 Take it a nap. Good afternoon everybody. Tom Stewart here with Liz Trotter. Mike Callahan is our guest today, and this is Smart Business Modes. Whoo-hoo. Take a week off and basically just fall apart, Donna. Donna, I really can't, I can barely even notice it because you do it so seldom in comparison to me. It seems a non-event for me. No better than that. Mike, how heck are you? Good, good Tom. Good to see you virtually here. Liz, always a pleasure to see you. Things are good. Just been absolutely crazy grinding through Q1. Just like everybody else in the service industry, it's time to start hitting those numbers you put in the budget from late last year. Team Over at Simple Growth is up to, I think, 25 or 26 full-time members. It's been a good run so far. We're enjoying it and helping service businesses, especially in the cleanings, who take their life back from their business. Or hopefully avoid that happening through automation. So I think that's kind of what we're getting into today. So perfect. Linda is one of our strategic success members. She's, I think, in our express group. And right now, that is the wig that she's working on is how to become more automated. She wants to, so this is perfect for her. She's been able to get some great insight into what she should be doing. Yeah. And I think that kind of as we dive into it, the biggest thing that we're looking at here, and before we go into it, I don't know if anybody listening has heard the story, but I'll kind of get vulnerable at the beginning because there is a reason why automations is near and dear to my heart. Yes, we do help businesses do this, but if you're looking to do it yourself, I want to give you the roadmap. But unfortunately, after five or almost six years of college, all the classes I was taking through that whole journey, the fortunate part is I was actually building a service business full-time in college. I had, I think, three crews on the road and all the professors and all the people that I thought and looked up to in the service industry were building businesses that I thought were really successful. The thing that I saw as a common factor is they were building these massive businesses as the one point of value was built around them. So literally, if they wanted to leave for a week or they fell ill, these businesses would have self-employed. But from the outside in, you didn't see that. So I built my business thinking like, well, I want to be like this guy or girl running this very successful business locally. All the professors in the college were running their businesses in these entrepreneur classes, showing you to build a business around yourself, the one cog basically that was holding the thing together. So literally after I graduated college, I had the decision to go with the corporate route, entrepreneur route, the service industry. And I was probably making more money than most people would have been four or five years out of college with that service business. So obviously I took the entrepreneur route, but as I continued to do that full time, it really took a toll. So I was working at one point seven days a week, literally a hundred hours a week. I mean, it was brutal. So we just had five or six different crews out with two or three individuals on each crew. It was daunting. So fitting as it is be February 14th, literally my high school sweetheart on Valentine's Day, I kid you not, came home from a work trip and literally said, Mike, I'm leaving you. Your business runs your life and I'm out. Never forget it. It was actually on Valentine's Day as I'm looking at the hearts in Liz's hair. So true story, can't even make it up. So obviously we hit rock bottom, or I did at least, emotionally and started after things kind of came in perspective and say, you know, there's some things in my life I love. There's some things I really don't like. And unfortunately at that point I hated my business. I was a slave to it. So I couldn't leave for a day or two at a time, let alone a week or at the end where I left 30 days in a pop. So as I searched the internet, I found Tim Ferriss in the four hour work week. And that's kind of when that started to happen. I found another automation platform at the time it was called Infusionsoft, now it's called Keep. So with no technology background at 2, 3 in the morning, I went out and bought Infusionsoft. And I literally was like, I'm gonna run this service business from the beach of Thailand and Bali. And I'm gonna be an entrepreneur, a lifestyle entrepreneur, woke up the next morning realizing, you know what, that's probably not gonna happen in this service business, but I bought this and I bought into emotionally the exit that could possibly happen for the nightmare I was living for the last seven or eight years and we went in and automated each part of the business and literally went from 100 hours a week to three to five hours a week to an absentee owner at 30 days in a pop. So if you're watching this, in my opinion, it doesn't matter if you're eddy-beddy at 100, 200,000 or you're trying to break that million mark or you're well beyond, it doesn't matter. Automations are not going anywhere. I was lucky enough to find them after that brutal experience. Obviously now remarried with kids and life is good, but that was the thing and that was kind of our passion with Simple Growth. And even before Simple Growth was a company, I wanted to help people understand how to avoid that pain I went through or at least if they're in it, how do you get out of it? Yeah. So kind of a long story short, but I thought, well, I guess it's actually fitting for Valentine's Day to tell the story. But that's where we're at with automations and that's how we got into it. And obviously we can have some conversation back and forth, but some of the things I want to look at is the main five stages of business and what are those growth hurdles and what is that pain point and how can we use automations to clear up that bottleneck to break that million mark and beyond if that's what you want or if you're a solar entrepreneur just cleaning residential or commercial places, that's fine too if you still want to be on the cruise, not a place that I wanted to live anymore, but place of automation can actually help you at that stage of business as well. Depending on the avenue you're taking, automations can fit pretty much any size of business. That's what I'm thinking. Even if people do want to, they want this as kind of a job also and they want to be out in the field though, you're going to have to have some automation so that you can go ahead and do that. So I can't see how automations hurt anyone at any time. It doesn't even make sense to me that it would. How long have you been doing automations, Mike? Probably going on, I'd say close to 10 years. So we were one of the first people, not the first, but one of the first early adopters on Infusionsoft. And that was just literally, like it's a story when it was just half hazard. I just found it and I love that idea. So we've done, we've automated just about everything you can automate at this point, but we're always looking for the next thing that's going to happen. To your thought, Liz, and I'd like to ask you, Mike, over the last 10 years, how have you seen the technology change? Like, I'll share my theory and you can let me know if it holds any water or not. That 10 years ago, I think that we would put an office staff together and put workflows together and then kind of figure out what technology can we throw in there to make it a little bit easier. But I think the technology keeps getting better and better and it's not optional. It's more of a necessity at this point. I think that we're to the point where the successful businesses are basically putting together their technology stack and then figuring out what staff they need to put around that to make it work. Yeah, I think that that is correct, Tom. I think the way we looked at it in the early days was what was the biggest pain or bottleneck? And we just took the smallest pieces and it did it. But each stage of the business is gonna have a different pain point. But as you're looking at software platforms, you've got some of the big ones just like MadeCenture where that's gonna be an enterprise software. Well, somebody's starting out maybe a smaller one person show that may not be ready, that might not be the platform they can automate on and use as a CRM yet. And they may have to scale into that. So you may have, like there's different levels of software for each stage of business. And as they evolve into that larger platform, you just like MadeCenture is you've got an all in one platform. So the biggest thing that I ran into in the early days before Zapier and that is we had multiple system chaos. So you had leads and clients that weren't matching up. There was a lot of double entry. So I think now with the new technology, that's where the new part of it was really coming in is through Zapier or web hooks or parsing emails. There's a whole bunch of different things that can be done. A lot of that double entry now is eliminated. But I think that that's kind of the progression that we're seeing that that makes sense. But that's kind of where I'm driving with it is you've got to look at a platform that you're here and based on this stage of business, if you're a half a million, you want to go to a million, a million, a half, you need to be able to scale with that. And you don't want to change platforms. But if you're just itty bitty and you're starting out, you're probably not going to be starting out with an enterprise software. You just couldn't afford it. Kind of like if you roll the clock back 20 years ago, having a website was optional. You know, I don't need a website. I'll do door hangers. You're not in business if you don't have a website, you know, in 2022. And it just seems to me that, you know, the automations and everything that goes around technology that you used to use the technology, had technology and all your people in the office kind of used it. But the technology more and more is running your business and you've got people that are basically just tweaking the technology. Yeah, and you're not, they think the biggest misconception in the early days at least. And now I still think it's to an extent, is I think when you go to automate a business, A, you're replacing people with technology. Well, you're not always replacing people. You're putting them on the instead of the $20 an hour jobs, the several hundred dollar jobs. And then it also is like really just tracking what should happen, making sure it happens when it should happen. So now the business owner can kind of come back and look at it at a 40,000 square foot view. And the automation is going to tell the individual that should be doing the job, that they didn't do it. If they didn't do it, it's going to tell them how and when to do it. So it takes the guesswork out completely, right down to maybe having videos embedded of like tutorials, how to do a certain thing in the business. And then it can escalate to bring an actual person in to manage something that's not getting done. So we're not replacing people, we're putting higher value and then we're creating a system of processes that always happens, predictable that's not relying on a person to basically babysit or dictate what's going to happen. But the job descriptions are changing as time goes on. Yeah, the people are going to have to be more tech savvy. And that's just, it's just the way it is. And the level of admin or even the level of technician sometimes based on a mobile app, it's definitely elevating. The mobile app doesn't really scare me because millennials and in all the new generations, they've got these cell phones in their hands 24 sub. Like they're probably teaching some of the business owners how to use the app. So that doesn't scare me, but in the office, yes, there is a different skill set for sure. Well, and it seems like now you have to have the tech to speak into Tom's point, you have to have the tech to be competitive. Where before it was kind of an add on it, it was a way to separate yourself, but now you don't really have options. If you do not have the technology to support your business, you're going to be left behind. You're not compete. Yeah, something as simple as pre and post service and notification. So one of the users right on your guys platform cleans my house. So I get a text message or an email from Tina the day before she comes. And when Angelica leaves the house, I get a text message or an email depending on my preferences that she's left the house. But I mean, that stuff is now, it's commonplace, it's needed, but everything like this post COVID world has been accelerated with instant on demand stuff. So like going to someone's house and having to look around for a week of cleaning or top to bottom to locks. That's a thing of the past in most businesses, speed wins. So if you can build a price matrices out even with a high low price range built into a software and then have an automated follow up to close that estimate, those things are gonna like speed wins in that consistency. You could get away with not doing that in the past, but right now you've got to adopt. Yeah, I see that as being a non choice too. It's just, it's the way the world is run now. Back in the day, how the world was run was there was yellow pages. Everybody was in the yellow pages like it or not, right? Now everybody's using some form of automation like it or not, because that's the way you're going to, that's how you're gonna win. Yeah, and I think that the ability that is is to make it personal and not feel automated. And I think Tom had a question that I wouldn't mind in a few minutes kind of getting into like what part of the automation based on the stage of business and how do we actually make that automation feel personal? It doesn't have to look automated and that's the thing that wins. But everybody's just the shotgun approach. You're actually alienating your clients or leads a lot of times. And that's the difference of a successful automation and a rookie automation implementation. We made those mistakes in the early days. So I'm happy to kind of share those wins and losses and how we did that. Yeah, we'll dive into that in a minute. I just wanted to make the point that back in the day, technology oftentimes was intimidating as an owner of a business, trying to run a business, not everybody has the technical skills, but the really cool thing about what you do with Simple Growth, Mike, is you've got a team of what now 25 people, did you say? Yeah, 25, I think we added 26 a few weeks ago on our sales team. But yeah, it's going on, I think you're five or six now. It's been a roller coaster, a good one though. So Mike will basically do it for you. That's the other thing that's changing. You don't have to be, you know, it's like, I don't change the oil in my car either, but I don't have to, there's people that do that. And this automations, which is becoming, the whole technology stack is becoming more essential, more necessary, you don't have to do it yourself. You just find the people who you can bring into your team and they don't have to be employees, you can sub it out to other companies who do it. They do it well, they do it every day for a lot of people. And I mean, I see that's the way it's going as well. You see it with independent contractors, you know, answering phones and doing stuff like that, managed services, you guys are all over it. Yeah, I mean, let's face it, most people don't have the time. And the thing that we realized in the early days is kind of a sickness. I actually liked writing the marketing copy. So the call scripts, the emails, the text messages, all that stuff, that was something I enjoyed. But let's face it, if we're running a business and we're actually focusing on the mission, the vision, the values, the strategy, which we should be focusing on, your time's not gonna be spent writing all that marketing copy. So what we did at Simple Growth is we realized industry-specific, right down to like weekly, bi-weekly cleaning, oven cleanouts, stove cleanouts, top-to-bottom deluxe or deep cleans, whatever those were, right in the commercial space of stripping and waxing, we've gone in and wrote all the marketing copy that people can customize, but all of that is like a totally turnkey solution. And like when we talk about some of the employee automations, literally down to what you should be doing on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly basis. And then you kind of customize it to your business and your workflow. Walk us through some of that, Mike. What type of automations are we talking about? Yeah, well, just to hit on the time, kind of like a framework is what we started in the automation. So if you're doing this yourself, this is really important because it's not a one-size-fits-all. So what I learned in the early days was life-cycle marketing. So as you're looking at a business, there's basically five stages of growth. The first stage of growth, I like to say 1A and 1B, and that's your solo-paneur. So the first person kind of is working part-time and they're working for somebody else. And then that's stage 1A and then stage, basically stage 1B is you've kind of said, you know what, I'm not working for the man anymore. They're making all this money off me. I'm gonna start my own business and that's what I'm gonna do. But really, stage 1A, your biggest hurdle to your business is time because it's only a part-time gig at night or on the weekends. Stage 1B, when you've gone by yourself, your biggest pain point is how to get gather leads. That's your pain point. And that's gonna be running up probably up to about probably just under 100,000 a year. Then you go stage number two, your biggest problem now is sales. And then stage number three, you're gonna be going in and looking at marketing and service. That's your next hurdle. Stage four is going to create your people and systems. And stage number five is basically that three to $10 million business where leadership and culture and replicating the leadership and mission and vision and values throughout the organization, kind of replicating that owner. So as you're looking at those different areas of like starting, starting to run and sprint to break a million and beyond, there's specific pain points that were in there. So the first one you saw as we're getting in the stage two when you're an actual legit business, probably doing 200 plus is your sales system. So that's the first place I recommend looking at. So to answer your question, Tom, we wanna take a look at it from basically left to right. So lead acquisition. They're coming in from your website, they're calling, they're texting. We wanna be able to go in and get their information through in the CRM, the customer relationship management software like Made Central. So you wanna get their name, address, what service they're interested in, whether it's automated or manual, but now they're in the system. We're checking for duplication if they're already in the system. We wanna know what service they're interested in. Is it a weekly cleaning? Is it a one-time deep cleaning, a move in, move out? So once we've gone and got that, we wanna educate them to the service. So I know, I think out in Vegas for the last conference there for the cleaning industry, Marcus Sheridan was one of the keynotes. So Marcus was doing the same exact thing in his business I was doing about the same time. He was on HubSpot, I was on InfusionSoft. What we're talking about, they ask you answer, we're educating, we're addressing the concerns of the consumer before they happen. So overcoming those sales objections and creating value. So we wanna talk specifically at that point our pre-estimate education or nurture. Now, if we're doing live quotes over the phone or off the website, we can have this run in conjunction. The whole idea is we wanna educate them how a cleaning professional does it and overcome any commonly asked questions or concerns, do I need to be home to have the house cleaned and certain insurance I should be asking for. And based on that, if we're doing a one-time deep clean with a recurring clean, we may talk about the differences of what's included. So are we wiping down the blinds with a microfiber on the deep clean versus our regular clean might just be hitting it with a feather dust. But what's included, what's not included? So by the time they see that quote, there's a perceived value you can charge the highest price in your market. And any of those questions or concerns that elongates the sales process, we've already addressed them upfront like Marcus talked about in his talks and we've shortened that sales cycle. So now they've got this bid, hopefully they accept that bid live over the phone or click that email. But if they don't, this is a process that we call 20 days to close. We follow up in each and every estimate personalized. And once again, the pre-estimate nurture was personalized to the specific service they're interested in, it's not a generic conversation. But we're gonna follow up through omni-channel marketing. And what that means very simply is we're gonna follow up over different communication channels. So the ones right now on all the biggest platforms are it's gonna be email, text messaging, and yes, phone calls. So phone calls are gonna be assigned as a task or a to-do or a ticket depending on the platform. That's gonna be complete with a call script. And it'd be literally on day three call Mrs. Smithback regarding her deep clean estimate. If she says yes, do this in the system. If she says no, do this in the system. If she says your price is too high or has price objections, all that sales script is built into that. And that can be tracked if your office admin actually does that or doesn't do that. And then we can filter down through some reporting. But the idea is we're gonna be creating accountability and delegate a predictable system of email, texts, and phone calls. And that combination is where we see closing ratios sometimes double in people's businesses if they just start using all the nations. So up to that point guys, before I go crazy here, any questions or concerns kind of in the beginning of that sales cycle up till we win or lose that estimate? I'm glad you took a breath, Mike, and then asked the question. Because there are very few people that I can't interrupt, but you're right up there, that's what I'm trying to answer. Well, there's a short list, there's a couple more, but we're not gonna get into that in a moment. There's very few, I'm pretty good at interrupting people. That was really good, I get a couple questions. So one thing that I think might be a misnomer for people is when they're thinking about automation, they think that they don't have to do anything. But that's not necessarily what automation is, right? There might be some stuff. Human interactions still need to happen, but you don't have to tell somebody to do it. And oh, by the way, if it doesn't happen, the automation that's built correctly should probably tell you it didn't happen so you can intervene. So it's a lot to do with management, the people that are doing it versus just doing it themselves. It's not a matter of just, okay, I've set it up and now I don't have to do anything and now I'm just gonna go live in Aruba now, right? And I'm never gonna look at anything ever again because if that was the case, there would be no reason, nobody would have businesses, nobody would be doing anything. We'd all live in Aruba, right? It'd be really crowded there. But there's still a human element that needs to happen. Yeah, there is and you hit on it, Liz. So we're looking at the sales portion right now. The next piece, which I think you've kind of alluded to is employee systems. And then the next step is our repetitive tasks. So there's actually three parts that go, it's kind of why I talk about those five stages of business is we need to automate them kind of in progression. And when we start talking about the employee automations or the repetitive tasks, eventually you can become that absence owner because all those things have been delegated and the things you're supposed to do, the automation tells you for accountability too. Okay, so the automation still aren't going to replace the people. The people, we're still gonna have to have people in our business. You still need people, exactly. People are still going to be doing the work. The automation is just managing the people, saying this is what needs to be done, here's your task, I'm checking in, you didn't do it or you did do it, it's tracking, it's measuring, a little bit of AI in there, maybe like, I know Tom's looking forward to. Yeah, we're not talking autonomy. I mean, it's not like just turn the machine on and walk away and yeah, there's still people involved, but their roles are different. And I guess the automation, we can go down the whole economic thing, return on human capital and the bill rates per hour that service company gets pretty low, house cleaning lower than most. So you really have to get as much juice as you can out of everybody you have in your indirect labor, being part of that autonomy. Excuse me, the automations give you the ability to get more value out of those payroll dollars. Yeah, and Tom, you hit on it. So like, literally, so the next step, once we actually win that client, this is where the beauty of it happens because you can go in, you can welcome them, you can welcome them, but really we're gonna send this email out or text them that's acclimating them what to expect when working with your company. If there's a credit card on file required, we get a PCI compliant credit card form on there, we get that on. And then we're looking at client cancellation. So usually if you keep that reoccurring cleaning client for the first 90 days, we're gonna be with you for a while. So we're gonna go through a 30, 60 and 90 day, basically touch base. It looks like it's personalized from your office and literally just touching base, like, hey Liz, how's the cleaning just touching base? They think it's actually a personal email from somebody from your office, but it isn't, it's automated. So we're gonna get those issues taken care of. So, like on a normal cleaning, the person may write back, like, Liz, thanks for checking in, your cleaner is awesome, but occasionally she or he is not wiping down the tiles in the master bathroom. That could be an issue after a while. So we're addressing it. Then we're going in and actually nurturing through a monthly communication, like a newsletter, but it's really educational. And then the secret that we found, especially in the cleaning industry is to segment your database. So this is a segmentation, not necessarily AI, but through tagging and client and leads, we're able to have a separate communication once a month to just our clients and our leads. So maybe we're running a promotion. We don't wanna say, hey, it's gonna be 10% off your first cleaning to our clients, but we may want to our leads that haven't committed yet. So we're able to have separate communication and promotion based on client lead, based on that client life cycle. And then you talked about building higher value, Tom. So this is where we roll into the upsell automations like the column. So the first thing we always do in a cleaning company is a one time to reoccurring. So obviously a move out isn't gonna be appropriate for a follow-up, but move in for a deep clean. If they haven't at seven, five to seven days signed up for reoccurring weekly, bi-weekly or monthly clean, the automation is gonna kick in and speak specifically to the service they had. And like, hey, let's get you on a reoccurring cleaning here. And we just had one go out this morning. We had a new automation client who does residential cleaning. Well, she had 25 or 26 basically acceptances for deep cleans from her reoccurring weekly or bi-weekly cleanings. So it was an upsell. And once a year, twice a year, you should probably get that deep clean to make sure everything is done that the reoccurring cleaning isn't had. She actually called the office this morning and was like, I think this is broke. I don't understand. They're like, well, no, you reached out and she had a price range for every house under like 1500 square feet. She had a price range. So it was literally someone's clicking on a button. Yes, signed me up for the deep clean. We went through and it was just like, oh my God, now how am I gonna staff 22 or 25 deep cleans here in the next month? But that's kind of what happens because when we get really busy, we forget to do those things. So we're gonna go out and do a one-time reoccurring. And then just like that deep clean example, we're gonna go out systematically throughout the year and upsell reoccurring services or one-time service in addition to reoccurring to start raising that client lifetime value. So if you figure her normal deep clean was probably around 400 bucks, times 20 people on the low side. That's $8,000 of revenue. She just picked up literally over one email. We have a sequence that usually goes out over three times based on them interacting or not interacting. So the worst thing you can do is like, hey, if you want the service sign up for it, but if you already had it, ignore it. So the automation should have some logic is is there an estimated play for it? Is it on a waiting list to be scheduled or has it been done say in the last 30 days? Like don't promote that, but that's the logic you wanna build to personalize based on that life cycle. So people can do this is what you're saying, Mike. Absolutely, you can do it yourself. You started it, you created it yourself. You can take what you're personally doing and try to automate it. But there's just, it sounds like there's a pretty steep learning curve for lots of these little tiny things that you might not remember about. It's the nuances. So if we have time, we're gonna kind of talk about employee automations next. And we'll talk about the perfect scenario and we'll talk about possibly some of the things along the way that you don't anticipate. But it's thinking about all the good things that you, the perfect path where all the things that could fall apart. That's where when you're building automations yourself, when I first started, I didn't think about all these little nuances. And after a couple of years, we started to realize if we can start fine tuning these then the automation seemed very personal and it handled all the different things that pop up and it's not if they're gonna happen when they happen. So how do we handle all these different things? Talk to us about, so let's stick with the client for right now still, right? Still doing sales and we're upselling, et cetera. So how do you manage stuff? I'm just curious. How do you manage stuff like, I'll give you an example. When we were, I'm not sure where we were, I think we're in Vegas and they had a bot that reached out, hey, Liz, how do you like your room? And of course, I'm like, oh, they said my name. Obviously this is a real person. I'm like, and it signed like Susie or whoever. I'm like, oh, thanks for checking in Susie. Everything's great. And then I get something again the next day. Hey, Liz, just checking to make sure that everything's good. And I was like, well, you know what Susie? I would really love it if I could get a refrigerator in my room, right? And so Susie said something along the lines of, yeah, our rooms don't come with refrigerators, something along those lines. And I said, I signed up for one initially in the beginning. Oh, nope, nevermind. I'm wrong. That was a coffee pot that I signed up for, right? And so she said Susie respond. And I still think I'm talking to Susie and Susie responds with, sorry, Liz, the same thing about the refrigerators, the exact same thing. And she said something like, we don't have coffee pots. I said, ah, that's a bummer. Well, can you tell me where I can buy a coffee pot? Cause I need a coffee pot for my room. Sorry, Liz, we don't have refrigerators. We don't have coffee pots. So Susie, are you a bot? And she said, kind of. That's awesome. So one of the things is to, if you are going that way, having humorous, so like in my company I had, I had Bill Murray in the lawn care company. We had Bill Murray from Caddyshack with a hose spraying the gopher. And like we said, like, hey, this is an automated thing. My name is Bill, Mike's personal assistant. You need to answer a few questions before you get an estimate. But that's one of the biggest things. If you're using bots or any of that real time technology, you should have some fun with it, make it engaging, let people know that it's not a real person. That's not a bad thing. Okay, that was my question. So you said earlier to kind of personalize it so people feel like they're talking to a real person. But you know- When you have the segmentation and automation, yes, you can, but a live person hop on on that website, you have no idea. So if you kind of let them know, so they don't get frustrated, you're good. But the key is just like you guys talked about earlier, you can't totally set it and forget it. So whether it's somebody in your office on like another monitor looking at it, or you have a virtual assistant, you know, somewhere in the world who knows. I mean, you can outsource VA is very cheaply nowadays. You know, with some standardized FAQs and some things like that, you've got to have somebody at least manage that because automation at that point, the AI is not there. Right. That we're gonna be putting into a service business. It's going to be, but it's just, it's not. So you still need that person. But if you hit certain points in that conversation, that bot should be raising its flag and saying, hey, somebody needs to jump in, you got a hot lead. She's asking me about refrigerators three times now. Help me. Help, help me. Yep. But I did really appreciate the humor. I did feel like, oh, great job right there. I just like kinda, and then she came back with, you know, telling me about, you know, being a bot. And I was like, okay, that's awesome. And you still can't have a coffee pot. Right. Definitely not a refrigerator. But that's like, so as we're evolving in this, but that real-time conversation, in my opinion, needs to happen because people now, especially after COVID, want real-time interaction. They want to be able to buy just like they do on Amazon. And if we're going to compete, I mean, you can, most markets, you can buy home cleaning on Amazon. Yeah. So I mean- Good point. Mike, I am curious about the changes that you've had to make since COVID with automations. Have there been many? Not really, because we already had kind of seen the bleeding edge and done it off. But the bots, like that's still, I mean, Google just came out with a chat bot as well. But if you've seen it or not, but there is some evolving technology, it's getting better. But it still needs a human in there. And you can build so much logic, but eventually it's got to be like, hey, hold on a minute, let me get you a real person. Right. But the ability to give a real-time quote or at least get somebody from shopping in the middle of the night and getting them off, they've emotionally committed. And then maybe you get them an exact price. That is, we've seen a lot of good results with that. Okay. But it's not perfect technology yet. It just isn't. Right, right, it's not there yet. But you also did say that just making a couple of these changes, a few of these automations, people are seeing increased close rates double. Oh yeah, I mean, well, you gotta figure it. If you've never, through expansion or upsell, gone and worked your client base, there's a ton of money sitting there. And every time you do it a move in clean or you do a deep clean, if you don't have a systematic way of upselling them automatically so you don't forget, like you're just leaving money on the table. So that alone- You do a number. Right, exactly. So now it just happens. Oh, it's day five. They haven't signed up for a recurring service or it's waiting to be scheduled or they've requested an updated quote. But if it doesn't meet that criteria, it's just popping in. And then that can be personalized unlike that bot because you know exactly where they're coming from or what they don't have or what they do have. Right, because you have the information. Right. And obviously we've probably got some listeners in Canada as well. Along those lines, we also wanna make sure we are cam spam compliant. So email compliancy. So you need to be able to, if you're north of the border in Canada, it's a double opt-in. I believe it's up to $10,000 per incident that you can get fine if you don't have explicit permission at a cam spam scenario. Now cam spam also applies to the States as well, not as strict, but I actually do recommend most of the laws in Canada. They're a little bit stricter right now that we do adhere to those because they are really best practice. So we're building automations now in Canada, US, and UK, which is England, as well as Australia. And there's different laws and different ways you need to do that. So we've got quite a few clients out in Australia and their laws are different. So you wanna be aware depending on where you're living, make sure that you're being compliant as well. And you should always give the person the ability to opt out of your marketing. And if possible, depending on the automation platform, you should give them the ability to opt out of promotions versus pre-notification or post-notification. And with cam spam, they don't have the ability to opt out of your billing or invoicing. So if it's marked as, and it truly should be billing, but if it's a collection invoice, which we can talk about later, we can go out and those things can't be opted out. By law, you have the ability and the right to send collections notices as well as invoices and things like that. Probably just like in the United States, you can send them on a certain schedule. You can't send more than one a day, that type of thing. Correct, yeah. And you wanna get, you know, it's a good practice, we standardize that. Those are things that I think a lot of people don't understand where we've had cleaning companies go in and buy like a list of 25,000 people and literally just spam them. And then they wonder why their email open rates get flat or drop and then they get flagged and like literally their Gmail account for their business literally gets shut down. There's definitely rules of engagement. So it's really, you wanna speak to where they're at in that life cycle. All right. Well, I mean, I feel like best practices are always something that we need to be looking at and make sure that we're compliant and doing things legally. Yeah, and there's some gray lines in there. So I mean, but you definitely wanna play by the rules because you need to hurt yourself and you can alienate your client base or your lead base really quickly. I heard you mentioned earlier about payments and credit card handling and same thing there, you can get yourself in trouble if you aren't doing that properly. Yeah, one of the scariest things is we see people in a CRM no matter what it is, literally typing in people's credit card information, expiration dates and the CVC code in the back and like client notes. Like if we walk into an account and we see that like more than once or twice, we literally will tell the people you've gotta get it out before my team will touch it. I mean, it's that serious. But man, if that stuff ever gets out, you have to scrumpt an employee, you're putting yourself in massive, massive risks. So PCI compliant forms, it doesn't hit the software, it's tokenized and it goes out to your square or whatever that is, processor. We're just popping you in and out, Libby. We love Mike too. Libby's an all star, like love what she's doing right now. We had Libby on last week, she is an all star, we love her. Yeah, looking forward to seeing her next week at QDS, so that'll be good. Yeah, we're all gonna be there. Tom, you'll be there, right? Yeah, we're all gonna be there. Yeah, I can't wait to do the amazing rate, y'all. I'm excited. I'm looking forward to the 80s party, I don't know, I can't lie. My outfit is not amazing, but Tom, are you still going with what we talked about? That's still kind of up in the air. I do love yours if you make it happen. Yours is good. Here's the skinny on that. My daughter lives in San Diego, and the only night she has available is Thursday, so I'm gonna spend some time with her. Gotcha. All right. Well, have her dress in 80s clothes and you can bring her maybe. Oh. I'm kidding. I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Too funny. Yeah. All right, so, Mike, what we were saying that there's basically three segments, right? Yes, we've kind of tackled on a very high level. It can go a lot more in depth, but those are the main areas for your sales. And in the sales, we want to be doing MPS, like basically net promoter scores. You want to be able to automate that to social reviews. There's a whole bunch of other things you can be there. But at a very high level, that's kind of your sales process. Next bottleneck that we saw well before the labor crunch that we're all seeing was employees. So we grew so much. We almost went out of business. We couldn't find enough people to actually staff the company. So we're like, well, the sales automation thing works pretty good. What if we just flip it on its side and basically create a sales pipeline for employees? So that's literally what we did. So we went out and created landing pages and the ability for people to go on indeed Craigslist, Facebook, ZipRecruiter, wherever they were coming. It would drive them into the automation. We built it out in English and Spanish. So we've got two different versions that we build now. One in English, one in Spanish. Very cool. There's some criteria to get through, but let's say Susie gets through the application process. What it does is it automatically either can trigger, there's two different ways of really doing it. So you can trigger the office to actually call and set up the appointment or drive through something like appointment core or calendarly and actually let the individual book their own online appointment. Pre or post COVID, depending where you're in the world, it's totally different, but some people are doing it in person. Some people are still doing it remotely through Zoom, doesn't, but that can happen in person or not. And basically before they get there, the ability to send reminders of the automation. So like, hey, here's where to show up. If you're a cleaning tech and we require a driver's license, here's the copy or address of the DMV to get a driver's abstract, maybe put some homework in there, some skin in the game, and then the ability for them to actually say they're not coming. Because especially in New York with the unemployment, people who are just literally filling out these applications and if you fill out so many applications and actually book an interview, it doesn't matter if you show up, you get your next three months of unemployment or whatever it is in there. So we had to build some areas and it was actually cool that most people gave you the common courtesy that they weren't showing up. So it was good. But once you got to that in person or online interview, we basically had a standardized interview script. So we're able to create a process that can be delegated and it didn't revolve around the business owner or manager all the time. But we had five or six key questions that we asked. And basically we're able to rank the applicant on an A, B and C methodology. And then inside the automation, basically created a database inside the software that you can go back and say, I want all my A applicants with a driver's license or without a driver's license. So basically what you do is you created this qualified labor pool that you could search from. So if you already know is if you're looking for the position you need, when you need it, it's too late. So what we're doing is going out two to three times a week, systematically interviewing for every position in the company and creating a qualified labor pool based on a couple of different metrics. And then in addition, we can tie into a product like Send Jim and actually go out and nurture those people through postcards or different things like that. So just like we're nurturing our leads, we really, if they're a good applicant in the rank but we don't have the ability to bring them in yet, we're going to go in and through some text messages or things through Send Jim, actually go out and nurture them and kind of build that relationship. And if we found the right applicant and maybe they ended up taking another job and things aren't good, but we're nurturing them, they're going to reach back like, hey, you guys hiring. So we're kind of, we're nurturing them like we would have a canceled or a loss estimate. Once we get them in there. Yeah, and that's something in the past you'd never really had to do, but now I think it's really, you've got to build that relationship to have top frame of mind. And the next thing we did is once we get them in, all the onboarding documents, so what to expect on your first day of work, the manager, whoever's bringing them in, if you have like a special training kit you give them with all their tools and things like that, everything is now automated with a checklist. So now the business owner when you bring the first person in or the new person in, you don't have to be there to onboard, you don't have to get everything ready. Everything that should happen in that process is all lined out. And then we go in and get our text documents like our W2s, our employment contracts, all those things are now through an automated process. So all those things are literally just dialed in. And then the final piece is in the automation we have the ability to do online video training. So what I did in my business is literally created an online video hub for the office staff, how to use the technology stack with workflow and testing. And then what we also do is allow people to give us their videos to basically train their cleaning staff. And so now we've created this own kind of little franchise without franchise fees. So when I sold my business, the service business, the day I signed, I never went back. I literally gave them an entire workflow how to onboard, train and take care of all those different pieces there. So that was kind of on a very high level how we automated the employee process. Wow, so all the way to the training. So like, do you have kind of a template or best practices to help your clients? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of good products out there right now that are pre-built in English and Spanish in the cleaning industry. In the lawn care where my first service business was, that didn't exist. But if you're gonna make your own, I can definitely give you some tips because we definitely did it right and did it wrong. So believe it or not, a smartphone, a wireless mic that goes into a Bluetooth or even corded, a tripod, 30 bucks from Amazon is probably your best move. We had a professional videographer that did weddings, do a bunch of our videos. Believe it or not, the cleaner, more professional videos did not resonate with our team. So it was literally like our guys and girls in their outfits, their uniforms and it was us doing it and it was relatable. And I'm not exactly sure why, but those videos worked a lot better than the professionally produced ones. So I wouldn't say that you have to go out and spend thousands of dollars on a videographer and editing. You can literally do it with a MacBook or a PC relatively cheaply. Okay, we have really unpacked a lot here. We got a question here from Linda and I don't know which one of you guys is more able to answer this question for her. My guess, that's easy. I'm just looking at it. All right, yeah, so is, can this work in conjunction with Made Central? I'm not savvy yet with Made Central and any other automations yet. So yes, I'm actually gonna be talking on a very high level about Made Central at QDS and the automations that are natively involved in there and then some ways to actually build additional automations on top. But Made Central has done a great job natively within their software suite so you don't have that multiple system chaos. But you can automate a lot of different things as far as estimate follow up. Just like I said, at my cleaner, I'm getting that email before she comes and after she leaves. So a lot of those things can be built natively right inside Made Central. And we've been also working on building some third party integrations with Made Central as we've been progressing. You're doing that, aren't you, Mike? I mean, you've got some people you're helping build about more elaborate marketing campaigns. Correct, yeah, we are. So yeah, it can be done. So yeah, it's not as the technology evolves, it's working really well. We work with Tom and Matt over there at Made Central. So yes, we are evolving and starting to go in but before we put anything to market 100%, we need to make sure it works 100% and I can support it. But yeah, the stuff we have built right now at Made Central is working and it would work on Made Central. But as we continue to evolve the relationship, we are building additional more advanced stuff as well. So this is bringing up a question for me that I'm sure a lot of people are wondering about as well, Mike, so then how do you charge for what you do? I mean, is it, do you like have different groups of things that you do that are certain amounts of money or how do you charge for this? Yeah, so kind of we talked about it first. Everything is in a, I'm gonna use air quotes done for you model. Obviously we're gonna give you the templated marketing copy of emails, text messages, call scripts. That's all included. At the end of the day, you own those documents, you need to update and make sure it resonates with the way you guys operate. But let's face it, most of us aren't copywriters, so we need a template to start working with. A lot of people actually just leave it the way it is, it works, other people go crazy and change the color of the buttons and the branding and everything else, the logo and everything's in there. But I mean, you can go as deep as you want, but yes, we provide that out. There's basically three different levels that we provide, sales level one, two and three. Honestly, it's kind of around those stages of business that I talked about. So you might not be ready for the full sales level three or three plus, but maybe your biggest problem is your stage number two business and that sales problem is your issue. Or maybe you're a larger business and you're going out and we need to go out and build a team and create this reoccurring system where we go out, recruit, train and onboard employees. So to answer your question, there's about three, basically four levels, one, two, three and three plus. Depending on the platform, we may be pulling in like a third party integration like Zapier or natively some of the stuff built like right on Made Central, some of the higher stuff we actually do pull some stuff out through some webhooks and actually connect it to a product called Infusionsoft Now Keep. So the pricing is all based on the size. My team supports and updates all of it. So if there's an update made central and we need to make sure the connection's working and it's working appropriately, that's what the team does. So just make sure the automation works the way it should. And then if you need some help, obviously I've got the team on the phone. We've got chat support between 9 a.m. and 10 p.m. Eastern. We've got a full built out team that just basically updates and supports it. All right, and so right now you were just talking about sales, but you said that you also have automations for two other areas. One is I think employees and then another one for... Yeah, we call it a repetitive task. So this was kind of my journey of like, okay, now I've got this thing pretty well automated. I've got the sales thing kind of dialed in, the employee thing's working really well. But now we're at like 30, 35 employees. Now I got sucked back in and I'm like, holy cow, now I'm a full-time babysitter. If I don't tell everybody what to do, it doesn't happen. Like I just had this beautiful thing and now we've grown again and now I'm fighting fires again. So with that, we needed to go in and figure out how do we go out and delegate it. So we look at like seven different areas of the business but they could be customer service, finance, the owner, quality control. There's six or seven areas that we're gonna dial in but really the high-level overview without seeing the flow chart was all broken out is we're looking at each one of those parts of the business in the seven core areas of what's the daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual things that each person has to do. And it literally, so let's say we have Dave as our salesperson and our commercial cleaning companies. We've submitted this bid. Well, the next day Dave is going to get a task or a ticker to do depending on the system and literally it's gonna say call ACME Inc. Follow up on this bid. Here's what to say when you're done, complete the task. Well, if I say 5530, if Dave doesn't do his job, the automation is gonna alert Dave like, hey, you're on the hook for this follow up, get it done. And then depending on the severity of it, it's gonna escalate to the business manager owner via text or email depending on how they want that set up. And literally say, hey, Dave didn't do his job. This was supposed to be done. Now we need a human to jump in and actually intervene. I recommend you fire him. Right, but that's the idea. But right down to the business owner when I was filing my monthly sales tax or quarterly taxes, I had that repetitive task. And then when Tammy took it over, I was able to just reassign it to her. So basically you're building and as we all know, we never build a position around a person. We build a position with the task and then we insert the person in. So the cool thing is as we build these different repetitive tasks or positions within the business, I'd be as a business owner, maybe we're in five multiple hats. I may be responsible for these five things, but as I start to delegate, now with a flip of the switch or an email, it's a simple growth. We just flip it and say, okay, now it's not Mike. Tom is doing this part. So we go to the scare. You log into the morning, the first thing pops up is fire Dave. Exactly, that's your glorified checklist. That's it. And Dave's the first one out now. So you mentioned working with like Made Central, for example, I know and also with Keith, do you work with other programs like ClickUp or like what other programs do you work with Mike? So right now we've got Made Central, we've got ZenMade, we've got Jabber, service autopilot and we're working in the green industry lawn care on a couple other integrations with the big cleaning platforms right now, those are the major ones. And then some of the cleaning softwares that don't have pricing matrices on it, we're just finished integration with a product called Compass Wave. So some of that can be actually brought into the back end of the software so they can have an estimating tool with square foot production or size of bedrooms, bathrooms, number of people, pets, dial into that dirt code. So those are the main ones we're working on right now. Okay, awesome. We've had integrated with. Yeah, that's great. Tom, I know we're getting tight on time. Did you have a couple more questions? Anybody on the call have questions? Cause you know what? I always keep going. Are you trying to pull up his website, Tom? I am pulling up his website. Okay, good. Uh-oh, moment of truth. So, well, we wanna make sure that people know how to get in touch with you, Mike and how they can move forward a little bit. So, now this is a real person popping up here wanting to chat, I'm sure. Nope, it's past five o'clock Eastern. Kevin's not there. But if you're down in the bottom left hand chat, there is indeed an actual live person. So if you're a client between nine and 10 p.m. Eastern, five days a week, we call it help, not support, but that's actually our chat feature through Zendesk. So we actually do have live folks, the Phoenix team with the time difference being three hours. Most of the time we're able to kind of stagger the team now. So there is actual help via phone from nine to five Eastern nine to 10 Eastern via the chat. Ah, very nice. If you're out there running a house cleaning business and some of the things that Mike has shared with you, if you don't have those types of automations in your business, you've got nothing to lose by reaching out and learning a little bit more about it. You know, this is 2022 and this is kind of where it's going and the competitors in your market are doing this. And like Liz said, this is quickly becoming necessary, not an option. Yeah, and we're, depending on schedule, I'm trying to finalize, we may be out at CBF Live with Debbie Sardone as well. So we are very familiar with all the top industry folks like Tom and Liz and we do work with Debbie and we've got like a business in the box. So it's all her production rates for CBF members, automations and Debbie has written all the content for things like that. So we are heavily invested in the cleaning industry. So it's, you know, blessing Martha Woodward probably six or seven years ago kind of pulled me in to the cleaning area and it's been history ever since but we definitely like working in the clean business stream. We get it. And if you're interested, the link to QDS, I'll just drop that here because that starts in like seven days and 13 hours. Oh my gosh, really only a week away? I'm excited. First time like literally traveling, traveling on a plane since COVID hit. So yeah. How about you? Oh no, you've just recently started traveling too. All right. We were at convention and wherever. Yeah, we're old hats now. Yeah. All right, Mike, are you nervous at all about getting on a plane or anything? No, I'm excited. I'm definitely excited. If you scroll up to that picture, Tom, I think there's actually a little picture of Matt Ricketts talking. So that's actually, they must have cut it off. So Matt is talking and actually I have joined him. Like that right there is the conference room and that picture is actually when Matt Ricketts and I actually did a shared talk probably two, three years ago. Wow. So yeah, it's a phenomenal setup. I'm right, you're very front. I'm cut off there. Over there somewhere. I don't know about this event well. Yeah. One of my favorites for sure. So I'm excited to actually get back on the road and not get back in that cadence because it's been way too long. I don't know. If it comes down to fun, just having fun, you cannot beat a quality driven conference. I tell Marseille, she's got to quit the QDS thing and just literally become like a travel agent or entertainment person. There is no other conference like it. Like she is awesome. Yeah, she is really knows how to create a big event that is not just one-sided out on any way you should perform. Yeah. Cool thing too is that that QDS event has been industry, obviously it started with cleaning but it's starting to get an influx of like lawn care and power washing, window cleaning. And I think that that's been some of the biggest learning curves I've had for my service business and as well as simple growth because there's an interesting perspective between the lawn care, home cleaning and pressure and soft wash. We all kind of do the same thing and run our business with the perspective on the HR and some of the processes in the field. If you can come to an open mind, like I've learned some of the biggest things from industries that I'm actually not in. So I think that's the cool part about that conference. It's not necessarily cleaning a hundred percent but there's other heavy hitters from other industries that are starting to come into those events which you can learn a lot from. I love that about this event. My favorite part actually. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there is a lot to be learned by people outside of your media circle for sure. So. Absolutely. It looks like they're still taking reservations or your registrations rather. So if you're interested. I'm gonna go home. Though you missed out on the special deal and you won't be able to play on the amazing race, I don't think. Okay, forget it. So don't even bother. No, no! No! You have to register because you'll still have a blast. Yes. Worth every penny in the after party is phenomenal. It's included. She's made it one big bundled price. So yeah, definitely. If you make it out, come on out. It's worth every penny. Such a good deal. We are at the top of the hour. Mike, thank you for helping us out today. This was good. Yeah, absolutely. It wasn't expecting to happen on but I think we did okay. So. Yeah, me too. I look forward to seeing you next week. Yeah, absolutely. We'll see you both of you guys. Have a great evening, guys. Happy Valentine's Day. See you later, everybody. Have a happy Valentine's Day.