next wednesday five o'clock eastern genie. Thanks again Thank you so much. Thanks. Good to see you both. Thank you everybody for coming. Have a great night everybody