 Hey, good afternoon everybody, Tom Stewart here, smart business moves, and our guest today is Amber Starling. Hey Amber, how are you? Hey Tom, I'm doing great. It is finally starting to look like fall around here. I'm in Manhattan, Kansas. The leaves are changing and we have started to get a little rain. Wow. But it's rain, it's not snow. Not yet. It's only matter of time. You know, before you know it, I imagine. Yeah, I'm just grateful I'm not one of the Issa residential members in Canada right now. I'm sure they have gotten a lot colder than we have. Good grief. It's not time for that yet. I mean, it's October. We've snowed in October before. It gets real hard to put on your cute little Halloween costumes. You gotta put a big jacket over it. You need to have two costumes, I guess, a warm weather and a cold weather costume. Yeah. Hey, I'm not raising kids in Kansas, but that sounds brilliant. So you're in Manhattan. There's a university there, isn't it? Yeah, that's going to be the University of Kansas. It's the Wildcats. Okay. And fun fact, we won our last game this past weekend. Okay. Yeah. So what's their record? I have no idea. I'm not a huge football fan. I just like the yelling at the television. So much fun. Hey, Denet, how are you today? And Amber, it's so cool that you're here. I appreciate that because you're always so much fun. And I remember the first time we met was a few years ago, kind of like when COVID was more of a thing and you and a few other people and you want to, I think it was presented as a scholarship or some type of grant maybe from another software company from Java. Yeah, actually, we were one of their grant recipients when they did their Boost program. We competed against, I mean, they were such amazing, such amazing other cleaning companies, painting companies, things like that. We were just absolutely floored when we got it. Over time, we've since moved over to Meade Central. And we've been very, very much enjoying that transition. That's been a major part in what I've been building towards, which is breaking the cycle of burnout for myself and then teaching other people how to do it. And I really got to a point where, unfortunately, the kind of stubborn that has to get to life or death before I'm willing to stop just driving towards that goal. So this was a lesson that I learned very much the hard way. And I'm going to tell you guys about that experience today. And I hope that this willingness to share will encourage other people to not wait until they hit the wall. And I guess one of the things that I learned about you a long time ago when we first met was that you're ambitious, you're driven, you, okay, is not good enough. You're in a leadership role in ISSA residential, aren't you? Yeah. So I am one of the ambassadors for ISSA residential. There are quite a number of us. And then I've also worked my way into the IICRC. We were the first Certified House Cleaning Technicians in the state of Kansas. And I am now since become a Certified Master Textile Cleaner over time. And those are things that I was working on throughout the time period that we're going to talk about today. And I really was, yeah, I mean, like there's, there's perfect and there's amber perfect. And one of the things that I tell people is that I am a recovering perfectionist. So it's, it's, it's an affliction that a few of us have to have to learn how to manage. So if you're a master technician, you are qualified to become an instructor for the HCT program. Yes, I am. Yeah. Are you working towards that? We are working towards that right now. Yeah. Oh, that is slow. We are also in the middle of switching over from job or domain central, doing a little reorg that went along with that. So we've moved from team cleaning to a solo cleaning model. And we've moved from hourly to percentage based pay. So I'm in the middle of quite a number of transitions right now. Even recently, we decided that we didn't want to mortgage anymore. We were like, man, why are we paying money for a house that we only get to sleep in? So we flipped the house solo it and moved into a motor coach. Oh, you were telling me about that. It's like a class. I remember that from convention. Yeah, absolutely. We were going to bring her down to your convention this year, but she's 20 years old. And I eventually decided that my poor little heart couldn't take it. So you mentioned convention. So I feel obligated to bring that up just to remind everybody that I guess starting November 13th, there is going to be ISSA residential, the industry, the only non-profit industry trade association for the residential cleaning industry formally known as ARCSI. And if you haven't signed up for that or haven't considered going, I would absolutely encourage you to consider going. And if you want more information or to sign up, I'll drop the link in chat. Yeah, that is a party and a half. It's usually a party and a half, but this year is extra special because we are celebrating the anniversary. We're celebrating 100 years of ISSA. We have a whole bunch of speakers lined up. We're going to do an extra special party. And I don't recall what night that is, but everything's in the ISSA show planner. Everything's very well laid out in there. You can look at all the different speakers. You can look at everything's organized into different tracks for education. And so that's going to make it a lot easier for if you're looking at residential and you don't do any commercial, you might decide that you want to just focus on the residential track. But there are other tracks like leadership as well. And it's going to be a really full show with a great program. And you know that there's like two anniversaries going on. It's the 20th year anniversary for ARCSI. You know, I was one of the handful of people, 20-some-odd years ago, that helped start RxE. Now ISSA is going to be potential. And I do. And I'm studying this textbook over here and there's your name on it. Oh, goodness. So yeah, yeah, you guys, ARCSI turned into ISSA residential. But my goodness, the programs that we have in place because of the work that you and other predecessors have done has been amazing. It's why we have even what we have today. Well, there's been a lot of people that have invested a lot of calories and with the idea of professionalizing our industry. And, you know, I can't tell you how excited I am to see you stepping in and playing a leadership role. Because, you know, at some point, I'm, you know, well, that's not true. I'm going to be doing this forever. But we need some, you know, more people to jump in and help. And I appreciate what you're doing. Yeah, it's funny you said it like that. There are so many people that I've learned from over the years that refer to retirement as the R word as if it was a dirty word. So yeah, I can definitely see why you're so passionate about this and why you would never want to retire. That's fine. That's fine. And it's gratifying. What we're doing is important. The work that, you know, the cleaning our cleaning professionals do is important. The people who take the risk and put in the hard work to build companies to create those jobs and provide those services are doing important work. And it's important that we work together to create a higher level of professionalism within the industry, because that's for the benefit of all stakeholders. Absolutely. One of the things that I love about ISSA residential is that we're very collaborative. We don't, there's no infighting. We're not like, oh, you don't get to see my checklist or don't even look at the chemicals I'm using. There's none of that that you see in other industries where they're just like very cutthroat competitive. We are super collaborative. We will share things all the time. And I just, I really love our industry for that. Thank you, Denet. You're too kind. And I'm not going anywhere. So with that being said, I think that we've kind of framed up our topic for today in a good manner. You know, how do you, how do you have so many balls in the air and do all the things that you're doing, doing it at a high level without getting tired and getting burnt out? So that's kind of the overarching thing while you're doing all these things. You need to make sure that you're capable of getting up the next day and doing it again. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And I did a whole lot of learning this, the hardest, dumbest way. So I'm very much looking forward to handing you guys a couple of keys. So you have a presentation, which I like it, already. Make some popcorn and see what we got here. Gorgeous. You touched on that earlier, this problem that we have in the cleaning industry. And it's, it's, this is something that we all struggle with. As cleaning company owners, we're people pleasers by nature. When we were solo cleaners, we're balancing the needs of our clients and our families and ourselves. And then once we hire our employees, we're not, we just aren't like major corporations. Our team members aren't a number to us. We work with them every day. We naturally began adding their needs to our equations. And when we aren't actively and intentionally making space for ourselves in our own companies, we inevitably face burnout. It's really easy to recognize these things, especially in other people, but like, it's really hard to do something about it or to recognize it in yourself. Once you do recognize it, you don't know where to start. Articles online give really great tips, but they don't really give you like an overarching roadmap. And there are a lot of misconceptions about the tools that you can use to establish and maintain healthy boundaries in your business. So today we're going to talk about what burnout is, what it looks like, and give our viewers a brief overview on how to build themselves into their own business. So cool. Awesome. So in 2021, when my therapist started trying to help me recognize these signs of burnout, it was the symptoms that really struck me at first. After all, I mean, is there a single time Tom in your entrepreneurship journey where you didn't experience one of these symptoms? Certainly, I think just being part of the human condition will, you know, from time to time. So is it, do you have to have a number of these symptoms and do they need to become chronic? I mean, if I wake up tomorrow feeling fatigued, that doesn't necessarily mean I'm burnt out, does it? I mean, if you wake up tomorrow and there's a tickle in your throat, are you going to treat yourself like you're probably getting sick? And the answer is if you're doing things in a healthy way and you start to feel off, that's when you should start to try to do something about it. That fatigue in snowball, it's fine if it's a day or a week or so. But if you're starting to see that feeling of fatigue just like linger with you, you're adding some more of these physical or emotional symptoms, then I think it would definitely be a time to look at your schedule and look at your commitments and see if you aren't overstretched a little bit. But you know, a lot of these symptoms, when you've got a lot going on, you know, you know, yeah, and you know that the conversations you have in your head and it's like, you know, I don't have time to be tired, you know. Yeah, that's what I told myself. That was how I ruled myself for a very long time. And frankly, Tom, it almost killed me. That's an indulgence that we'll deal with on another day is kind of the But that's not good, is it? No, it's really not. So when my therapist was talking to me about these signs and symptoms, she just asked me, well, you know, how are you going to keep doing all of this then? I remember just looking at her completely dumbfounded. I told her I'm just going to dig deeper, obviously. And you're right, like that's what we often say to ourselves. I was in my late 20s. I saw my willpower as an unstoppable force. And I saw my body as a vehicle that I could conquer and then use as a vessel for that will up until that time. That was how I governed myself. And it worked back home in Florida. It seems kind of like a previous life. But back home in Florida, I was a volunteer firefighter. I use that to overcome my fear of heights, my fear of fire, my fear of tiny spaces. I trained in 80 pounds of gear, 95 degrees and 100% humidity. And in less than four years, I made the rank of lieutenant. When later in 2015, a lady pulled out in front of me in the rain. I was driving my motorcycle home. It's like 25 miles an hour. She stopped in the middle of the road, though, the back brake locked and there was nowhere to go. She shouted my pelvis. She broke my C1 vertebra. She broke my nose in two places. It was, yeah. Oh my gosh, it was crazy, Tom. It took four days for the swelling in my abdomen to go down enough for them to even be able to operate. Oh my goodness. Yeah. So after it was done, my orthopedic surgeon came in and he broke the news to me that I would never fight fire again. And I did the same thing that I always did. I doubled down. I told him believe so vehemently that the nurses had to sedate me because I was super upset. You weren't going to accept that at that point? No, I wasn't. I was not willing. And what it comes down to is I wasn't willing to accept my own mortality. I still thought I was 12 feet high and bulletproof and I could just walk over mountains in a single leap. So what did you do at that point? After your blood pressure went down a little bit, what happened after that? I was extra dumb. I tripled down and I was back firefighting within six months of the accident. I don't recommend that. I recommend that you listen to your physical therapist. I will pay for that for the rest of my life. Just listen to your physical therapist, man. So you went back and you proved the physician wrong, but maybe you really proved them right. Yeah. And I ended up proving myself wrong because I really did just follow that double down, double down, double down pattern until I couldn't double down anymore. So I got done with firefighting. My husband moved us to Kansas and nobody would hire a military wife. And so I hired myself and built this company. So there was no reason for me to believe that I wasn't an infinite well of willpower and energy. And so I treated my body and my mind like that until I was 29 years old. And that was last year. I started my company in 2017. I had a hundred dollars worth of cleaning supplies from Dollar General. I had the vacuum for my house and we doubled revenue year over year for the first three years. These photos, the first one is from November 2019. The second one is February 2020. The third is March 2020. And then that one is November 2020. In early 2020, I felt like I was really hitting my stride. I brought on a business partner previously that I thought that I really needed only to later figure out that not only did I not need him, but that he had done more harm than good. So in January of 2020, I planned and implemented a hostile takeover of my own company. And then I just hit the ground running. I completed two of those five classes that I needed then to become an IICRC certified master textile cleaner. I was still volunteering a lot around town. I was the director of an entrepreneurship program. If your breeders may be familiar with it, it's one million cups. It's an initiative by the Kauffman Foundation out of Kansas City to engage, educate, and connect entrepreneurs for free. And we primarily worked with startups. We brought them in. We let them present. They told us what was going well in their business so that we could learn from them. And they told us what was going not so great in their business so that we could help give them feedback and advice. And I really, really enjoyed all the things that I was doing at the time. And I had developed strategies to continue our expansion into the residential market before the pandemic hit. How did the pandemic affect you guys? You know, we had some shutdowns. I mean, we had six branches at one point. And when COVID hit, we, you know, we didn't know what we didn't know. But we were kind of playing best case, worst case. What's a smart thing to do? And some of the branches were marginally performing. So we liquidated some assets and basically got down to three branches. Well done. Y'all leaned up. Yeah. And some of the branches, you know, closed down for COVID for a few weeks. And then, you know, we'll open back up. We were kind of doing what everybody else was doing and moved to solo teams and, you know, kind of, you know, the social distancing part of it. And that was good. We stayed with it. And we started working, you know, spending a lot more time working on Made Central because we had the time to do it because we weren't cleaning as much as we... Yeah. Well done. That sounds like a fantastic use of your time. And you guys were an established company so that you had that opportunity to get leaner. We were not a very established company at the time. And in April of 2020, we lost 60% of our residential clients overnight. 30 days later, we launched three pivots at the same time. We didn't have the money for marketing professionals to tell us which one was going to be a good idea. And we didn't have the time to do anything else because we weren't operating. I mean, we were cash basis. I didn't have debt. I didn't have any of my own money to put in to help float us. We were just doing what we had to do to survive. We chose government contracting, commercial janitorial, and post-COVID cleaning. The post-COVID cleaning helped us float through the rest of that year and our commercial division has grown considerably. Our first commercial contract we landed in May of 2020, so very, very swiftly after we launched those pivots, we actually got our first contract while the government contracts ended up, they just take so long to bid from start to finish and they really are kind of like a lowest bidder game. We ended up putting that one on a shelf and then we pushed forward with commercial. Over time, eventually the demand for that post-COVID disinfection services has gone down pretty considerably. And through those things, we were able to still double our revenue in 2020. And I remember one of my entrepreneur friends just looking at me and saying, wow, Amber, you're rolling. There isn't even a pandemic going on. And I was. In 2021, though, in addition to running both the commercial and residential divisions of my company, I have a cute little plaque back there from when I completed the SBA Emerging Leaders Mini MBA. So that was, it's a free program. It's basically a master's in business except it's boiled down into weeks and months, not years. It was a very hard program. Do I sleep? No. Well, and that was half the problem. Yeah. I was also at the time planning an expansion to a nearby city in Wichita. And I came out as gay. At that time, the dissolution of my marriage to my husband naturally followed. And through all that transition, I still ruled my body like an unsympathetic dictator. I kept digging deeper and deeper into my own flesh to find more strength. And that worked until the well ran dry. When did you figure out you were burning out? Yeah, so that would have been September of last year. I dug deeper and for the first time in my whole entire life, I came up empty handed. My weight started to drop. I spent hours a day with nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, panic attacks. I lost 27 pounds in less than six weeks and it took me six months to gain any of that weight back. Wow. I have a bit of a dry morbid sense. Some of us can lose that weight and kind of, you know, I did not have it to spare. Yeah, you didn't. You don't. Yeah. Wow. Okay. So like I have a very dry morbid sense of humor. It's off-putting to some people. Some people find it hilarious. But I was talking to one of my friends and I was like, you know, how many panic attacks a day do you have? And they took me very seriously and they said you mean per month, right? And I didn't. I was experiencing two to three panic attacks a day. It was just like all of a sudden? I mean, was it, were you like having discussions with yourself for a while or was it like one day? It's like, wow, this is just falling apart really quick. Yeah, it was a lot slower than that. It was just like, you know, going through a whole day and barely having time to eat, but drinking coffee. It was well, you know, for a few weeks at a time, I'm going to have to work 80 hour weeks and sort of 60 hour weeks. And it was just a lot of, it was just a lot of me really coming down to not holding my own boundaries and not treating myself as a person. Like I was so willing to seed space to everyone else in my life that eventually there was no space for me to be anymore. And then the reason that it got that bad that quickly is because your GI system is very, very sensitive, especially when it comes to things that are anxiety related. It affects your GI system first. And so what happened was I ended up with IBS. I ended up with GERD. I ended up with acid reflux and a imbalance of bacteria in my small intestine. And so it made it to where I mean, without medical intervention, I would have, I was not able to process nutrition anymore. And all of this was going on and you had, in essence, two businesses you were running in these other commitments. And working on my career, what was I thinking? I was thinking that if I just dug a little deeper and tried a little harder, it would all be fine. Right? Yeah. So eventually it culminated with a 12 hour straight overnight panic attack. I was on the phone with the suicide prevention hotline for three hours and found out that our local crisis stabilization unit has 10 slots for the 11 counties that they serve. So our mental health system in the US is pretty lacking. It is especially lacking in the Midwest. There are not a lot of resources and geographically, everybody's spread out quite a bit. So it's hard to get those resources implemented in a way that makes financial sense both for businesses, but also for government services. And that still didn't even stop me. I didn't stop Tom. I know. That's why I was like, I will be super honest with you. I'm dumb. Let's get ready to turn around. So, okay, well now, you know, I guess you started like getting all of this fixed, but not quite yet. No, I was still pouring from an empty cup. I didn't enforce personal boundaries. I didn't enforce professional boundaries. Like I left my staff call out of work for the last minute, no problem. But I never allowed myself to call out at all. I didn't have a terms of service document yet. And I just repeatedly gave abusive clients the benefit of the doubt. Like, oh, well, maybe they just didn't understand. And at the end of the day, I mean, you've been in business long enough to know that there are some people who are just trying to scam cleaning companies. And there are some people who want to be dissatisfied with their service. That is true. There are some people that you know, have hated every cleaning service they've ever had. I know. I know. And that's what I mean when I say they just seem to want to be upset with. They really do. They'll go through, you know, five to 10 maids in a single city and still be say, oh, well, you know, none of them met my standards. So yeah, I mean, your terms of service are designed to protect you from that. And I didn't have that shield. My office assistant at the time told me that, you know, her role was 10 hours a week. She told me that she was completely overwhelmed with it. So, you know, even though I was working 90, I let her go on paid leave and I picked up the slack. And I wasn't even the I wasn't even the highest paid person in my org chart. In fact, I was the lowest paid person in my org chart, because I just really, really believed in this and I wanted to make it work. So what changed? What was the the the the moment that you were able to see this from a different perspective? Honestly, Tom, I don't think that there was a single moment. There is if you are if you're in this process, there is no single moment of clarity when things change. If you're looking for that, then don't. If you're if you're waiting for that to happen and it never happens, then you're just never going to get better. It was kind of like a one step at a time thing. I got within about five pounds of weight loss from ending up in the ICU. And I just reached a point where I was like, you know, I would rather not die. I have entirely too many things to live for. And if the way that I'm governing myself and my relationships is killing me, then I have to change. I thought you was going to say I have too much stuff to do today. Well, I mean, having too much stuff to do is definitely part of it. Part of the reason, you know, absolutely. I did start putting things down, but like it took me a while to get there. I had to recognize that my relationships and my personal and professional lives were were kind of one way streets. And I exported a lot of resources, emotional labor, actual labor. And I usually only imported a litany of half apologies. And I kind of fell into this pattern where other people didn't even have to make excuses to me about their behavior. I found excuses for them. Oh, yeah. And so we really just reached a point where I was like, you know, I have got to rework the way that I approach my life to not keep digging into myself like this. And I do want to give you a trigger warning. The next photos show my body condition while I was very sick. There's still a little hard for me to look at. I got scary, scary, tiny. So the next slide will include pictures of when I was teeny, teeny, scary, tiny. This was between September of 2022 and March of 2023. My body just wasted away into mountains and valleys of bones. I would have nightmares every day I'd wake up before I am, spend four hours in the bathroom, put on my uniform and go to work until nine or 10 at night. I remember just dozing off on the bathroom floor on the bath mat between those waves of nausea. I reached a point where I could count my ribs. I could count the vertebra in my spine. I could see very clearly my hips. And it was so, it was so bad that I didn't recognize myself in the mirror anymore. I went from a dress size eight down to a dress size zero. And I didn't even take photos of myself. These are photos of my girlfriend took because she absolutely adores me and never stops taking pictures. But I did. I just, I just wasn't myself. It feels now even still strange to see my own wardrobe look like hand me downs on me. I tried to put a smile on through this entire thing, but like it never really hid even in the top right picture how thin my face got. Or in the bottom left or center, just how small I ended up being. This was, this is really life threatening at this point. It was, it was. Yeah. And I hope that other people don't get that far. Please don't get that far. Yeah. I mean, I'm anticipating that you're going to share your journey back and help all of us like get ahead of this. And if we're going in that direction turning around before things get too bad, but I will be your cautionary tale. Don't become one at the time this was happening. Like did you, were you aware that it was that bad? Or were you still kind of telling yourself that, you know, if I just work hard, it'll be okay. Uh, no, I was pretty aware it was that bad. A lot of my recovery involved my cuddle up for my therapist has also had to put weight back on before. She is absolutely amazing. She has already beaten cancer once in her life and she's younger than me. She, so she recommended to take and put my horrible disgusting protein powder into a jello mix of jello pudding because it would make it significantly less terrible. Less terrible and good are two different things. It was not good. You're bringing the better bad alternative. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So, um, yeah, I will credit my life to protein pudding, but I have also told my girlfriend if we ever have to do that again, I would rather do, I would, I'll eat anything else. I don't care. Give me mountains of brush or sprouts. Give me, give me just seas of broccoli, but don't, don't give me any more of that stupid pudding. But like, you're right. In retrospect, I did realize that the personal professional boundaries I had in place were vastly insufficient. Um, but at the time I thought I was good at boundaries and I would be willing to bet that they're part of our listeners who think that they are good at boundaries, but are struggling with these things too. This book right here changed my life, saved my life, saved my life. The name of that book is, um, it's the set boundaries workbook. I'm going to talk about it later, but I actually pulled one of the, uh, actually pulled one of the activities out. Um, if you are going through this and you're like, wow, don't call me out like that, then this is probably about you too. Um, it really helped me kind of like look in the proverbial mirror and it opened my eyes to how well I was really doing with my boundaries. So we can go ahead and look at this activity together. So we have in the last six months, I have waited for others to figure out what I needed instead of just telling them. I have let people borrow items without, you know, enforcing that they be returned, loaned money I couldn't afford to spend money without considering my budget, said yes to something that I didn't actually have time for, uh, experienced GI upset or loss of appetite due to stress. And a lot of people will say, oh, well, you know, I'm just working throughout the day. I'm not really hungry, but you've got to check in with yourself and really pause for a minute and think about that. Um, you know, sometimes it is just like, oh, well, I'm busy. It's warm outside. I'm cleaning a couple of houses today. I just don't want to eat when I'm cleaning. That's one thing. Um, but if it's like really, really piling up, then, then yeah, these, these are signs that you aren't holding boundaries that are protecting you know, and that's what boundaries are. I mean, it's not like this big gigantic sign that says no humans allowed, go away. It's about having a framework of expectations of how people are going to treat you, how you're going to interact with your environment and how you're going to protect yourself. Um, so when you're, yeah, go ahead. So you had a couple of things, I mean, more than a couple of things going on. I'm, I'm sure, but at least, you know, discussion just started, started, you know, I could very much relate to, you know, I've got multiple businesses and I'm ambitious and I've got these projects I'm working on and, you know, sleep is for sissies. Yeah, I know. It's possible culture. Yeah, but layered over top of that, you know, the, you know, the, the questions you have here or the, or the, you know, the, you know, those statements, you were dealing, you know, that's like having your hands tied behind your back. Yeah. I mean, and even if it's only, like it doesn't have to be all of those, even if you're only starting to deal with a few, checking in with this activity is a really, really great place to just take stock and see if you are starting to kind of walk back some of your boundaries and see if it's time to start to reinforce them. Okay. Yeah. So I did. Your therapist helped you see this? She's the one who gave me the book. Yeah. And yeah, she did help me. When you, when you looked at this list and kind of went down to the checklist, did that change your thinking about some things? Yeah. Well, first I wanted to throw the book in the garbage can kind of like the doctor and the I know. Yeah. Yeah. You see her seeing the pattern, Tom. Thank you. Man, I should have had you in my life at that time. But yeah, no, at first I was very offended and eventually I reached a point where I was like, you know what, you're right. And I started to slow down. I wish I had done it a lot sooner, but I'm going to tell you how to do it. So you can do it a lot sooner. First off, we have, we have to set boundaries with different people. So even as a solo cleaner, you have to set boundaries with the public, you have to set boundaries with your clients. And then eventually when you have employees, you have to set boundaries with your employees too. So since everybody has to deal with the public, we're going to start there. One of the things that we didn't used to have was this cool little section at the bottom of our GoodWitch Cleaning Services card. We used to just have it where it was just like always open because our Facebook page was always responded to. And that was not great. I mean, it was great for my customers because they got used to just being able to reach me anytime of day or night. But it ended up becoming something that was very, very hard for me because I was constantly, you know, every time I opened up my phone, it wasn't somebody saying, you know, hey, how are you? It was an employee or a client or a problem or just something that I had to deal with. Making that decision is one of those decisions where you know, you're thinking if I make that change, if I go ahead and I put these hours in here, if I don't respond to that message at 10 o'clock at night, am I going to lose a customer? Is this going to hurt my business? Are my sales going to go down? Am I not going to be able to make payroll next Friday? Am I going to go broke and lose everything? Yeah. Yeah. And for a lot of people who are starting out like I did where you started out as a solo cleaner and you just built out of what you had and built it out of your own labor, yeah. I mean, that concept is terrifying. So when you made this change, how did it affect your business? At first, there was a couple of clients who did not appreciate it. They are no longer clients. And honestly, the only people who have been offended about it ended up not becoming clients. I've just kind of reached a point in my life where if you expect a business to a small business, not a large corporation that can afford their cool little call centers and stuff, but for a small local company, I just don't want to work with people who expect them to be on all the time. I understand that my job as a cleaner is not just to make the house look better and smell better. I understand that not only do I have a responsibility to make it cleaner and safer for those residents, but I also understand that this just isn't coming just out of their household budget. This is coming out of their mental health budget. It's coming out of their fun things to do on the weekends budget. Like they're getting more out of a house cleaning than just having a clean house. They're getting some of their time back, they're getting some of their sanity back. And so understanding that we provide emotional labor also means that I can expect that they are going to hold themselves to the same standards in the way that they communicate with me. So I don't contact my employees outside of business hours unless it's an emergency. I don't contact my clients or the public outside of business hours unless it's an emergency. And I kind of just expect the same. So another thing we did was small like solo cleaners. Well often and for a while I did have the cell phone that I carried was the business cell phone. And so it was not only on all the time, it was specifically me. And that that mix between my professional communication and my personal communication was one of those things where it started to encroach on my time. It started to encroach on my ability to take care of myself. And that really was something that I needed to do to make it possible for me to continue doing this in a sustainable way. So for the benefit of anyone who's running a business that might be in that same situation, you've set that expectation with your customers and if you change it and say, okay, well, this is when I'm available and this is when I'm not available, there will be a subset. Usually in my experience, I mean, I've been at this for a while and almost without exception, the head trash that we deal with in terms of, you know, how much business am I going to lose when I make this change is usually way over inflated. Oh yeah, it was, it was. And for the few you lose, fine, okay, you've taken care of the people who, you know, not only was it misalignment of expectation, but misalignment of values, the customers you have left and the customers you'll get in the future are going to appreciate and respect the, you know, that your values and where you're coming from in terms of how you're running your business and they're going to appreciate you more and be more loyal for that. So, financial, revenue standpoint and everything else, I'm assuming, I'm guessing that you're in a better position now than where you were when you were 10 o'clock at night. Much, yeah, yeah. Honestly, it didn't really affect any of the like most long-term real oil clients that we have. Most of them were like, oh, good for you, Amber. I'm proud of you. And that wasn't the, that wasn't what I was expecting at all. You're right. So, you know, if you're, if you're worried about making some of these adjustments, you're probably worrying about something that you shouldn't, you should be worrying about what's going to happen if I don't make these adjustments. Yes, yes, I am what could happen if you don't make those adjustments. Another thing that we noticed was a lot of the last minute annoying calls that we had were like, oh, can you come do my move out, clean tomorrow? Do you have somebody who's available today? Like, no, I don't. I don't want to be rude or anything, but I keep my employees employed full time. And we can't do that by just accepting same day bookings. So we had to be really clear on the, you know, how much notice do you need? Hey, we booked two to four weeks in advance. You know, what kinds of jobs will you take? Part of this process was us dissolving our short term rental division. And that was, you know, while we were doing Airbnb's, we had 14 under management. We worked with those managers for two years. And in the entire period of time, I did not have a single weekend off. Somebody would call out because they didn't want to do their Airbnb or he, you know, Airbnb owners, if you're familiar with the short term rental game, have a tendency to create what we call scope creep, which is where they're just like asking you to do extra things for zero extra dollars. And he's just like, oh, well, you're there. And all those while you're there is out up. Yeah, absolutely. You know, can you, you know, some light bulbs that are burnt out and, you know, there's something broken in the backyard. Can you fix that and make sure can you please pray for ants while you're there? Like, no, I'm not an exterminator. Look at me. So that was one of the things, you know, what kind of jobs will you take? We had to say, hey, we're no longer doing this. How much notice do you need? I need two to four weeks. How do you prefer to be communicated with? If it's not a call, you know, perhaps you prefer email or you prefer text messaging, I have found that a lot of my clients prefer me to text them because they also lead very busy lives. And sometimes they have a screaming child in the background that doesn't want to let them have a phone call. So those are boundaries that you can set with the public and ways that you can broadcast that message to the public. When we're talking about specific clients, there are a number of things that we can do your terms of service. We have broken ours down into some pretty simple sections. We have our basics and one of them is as basic as our office hours are nine to five Monday through Friday. We prefer to be contacted during them. If you're repeatedly contacting us outside of office hours, we may elect to not retain you as a client. So your terms of service, they don't have to be written lawyer. You're allowed to write them yourself. That was one of the common misconceptions that even I ran into was that, oh, well, I can't write my terms of service. I need to be able to afford a lawyer to do that. And the answer is no, you don't. Our financial policies, like, you know, some people are, you know, when they're doing residential services, they're getting you in a contract and that contract lasts for a period of time. Oftentimes in residential cleaning, it's not a contract. It's what you call a service agreement. And that service agreement is just going to govern like, hey, this is the scope of work I'm doing. So you know exactly what you're paying for. And then this is the price, you know, exactly what you're paying. And so those financial policies are state. Hey, this is not a contract. I am not some, you know, multi state broadcasting agency or, you know, cell phone provider. I'm not going to lock you into a contract for three years and then treat you however I want. You know, I earn your business every time. However, that also means that, you know, we can both cancel at any time, either way. People policy. Oh, did you have something? Yeah, in part, in part, your setting expectations and so much of it is a lot of times we don't do an awesome job of setting expectations. And if we don't do that, then your customers just assume whatever fits, you know, their needs at the moment. Yeah. And you know, there's a whole definition of quality about expectations and perception. And if we can get a limo on expectations, and then, you know, meet those expectations, life is beautiful. But it's so beautiful. You know, so how did you, did you figure this out? Did you get some help with this? How did you, I mean, what you're doing here is awesome. How did you make this happen? Yeah. So Jessica, my general manager, was the one who put her foot down and she was like, no, we're writing in terms of service. What we ended up doing was we have Trello in our office. And so we made a little Trello tab of things that we could come up with that needed to be in our terms of service. And then we had a little parking lot where we were putting in things that happened with a customer. So when we had, you know, whenever we had an incident, we were like, dang, we should have had a terms of service for this, we just put it in the list so that we could write the term of service for it. And that's kind of how we developed our process. So having the terms of service as part of it, and the other part of it is making sure that your customers have those top of mind, they understand what they are. You can have rules, but if nobody knows what they are, then you might as well not have them. Is that what the email templates are about? Yeah. So those are actually for when you need to communicate with a client about whether or not they have worked within the bounds of the term of service or they haven't. One of the things that I see cleaning professionals ask a lot is oh, I'm already in this situation, I have this client, they're upset with me. How do I handle it from here? And really, or what do I say? How do I respond? And really, the time that you should be doing that is not when it's actually happening. When you recognize that there are terms of service in your list that would trigger an event where you say, okay, well, I know that this client is a poor fit or we got to the house and it was locked or they canceled at the last minute or they needed to claim their satisfaction guarantee to initiate a claim, then what you can do is you can put those email templates, write them ahead of time. Even if you're just using Gmail, you can save those templates. It really takes the emotionality of it when you're dealing with a situation like that. You're not having to write it while you're feeling it. You already have it in your back pocket. Basically, you're anticipating conversations that you're going to need to have to make sure that everybody abides by the boundaries, abides by the terms of service. You're making it really easy for you and your team to communicate that and stick to it when the situation calls for it. Yeah. We have some pretty strict policies. In our people policies, we clearly state, professionalism is important to us. My employees in my residential and commercial divisions average 13 years of customer service experience. My average employee has 13 years of customer service experience. We are very people-oriented. I have to tell people, hey, we are open to feedback. We're not open to abuse. If you abuse one of my staff members, whether they are in your house, if they're in your house, they're allowed to walk out the door. If somebody yells at my office manager, Lisa, she's allowed to hang up the phone. Sure. Absolutely. Absolutely. We're kind of shifting right now. This industry is shifting from a very much a buyer's market to the pandemic created a bit more of a seller's market where cleaning companies were able to command a higher price as long as they were also willing to do extra disinfection, take extra classes, and be willing to step up to the plate. Even before COVID, as an employer, you have an obligation to make sure that you have a safe work environment. Absolutely. No, certainly your customer's homes. We've got just a few more minutes left, Amber. Are there any points we want to touch upon in closing? We can get through this pretty quick. For employees, you have a training manual. We have our training manual on training wall. So you see in the side, we actually screenshotted a couple of those pages so you can see them. We have our cleaning checklist. We have a team member manual, TMIP. You'll notice that I say team member instead of employee. So that is a team member improvement plan. So if somebody has broken our training or one of our policies, then it's not something that you would need to fire immediately. We have, you get a verbal warning, you get a written warning, and then that's three strikes you're out. But so having that template already ready so that you know everything that you need to say and where you need to put it is important. Keeping an inventory sheet of your chemicals and equipment, especially if you have employees who are struggling, they're leaving stuff behind at clients' houses or they're not always coming in with the equipment that they need. We have equipment checkout forms now that are signed. There are some really, really amazing tools that you can use. When I'm looking at meal preps, I have a few little things that I always do. It's like instant pot meal prep, budget meal prep, five-ingredient meal prep, slow cooker meal prep. Those keywords in Google will get you a really, really far away. Being on your own client list, whether you're a solo or you have employees, be a bi-weekly client. It doesn't have to be a huge slot. It doesn't have to be your own house, but like get yourself some support. Keeping nutritious, hydrating snacks around my office manager and my field operations manager swear by apples and grapes. They're a really good way to just get some good nutrition and you get some hydration in you and start to feel a little bit better. We have the binaural beats and the 12-hour sound machine podcasts are great tools to help bring your nervous system down. There are different types of self-care. I had to tell one of my friends a while ago and it's kind of become a running joke. Taco Bell is not self-care. Getting yourself nice. No, it's bad for your body. I know, but there are, I mean, and that can be one thing, just getting yourself a little pick-me-up, but there are many different types of self-care. These are some of the books I recommended that set boundaries workbook is right there for you. They're industry resources, so Goja and RJ host a monthly coffee and conversation through ISSA residential. They bring on a presenter each week, but we also at the end of the day, we go into breakout rooms, we hang out, we talk. It's a really good time. The ISSA residential has the house and home cleaning discussion group. The Angela Brown's professional house cleaners group is a great one. They have a ton of members. They're very active. And her Ask a House Cleaner podcast was my bread and butter. When I was doing solo, I was always listening to that, just trying to find connections because as a solo cleaner, it's just hard to feel like you're part of an industry because you're all by yourself. There are a lot of the ISSA ambassadors. If you are looking for one of us, shoot me an email at GoodWitchCleaningatgmail.com and I will get you in touch with your ambassador that is closest. I have to tell you that since we implemented our terms of service, we have gone 211 days since our last unreasonable client. It is thanks to our terms of service that we've been able to do that. Do you have a board in your office that you update the number every day? No, but I have been very much considering it. I just haven't done it because I don't want to jinx it. My goal is that everybody after this session, so this is going to be at the ISSA show. It's going to be on the showroom floor in the Solver X Theater. We are doing boundaries for business owners and I've actually made a workbook for the attendees. So it's like step by step, fill in the blank. You will have your terms of service ready to go by the time you are back home from convention. So please come visit me. This was our preview for the show. Mark Baker is a big fan. He's asking you for a part two. So why don't you have a lot of snow and you can come back and we can continue this discussion. Awesome. Talisa, Marie has a question. If we could squeeze in really quick, maybe just a moment to help her with wanting to know how to make the jump from small residential to commercial. Where does she start? She mentioned she does air bean bees but has an off season where I guess work is slow. Yeah. So getting into commercial from residential is going to be a little bit difficult. Oftentimes, those commercial clients really want you to be outside of regular business hours. So if you are looking for commercial and you're trying to supplement with a residential company, you may try looking at some smaller offices that will allow you to come in during the day. But honestly, if you're just trying to fill in off season work for air bean bees, there are plenty of opportunities to get more recurring residential clients, especially this time of year when everybody's getting ready. The off season for air bean bees is the on season for holidays. So you can get those people who are getting ready for holidays, getting people in and visiting and kind of build on that back end there. I'm not sure without being able to speak more to her about her particular client balance and the resources that she has available, I wouldn't be able to responsibly make a recommendation. Okay. Fair enough. But that's a good advice. And we're at the top of the hour and Amber, in my opinion, this takes a lot of courage to come here and to share personal information like this. But I know where you're coming from. I know it's in your heart and this is helpful to probably more people. It's probably helpful to more of us and what even we are aware of at this point. We all have various degrees of needing to take better care of ourselves. Absolutely. It's hard nowadays, it really is. I look forward to seeing you in Las Vegas here in a few weeks. Absolutely. I am so excited. So we're going to go ahead and call it a wrap for today, but we're going to be back next Wednesday, five o'clock Eastern for smart business moves till then everybody take care. All right.