 Hi, this is Tom Stewart with Clean Business Today. I'm back with my partner, Liz Trotter, and we've got Matt Ricketts joining us today. So, you know, another afternoon of talking about smart business moves for dealing with the coronavirus, if you're in the house cleaning business. Liz and I were chatting earlier today, and we got a Ricketts, uh-oh. Every time, I do this every time. I tried to get it before, but I didn't. Sorry, oh. Okay, Liz and I were chatting later today, earlier today, rather, and she was sharing some discussion she had with some other cleaning business owners, and I guess things that we should be thinking about right now, you know, yesterday, we said that, you know, if we haven't gotten past the financial part of this in terms of applying for our loans and pushing our debt off and all of that, we need to be getting there real quick because, you know, we're gonna have to figure out what we're gonna be doing with our cleaning businesses when the coronavirus starts to taper down and things. You know, I don't know what normal's gonna look like, but it's gonna be different than it is now. I mean, a lot of us are shut down, and for those of us who aren't shut down, you know, we've got a lot of customers that don't want us in their home. So, you know, what do we need to be doing now to kind of get ready for what's next? And Liz, you were sharing some discussions that you were having today. Yeah, we were talking about, you know, there's basically two different groups. There's a group of people that is already shut down for whatever reason, and then there's the group of people or companies that are still running, right? Still operating, but for both groups, anybody that's getting the PPP, which pretty much I think is all of us, we're all trying to get it at least, we need to be at the very latest, we need to sort of be up and kind of run in hardcore the beginning of May, so that we can get all of May and all of June. I mean, ideally, so that we can get our best opportunity to get our eight weeks of payroll forgiven, right? So, how do we be up and running until May 30 is a Monday, right? How are we up and running full steam ahead on May 3rd? And two prongs, one is the client and the second is the employees. We need to have enough employees and we need to have enough clients. Either one is gonna be good without the other. And so, the main thing we're talking about today is because we've been talking a lot about the employees over the past couple of weeks, right? I think we've basically been talking a lot about that. But what are we doing to prep the clients? How are we getting them ready? A lot of them have already skipped or just gone on hold for a short period of time. They've donated money. They said, I'll keep paying but don't come clean. So, all of those things are telling us that the customers are of the mindset that it's not good to have us out cleaning yet. They're even willing to pay to keep us away. Okay? So, and of course it's not because they're trying desperately to keep us away but it's important enough that they're willing to, they want to support us but they still don't want us in. So, trying to change that narrative and coming up with some strategies. I was saying that we need to be looking to begin changing that narrative now about start thinking about having us back out. Why it would be a good idea to have us back out. Why you want us back out? I was sharing a graph. I think you and I were looking at this earlier today, Tom. The healthdata.org graphs that show where the resources, the research use, like in my state, it's been five days since peak resource use on April 2nd. And so, looking at that graph, it's showing us that in May, we're going to be in a pre, oh, we lost Tom. Sorry, Tom. I kicked him off talking about graphs. He got too excited, you know. Hopefully we're still live because isn't he the one in charge of this thing? No, we're still live on screen, we're on stream yard today, so it's okay. And so anyway, talking about different things that we can start telling our customers about why it's going to be really safe and maybe tapping into some loss aversion. Hey, Tom, could you have me back? Hey, it's on the wrong button there, but we're all good. I'm tapping into like some loss aversion maybe, some scarcity so that they start getting like, and we kind of have to do this in order. It's going to be safe, it's going to be great. Start getting ready for it. Here's good reasons why it's okay to start thinking about having your house clean and then hitting them with some scarcity and some loss aversion, like, go ahead. I don't know, so I think like we need to first kind of format it into a timeframe of when we're going to be reopening and really start communicating that to your customers ahead of time, whether or not you're going to hit that target or not and what your goals are for reopening. I'm going to open up, if you guys let me share, I'm going to open up a communication we sent out to our customers in blog form here, but see if my computer will let me open up another window here. But I mean, I think that's the first thing is you need to pick a date, whether or not you're going to hit that date or not. We don't know, right? You don't have a crystal ball what all the information is going to be that's going to help you make that decision. But I think you need to have some goals in mind. So let me go back and only share my screen. I'm going to just show something that we sent out via email, but also let's see. Should be a button at the bottom, it says. There we go. Let me go over here. All right, so we did this thing an update to temporary service suspension. We sent this out to our customers and basically we talked about our goals through the crisis. So what we're trying to accomplish right now, so we're trying to contribute to the community effort to slow this part of the virus, ensure the health and safety of our staff and clients and ensure the long-term health and continuity of the business. So obviously that's an important goal too, right? So we want to be upfront on us about that. And we also described how we're going to make our decision to come back to work. So we're waiting that we're trying to make sure that peak infection in St. Louis never exceeds the amount of available beds, critical care resources. And so we don't want to be a part of any community spread when the worst of this is going on. But we're also clear that we're going to work in an environment where COVID-19 exists, we're going to do some things to mitigate that. We're looking for the lifting of strict stay-at-home orders. Our statewide order ends on April 27th and our city order ends on April 24th. So I'm hoping somewhere in that window we'll do that. And excuse me, we're also looking at some customers that have some customer need, the client needs. We're actually bringing a couple of people back right now because we're getting a lot of empty, clean requests and things like that. So I'm back up to about six technicians next week, I believe. So from 36 to six, it's not, it's not ideal, but it's there. And then Liz was talking about offers to continue to pay. We created an employee assistance fund, Joe Walsh gave me the idea of doing this. And we've collected about $2,000 so far. So I'm going to match 1,000 of that and hopefully I give it up to about 3,600 so I can give out $100 gift card to all of my employees. And I've also sold about 15,000 in gift cards since we closed. But the idea is that we're communicating this. So our goal, we actually had April 20th in this blog post but on the email we actually changed it that actually finalized, I need to edit this. We said we would try and reopen on the 24th in fact. So that's later that same week. And in advance of that, we're putting together some internal steps and some external steps as far as things that we're going to do to reopen. So all the clients that are on that week, about a week out, we're going to email them. We're going to basically run a report in our software made central and then we can email them directly. But if you don't have that, just we're going to communicate with them a week out, see if they're ready for us. And then if they're not, we're going to pull them down ahead of time so we know have a better idea with staffing. And we're going to call everyone individually too so that we aren't kind of caught flat footed with that. So I'm going to go ahead and stop the share here and give it back. But that's one form of communication. We're going to keep doing that sort of stuff. And then we're kind of writing out our plan for both the staff, timing what we need to do with them and timing what we need to do with the employees, I'm sorry, with the clients. And again, there's so much up in the air still, it could all just be a guess, but you need to be doing something, right? So it's a... I share a link in the chat to a website. I'll just put this up here real quick because I think it's useful. This was what Liz was referring to. The link is, we're going to have a question on cleaning business today too on our resource page, but you can go to... Oh, this is country. Wait a minute, I took you to the wrong one. Just go down, Tom. Just go down on that squally button and it goes to states. It's on my blog too. So if you go to that website... I did States of America, Tom. Go up to where it says United States of America and then click on the carrot and then go down. Scroll down. And you'll find whatever state you want. Oh, I got you. So if you want to know what country it's gonna be hitting peak, you can do that too, but I don't know, let's pick a state. Yeah, we're nine days away from peak in the United States is what it's saying. And so by state... You're in Kansas, right? I'm in Missouri now, thank you. I'm kidding. 12 days, yeah, you're on the 19th. Ooh, you got a ways to go. We're five days past, so we're in a really great place. Yeah, it's different. It's gonna be different everywhere. So yeah, we're 12 days, 11 or 12 days from peak. And again, that coincides with my plans to open late April. We'll be on the downside. People will start being able to know that resources aren't gonna be constrained in hospitals. To be perfectly honest, I don't think we're gonna see a total normalization of society until mid-May, maybe early June. So that's... How do you know, my total is a big word. I mean... Yeah, you're right. You're right, total... But I do expect restaurants to be able to be reopened by mid-May, late May, early June, and they're gonna just have to have some spacing and some other things. We're gonna start getting back to normal, I believe, in mid-May, early June, depending on the region that you're in. And you're gonna see... The whole social distancing part of this, though, is realistically gonna be with us until there's some type of vaccine. I mean, the idea of large concerts, how professional sports is gonna work, I mean... I don't know, look at China. They're having a big national... It's a national holiday this week, and there's lots of big gatherings and people out in public and things like that. I think that stuff is gonna be a risk, but it's gonna be a moderated risk when you get the transmission level to one-to-one, basically, where they can go back to contact tracing. Had we done that on the beginning, we may not have actually gotten to where we are now, and that's probably a rabbit hole to go down to. But we get back to the point where transmission gets to one-to-one and we can trace things. I think you can get back to fairly normal life, but I'm not sure you're right, that I don't know that I personally would be comfortable going to concerts, baseball games, things like that. So I'm not sure how those are affected if they are able to reopen or not. I think a lot of it's gonna be the public's desire to do those things and measuring those risks and rewards of society of being able to do those things. But I think you're right. I think some of the larger gatherings, things like that, live concerts, stuff like that, we're talking maybe fall before we see a resumption of all of that kind of stuff. It would be reasonable. So like Iron Man stuff, like I had a race I was supposed to do May 31st. They canceled it for the year and the earliest races they have scheduled are now September. So not that they have any better information than the rest of us, but that's their prediction is September is when they're gonna be kind of back in business and doing races and stuff like that. Well, I know that when stuff started happening in March, everything sort of got kicked out six months to September. Such every single thing that I was involved in that got kicked out was kicked to September. Not all that stuff's happening in September, obviously. But I don't even know. I don't know. I haven't put any faith on that September dates for any of the stuff, just because the world is still gonna be a little topsy turvy in September, even if it's only because every single thing that there is is scheduled to be done in September. We're all in competition for September. Yeah, I would say this. One thing I kind of want to talk a little bit today about is there's a lot of gimmicky stuff going on. Like everyone's getting the idea of like fogging and electrostatic sprayers. And while I think that there's some definitely good place in the market, I kind of want to talk about a little bit about some of the ideas that we can all implement to be kind of get ahead of this when we're getting ready to reopen, kind of train our staff to make sure that they're kind of on the same page. Tommy, you're ready to share some of the stuff that you've been writing down and you're gonna teach or is that maybe you want to share that another day or? No, we're building an agenda. Basically, questions that need to be answered. Do we want to jump into them more? Okay. I don't need to just maybe introduce what we're talking about. We don't need to jump into the actual topics, but maybe the broader overview of training and why you're creating a training and versus some of these new gimmicky things which I think we can all add into our businesses as able. I don't want to call them gimmicky because I think there is some benefit to some of them if done properly. What's the right word? Not gimmicky, but new kind of technology-based things like fogging, electric spring. Why thank you, man. I mean, I'm all about gimmicks, you know? Yeah, I say gimmicks. I'm about technology, engineered water solutions, dry steam vapor, aqueous ozone, hyperchlorous acid. I mean, we use all of that situation really, you know? ATP studies. But what we're developing for Castlekeepers and Matt and I have been working together with, you know, Joe and a few other cleaning business owners to put together a program to use internally to help our cleaning technicians be prepared and know what they need to know and have the skills that they need to clean in what we're calling the first COVID-19 world or really, I guess, a COVID-19 world, too. And, you know, we're going to make the distinction between, you know, forensic deep cleaning and, you know, putting on a Tyvek suit and a respirator and, you know, going in and wiping out some, you know, virus and a hot, you know, internal space. All that's good stuff. And I think it's really good to know that if you're in the cleaning business because, you know, somebody's going to call you up and say, hey, you know, I've got a house here that, you know, I had two people with COVID and we just took them to the hospital. Can you come clean it? You need to know what you're dealing with there to make good decisions. Are you equipped to do it? Are you trained to do it? You know, do you have the right people to do it and the right chemicals and so forth? And if you choose to do it, you need to do it the right way. So there's a class that ARCSI is doing through GBAT that's a certification class or at least, I guess, they give you a certification of completion and a certificate of completion. It's going to be an online course. I think it's like $49 to ARCSI members, which is really awesome. I'm glad that they're making that accessible. I'm going to take it. Yeah, I'm going to take it as well. I think we all should. But that's not what we're talking about here. You know, as business owners, we need to understand that stuff. And if we're going to do it, we need to train our people and make sure our people are trained to do that type of work. But what we're concerned about, what I'm concerned about is, you know, 99% of the work that we do is cleaning with Jones's house every other week. So how are we going to do that in our scheme from away when things start opening up again because the virus isn't going to go away just like that. There's people out there, they're still going to have it. The thinking is it'll die down some over the summer. And if they don't come up with some ways of treating it, at least some therapeutic that it's going to probably pick back up in the fall. And the prediction is that there will be pockets, there will be cities that's going to flare up to the point where, you know, like Matt said, if we can do contact tracing, we might not have to shut the whole city down the way that we're doing now. But it's going to be with us for a while. So how are we going to clean in a world when that risk is out there? So we want to be able to, and I'm talking again, not forensic cleaning, just regular Mrs. Jones's house every other week, what they call, you know, every other week maintenance cleaning. We still have to know what COVID-19 is. We need to understand, you know, how to ask the right questions to identify if me as a cleaning technician or your cleaning technician working for you might be at risk, do they have a fever? Have they traveled to some place that there was like stay-at-home orders and some, you know, a lot of known cases? Have they been in contact with anybody who's been diagnosed? Those types of question. We need to understand how it spreads. We need to understand what we need to do to stay safe. And we'll just talk about, you know, all the basics, the proper ways to wash your hands. You know, if you're going to use a cough, you know, how to do that, just the basics. From a professional house cleaner, what are the things that we need to do to stay safe? And you can argue these are things that we should all be doing as professional house cleaners even before this, but we're going to reiterate it because now more so than ever, you know, it could be a matter of life and death if we don't do those things properly and as well as they can be done. We want to explain what the chain of infection is and how we as cleaning professionals can break that and what we need to know before cleaning a home. You know, this kind of gets back into being able to ask the right questions to make sure that, you know, that home is going to be safe and we have a clear understanding of what the scope of work is, which kind of gets into what's the scope of work. And again, if the bar is being raised for a lot of consumers for a lot of us in the industry, the scope of work was come on in and just kind of make things look good, run the vacuum cleaner, take the trash out, bang, bang. Now the scope of work for a lot of people is going to be, you know, keep my home safe. You know, tell me about, you know, sanitizing and disinfecting, high touch surfaces. What is hygienic home cleaning? The scope of work is going to be higher and it needs to include things like how are we going to keep our customers safe? You know, it needs to include how do we keep our employees safe? Things that we never even really had to think about. I had something on here maybe to add to your list too. So using PPP or PPE, well, we all want to use PPE, but using personal protective equipment and its limitations because one of the funny things that I see like when people are using gloves and stuff like that, and this is at the store is they're wearing gloves and then their phone rings, they take their glove out of their, like they've been shopping throughout the store, then they take their phone up and they put their gloved hand with their phone up to their face and I'm like, you might as well of just like, just rub that glove all over your face. Like, so like, you know, the limits of PPE, you know, of the personal protective equipment, things like that. I think we should really make sure we cover with people and our staff understand those things too. So this is all good stuff. This is what I'm, right in my wheelhouse, what I'm working on right now to develop an internal course and then again, work with you on things that we're covering and just really making sure that our staff are on top of this stuff when they come back. Liz, this is, I think, we were talking about this earlier today, means Tom and I was telling him, I was like, one thing that I think Liz does really well that's gonna scripture well in this new world is employee engagement. You cannot have actively disengaged employees working for your company in this new world. Do you, what do you think about that? Like, making sure they're engaged in these processes, understand them and that they're part of these solutions and that we don't have actively disengaged people working for us. So I think that the piece that could be added in there a little bit more strongly is a little bit more psychological safety. So I think that that needs to be key. People don't really, you know, the old saying, people don't really care what you think until they think that you care. So that message is gonna fall on deaf ears if they don't think that it's safe for them. Or like, just, ugh, it just sounds like rhetoric, so. And this whole agenda is still very squishy at the moment. The whole idea came up last week, hey, we need some training and I know that we've been talking about what are we gonna do inside of Castlekeepers and, you know, Matt's business and a couple of others. And it's like, hey, we're gonna do it. Why don't we just do it for the industry? So you guys are kind of watching us make the sausage here but we're gonna have a program here in a few days that we'll be able to share in the channels that we're gonna be able to do that. I think it was discussed yesterday that it would probably be better not to do that at this five o'clock hour because this is, you know, for us, this is for the cleaning business owners and we need to come up with another venue and another time slot to do this. I don't even know how long it's gonna take. By the time we get done, you know, if we can squish this into two hours, that would be cool. It might be a little bit more, I don't know. I wanted to hear Liz one more thing about the psychology of what she's saying though because I think that actually is, so that goes on the training but I think that might even be good to talk a little bit about today because she's doing that really well. She's, you know, her staff engaged right now and then she's keeping her customers feeling safe too. So that's like a double, then that kind of goes back to this communication of getting back in business. So, you know, that might be, that's awesome for the training but I'd love to hear Liz's thoughts on that a little bit more since she kind of brought that up. That kind of has my brain tweaking a little bit. Do you have any tips for people that they can kind of engage their employees and then also maybe the flip side of that, they're customers when they're getting ready to reopen? So I think a lot of us have been trying to really keep in contact with our employees and staying engaged and doing a really good job there. And I also think that we've, most of us have been doing a really good job of trying to stay connected to our clients but we've been sending them a little bit of a mixed message, right? If you're closed, if your business is closed, the message has been, listen, it's not safe for us to come into your home. And so just all of a sudden saying, hey, we've decided on this day it's going to be safe, it's gonna be a little bit of a struggle. People aren't going to accept that. So that's why I'm talking about, having to kind of sneak up on it a little bit, start adding in a little bit. One thing is we know that a lot of our customers, like Matt, you have a great example, you've sold how many gift cards and people are donating how much money to your employees that they want to help. They really do. I was joking around a little bit with Tom earlier, but it's not really a joke. It's that people really want to help you so much, they're willing to give you money, not to come into their home. I'll pay you a lot of money as long as you don't come here. So changing that narrative, really, it's not going to be a one step process, not one email, not one email that goes out that says, hey, we've decided it's safe now. So you can trust us because we've been paying attention and that's not going to cut it. So what I was saying earlier is, I think it needs to start with, hey, look at this new trend. We're really excited about this trend. We know you guys are too, showing maybe like Tom showed, Tom put that link in there of how we're beginning to flatten the line, at least for the resources that are needed. Start there maybe. And again, starting with safety. Oh, what's the name of that triangle, Tom? The one that I always wanted to talk about. The one that Maslow's hierarchy needs. Yes, thank you. So starting with Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the bottom level is safety. People need to feel safe and they can't hear your next message until they feel safe. So hitting that first, hitting that message of safety first, hey, look, it looks like it's starting to get safer out there. And then the next thing up from there is, oh, yep, now that we see that, where we would love it, we know that you guys want to help us. You've been helping us all along. There's a new way that you can help us get on schedule. And then start to talk to them about how they can help you and then how you're going to be able to help them. And then just keeping that communication going forward. Save, save, save, help, help. We're back to normal. Because everybody wants to get back to normal, really, definitely. I love that. I'm gonna make sure that we really use some of those ideas in some upcoming communications as we kind of drip, drip, drip this information out. Getting ready to resume. In the training that we're talking about doing, everything that we do that's in preparation for this to make them safer, to make us better. We need to be telling that story. It's almost like Christmas is coming. It's, we're being presumptive as we're start telling the story. So when it's time to start, it's not a shock. It's like, well, yeah, this has been coming for a couple of weeks. Yeah, I agree. And I like the idea of getting them to help us by getting on a schedule now. And so tapping into a couple of things I had mentioned before, which was the scarcity mindset and also this loss of version, both of those things. So one way of doing that would be like if you're closed right now, listen, we know that we're going to be ramping up like you said, Matt, you kind of have a date, just throw a date out there. You gotta have an anchor, there's gotta be something. Throw your date out there and then start getting people on the schedule. Help us out by getting on the schedule for the first whatever and people that get us on the schedule will do blank for them. Or get on the schedule now because we know that there's going to be such a rush on cleaning that we're worried about anybody that any of our current best clients don't contact us now that we won't be able to get them on for another month. So that's that loss of version thing. People are like, I don't have to wait a month. Somebody else had what I thought was a really great idea was to maybe talk about why should they want to help you? What will they get out of helping you? Like kind of creating this relationship because we know that this is your relational business, right? So we don't want to turn it financial if we don't have to because once you change a relationship from a relational to fiduciary, it's hard to go back. And then it's really everything's about the money. So you want to try and keep it away from everything being about the money, especially when we start up. It's not going to be easy for us. We're going to, we want to be able to charge a lot of money because for these initial claims, we don't want to be going broke while we're hiring these, bringing on our new people. But you know, it's tricky. That's a kind of tough balancing act I think you just brought up. I think a lot of people are worried they're going to come back in after a month and it's going to be deep clean after deep clean with these customers. I think that's part of your communication too is if there's a lot of deferred maintenance, do you want us to do a deep clean or can we catch it up over time? And I think you're going to need to communicate that with your customers pretty clearly because I would suggest telling them, hey, we're happy to do a deep clean the first time if it's been a while for us to be in. But if not, if there's a lot of deferred maintenance the house probably won't be perfectly clean the first time, we'll stay on your budget and we'll do as great a job as we can and focus on a lot of those really high touch traffic, high traffic, high touch areas and we'll catch you up over the next couple of visits. But yeah, I would love to try and sell everybody on deep cleans when we get back because we're going to have less customers to start with. So it'd be great if a lot of them were like, yeah, I definitely need a deep clean. Like that would, you know, so instead of serving 25 instead of serving 55 to 60 customers and even if we only have 25 the first day, you know, we're pretty high on revenue because we're doing that. Another thing to really think about too is as you come back, some of your staff is not going to be ready to come back because they're going to have childcare issues. They're going to have some other things that they need to have sorted out and how do you kind of communicate with them that they still have a job and that they're safe and you just need them to get those things taken care of and you understand. Liz, are you seeing that childcare became a big issue for your staff out in Washington or are those centers open or closed or how's that working? Everything's closed here. So we're in the same boat as everybody else. Assumption school is going to be closed for the balance of the year. Yep, they officially, not the assumption, officially they've been closed. Schools, but what about childcare centers though? A lot of those will probably have to reopen, no? They're going to have to reopen but right now they're still all closed. Okay. Yep. We have five people that have children that are probably eligible for the FSCRA that are going to have to be dealt with in one way, shape or form. So dealing with that too. You said something, Matt, that made me think of a really good idea. I lost it. I was going to write it down. I started to and I forgot. Uh-oh. Sorry. Say it again, Matt. Yeah, say it again, Matt. I don't even know what I was talking about. I know I was just talking about just spooling up your employees and getting them ready, but yeah. Oh, that's it. You did it again. That was it. We need to tap into that. That one of the reasons why you want to get your house all the way, why you're going to need that deeper cleaning, et cetera, is because everybody's been there, right? The kids have been there and it's too much work for you. You've been putting all of your effort into keeping everything disinfected. And so now we need to, and this is another chance for us to educate the public again, right? So now you need to get us, get us in there to do some cleaning. So we're kind of going to go backwards. Will we also be pitching, spending extra time on all your high touch surfaces? If you've been closed, absolutely you're going to do that. If you've been open, you've already been doing that. So the companies that have already been open, that's what they've been spending a lot of their time, energy and effort on. But if you've been closed, absolutely. I think if you're closed, you got a much better pitch to go in there and do a deep cleaning and get everything all cleaned at one time. But you also have this nice little scarcity piece that can only fit so many deep cleans in and again, right? So if you know you're going to want that deep clean, you need to let us know now so that we can get you on. So I think the longer list we have of people that are saying, yes, as soon as you open, get me on the schedule, the better. We need a list that's 500 names long, right? So that we can start plugging, plugging, plugging because we want to be able to school up fast. Otherwise, you know how hard it's going to be to school up with only eight weeks of time? Yeah. And the other part of that is the much longer list of prospective customers and former customers. And how many of them out there after going through this might see more value in your service that we're assuming that we're going to start off slow. But if you look at that larger population, I'm curious as to how many of those are going to say, well, I hadn't had my home clean in a while, but Doug, I'm going to do it now. Yeah. I will tell you, I know of a company that's in Colorado that has kind of fought the shelter in place order and got lawyers involved and they're open and they say they've never been busier before. And they are basically saying that they've never had so much demand before, which flies in a little bit of what I was experiencing, but maybe that's because this owner did a really good job communicating why cleaning was important and what the value proposition was. I personally wouldn't have gone the same route, but I firmly believe he believes in what he's doing and I think he's doing it in a safe and ethical way. So I'm a little jealous of, I'm not going to lie, so part of me is a little jealous that he's rocking it right now and he's thriving through this. He's going to get his PPP money and be basically pocketing it all, you know? So, but you know, there is some evidence out there that when we reopen, there is some pent-up demand that's going to be available for us to capture. Vinny wants to know if you can share the name of that company, she's in Colorado. I cannot, because I don't know that I don't know that they would want that. Lawyers are involved. Yeah, lawyers are involved. So I do know that they did spend some money getting lawyers involved to fight the stay-at-home order and have been successful at staying open at this point. So that's a different animal. I personally am, you know, I wouldn't go that far. I just like, that wouldn't be my personality to go that far. Like I'm more of a, I'm not really like one to like try and fight the power. Like I'm like, all right, that's the rules. Like I'll stay within the structure of the system and I'll figure it out. But some people, you know, they figure out how to buck that. And this company did. And I think they're thriving through it. So. Well, and there's some value to this last man standing idea, right? I mean, if you're operating and nobody else is, you're gonna be busy. I'm sure that has something to do with it. That's why I'm not saying the name. If they're closed, and the blog post that Matt showed earlier is worth taking a hard look at because you really need to clearly explain, you know, these are the reasons why we closed. These are the things that we're looking for to open. And like what Liz was saying, constantly monitor that progress. It's like, remember, there's like three things that we're looking for, you know, peak hospital use, making sure the PPP is out there or PPE rather is, you know, available. And, you know, any type of, you know, legislative, whatever that's telling. So we shouldn't do it. And, you know, we're okay on the hospital beds and we understand that, you know, all the PPE is on the way. And the other thing I didn't address is is the OSHA guidelines of risk. And then there's also some other risk assessments by job that the New York Times did like this graphical risk assessment by jobs. Have you guys seen this? I wish. It'd be kind of cool if we brought it up. If the jobs are safer than, you know, working at a retail store or food service, our costs- 16 times safer than working at a retail store by contact, yeah, by contact with the public per day. So a maid has between like 12 and between 12 and 42 contacts with the public per day. A maid or a janitor between the two jobs. And that's with, you know, if they go to the grocery store or things like that, if they don't do any of that and they just go home, like between 12 and 42, a retail clerk has between 200 and 600 contacts per day with the public, depending on what job it is, how busy the place is, things like that. And that may be declining with some of these restrictions they're putting in place where they're only allowing one family member in stores and do it. Oh, like handing cards and money back and forth. Oh my gosh. There's no potential distance in there. And some of it is just moving the carts around just because like, so some of the contacts with the public that they're counting, like where it's really high, is they're going out and collecting the carts. Well, each one of those carts was touched by a person and they go out and collect 150 carts. There's 150 potential contacts right there. Like, they didn't actually even have to get near the person. So the risk factor for our job versus other jobs is exponentially smaller. And so- Can you find the study and I'll share it on the cleaning business today, resource page? Yeah, I'll try and find it. It was a New York Times article a couple of weeks ago about different careers and their exposure. It was really, it was really mostly about how low-pay jobs are actually much more likely to be exposed to the coronavirus than it was a necessarily like job for job, whether it's the most dangerous job because it didn't have doctors on there or anything like that. But it had nurses and compared nurses and then retail clerks and stuff like that. But it was more of a study of how lower wage jobs are more, are exponentially more in contact with this disease than a lot of other careers, basically. I think I've heard the term exponential use so much over the last few weeks with exponential growth and everything else. I think the growth is less exponential now. It was only, I put a post out on my Facebook where it only went up 8%. Most of the current data is coming in better than what was projected. And I guess the whole part of that is, what's the counter argument if all of these preventative measures and pay at home wasn't happening, what would it look like? So we'd have a million people, we'd have a million people dead and it would be, we'd have a healthcare system overwhelmed. I mean, that's the counter argument that you have to be prepared. You know, some, I think the UK was originally, that was their argument. We're just gonna let this rip. Do you remember that? Like that was like a couple of weeks ago. The UK would- We'll all do it and then it'll be over with and we'll all be immune and- We were just gonna let it rip. And then they started seeing their hospitals fill up and they're like, oh, this might not be so smart. Like we're already at like 30,000 cases into this like one or two weeks of letting it rip thing. They had their schools open up until like a week ago. I mean, they were all in on just like, and so I think the UK is in for it pretty bad because they're pretty far behind the social distancing. So what we'll have to look at and see what their per capita numbers look like with some of the delay. Of course. Their prime minister is in ICU as of last night. Yeah, he was shaking coronavirus patients' hands with no gloves in the ICU. He was like proud of that. Like he was going around to the ICUs and like mad grabbing like patients and like handling them, like literally like just to show like how safe it was. Like last or maybe two weeks ago, I think there was some video of him doing that. And then there was another of them with like where he's like in a lab handling the virus and he's not wearing gloves. And he's just like, no wonder he's, I mean, he made some choices that I wouldn't have even thought to. But yeah, I pray that he's gonna recover. I think that that would be tragic, but there was some obvious things that he did that were probably not very smart in hindsight at this point. So yeah. I heard he was in ICU though. He's in ICU. He's on oxygen, but not on a breathing machine. So they say exactly. So he has turned over day-to-day operations of the government to his deputy. So that's not necessarily a great. I mean, I'll put you on a vent. I mean, you're like incapacitated. You're out, right? Well, you have to be usually because you're struggling so much because I don't really wanna get into too much of this, but yes, they have to put you unconscious. Oh, come on, call the grocery store. No, we don't wanna do that. It is, I've got a question for you. I know that you have studied consumer behavior as it pertains to quality scores and how they kind of go up and down. And you're pretty good at anticipating trends based on certain things in the business. For companies that have, I mean, what are the quality scores looking like now that everybody's kind of concerned about the coronavirus and for companies that have been shut down and they start opening up? I mean, would you expect to see them truck? Be better, be worse, right? What would we be looking for in that regard? So I don't know, Tom, I haven't actually put a lot of thought into it because, you know, I've been open so in Olympia and I haven't really thought a lot about it, but off the top of my head, I would think that initially the scores are gonna be higher and then they're gonna drop, they're gonna be fast, they're gonna be not happy and they're gonna be really unhappy when they see any small thing. That's just my initial thought. And then to be caught, my thinking there is, yay, good, I need my house cleaned, but it's gonna be more important than ever that you do a good job. So yay, I'm happy, high score, but if I see anything that indicates to me that you didn't actually clean, sanitize and disinfect my house, I'm gonna be peeled. Where do you clean and within your own business in Olympia are there, you know, are customers more demanding now? Customers are more demanding, but they're also really happy and thankful and grateful. So our scores are actually a little bit higher right now, but they are very, very demanding. But again, you know, the people that are going out and clean are much more, you know, they're much more committed and much more devoted to doing a really great job. So it's twofold why the scores are better, the people are actually more careful in what they're doing. And they're doing a better job, maybe. I mean, it's the state's job. They are doing a better job, they are. Now they're not maybe necessarily doing a better job in some areas. I really have always had a problem with the vacuum cleaners. So I'm like, just put back to you guys. I don't like the, no, the aerating of everything. I just don't like it. Even if it's, you know, a really good vacuum cleaner, just that bar kicking stuff up into the air just doesn't sound good to me. So we have not been doing a great job of vacuuming. I know we haven't because I'm like quick, just quick back to you guys on the main walk areas and we're telling the clients that too, don't, you know, don't clean everything. So when we go in, we're gonna have to clean under beds really well. Everything's gonna have to be good if you clean on the floors. I don't see, you see that the vacuuming being a risk. I don't see it as being a risk because if the virus is dry, it dies pretty quickly. So like, you know, like encapsulated in dust and things like that, it would be pretty low risk. So. I wasn't so much worried about the stuff that's on the carpet. I'm worried about the stuff that's still in the air and getting the air flow going, right? And blowing the air flow around because anything like that I expel begins to drop immediately, right, goes out and begins to drop. But as soon as, yeah. And again, you know, we all have our own little things that make us fancy. And it gets back to the novel virus, the research. We're all, we're just kind of guessing based on. Yeah, we don't know. We don't know for sure. You're right. My guess on that is that that's probably a fairly low risk thing to worry about. But the other side of that is if the virus is aerosol, let's say there was someone sick in the house, the air flow might actually help it sink first. You know, but you're right, it might start up initially, but if the house, the air was still like, you know, people just walking through the house and moving might get the air just to sink on its own. But again, just this speculation, we really don't know how any of the, they don't even really, they don't even have a good transmission model on the ship because if it is aerosol, I would think the transmission would be way worse than it is. Like in St. Louis, they just shut down all the public parks because they're worried about transmission in public spaces. And people were being dumb and they were like having picnics and parties and honestly, St. Louis is not always the brightest place in the world for like, we're not really rule fault. Like, you know, we're not actually, as a city of much rule followers, we're kind of like the show me state, you got to prove us wrong basically kind of thing. And it's, and like that motto sometimes doesn't work in our favor. But anyway, they had to shut down the parks. And I don't know that there has been a whole lot of proof that, you know, if you're outside, you know, that there is as much risk. And so I ride bikes a lot. We talked about this last time was on. And so like they've banned group bike rides, which I think is smart, but they're thinking that an asymmetric rider could be like putting out this like cone of like destructive air for like, like you would have to be like 40 feet behind this person to be completely safe. If that's the case, man, I would think there'd be way more transmission of this than we're already seeing. What do you, I mean, I don't know, we're getting off track. I mean, I don't know as professional house cleaners, this is probably a little beyond scope. But, you know, I think about that, you know, go out for a run and like I'm, I see somebody coming at me and I kind of like get on the other side of the road and somebody's in front of me. It's like, I'm thinking of vapor trails, you know, it's like, is this person, am I breathing there, dirty air? And dude, yeah, I think, I think about that too. So again, I, you know, there's certain risks I'm going to take. I'm going to go outside and get some fresh air. I'm going to go on, I'm going to go on a run tonight and I'll probably, you know, cross paths with somebody and they'll have left some vaporized air. So back to the vacuums. I mean, I don't know. I don't know that you're wrong. I don't know that you're right. I think it's an interesting, it's an interesting idea. I noticed that David Kaiser was on here earlier and I know that he's actively involved with Syria Planning Industry Research Institute. I know they do all kinds of research about vacuum cleaners and spread of pathogens and David, if you're still here and if you have any research on that, you could share. Maybe you could come on another call, another Facebook live and give us the real skinning on what we need to know about using vacuums and the spread of pathogens. So Winton Hale had a good question about feather dusters, vacuums, brushes, make sure there's no cross contamination. I can share what we're doing if that makes sense. Would we lose Liz? She might have, oh, there she is. So we don't use feather dusters per se, Winton. We use microfiber sleeves that go over, we have two different lengths of dusters, one long and one a little shorter and they both have kind of different structures. I actually have some in the car and I can show them on another, send some pictures at the time. But anyway, we only use one of each per house and then we wipe down the handles and everything in between. We're washing down our vacuums, our mop poles. We're actually washing, we're taking our patties apart in the car, washing down every bottle. And we're also doing the sides of any of the mop buckets. We use a, it's not really a mop bucket, but we do a self-contained mop system where the mops are pre-soaked in solution. And anyway, so that is being washed when we're coming out of properties. And we're only doing empty properties right now and we're going through all those extra steps. The only thing I'm doing right now is commercial and empty, non-occupied spaces and we're still doing all that. So that's what we're doing. I don't know if Liz, are you going to that extreme or is that sort of the mindset you have too? Yep, we are, a lot of that again is for psychological safety more than anything in our case. But yeah, we're wiping everything down with a disinfectant cloth that I think it says it has like a one minute, has to remain wet for one minute versus, or it might even be a 30 second cloth that we got. And so yeah, we're wiping everything down. Like a hydrogen peroxide, like a medical grade? Yeah, yeah. Hydrogen peroxide is a little darker. Yeah, I like the hydrogen peroxide for that reason. And I don't want to key everyone in on hydrogen peroxide because I want to get my hands on plenty of it when it becomes available. But what I do like about it is that it actually is a pretty good cleaning agent and it has pretty low dwell times as low as 30 seconds typically. Anyway, when that becomes readily available that's gonna be a great product. However, it is caustic at higher concentrations needed to actually be a disinfectant. So it can cause damage to surfaces and it oxidizes iron and some other metals. So you have to be careful of, and I don't want to go into the deep and the weeds and the technical stuff today, but that is, it has its pluses and minuses. All of these products do have their pluses and minuses. It's a lot more acidic, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, and it is. That's why I mean why it's caustic. So it reacts to iron and creates oxidation in higher concentrations above about 3% per volume. And most of them are typically like 1% or 1 1⁄2%. And honestly, it can be as low as 1⁄2% and still be effective. But it just depends on what the EPA has said, but there have been studies that show that it's an effective disinfectant down to about 0.5%. Anyway, it's product by product. You got to go by whatever the label is if you're using it as a disinfectant. But in higher concentrations, it can cause problems. So you don't want to just mix your own hydrogen peroxide and count on that to be safe because- And then fog. I heard somebody talking about that. I'm serious. I heard somebody saying they were going to do that. I was like- With hydrogen peroxide? Hydrogen peroxide makes a great fogging agent, but I would think you'd want to go with something commercially made versus- You don't want to drool on your own. You need to have the right PPE. Yeah. I think that hydrogen peroxide, they use it for safe rooms, but you don't want to be in that room. What they do is they put a machine in the middle of the room and they fog the room while they're not there. So they use it in labs and stuff like that to create clean rooms because it really is super effective as an antimicrobial, like kills viruses, kills spores, kills really everything in the right concentrations, but it incredibly could be incredibly dangerous. So I hope people are like, with all these new technologies that they're- I'm very concerned that that's really part of the training that we want to do is just help people understand there's some risks associated with some of these really cool tools out there. If you're going to use, take the G-BAC course, the one through RxE, so you have a good understanding of what you need to know and the risks associated with it. Yeah, I think that that's one of my big concerns for a lot of what's going on right now. There's going to be a lot of, when I said gimmicky stuff earlier, it's not that it's gimmicky, it's that done wrong, like we're adding complexity to our businesses that we don't necessarily have the training for ourselves and then we're trying to have our technicians do this stuff. And you have to remember, most of your technicians don't have half the technical knowledge you have. So if you don't understand it really well and you don't have the ability to communicate that stuff to them really well and train them to be safe, I would be very cautious of those things. And again, getting back to reopening, I think that those things can be really things that you can sell well. And I'm buying a couple of electrostatic cleaners for some of my commercial properties. I think that it has its place. And especially we have these gem spaces in a lot of these apartments that we serve. And we have these beautiful apartments and they have these gems that kind of put, like a club fitness or whatever your local gym is, it kind of puts them to shame. But man, those are probably going to be hotspots, right? I want to just go in there and like ghostbuster those places. So having those services when you reopen makes sense for areas like that. But like, do we want to go into people's homes and be fogging them? Like, what did they do in there that they need to have their house fog? Like what happened? Like it doesn't seem like the risk versus the reward is there. It seems that's what I mean, where it seems kind of gimmicky. But I want to be clear. Like I think there's a place for it. I think you can do, you can do that as part of your communication plan to reopen and how that can help people. But I think you should understand it well. And I don't have a good grasp on how to use that stuff. I consider myself pretty technical in my knowledge of cleaning. And I don't even understand how I would use that effectively in people's homes. And if it's no substitute or it's not, you know, it's not an apples and apples trade-off in terms of, yeah, I'm not going to put the white down surfaces. I'm just going to fog everything. There's some efficacy in certain circumstances, but you know, you're far from, you know, truly sanitizing disinfecting surfaces the same way you could if you were using the proper paint and the proper wipers. Yeah, we talked about that earlier today, Tom. So we talked about like, we've been talking about communicating with your clients. It's the difference between, it's what, what did we, how did we describe it earlier? We were talking, we were saying it's the difference between, you know, removing it completely versus just kill, it's like basically putting a pesticide in your house versus you're driving a mouse, right? Like, so go ahead and do your analogy. You don't have, you know, you have a mouse in your house. You don't have to kill it. If you can just capture it and let it go outside, you've kind of done the same thing. So, you know, I think there's a misconception out there that we need to go in with strong disinfectants and kill every germ in the house. And there's a lot of germs that really, they're good. We need them in order to survive. You know, you got, you know, stuck in your colon that, you know, we need that, you know? But you don't have to kill a lot of germs, but, you know, catching them through the normal cleaning process and using the right tools to remove them from the home safely is just as good and sometimes better because you aren't bringing, you know, these poisons into your house when you're doing that. I'm not saying disinfectant for bad, but, you know, there's a balance. And we need to understand what the real objective is. We want to get the pathogens off of the high touch areas so we aren't getting them in our hands and sticking them in our mouth and our eyes. And at this point, you can do that a lot of different ways. You don't have to kill everything. Yes, Liz? Tom, so I'll just point out here that it is 306. You need to get your link up for us. And we did have a couple of questions here. Wintel wants to know, Matt, if you could share where you get your dusters, maybe with Tom and he could put it in a link maybe unless you have it somewhere. I think I get them from the place that's on, I think it's the, so cleaning business today, who's your microfiber sponsor, Tom? That's a good question. Direct Mop, huh? Direct Mop sales, that's who I buy it from because they give me a good discount. They're a good vendor. So I get my dusters from Direct Mop sales. So we're getting two birds with one stone here. So we got a cleaning business today. Oops, I'm taking it to their website. There you go. Yeah, Direct Mop sales. But yeah, you can find the link right on Clean Business Today. It's like a pop up for them. We've been using them for a couple of years now. The price is good and they have good shipping, free shipping too. So I also used to use another company that I like and I don't want to not say their name because I think they have good products. If you want to look at them too, would be Mops Plus or Mops Direct. I think they go under either name or no, no, Mops Plus or Microfiber Plus or Mops Plus, I'm sorry. And they have good pricing, good products, but they have high, high shipping minimum. So unless you're ordering a lot, it can be a little bit pricey to order from them. But I think that they'll work with you if you're ordering, you know, like a pallet worth of Microfiber. But if you're just getting a box worth, it can be a little bit pricey. Pricey, yeah. Eloisa also is asking about the name of the vacuum study. I think you referenced David on that maybe. Yeah, I was alluding to the fact that cleaning industry research institute studies stuff like that. And I know that they've got studies. I'll defer to David. I made a note to ask him if he could share some information we'll get him on a call here, not too far in the distant future. And he can share some of that information with us. I wanted to kind of finish one thing about what we're kind of going forward with and that's kind of pivoting or transforming and, you know, what's moving, what's next? And that's kind of maybe a future conversation. I don't want to end on that, but I want to share that like my business is pivoting, but I'm not changing everything just to do this. So maybe that's a topic for a future conversation, but that's sort of where I'm kind of thinking into the future of maybe next time you have me on. Okay, yeah. It is time for us to really start working on what is the business going to look like when things open up and we start doing business in the post COVID-19 world. Cleaning business today, you guys know the website, subscribe over here to the right. You get our newsletters. We had Joe here yesterday and he's working on a press release for us. And I know that he's got a draft out there. I'm hoping he'll have something for us that we can send out in a newsletter tomorrow, if not later this week for sure. So something that you can share with local media as well as the press about some of the gaps in the logic with how the PPP works. And then the $6 an hour federal unemployment above and beyond, whatever the state, you put those two together and it works. The $600. What are you talking about? $6 an hour, Tom. Okay, whatever. Tom's making up new stuff. We are not having the $6 an hour. It's happening fast. Okay. Yeah. You're starting with Chris, though. Well thought out, well reasoned government programs done overnight, no? Yeah. So if you don't know what we're talking about with the PPP conversation and what we're looking to have done, not we, Joe, Joe Wall started this, but we're in full support. Watch the Facebook Live from yesterday. I think you can get a pretty good recap if you just watch the end of the Facebook Live. You have to watch the whole thing. Yeah. Also, I wanted to remind you, go ahead. Oh my gosh, yes he is. He's awesome. Just one more thing. I wanted to make sure that everybody understands the reason why we are putting this link in for the cleaning business today every day is not just because we want more people to sign up for cleaning business today we just need more customers. It's because we really want more people to get this message. So please share that link, help us to get this message out. We're looking to, we really want and we're very committed to doing whatever it takes to see every day we have at least two people or three people on this call giving up an hour a day every single day, minimum, not including any kind of prep time to share some free resources, ideas, thoughts and so please share that link for us to help us get that message out more. Prep time? Prep time. Tom doesn't do any prep time. That's a new concept. How am I doing an hour of prep time and war planning every morning? What are you talking about? That's got me getting up at like 4.50 every morning now. You put me into that. I'm telling you, I feel better. For all you people, that's what I talked about last time is I needed to get back on my routine and calendar out my day and I've done it and I'm up at 5 a.m. I'm a little tired right now. I'm a little grumpy, but I still got to get a run in and then I'll call it a good day. I did everything on my calendar if I do that. Just don't be running behind me anymore. I won't. All right, guys. Anything else? Thank you Bridget and Sharon. Are we good? That's it. Thanks for Tom to tell us like it is today. I'm sorry? I don't have anything for you to tell it like it is today, but I'll have some for tomorrow. And a little more information. We're developing the outline, getting our material together for this training class that we want to do for training in the post-COVID-19 world. So I guess we need to figure out what channels we're going to do that on and how we're going to make that accessible to everybody. And I guess people were asking for some type of certificate of completion. So we'll have a little quiz or something if they complete that, we'll get a certificate. We'll have more information on the next couple of days as to how that's going to work. But I see us actually having that done in the books and behind us and complete and people taking the program currently by this time next week. I'm excited about it. So get your employees ready, y'all. Yeah. Okay. It's time to start getting everybody back in the mode to work right now. We've got rooms. We've got a lot of homes to clean. Liz is doing them all for us. And that not to be named company out in Colorado is cleaning all the houses. Yeah. It's clean. There's demand. There is demand. We're ready to open and there will be customers. So that's a good thing. So. With a whole new purpose. Yeah. All right. With a purpose. Okay, guys. Thanks a bunch. We'll see you tomorrow at five o'clock Easter. Bye, y'all.