 we're going live. We are live. Hi, everybody. Tom Stewart here. Thanks for joining us. We're going to have an awesome time today. We're going to be doing on the spot. I've got my partner Liz here. Hey, Liz. Hey, Tom. And Liz is on mobile assignments today. But I'm sitting still, everybody. Look, is that a is that an email that you're doing there? You're texting what's going on? Tom, don't be trying to bust me out now. Come on. Be nice. Okay. Yeah, we're good, Paul. And we got our we got our special guests. And you know, we've been kind of keeping this close to the vest all week. But it's Paul free of, uh, of, uh, made and best clean. And I mean, he's got a bunch of stuff going on. And part of it is his computer is not playing exactly right. But we've got a we've got a plan B and we've got our sound patch together. And can you hear us, Paul? I can hear you guys. Can you hear me? We can hear you can hear right lives. I can. I can hear perfectly. I lost Paul. I spoke to some thought we had it. Hey, Leslie, how are you guys doing? Got Bridget here. Did I did I hear that there was Denet is in too? Yeah. Tom, I can't see anybody. Like, Oh, here, I found the place where I can see them. Now I see them. Hi, Bridget, Denet, Leslie. How you y'all? Okay, good. I'm glad I can see comments. That's super helpful. All right. Did any of you guys figure out that it was Paul? Oh, okay. Tom, can you hear me? I can hear you fine. Did you hear me talking to the girls? All right. About did they figure it out if it was Paul? Yeah, good. Yes, I heard that. Okay, I'm glad just because my phone went black. Okay. You know, this is a new this is a new bit that we're not practicing, but apparently we're getting really good at it, right? Messing up on tech. Yes. Hey, Paul. Hey, Greg's here too. Hey, Greg. All right. So this is a good chance. Oh, Linda's here too. I see Linda. Hey, Linda. All right, you guys. So this is your chance. Hey, Sarah, to start thinking of your questions for the three of us, we are going to do on the spot today. And on the spot, how it works is when y'all ask a question, all three of us will answer the question. Each one of us will have one minute, 60 seconds to answer the question. And then Tom will have a timer. Time will be up and it'll be the next person's turn to answer the question. Okay. Hey, Paul, thanks for joining us, man. Before we get started, just tell us what's been going on at Hoboken, what you've been up to? Wow. So I gotta tell you, the last couple of months have been incredibly trying, challenging, and incredibly exciting all the same time. I've really spent the last couple of months rebuilding and I saw this as an opportunity to really start over. I mean, how many times in my life, right? How many times in your life have you said, wow, I wish I could turn the clock back a couple of years with a knowledge of experience that I have now, right? It's so many ways. Go ahead, I'll work here. So this was, for me, this was a great opportunity to do that, right? So I started the business in 2013 with no experience in the cleaning business and the industry at all. And the business took off pretty quickly. And I was kind of caught in this whirlwind. And I still had customers going back to 2013, 2014, right, hadn't raised prices, things like that. Now it's like, our revenue dropped 95% in two weeks. It was devastating. Wow. But what I knew is that it was going to rebound very quickly, right? Our industry, we're very fortunate in the industry that we've chosen in that, look, today, people understand maybe more than ever the value of a quality and professional cleaning service and how important it is. And I knew that that was going to happen. So now it's like, okay, you know what, 95% of the business is gone, but now I get to rebuild it. I can now take back the customers I want to take back and maybe not take back the undesirables. So this is what's been waiting for me. What we did was we pivoted and we got into a lot of commercial work. So we started doing a lot of work for government entities, senior buildings, public housing, things like that. I kind of leaned on and called a lot of these politicians that have been calling me over the years for donations and said, hey, I need something from you now. You get these buildings, you need them clean, you need disinfected, we can do it. And that took off. So we've been doing a lot of that. And that has carried us through a lot of this downtime. Now, of course, things are starting to loosen up. And where we are, it's just, it's a very densely populated area. It's vertical living for the most part. So people got, and it's a hotspot. So people freaked out. Nobody wanted to be in an elevator. Nobody wanted to be walking down a hallway. Nobody wanted to be in a stairwell. Nobody wanted to be, they don't want to be around anybody. So it was like, you know, that's it. People just hunkered down, they locked themselves in their apartment, and that was that. So now it's starting to loosen up a little bit. People are calling, the phones are ringing if you want to resurrect their service. And now it's great because we have an opportunity to go back and okay, you know, look, this first cleaning, of course, is going to be built hourly because we haven't been in your home for quite some time. And now the fact that you're not going out to eat, you're using your kitchen a whole lot more, your kids are home, more home, with a lot of wear and tear on the, on the, on the, and the good kind of, what's beautiful about it is the good customers get it. You know, like, you know what, I, I understand, I, I'm with you and the undesirables don't get it. And I let them go. Yeah, that's awesome. It was just a great purge. So, I, and, you know, got a taste of the commercial industry and said, you know what, like, I really like this. So, as you can see behind us, right? So we've, kind of, we're, we're branding under this company, that's clean. And we've got some subsidiaries, right? So we've got a residential side, which is made in Hoboken. We have a commercial side, which is bestofficecleaning.com. And, you know, we're gonna probably start up in Manhattan again. So we'll have a Manhattan. So it's, it's just been great. We've been having a great time. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So, Well, and you've really done a lot in a short amount of time. Yeah. We use the term pivot a lot during this unprecedented time. Yeah. And I mean, that's definitely some serious pivot going on there. Yeah. Well, yeah. And during this time, right, relocated offices. So we, we moved, moved about a mile from where we were into about three times the amount of space, which is fantastic. So it really gives us an opportunity to grow. In the branding there, I like the sign by, I mean, your office, I mean, your branding has always been top shelf. Oh my gosh, that's so true. Okay. So let's talk a little bit about what we're going to be doing today. This is going to be a little bit different than our normal smart business moves. We're going to be doing on the spot today. And that is a rapid fire Q and a session where, you know, our audience gets to ask questions and each one of us will have 30 seconds to answer that question. We have. Wait, Tom, 30 seconds. I thought it was a minute. I was seeing if you were paying attention. Good job, Liz. 60 seconds. You get a minute here. Okay. So the way this works is we start and when we start, we click and we start discounting down. And when this, and this is actually set, I'm going to have to adjust this for a minute. But while I'm doing this, um, yep, there we go. Um, when it gets down to the end of the minute, we have to stop if we haven't finished our answer. We can answer the question less than a minute. That's awesome too. Whoops. And it looks like Liz, uh, where'd you go, Liz? You don't want to answer. I'm testing you Tom to see if you're going to be ready or not. Yeah. See if I was paying attention. I'm all over it. Okay. So I think everybody's got the drill and we kind of rotate amongst ourselves as to who answers first, um, whoever's answering first. It's usually a little bit harder because you don't have any time to formulate your answer. So when you go second or whoever's going second or third, you guys need to expect a better answer out of them. How about, um, so let's, let's roll. Anybody have one thing Tom housekeeping real quick housekeeping thing. Normally I read all of the stuff on the comments, but today I can't read them and be live at the same time. So you're going to have to read questions. I can do it. And I'm looking at have to do all the work today, Tom. I'm good. I'm exhausted here already. We haven't even started. I'm, uh, I'm looking here, but first I want to know who figured out it was Paul from my awesome clothes. Yeah. Anybody. I mean, the whole cooking thing should have, uh, tipped it to anybody who's been to foundations anyway. That's what I was thinking, right? So let's see what we got here. Um, Leslie says that's, uh, what's your favorite? Okay. These are actual questions. Okay. I don't see anybody here that's, uh, taking credit for figuring out who our special guest was. So we come up with, with, with better clues. Uh, I don't know. Yeah. Somebody should have been able to get, I feel like I did a good job, but okay, I'll, I'll do better clues next week. It makes sense to me, but I knew the answer before I saw the clues. Okay. So you guys, uh, ready to jump in on this? I think Bridget had the first question up Tom. Okay. Yeah. This is a, this is a long one here. Let me, uh, let me read this. Bridget asks, I think she's asking Tom will be up and I'll be the next person. We were at 499. We have dropped of course, but what should I spend and marketing and SEO, I guess on marketing and SEO, such as Edwards and Facebook. I think she was using speech to tech. So we're going to have to, She was, she says that later. In Facebook marketing to get back to where we were. I don't think today, but we were down about 30% from this time last year. So for about a half a million dollar business, I guess she's asking, how much should she be spending on marketing and SEO, such as what is Edwards? Edwards. I knew y'all. So this is why I usually look at all of the text and ask all the questions, you guys. So you're going to have to be careful. Okay. Can't be good at everything. That's right. Paul, you want to take a first, first crack at this one? Well, you know, it's interesting, right? So going through that same exercise, you know, wasn't really sure, right? Because who wants you back in their home, that kind of thing. I mean, look, I'm in a pretty dense area. So we're doing a lot of, we're doing a lot of outbound marketing, more so than I've ever done before, just because. But, you know, look, ad spend, I mean, we're doing about 1500 a month on Google ads. And, you know, then we're doing another 1500 in just organic SEO. So, I mean, that's where we're at and getting a bunch of results. Okay. Bang. Liz, do you want to go? No, you know how much I love this topic, but I'll go anyway. Yeah, you're on. All right. So, Bridget, I don't know what you should be spending. I can tell you what I've heard of people spending. I've heard of people spending as little as 1%. And that's for a company that has amazing signage, a lot of cars out on the road, and his business is on a main thoroughfare. So, he doesn't really feel like he needs to spend money on marketing, and he's growing. He's up full, fully staffed, and he has full operations in place right now. So, I mean, holla. But for my company, I needed to do some marketing. So, what I'm doing is spending my time on my current clients, everybody who was already a client reaching out to them one-on-one, asking them to come back and charging a little extra money. That's been my strategy. What you should do, I got nothing for you. Sorry, hun. That's what happens when you get to your end of your minute. Okay. So, remember, I said, whoever's going last should have the best answer. Well, that doesn't apply this time. But what I would say is that you need to be looking at what type of return you're getting off of the money you're spending, how many leads you're getting, and how many of them you're converting. And the standard is like 5%, but like Liz says, a lot of people will spend less than that. I've never been a great component of that. I've seen people spend 5% or more and get allows you to turn off of it. So, you really need to be tracking your leads and seeing your conversion rate. And if you're actually making money off of the marketing you're spending, I keep spending until you start seeing that curve bend down. We're spending on AdWords. We hired a new firm to manage that for us and we're north of a grand now. But part of what we're doing is just trying to dial in to get lower cost per leads. The other part is labor. Make sure that you've got enough labor to do the work that you service the leads that you're getting. All right, you guys. So, you'll notice Tom always finds a way to sneak in a couple of extra words. Well, that's because I've got the clock. He does. Okay, let's see here. Sarah Mitchell has a question. Do you have a cleaner incentive program and what is it? Liz, you want to go? Okay. You've only got a minute. Go. Okay. So, right now we do have a professional cleaner incentive plan in place and it is around COVID-19 stuff, right? Because we have PPP money, etc. But we're probably going to keep a version of it in place later as well. We are tracking three things. We are tracking attendance and not just attendance, how many hours per week you work. The more hours you work, the more money you make. We are tracking your payroll percent to revenue or the individual people are tracking their own payroll percent to revenue. How much money are you making for me? If you're making me a lot of money, I'm going to pay you more. And then the third thing we're tracking is your quality. So, I think you guys know about quality driven. If you don't, you should check it out, but we're checking the ratings and more money for higher scores. We have incentives for our employees. I don't know if you could call it an employee incentive program or a compensation plan. We compensate based on, we do a commission-based compensation plan that you earn a percentage of the revenue generated and your percentage is influenced by performance. I mean seniority is a component, but if you're a team leader, you get a higher percentage and we adjust that percentage based upon scorecard scores, which are basically quality scores and attendance and some other factors. Also, we do bonus programs from time to time. We'll have contests where we'll do spot bonuses and dollar rewards for good scorecards, for attendance, for other forms of recognition just to kind of keep people engaged in the program. You ready, Tom? That was impressive. I'm ready. So, I'm back. I disappeared for a second. I was trying to find something to show you guys. So, Liz, Tom, we have these poker chips. So, our core values being communication, honesty, integrity, professionalism, superior service. So, we have a series of poker chips. I'll find it before this session is over. One of them that I have is a day-off chip. So, again, as Tom said, we don't have a program in place, but we do incentivize. And one of the ways that I like to incentivize my staff is by giving them a day off. And we do rate, which we track attendance, of course. We've used quality as well. We send out surveys after each cleaning and we keep track. And for five-star reviews, there's also some incentives. But I find, for me, a day off is a great incentive. And it does cost a whole lot of money. Very good, very good. We call that pulling a Tom. Good job, Paul. I'm gonna find a chip. Hold on one second. Okay. And I don't know if anybody was paying attention, but when he was talking about his core values and he listed them off, the first letter of each core value adds up to the word chips. So, if you didn't catch that, that's how the poker chips tie in there. Paul's branding is next to none. He's good. Top notch. Travis has a question. He wants to know how do you handle Airbnb's? Doing laundry, stocking miscellaneous items, not wanting to pay regular rates, cleaning only between 11 and 2, blah, blah, blah. Very good. We do some Airbnb's in Castlekeepers and we've been doing vacation rentals, which I guess is a variation of Airbnb's. And we've been doing that for well over 20 years. I mean, the laundry, there's two variations of that. One is you do them in the property. The other is you bring them back to your office and you'll order them. We have commercial laundry facilities in our office and our warehouse. So our strong preference is to get three parts of linens and we always have one back in our warehouse ready to go. As far as the pricing goes, it's just a matter of negotiation. If they aren't willing to pay a price, which is getting a return off of your human capital, you know what your labor costs and you want to maximize your return off of it, then you don't take them as a client. We provide soaps and paper products and we have charge. Hey, Tom, before we start the timer, can we look at Paul's chips real quick? So let's see. So this is our poker chip. This is a real poker chip. I mean, it feels authentic. So I've got these and I've got a variety of them. This one happens to be, you know, the paid day off. And then, you know, I also have, you know, I've got these chips and again, I have a different colors, but this is a free 90 minute clean. And, you know, what I'll do is if I'm walking around town, I always have a couple of these in my pocket. And if I see, last week I saw a woman, I mean, she looked like she was 10 months pregnant. I mean, just sweating and struggling and I said, you know, hey, here you go. I hope you didn't say that to her, Paul. Say again? I hope you didn't say that to her. No, no, no, no. So I said, hey, you know, you look like you could really use some help. Here you go. I'm Paul Fried. I'm the owner of Mainland HoBoken. Here you go. Give us a call whenever you need it. And she was just blown away. So another woman who was limping, she had a cast on from her crotch right down to the tip of her toe, gave her a free cleaning. Again, it's just great PR. It's great marketing. And, you know, look, giving a little something back to the community as well. So it's terrific. But I also have, we have free oven cleaning chips, free fridge cleaning chips. And the pulver chips are great. I mean, it's just fun. And people like them. Awesome. Yeah, I love them too. I want them. So, okay, so Liz, you just bought yourself an extra couple minutes to come up with a really good answer for this. So looking, looking forward to hearing what you have to say about how you handle Airbnb's, you're on. Okay, I actually like Airbnb's. The thing that I have found that makes it doable is that you have a really strong system internal system that you don't deviate from. It's the deviations that cause problems. So I have to have the information. We can advance the guarantee of time. If you can give me a week in advance. So on Monday, you tell me from next week's jobs, what you need to have done, what properties, I can guarantee you what times I'll guarantee that we're going to be there. You know, if like after 10 o'clock or before four. And that's usually our timeframe. We have a list of what we fill. We fill shampoo, conditioner, hand soap, toilet paper, paper towels, dish detergent and laundry detergent. I don't fill other stuff. If you need other stuff, you got to do that. This is all we do. So for us, it's been a matter of really good systems that we do the same every single time. No deviations. Very good. How about you, Paul? So for us, what we find is that what people really want is the reliability. Just about all of our Airbnb clients have come from other cleaning services, and their major complaint is the place wasn't clean when the tenants or the customers moved in or arrived. And that's just huge. So if you can market that and just promote that, guarantee that, that itself is worth a couple of bucks to these people. We also require two sets of linens. We keep one back at our office, our shop. We also have a larger facility where we launder them. And that just works. We don't get involved in paper goods, soaps, things like that. Although we've been considering it, I think we're going to. We'll probably just private label some made and hobo can soaps, things like that. People can steal them and take them. It's some great marketing as well. But yeah, it's an area of our business that grows constantly. Excellent. Okay, so let's see. Leslie has a question. She wants to know, what's your favorite most productive form of advertising? You're on, Paul. Okay, so for me, so again, we work in a pretty, I'm just going to look for something hold on, but for me, we work in a pretty dense area. So we, it's an urban market. We have vans that just drop off and pick up cleaners. Nobody is, our cleaners don't drive, our drivers don't clean. So we've got vans that are buzzing around constantly, and they're always in somebody's face. So the vans are tremendous. We, SEO has always been great. It's, listen, it's made in Hoboken. So we live in a mile square city and there's 60 some thousand people, if they're googling for a made service in Hoboken, it's like they can't miss us. But here, I'll tell you what, some made in Hoboken hot sauce. All right. I love it. I'm a hot sauce guy. Love it. These are a lead behind, initial cleaning. We drop off. People love it. Okay, somebody else needs to ask this question. Somebody needs to ask more questions about marketing. Like, what is one of your favorite marketing things? Because Paul has got a million of these, you guys. He's got so many awesome things. You guys need to ask more questions. Go back to the stock room. Hold on. We're going to invite Paul back again to be a guest. And all we're going to do is just tell him to pull out examples of all the stuff that he's done. Oh my gosh. That's good. So I'm going to ask him, is he back on yet? Okay, Paul, don't share anymore. We're going, we're going to invite you back again, Paul. And all we're going to do for the entire show is for you to pull out stuff. I'm not kidding. Can you do that, Paul? Oh, I can. Paul, I would love that. Not next week, but the week after that. Or actually, Tom, what if we changed our Monday topic? Do you have time on Monday, Paul? I do. Okay. Well, Paul, we're calling an audible here. Paul is going to be here Monday and we're going to talk about just marketing. Yes. Yes. I don't know anybody that has the unique marketing, not even close, not anywhere on par with Paul. Okay. So we got a Monday topic. Thank you. That's so awesome. Thank you so much, Paul. I know you're spending an hour today and then again, an hour on Monday. We really appreciate it. I love it. I love it. It doesn't even feel like work, does it? Because it's not. Not at all. I've been looking forward to this. Okay. Liz, follow. No, I went second last time. It's your turn to go second. We're going around, Robin. I go, I went first on the Airbnb question. Okay, whatever. I got nothing good. All right. I mean, I don't want to go after Paul. All right. So we have cars. They're not as amazing as Paul's. They get the job done kind of. We don't really have amazing marketing. That's the problem. I do local networking. And so a lot of people will know us because of that. I have strong branding in our uniforms and in our people. So a lot of people will know us because of that. We have three different levels of service, three-star, four-star, and five-star. And nobody else in our area does that. So that's helpful. So we have a lot of things that we do uniquely. We make cookies for our customers. Nobody else does that. So we have a few things like that that we use. Very good. Okay. We've been at this, I guess, since the mid-90s. And we first got into this business. I mean, marketing was about getting a really big yellow page ad and sending back and taking orders. And we were awesome at that because we had the biggest yellow page ad. You know, everything has changed so much. So over the last, what, 20-some odd years? Gee whiz. It's all digital for us. SEO, everything in the digital space, getting reviews, getting, we do some things with ad words. We do some work with some of the lead gen companies. But for the most part, it's just focusing on the blocking and tackling and making sure that you're ranking high on the first page, coming up, you know, in the map pack and getting people to your website. Once you get them there, having them convert. Don't worry, you guys, Monday, we'll let Paul talk. It'll all be good. Yeah, yeah, you'll get a, I can't handle that pressure. You know it's true, Paul. You got, you got all weekend to get all your props together. You know, it's, it's interesting. So our, I mean, can I talk a little? Sure. Yeah, of course. So, so my, my, our new office is just outside the Lincoln tunnel. Now you're talking about hundreds of thousands of cars that are driving into the city, right? I'm most ready to give a day, aside from, of course, what we're experiencing now, but so we're, we're up above the ramp going in, right? The helix going into the tunnel. So I'm looking at these overpasses and there's these fences, right? So that people can't jump or throw things over, right? But you've got all of the traffic coming, coming, coming. I'm looking at the fences and all I'm thinking about is like, I just draped a banner over the fence, right? And just let it hang. I could probably get, I could probably get a good two hours before I get arrested, but you know what I mean? People are going to see that sign. It's going to be great. I vote no getting arrested, Paul. No, no, no. Now they wouldn't arrest me, but I'm sure they would just, okay, let's go. Come on. But no, it's, it's great. But hey, you get a lot of leads that way, right? Liz, Sarah wants to know what is a good or standard growth percentage per year to aim for? You're right. So I am not first because I have not gone last even once. You want me to go first? Fine. Yes. Okay. That percentage varies depending upon how many customers you have. I mean, in foundations, you'll remember, Sarah, we've got a growth curve and it starts off really steep because you gain customers more in a linear fashion, but you lose them as a percentage of the ones that you have. Industry average is about 5% loss rate per month. You want to be better than that if you can be. But when you start off and you got no customers, basically you're gaining them and you aren't losing very many. So you're growing really steep and that percentage, when you go from one customer to 200, that's 100% growth, right? So that percentage is going to be huge. But the bigger you get, that kind of gets flat. So there's no one great answer for that. It's purely a function of where you are on the growth curve. When it starts to get flat, you need to come up with other strategies. And that's another question if you want to ask it. Okay, Liz, would you like, would you mind going second or you won't go? Okay. I've been second every time, Tom, but I'm happy for something. Are you going last this time, Paul? Would you mind going? You know, sorry, I mean, I could almost mimic what Tom had said. And, you know, of course, year one, right? It was incredible. Year two, great, but not as incredible. Year three, kind of dipped a little bit. You know, we, you know, we just look at the bottom line and I just try to, you know, increase that number, however I can throughout the year. I don't have a set percentage. You know, what I try to do is we try to, we try to pick up or convert five bi-weekly customers a week. And, you know, during good times, it's, it's pretty easy to do. Again, right, we, with this COVID-19, we, we, our revenue dropped 95%. So we're, you know, kind of, we started back for kind of zero again. But the goal for us is going to be new bi-weekly customers every week. Sweet. Yeah, hearing that 95% drop, that, that's painful, even to hear, Paul. Oh, it's frightening. But again, it was very, it was, the fear was very short-lived. It really was. So that's not your style. Liz, do you feel, do you feel like answering this question? All right, Tom, if you're going to make me go last. Okay. So my answer is not going to be a whole lot different, but this is what I can tell you, Sarah. So in our mastermind groups, when I'm bringing people in, we do give the, we have two different groups. One is a group that is smaller, typically smaller companies and they can grow bigger. So we push them to have a 40 to 45% growth. I don't think that's unreasonable. And then we have some bigger companies and those companies, we try to get them to aim for 30 to 35% growth over the course of the next year. Not, not a whole lot of people are really excited about what their growth numbers are looking like right now for 2020. But like I said, I do have one mastermind member that he's, he's actually up. Texas. Hey, Paul, we just have a question here. A couple of people are wanting to know where you get your branded hot sauce from. Who does your private label on Hot Sauce Harry? Hot Sauce Harry. Yeah, wasn't that kind of obvious, Tom? HotSauceHarris.com You guys get that? HotSauceHarris.com? Never even heard of it. That's awesome. See if you can see it. Hold on. There we go. HotSauceHarris.com. Here we go. Yeah. It's interesting because the, you know, the HotSauce, we have customers that they'll call and they'll say, Hey, I'm out of HotSauceHarris. Can I get another bottle? And, you know, and of course, I mean, I'm a HotSauceHarris guy anyway, but you know, I, maybe I should save this for Monday. I don't know, but, you know, like I'll bring a bottle to a restaurant and just swap it out. Like I'll leave my bottle and take there. Do you ever go back to see if it's still there? I do. Yeah. And so much it is. It's hilarious. Nice. I love that. Okay. So Dan's got a question. In our industry, how best can one determine when the time is right to build an office team for the ultimate goal of achieving next level growth? Liz, Liz, who should go first this time? I'll go first. I haven't gone first in a while. You sure? Is that okay? I can't even remember what the question is. Oh yeah, it's up here on the screen. Let me see. Determine when the time is right to start building an office team for the ultimate goal of achieving next level growth. Okay. I have an answer and I don't think anybody else will have my answer. I'm stalling for you. Are you getting it? I'm ready. Okay. Okay. So what I'm going to suggest is a little bit different than what the standard wisdom is. Usually people will give you the size of your company. When you're at $250,000, you need this, $500, this. I'm going to recommend something different. Mike McCallowits has a new book. It's called Fix This Next. He talks about figuring out what the needs are of your company based on the business hierarchy of needs. You'll have to read the book to get more information than that. But you do just sort of a self-analysis on your business and your business tells you what it needs from you. The exercise will help you to be able to see when what you need is more support staff. I just posted in the chat the link to Fix This Next. They've got some free resources. They have an assessment. Yeah. McCallowits is awesome. And that link that Tom posted, that's the assessment that I'm talking about that can help you figure out when you need to hire for office staff. And he went to Virginia Tech. Yeah. Okay. When we do foundations, we go through calculations to help you understand if you can afford support staff and how much support staff revenue or salary rather than you can take on based on where your current revenue is and how many extra homes you need to clean in order to add an extra person. When you add people and support staff, it has a lot to do with what your strategy is and what it is you're trying to accomplish. There's a lot of people who are able to build businesses that meet their personal needs with a very modest, if any, support staff. Conversely, I know businesses and I've been known to do this from time to time. I hire people that I'm upside down. I'm burning cash. I'm taking money from other places to pay them because I want to grow more quickly or there's things that need to be done that I just don't want to do. So I don't know if there's one great answer, but those are the considerations that you would want to think about as you're figuring it out. Ready Paul? That you would want to think about while you're figuring. That was a dozen words, Tom. You're approaching on Paul's time here, Paul. Hey Dan Smith. So listen, how can one determine when the time is right? The time is always right. The time is always right. First of all, you'll know when the time is right. When you feel the time is right, just do it. I'm investing so much money into my business right now more so than ever. I mean much more than I did when I first started. New vehicles, new website, new office. Because of the way we're set up and I have these drivers that are shuttling teams of cleaners around, they're not producing. That's the soft cost for me out in the field. Now I balance that in a number of ways because they are driving these billboards around and they're advertising. But they're not producing per se. So I try to keep the office clean, as most of you know. I've been working with a VA. I've run my business pretty much with nobody in my office. But I'm bringing it off the staff. Because I do think there's thousands of times higher because a lot of people aren't looking for work. Probably more than that was. He talks fast enough that it doesn't matter, Tom. Did you see that? That was good. There's a lot of great candidates out there now looking for employment. Now is a great time. It looks like Liz decided to drop off. I don't know if she had to go to the bathroom or I don't know what's going on here. But we lost Liz. I'm sure she'll be back. This says Greg Stader, but there's a message right below it that says it's Rosemary. So I guess Rosemary is using Greg's Facebook account. So hi, Rosemary. How are you? Rosemary wants to know what are some ideas for contests or games to keep technicians engaged and to have fun? Is this Liz? Hey, Liz. Glad you could join this. Can't hear you. What? We can't hear you, Liz. No, no hear. She probably thinks I'm goofing on her, but no, obviously I'm not. No, can't hear you. We can't hear you, Liz. Sorry. Okay. Let's go ahead and get started. Maybe Liz can figure this out. Otherwise, we'll maybe put her up full screen and we can let her answer and see if we can read her lips. How about that? It's a shame because she's probably got the best answer here, but I'll go ahead and get started. Our company culture is more professional, if you will. It doesn't mean that you can't have fun and have games, but it certainly isn't as gamified as what say Liz culture is. I mean, we do some things. We have a prize wheel and we mix that up. Sometimes we have gift card amounts, dollar amounts, while augment people's salary type amounts, get time off. Other times, we just do goofy stuff where it could be a candy bar or can of beans or stuff like that just to mix it up. You can get to spin the wheel for a broad spectrum of things. We can do contests for having perfect attendance for a period of time or getting compliments or high scorecard scores or being nominated by another team member to spin the wheel. Here's Liz back again. Hey, Liz, can you hear us or can we hear you? Talk, Liz. No, this is tragic. Not working. Paul, you want to come in and go? Yeah, you're there, Tim. Yep, you're good, man. Go. Awesome. We love to have fun at work. We've created a pretty cool culture. One of the things that we did, and again, because of the way we're shut off, everybody comes back for lunch at some point because it's a very tight day area. We're only working in a two-mile radius, so we have lunch back in the office. One of the things we did was we did a chef's challenge, so we had judges each team. We worked together, too. Each team prepared a meal. They were rated on taste, appearance, presentation. That was a ton of fun. Our new office, we had some head space in the back. I had asked the team what they wanted to do in that space. They wanted a food ball table, so we bought a food ball table for the office. We're going to have a World Cup, and the winning team is going to get some time off, so we're going to get some fun that way. World Cup. That is awesome. Here is Liz. Talk to us. Can't hear you. Well, this work. Can I just blow her up? Getting tight on time. Let's see if we can fit in another question. Let's see. What do we got here? Sarah has another question with overhead. To go with my overhead position question, what percentage of revenue is admin? You want to go? You want me to go, Paul? Yeah. Why don't you go ahead, Tom? This is something that we tracked within our own business and seen in other companies, as well. Speaking for castle keepers, we've got a number of 13 percent. Typically, if we can keep that admin, indirect labor support staff number below 13 percent, we're typically in a place that's our sweet spot. That's when we've got enough resources to grow and take on more work and still be profitable. There have been times that we could squeeze it down to 11 percent and make a lot more money. If you try to get much more below that, oftentimes you find that you're just short of the resources you need and it starts catching up in terms of customer support or recruiting or other things that you think you can let slide for a while, but eventually it'll go ahead and invite you. I don't know if it applies across the board for everybody, but as a benchmark, I think it's a pretty good place to start. For me, that's great information to have, Tom, because again, the way we're set up, I try to keep the office as lean as I can because of these non-producing drivers out in the field. I'm now starting to grow the office staff. We've got the accommodations for it now in the new space and starting the commercial division. I think we're going to need it. I've been up until now, I've been working with BAs. I've been doing that for the last year and a half or so. That keeps the overhead way down. Again, we're going through this growth spur now looking to free in some office staff. That number that you threw out is certainly a good guideline for us. Okay. Liz is back in the house. Yeah, but can you hear me? Yes. There you go. I restarted my phone. Yay. Okay. You missed a couple of questions. I'm going to go back to the one that I think most people would want to hear you answer in this. What are some ideas for contesting games to keep technicians engaged and to have fun? I'm going to go now because you don't need any time to think of anything else. Okay. I like to have a different game every week that they can plan on. Some games last an entire week and some games might only last a day. Sometimes a contest might be a Facebook contest. So whoever has the best vacuum lines, whoever has the cleanest car, could be anything like that contest. I'll just throw one of those or I don't, but our culture coach will do it. She'll throw one of those out just sort of as a filler. But I like to play a lot of different games. We have a program called Team Builders that we don't do a lot with, but we used to do a lot with had a lot of different games in it. We like to play bingo. So it might be cleaning bingo. We like to do scavenger hunts. We like to do like a wears Waldo type thing, but it'll be a random item. Whoever can find it, see it, gets a picture of it. Too many things. Sorry, Sarah. That was good. Okay. So we're down to about three minutes to the hour. I'm going to suggest that for the moment, we should probably go ahead and wrap up. It is Friday after all. We don't want to go going over time. Still have some questions. Can I just interrupt real quick? Sure. Okay. So I wanted to say Dan, Dan Smith, he was the one that asked about bringing on office staff, but you probably don't know this, Tom, but he's actually signed up for foundations for our next version in March. So Dan, I just wanted to tell you, don't worry, you're going to get a much, probably more information around that topic than you could ever want in a good March. So I just wanted to let him know. We will load you up with how to do that. Yeah. A lot of time working on that. Cleaning business today is right here. If you haven't subscribed, you just really easy. Put your email address and your first and your last name. We've been rolling out some pretty rocking information here and a lot of new articles. Derek's got a team working again and I'm really proud. I'm excited to see what we're doing there. You can go to coronavirus downloads and see all the awesome stuff that we've been putting out here for the last few months. Most recently, Martha Woodward's team building program has a link and the website that Paul Weaver shared with us yesterday is here. He had a lot of good information. We had some technical issues there too and you guys, you know, bear with us on that. Appreciate that. For you guys who are doing PHC, I don't know if they got the word out or not to everybody, but class five went live today. Six is going to be going out Monday and seven is well underway to get that wrapped up by the end of next week. Okay, here's something else we need to share. Where are we? Oh my gosh. Okay. All of this time into the call, I finally figured out how to set my phone up so that I don't have to have it fold it. I am just proud of you, Liz. Okay. So one thing I have before we leave, I have a question for Paul real quick. So Paul, we do have people asking us about foundations right now and you went through foundations not that long ago. What would you say like was a great takeaway for you? Wow. Any great takeaway. Well, did you have a great takeaway? There were so many. You know, look, I love the immersion. I love the fact that you got this, you know, group of business owners, like-minded business owners, just, you know, together in this one space, 24-7, the networking, the team building. Look, you know, again, I think I shared with you, you know, this was like, I dealt with a lot of consultants in the industry and there was just so much information, but it wasn't overwhelming information. A great thing. Look, I love the camaraderie. I love the, just sitting around the dinner table after a day of class and then just kind of brainstorming, networking. The whole experience was incredible. Great. Awesome. I know a lot of people love that whole immersion experience. You know, that's why I think so many people go back for two, even three times is because of that piece. You can't really understand it if you haven't gone through it. Yeah, it was phenomenal. By the time you make it to the end of the week, you certainly, I mean, it makes an impression that I think sticks with you for the rest of your life. I mean, we've had people who has been many years and I mean, like you say, people keep coming back and it's an awesome experience. Well, anytime you're visiting chefs I'm there. I still make those little muffin things that you taught us how to make Paul. I make those all the time for the girls. They love them. So we can do a week of hot dogs. You can tell us about hot dogs on Monday. There's a, there's a hot dog story brewing. Liz, you want to take us through what we're doing next week? Tom, I would love to, but I can't see the schedule. Well, let me help you out here. Thank you. Monday. Monday, we've got our special guest, Paul Friedback, and we're going to take the entire time and we're just going to talk about marketing. And that's, you guys, thank you, Paul. Yes. And you guys, you guys need to come back for that. You'll, you'll learn a lot. You're going to have a tremendous amount of fun too, because it's, it's, it's a takes brutal marketing to a new level. Tuesday, Alonzo Adams is going to, to join us. Alonzo's been a friend for many years, runs a business outside of Philly called Busy Bees. He's the chair of the residential cleaning council of Arcsy, basically the ISSA. And, you know, we're going to be talking about a very timely subject, racism in America. And, you know, as business owners, we all have an opportunity to contribute and be, be part of the solution to a problem that, quite frankly, has been here for, for way too long. And, you know, that's going to be a special topic, a special meeting as well. And I hope that all you guys are able to make, make it for that. Paul August is going to be joining us on Wednesday. He's going to be sharing growing your business during a pandemic. Carrie Knight's going to be with us on Thursday. And she's going to be talking about keeping it real during the COVID-19 crisis. And we're going to do on the spot again next Friday. And we've got another special guest already lined up and it's going to be awesome. And do you want to give a hint now, Liz, as to who it might be? Okay, sure. I'll give a hint every day until Friday. This hint is that this person is small, very small. And, you know, there's a lot of different ways that you can interpret that. You're just going to leave that ambiguous at the moment. It's only Friday. Okay, we got to, we got to go here. You guys, you know, get some rest, stay safe this weekend. Some parts of the country, you know, COVID's starting to spike up a little bit again, you know, please, you know, stay on your toes, make sure, you know, all the, all the stuff that we've been teaching in terms of, you know, the proper way of washing your hands and social distancing and, and, you know, just in your staff, like on Monday, please emphasize that now's not the time to get lackadaisical with your PPE. We will see you guys back here Monday at five o'clock a.m. And we're going to have a lot of fun learning about marketing from Paul. Paul, thanks again. Appreciate it. Thank you, Liz. Thank you very much and listen, everybody out there. Have a great weekend. Thanks Paul. You too. I look forward to seeing you get on Monday. Bye guys. Likewise.