 Hi, good afternoon, everybody. Time Stewart here, Smart Business Moves. I'm with Liz Trotter and Liz. Hey, y'all. And today, our very special guest is Courtney Wisely of Rescue My Maid Service. Hey, Courtney. Hey. And we're going to talk about automation and how it can change your business, how it can change your world, your life. I mean, there's certainly something you said for letting machines and computers do stuff that you might be used to burning calories on, let something else do that for you. You've got more important things to do than the trivial minutiae. So we're going to talk about that in depth. And I'm kind of a nerd when it comes to stuff like that. So I am looking forward to that. I'm going to be taking notes. But before I get too deep into that, if I don't throw this up here, Liz is going to be mad at me. Whoa, my goodness. See that? So mad. When I was in school, they told me that might never mind. I thought you were just trying to subliminally influence people to go to the maids over summit, right? I think that's what you were doing right there. I thought I was having a flashback or something. You told me that might happen. But I think it was my computer. I'm feeling better now. Hey, Christina. Courtney, do you see her comment? Yeah, hold on. Look at this. They're bringing the log already, Courtney. Hi, Christina. Yeah, she's one of my students in my course right now. So she's leveling all sorts of up when we'd like. All right, so, Courtney, can you see the live comments there on the right-hand side of your screen? If you see where it says private chat, all right. Good. All right, so here's the schedule for the week. Oh, I have to warn you first, too, Courtney. I've had at least five different people ask me about some automations, questions. And I said, just show up on Smart Business Moves on Monday because Courtney's going to be there and she's going to be talking all about ClickUp and everything else. So just so you know. What is this thing when you say ClickUp, you're like, clack-at. ClickUp, clack-at. The people who love ClickUp, you know, it's harder for some of us than others. What do you really care about, Glyz? Come on, don't hold back. I know. ClickUp. There you go. Hey, Courtney. OK, so tomorrow we're going to have Ernie. And unprecedented times require unprecedented customer service. So Ernie, he loves everything customer service and he has done so much research over the years about customer service and what it takes and what needs to happen, et cetera. And right now, he's got a whole new twist. Now, what do we need to do during this? What kind of times, Tom? Unprecedented times. Unprecedented. Yeah, six hours. Check that off. Yes, you got it. We're quick today. And let's see. OK, you're already getting some props up here. Denise, if your course is amazing. And then on Wednesday, we're also going to have Greg. And Greg did something really cool. He wanted somebody to refer businesses to when somebody would call his business and they would be a little bit price conscious and they didn't like his price. He wanted someone to be able to refer it to. So rather than researching the other companies in his area, yeah, he just started his own company that has a lower price point that he can refer his customers to or leads to. I love this. Can't wait to hear more about it from Greg on Wednesday. And on Thursday, we have my favorite guest. This is my daughter. Her name is Sharer Redle. And she has been the top salesperson in her company, which is Electric Guard Dog for, I'm not sure how many years, but she consistently sells over $40 million in sales a year. So she's going to give us her top. 4.0. 4.0. Now he hates this number. He's like 4.0. I'm sure that's not right. This is like SBA loan type money. I mean, that's huge. He's sold big money. That's what she does. She's a professional salesperson and she makes big money for her company. Okay. And then on Friday, we have a secret guest and I don't have my clue yet, but I will by the end of the on spot. I mean, spot business moves today. Alrighty. That's it, Tom. Back to you, Courtney. Courtney, what's going on in your world? Oh, lots of stuff's going on. I am currently in the middle of week six of a 10 week boot camp that I started whenever COVID happened. So I don't know if you knew I used to do rescue missions where I would fly all over the country. And then I had these big retreats where people would all fly into me and then COVID happened, so I couldn't do them anymore. And so I transitioned and pivoted and put everything online and created the digital systems boot camp, which as it turns out, way cooler to teach like this. So... I love you about it. Yeah, so... That's for everybody too, huh? That is an interesting observation. Because anybody, I mean, I guess there are examples of where when people have to shift to kind of make things work with COVID, it's not quite as good as it was the old way. But for every one of those, I think there's probably a half a dozen examples where people have figured out not only how to make it work, but make it work better and they're never gonna go back to the way it was even when COVID is gone. Yeah, this is way better. It's way better because before I was limited to the Airbnb space. So I could only teach 10 to 12 people at a time. And now I'm able to teach, there's no cap. So, you know, I think we've got, we've got almost 70 students in this class and there's, you know, some office managers and stuff in there as well. We're taking it along with the owners, which is pretty cool. But doing it this way also allows them to have access for six months so they can go back and rewatch all these lessons instead of what we used to do, which was cram everything into four days and then they would leave and just be like mind blown. And then there's like, I have no idea what just happened in four days. Like, and it was just crazy. So now it's just much more, you know, self-paced. And it's, you know, there's questions and live class calls and homework and quizzes and all of the things that I love to do to be a teacher. So, yeah, it's an amazing experience. So what is this program about? What do people learn and what skills have they developed in this program? Yeah, so basically the last craft of the course is all ClickUp. Like that's week five through 10, well actually week five through nine is ClickUp and setting up the entire digital infrastructure of your business. They learn how to do all of the automations. They learn Zapier, they learn the internal ClickUp automations. All of those things are in the last half of the course. So the first half is started, it starts with the technical foundations and tools. So I go through teaching them all of the things that people don't even realize are out there that help you with the simplest things. So such as LightShot or Bitly or Calendly, Zoom. Like all of these obvious, obviously they'll be pretty popular right now because of COVID, but you know, the things that are like in your extensions, all your extensions, they learn how to organize their bookmarks. They learn how to create an alias in Gmail. They learn how to do full tearing. All the basic computer stuff that a lot of people think is basic is really not basic to most people. So we go over all of that and that's just in week one. And then week two is full on Google Drive. So we set up their entire business in Google Drive. We have them completely redo all of their templates if they don't have them to, you know, we have like professional branded documents and all of that. They learn how to share things, how to collaborate, Google Power or not PowerPoint, Google Slides, Google Docs, Google Sheets. They learn all of that stuff. And then week three is hiring and company culture. And we go through all of the automations about like your hiring pipeline and how you can filter out the, you know, disqualified applicants, set all of that stuff up. Company culture stuff is huge, which Liz, we probably should talk about that because you're like the queen of that stuff, aren't you? But what you're telling me is there's probably not a part of your business if you just really think about the process flow of, you know, hiring and training, the whole recruiting part and then the whole marketing and sales and logistics, scheduled dispatch, customer service. There's not a facet of your business that doesn't have opportunities for automations. And that's really what you're helping people do. So as you go through this, I guess you probably learn a lot. You probably see a lot. You probably have drawn some conclusions in terms of, you know, where the industry is and where, you know, if I just grab 10 cleaning businesses at random, but where are the best opportunities? I'm just sitting here, you know, just running a cleaning business. Where do I need to start looking in terms of getting the most bang for my buck if I wanted to start looking at automations? Well, learning things like ClickUp and Zapier is really the magic kind of solution there because if you know both of those things, you can literally do anything you can think of, anything. Could you help us? I guess just so we're all on the same page, what are ClickUp and Zapier? Okay, so Zapier is basically like glue. So it connects to softwares. So if you want, let's say you have a scheduling software and you have leads that come in there, let's say you have a booking form on your website or something like that, and then you want something to happen in another software. So for example, if you have MailChimp or an email marketing software, if a new lead comes in, let's say you want that lead to automatically go onto a MailChimp list so that you have automated marketing setup, well, that's what Zapier is for. So Zapier will basically connect two softwares that are not natively integrated and you can make them connect. So that's what that magic is. And then ClickUp is actually a project management software. So if you've ever heard of Asana or Trello or Monday, all of those are project management softwares. ClickUp is literally nicknamed the Asana killer, which is kind of funny because Asana was like the number one, before ClickUp came out, it was number one and now ClickUp's just taking over. So, but basically it allows you to have oversight a hundred percent of every single area of your business. I can go anywhere and I travel a lot, except for not right now because of COVID and it's literally making me want to like scream. But normally I travel every single month and I'm able to do that and run my business from literally anywhere because I have a hundred percent access to see everything going on with my clients, my customers, my employees, my inventory. I mean, literally every single part of my business is in this one spot. So it's pretty manageable. This is project management software. You know, I think a project management software is building something, you know? Launching a rocket, going to the moon. I mean, that's a project. And I'm just cleaning homes every day. Why do I need project management software? So if you plan on scaling a business and actually having like a full-on operation with a team of people, you have desires to have an office manager one day or a virtual assistant or all of these things, you have to have one spot to communicate with those people. Now, I don't have my cleaners in ClickUp. I actually just use Slack to communicate with them and then they're in my scheduling software, of course, so they can see their schedule and stuff on there. So it's kind of like a two-way ZenMate. I use ZenMate, of course, and ZenMate and ClickUp are integrated, but the cleaners are not in ClickUp. The ClickUp is for the backend. I kind of look at your scheduling software as the front end of your maid service and then ClickUp is the backend. So all of the office administrative processes, the marketing, all of the finances, all of that stuff, the hiring pipeline, the customer pipeline, the lead pipeline, all that stuff is in ClickUp. So, yeah. And you integrate, you just have Zapp here to integrate to what I would call your production management software with you to use your scheduling. 100%. Yeah. So like for example, whenever a new lead comes into my website through my quote form, it pops into ClickUp and then it automatically notifies me, it's like, you have a new lead, so I call them and then if they don't answer, let's say, I'll slide them over to first follow-up and it'll automatically set the due date for the next day. It'll send them like an email saying, hey, just left a message or whatever. And then the next day, so that magic just happens automatically. And then the next day, when I log in, I have an inbox in ClickUp. So every day in my inbox, it tells me exactly what I need to do. So the next day it'll come in and it'll say, hey, it's time to follow up with that person. So all of these follow-ups, you can automate to where they automatically remind you at certain intervals, based on whatever you want your frequency to be. So like I have one day and then two days later and then three days later. So, but that's all, that's all automated. Wow. This really does sound, you're making me want to pick up really bad right now, Courtney. I'm like, okay, so yeah, I'm using Asana maybe I need the Asana killer instead. I know. Yeah, that does sound good. Even like the quality check is automated. So we've got, cause we use Slack, so we have a quality check channel and my quality check person of course is on that channel. And every time that I add a tag to do a quality check, it automatically notifies them in Slack and sends them a link to fill out the quality check form which is in ClickUp, this ClickUp has forms and it's all connected, it grades it. I mean, it's just, it's amazing. Super nice. Okay, so Courtney, how much is this course? What is this course called? So my course, I know you have a lot of different things. Yeah, I only have one course right now. Rescue MyMadeService as a company offers, websites and social media management and all kinds of fun stuff. But the course is my first course actually. So the digital systems bootcamp is what it's called and we're gonna be starting the next class probably at the end of August, early September. I'd like to take a small break after this one cause I had, I ran two of them back to back. So kind of exhausting. But so probably like the first week of September is what I'm thinking. And I'm still kind of hashing out if I wanna offer some different options versus just a one price thing. But the minimum is 1500 and then I may have a higher level experience. I think I might just do the 1500 for like the videos only and then have the actual live classroom experience as a higher price point. So, but that's where it starts. So are you gonna give us some kind of a special deal? Anybody that's on this Facebook live today? Well, they can't even sign up yet. It's not even open. Okay. It's not even open yet. It's not even open yet. That will make it a lot harder for us. Hey, Julie. All right, sounds like everybody's loving this class. That's for darn sure. Well, I can't even sign up. How am I gonna get hooked up with this then? Yeah, if I can sign up. If you go to the website, you can sign up to be on the list. You just can't actually like pay for it yet because I haven't opened that yet. So, yeah. Got you. Gotcha. Okay. The end of July. So, obviously, ClickUp is a cornerstone of what you do to, you know, in your automation process. You mentioned Zapier is a way that you get software to talk to each other. Are there other platforms that you use that are an important part of the mix? Oh, totally. I, well, there are, and there's also some that I don't teach because they can get away with just using Zapier, but I love Integromat as well, but that's a little bit more advanced. So, I don't typically teach that one because Zapier's fine. So, Integromat kind of does like a little bit more than what Zapier does, and it's not super necessary unless you're a total geek like me and wanna like completely automate every tiny little thing. So, but Integromat, cool. I use sign requests to automate my customer guidelines. So, in ClickUp, I just swipe them over to pending guidelines and then it automatically sends the customer our guidelines so that they can digitally sign them and send them back before service. We use, oh gosh, there's like so many things I'm trying to think. Now we use Drift, a chatbot for free on our website. We use get site control to capture leads as far as like, you know, save $50 on a cleaning or whatever. That's something you can just throw up on your website. That's super easy. I teach all of that stuff in the course, the chatbot, the get site control, all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, I'm trying to think what else? There's like 30 things. So, if people, let's say that, well, they can't go through your course right now until end of August or September, but let's say people wanna get started on some automations right now, right? And they want to, they're really inspired by this and they're like, yes, I wanna do something. What would you recommend people start with on their own? Should they get started on something? Are there certain things that are easier to automate or will have more impact or will get them a better return on the investment? Do you have any ideas? So, I mean, automating your customer guidelines is easy, so they could do that now. The problem is that if they try to automate some of the stuff that I've mentioned, it won't make sense unless they have ClickUp and unless they have it set up the way I teach it or else they won't be able to do it. So, it's kind of hard to be like, oh, you can start before doing it because you kind of can't, but you could definitely connect your scheduling software with your email marketing software. You could totally do that before even involving ClickUp because that doesn't have anything to do with ClickUp. So, that would be a good one. Okay. So. All right, so go ahead, Tom. No, it's interesting. So, you're teaching primarily business owners, clean business owners, how to do this themselves, which is an approach and obviously I'm seeing like people like Marl has given me a really good testimonial here that, you know, she self, you know, disclaim non-techie and she's rocking it out. You know, and there's this other school of thought of, you know, I need to find a VA or just some techie person just to do all this stuff for me because, you know, I'm running a company, I don't have time for that. Why didn't you say that? Help me with that. Why didn't you say that, Tom? So, what's interesting was after the very first class, everybody, so by the end of the class, you have an entire VA training library. So, in week nine, you actually, I have them set up their training library, their virtual training library with videos of how to do everything that a VA would need to do an office manager. So, what happened was at the end of the first class, they got it all set up and they're like, okay, Courtney, so where's my VA? And I'm like, what do you mean? I don't have a VA. So, what I did was I partnered with Maria Dorian who owns TaskAway and we actually created a whole system and so I have DSB certified VAs. So, these VAs are basically through Maria, but I'm the one that is hiring them, vetting them, they're from my hometown and they come into my office in person and they train for a full week and they train on my specific systems so that whenever they graduate, my students graduate, I get to match them and they don't have to worry about like training, like they're just done. They know exactly what they're doing. So, yeah, it's pretty interesting. Where's your hometown? I live in the middle of nowhere. I live in Festus, Missouri. Festus? What's it close to? I know, we're about 45 minutes south of St. Louis. Okay. Liz will tell you that I'm not really good with names, but I'm pretty good with where people live. So, whenever we're talking about people, she's telling me their name and I don't even know who she's talking about. I was like, where do they live? And she's not really good with geography. So, anyway, if I know where you live, I'll remember who you are. Festus, Festus, Missouri. We've got about 10,000 people here. Okay. And they're looking and they want to be VA's and do automation work for house cleaning companies. Well, we don't have a lot of job opportunities here and COVID actually hit us pretty hard. So, a lot of people closed. And yeah, we've got, it's interesting because we have a lot of colleges in St. Louis. So, people go to college, they get really educated and then they want to come live down here in the country because it's nice, there's no crime. So, we have all these really educated people living here that don't have job opportunities. So, it's kind of awesome, like it works out great. Ken says there's a Festus for the rest of us. Yeah, he's always like quoting Seinfeld. I love that, I love Seinfeld too. I can't quote anything. I do love Seinfeld. I recognize it. All right. So, for the people that are on this, it looks like almost everybody that is on this Facebook Live today is either taking your course or has already taken your course. But I'm concerned about the people that haven't taken it and can't take it at least until September. What do we got for those people? How can we help them out today? So, they can obviously go to the website and sign up to be on the list and then they'll get info as soon as that's released late July. But as far as, I think that they should go to YouTube. That's what they need to do. Go to YouTube, learn how to use MailChimp, learn how to use whatever marketing or email marketing platform that they want to use and then they can automate that stuff with their scheduling software. Is there, do you have like a top three or top five? If I wanted to, because I'm a big YouTube fan, it's like, the library is full of books about stuff I don't know anything about, but if I need to figure something out, I can, you know, set me in front of a computer and I can Google it and usually figure out what it is I need to know. Point me in the right direction though. What pieces of automation software would you recommend I'd spend my time on if I was wanting to use, you know, these tools and these techniques to automate my cleaning business? Zapier and MailChimp and your scheduling software. I'm sorry, Zapier MailChimp, what else? And then whatever scheduling software is Zapier integrated. So that's the key. A lot of people I feel super bad about because they're using softwares that just don't have Zapier integration. And I'm like, ooh, yeah, I can't do that. You gotta have one that has Zapier integration. Scheduling software, you mentioned ClickUp, right? What was that? ClickUp, is that important? It's, okay, here's the thing. If you get ClickUp, they're gonna just completely end up in the corner crying because it is so overwhelmingly powerful that it took me a year to build the system out. And I am super techie. So it's one of those things where they can totally get ClickUp and they can have fun and play. But I'm telling you they're gonna be so frustrated because it's just like, it's so overwhelming that it's like, where do you start? So, yeah, but it's amazing. So, I think Tom, what you're saying is ClickUp is great. But if you're considering working with Courtney in the future, don't do ClickUp first. First, do MailChimp Zapier and Scheduling program. And then when you take the course, you'll be all set up for ClickUp. And then she's gonna run you through how many courses, class of six, five, six? It's 10 weeks. And didn't you say that the last half, five or six classes would just ClickUp? Mm-hmm. Yeah. So just the last half is all ClickUp. She's gonna have you set it up her way. She's just gonna tell you, do this, do this, do this, instead of having to try and figure it out. Yeah. So instead of watching, you know. Yeah. And it's not even just like my way, but like they're gonna learn exactly how to branch out on their own. I take it very seriously to like teach people how to think autonomously and how to, when they get out of my course, they then join my graduate group and the people in my graduate group are innovators. Like they're the ones that are creating new ways of automations and they're creating new systems and because they've learned like how to think outside the box like this. And it's like amazing to watch. So yeah, it's pretty cool. So the program you're talking about is how many weeks? 10. 10 weeks? Mm-hmm. How much time during a week would one have to spend in this program? About 10 hours. So it's basically 10 hours a week for 10 weeks. That's almost a hundred hours, right, Liz? Some people say it's a lot. Let me think. I mean, that's important, you know. Brother, you're gonna like go to YouTube and try to learn how to use some of this technology yourself for crash the learning curve and jump in a program. Still doesn't happen without making a commitment of time, which means you're probably gonna have to change some other things in your life because not a lot of us just have an extra 10 hours of waking time around to jump in and do that consistently for 10 weeks. Mm-hmm. I do it for a week, but you mean I gotta give you another 10 hours for another nine weeks? It's intense. Is that hard? Do you find that some people struggle with that? Everybody struggles with that because we're all busy. So it's not, there's not a single, the only people that didn't struggle with it were the ones that took my first course during COVID because they had like nothing to do. But as soon as businesses started opening back up, then people were like, okay, this is intense. And so what I've seen people do is they typically like binge learn on the weekends. And so they just, Saturday to Sunday, they just do everything on the weekends and then they work on their cleaning business during the week. So that works really well. Okay. Mm-hmm. Well, I mean, it's commitment and it makes sense that if you're gonna be getting the kind of outcomes that you're talking about, you're definitely gonna have to put in that type of a commitment. I mean, we push that all the time, the same thing, you know, that you can't expect the great outcome, the minimal amount of commitment. So let's see, it sounds like you're a great teacher as well. Don't leave people behind. Denise, so worth it. Yay, it sounds like you got tons of great testimonials here. I'm thinking that you should be copying these really. Go in, right? You're gonna have to go into Facebook Live and copy and paste all these. Oh, look, Sarah, four weeks behind. Well, she's not on vacation too. You better wait till you get to week four. It's a killer. Mm-hmm. Week four is all the networking and the marketing road. So what areas of your business are you not including in your program, Courtney? What, I haven't heard anything about your financial portion. We cover finances in week four. Finance is a little different because everybody does that differently and a lot of people have accountants or bookkeepers or whatever. So I go over how to set it up if you do it yourself. But because of the fact that everybody's so different, I don't teach them a specific way and I have my own accountants, so I don't do it myself. So I have nothing to show them. But we do talk about exactly how to set up. And they'll know, that's the great thing. They learn these skills, so they'll know exactly what to do to set it up if they do do it themselves. But the only thing that I don't cover is cleaning. If you guys don't know how to clean a house. Like that. How did you like get into this, you have a story, this is part of your journey. How did you get here? How did I get here? Well, I started with ZenMaid as a virtual appointment center and then worked my way up, started my own cleaning company. I got really obsessed with that. So you were working with ZenMaid before you ever got into the cleaning business? I haven't even talked about that. You have a cleaning business in Festus, Missouri, I take it. Yep. Okay. Yep, MagicMaid. Biggest one in the county. Yep, it's not saying much, we're in a small town. But it is pretty awesome. Yeah, I mean, it's great. I fell in love with the industry and was like, I can start a cleaning business because I know how to do it now. I've been watching everybody in our industry and our users are obviously all maid service owners. So I learned from listening and I knew exactly what not to do. I'll tell you that. So I started my own business and that was three years ago. And so, and then I started rescue my maid service two years ago. So we're at our two year point now. So yeah. All right, and I always call this maid in a box, but that is not what it's called. Made-a-vation, maybe? Yeah, Made-a-vation. Made-a-vation. And so, tell us a little bit about that too. Festus has never been cleaner. That's just such a weird name for a city. I know, it's like the worst name ever. And our town name next to us, we've got Crystal City and then Herculaneum. Like, it's the weirdest area ever. So we have, hold on one second, I'm trying to get it. I'm throwing something at my admin assistant like, hey, I'm trying to get her to the, will you go grab a Made-a-vation box for me? So Made-a-vation is something that I started almost a year ago. I can't believe we're almost at our year anniversary already. But it is a subscription box for maid service owners. So every single month I put in a tech item, an office item, a cleaning item, a self-care item and a book. And we do a book study each month on whatever the topic is for the month. And then I have a live, like a featured expert every month on a different topic. But this is Made-a-vation, that's Made-a-vation. That's pretty cute. Full of goodies every month. Yeah, it's cute. It's cute. So can you give us an example? Is there any story? Can you give us a box? Can I get in a box? Whoa. What? You know, wait, what's in it? Oh, you wanna see some samples of stuff? Yeah. Will you go grab, yeah, just grab something cool off the back of the, I don't know, I've got all kinds of stuff back there. I have to prepare like three months ahead of time. So I've got like inventory off the wazoo. Cause you never know. Oh, good. Well, maybe you could, it was in last month's box, Courtney. So you're not giving away any records or anything. Sold out. I don't have anything here cause we sold out. But here's some. Well, nope, these are for next month. So grab that white, can you give me two seconds? Sure. Well, it looks like Julie got a pink house. Ellen said she loves her motivation box. Well, so Ellen, what do you get in yours? Can you tell us what you've gotten in the past? Courtney goes and tries to grab us one. Hey, Molly, hi, Molly. Isn't she getting buried? Yeah, she is getting really huge. Okay. These are some older, some items from a past box. So this was our office item, which is like a desk plate. It's cute silver thing. I like that. And then like this kind of stuff. It's like a mini wireless mouse that you can plug in your laptop on the go. And she liked her pink mouse. Yeah, I love mine. I take it all. Well, my computer's pink too, I can't imagine. But I try not to keep everything pink because we have a couple guys, but most of them are women. All right, let's see. She's beautiful, Tom. Oh, I think you might be talking about Molly, but you're beautiful too, Courtney. Yeah. Molly, oh, you're gone. Where's Molly, Tom? Come here, girl. Where'd she go? Everybody's gone and I'm dog-selling. Aw. Oh my God. That's adorable. She's a baby. She's a baby. She's cute. A little over three months all. Oh, big. She doesn't look as, I mean, she still has baby fur and baby face, but she's so big. She doesn't have the cuddly baby nest. She was six pounds at eight weeks and she's, I don't know, a week past three months now and she weighs about 20 pounds. I'm so glad I don't bring my dog. I'd be miserable. Yeah. We learn we are not dog people at my house. We are not dog people. We are cat people. I would like all the pets all the time. I'm gonna wage your vet that Liz has more cats than you do Courtney. She probably has more cats than all of Festus. I have three. Three? Only three? Where are we at now, Liz? Tom, you're almost good of a vet. I currently only have three cats. We're tied. What? What's the average number of cats you had over the last couple of years? Okay. So on average, we tend to run close to about 20. But right now we only have 30. Yeah. Do you have all those cats? Do you have cool names for your cats? I think they're cool. I don't know if you would think they're cool. I like names that are like, let me think of a name that we have. Linda has nine cats, Tom. Okay. That's respectable. All right. Sara has seven. Yeah, that's what happens, right? You get a cat and then they have babies. I live out in the middle of nowhere. So the cats get dropped off around here. And I end up with cats that I have had more cats fixed, tucked, nipped and tucked in the last two years than anybody else in my family. So that's a lot of cats. Yeah. All right. So back to work. Done, not no more cat talking guys. So, I'm sorry. I'm also- I was going to say that Linda and I were doing a meeting like this last week and the cat jumped in her window with a mouse in its mouth. Do you remember that, Liz? Yes. So my window, so I'm sitting here at the computer. The window is maybe four feet away and I keep it open all the time and this was at work. And the cat, this is an office cat. She's a very good mouser. She's why we have her at the office. But she jumped up into that window, which I wasn't expecting. And she had a wiggling mouse in her mouth. I jumped up and flew out of the office. These guys didn't know what was happening. I was like, and went running. They're like, what's going on? Everybody else on the call. Yeah, thinking that was crazy. We need to make that happen for smart business mousers. Everybody would appreciate that. It was awful. I don't care for mice. I'm good with spiders, snakes, but yeah, mice, not for mice. Not for mice. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So Linda, I also rescue kitties. That's how I end up with having massive cats around all the time. Okay. So Courtney, well, another question that I have for you is when you're working with new business owners, right? And there are a lot of people that are non-techie. Like Marla was saying, she's non-techie. I'm super non-techie. So a lot of times I'm like, I don't know. I don't want to do it. It seems like it's going to be too hard. What's the biggest struggle that you have with your students? Like, what's hardest for them to get over or to figure out? A mental block. Cause you know what's really funny is I watch so many people say that they're not techie and then I get to watch them develop their skills in my course. And by the end of it, they're like, I can't believe I know how to do this stuff. And I'm like, I can't. And I'm so proud and watching them develop into like little techies. Like it's just amazing. But the biggest, it's just a mental thing. But I have never seen anybody fail at my stuff at all. Not even at my stuff. Just I haven't seen anybody fail at technology if they actually are trying. Like that's the key. They have to try it. If there's people that just instantly mental block it and they're like, I can't even try it, then they're going to fail. So yeah. You just got to take that first step. Well, I'll tell you. I worked with, I had Infusionsoft for a few years. And I could do Infusionsoft. But I'll tell you what, it was never easy. It never got easier. Every time I had to create a new campaign, it was like, oh, my gosh, kill me. Infusionsoft was horrible, so I don't blame you. That is like the most bloated software ever. Like it is way too complicated. Yeah. It should not be that complicated. I know. I feel like that too. Oh, he's going to put you to the test. Paul in your class right now? No, I think he's saying that he wants to be Paul. You're not in my class, right? He's going to get in. I don't think I was in my class right now. There's a lot of people that will sign up, but they don't have live calls. So I don't know if they're actually in there until like later. Well, Paul, if you're getting into the next class, sign up. I'll be in there with you, because I'm signing up too. Yeah, I think I know Paul. Paul, I think, is being modest. I think Paul's good at everything that he does. And I'm sure that technology is no different. I didn't think so. Yeah, he's not at all. I know I would be shocked. I would be shocked, Paul, if you're not good at tech stuff. I have never seen something you weren't good at. So I'm not buying it. I mean, honestly, I have a question. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. I forgot what my question was. Go for it. I was just going to say that really, it's the most important thing to me is that A, that they try. B, that they don't give up. And C, that they accept their best. I don't like people that try their hardest, and then they still give up on themselves after. And it's like you couldn't have done any better. You need to be happy with that, you know what I mean? And by the end of it, I want people to not be defined by their cleaning business. Because I think that is a, I think that's personally, I think that's the biggest problem with cleaning business owners, is they turn into someone that is defined by their cleaning business. And that is not how life could be. So this allows people to step back and say, I own a cleaning business. This is how smooth and automated and awesome it is and how it runs like a well-oiled machine. And now I can focus my time on like other hobbies in life that I wanna do. And then they have a space they can both roll out and cook up and they'll know how to do it. But it's cool, cause it really does allow people to like finally like take a step back and separate. So. In some regards it's not like, yeah, that's cool. Yeah, Paul is old. You're not old, please go away. Go away with your fake oldness. So, well, you're gonna be in my class, Paul. So you'll be in good company, right? So Courtney, how many people can you put into a class at one time? Cause it sounds like you can put quite a few in because now you're doing it virtually, right? Yeah, I guess the limit would be 500 cause that's whenever Zoom taps out. There's really no cap on it, honestly. Is there any one on one though? Like if I'm in class and I have a question. Every single day. So four days a week, we have live class calls. And so people come on there and they ask all their questions and we share screens and we help each other out. And then we have a Facebook group for the students so they can ask questions nonstop in there and get answers. And we post Loom videos to each other whenever they'll ask a question they'll post a Loom video like, okay, look at this. This is what I'm trying to do. And then I'll post a Loom video and show them how to do it or something. So it's like a 24 seven experience in the Facebook group but then we have four live class calls a week. Wow. Okay. So you mentioned Zappier. Zappier makes me happier. Yeah. Man with him. Sometimes versioning software. Right. You tell me, click up, stay away from that. Will make me cry. Don't stay away from it. Just like, don't freak out cause you're going to freak out if you look at it and then you're like, this is way too coply. It looks really complicated. But once you don't have to do that if you're in the course cause I set, you will set it all up and you'll know exactly what you're doing. So it won't be scary. What else? Are there any others out there that that cleaning business owners should should at least be aware of if not taking a look at and trying to figure out how to use it. Automation software. Is that what you said? Yes. I would say get really, well, I mean, we covered all the automation stuff. I would just say really get familiar with things like Canva. Get familiar with, we cover Canva a lot. We have a whole section on Canva. So. And for everybody, what is that? Canva is a, basically it's a graphic design software and I know that sounds very scary to a lot of you. It is so easy to use. It is like the easiest, most user friendly thing you'll ever use. It's like drag and drop, click color. If Photoshop has made you cry, don't worry Canva. Yeah, Photoshop is horrible. Oh, it's not horrible. Photoshop is amazing, but Photoshop is extremely complex and this is nothing like that. So yeah, Canva is super easy and we teach you how to make your ads pop, how to do video job ads, how to do video marketing ads, all of these things and how to organically market on Facebook because Facebook ads is like a killer. Like it's not the best, doesn't have the best ROI obviously in our industry, which is just kind of a known thing. But yeah, if you can create your own stuff and then we teach you how to go into all the local mom groups, what to search, how to do the sharing and all that kind of stuff, that's a big part of it. So yeah, Canva, what else? We use a survey software called Quality Driven. I'm sure you guys have heard of that. So we touch on that. I don't actually teach it because Quality Driven teaches it. If you let them know, hey, I wanna learn this. So there's no point. But other than that, let's see, I'm looking at my tabs up top of my computer to see what I'm missing here. You were talking about a lot of stuff. You're in your first, very first class. It sounds like you teach about a lot of different products and different things that people, resources that people can use that they've never even heard of. I think you can mention like Bitly. Yeah, so just a lot of different things that people might not know. It sounds like from the common place to the less common. So yeah, secret weapons and things. There's a cool tool called ColorZilla, which I love, which you can basically copy the color code of anything on your screen and then you can use that to create Canva ads or whatever. So if you're on your website and you wanna know what your colors are for your brand, like it tells you that and then you can create ads that match your brand and stuff. So just simple tricks like that. So yeah, that's very cool. When you get your credit card bill each month, do you have like all these charges for all of these pieces of software that you subscribe to every month? I don't do credit cards, but my, those are all business expenses. So yes, they go through the business account. Okay. But there's not a lot of costs, most of this is free. Can you sign up for some of these platforms? I mean, you have to give them some type of like debit card or something for some of these, right? Some of them, most of them are free, but the only things that cost money, like canvas free, I use, you know, canvas for free, Slack for free, Marco Polo free. The only thing that I tell them whenever they sign up for the course that's like an absolute necessary expense is Zappier you have to pay for. And then your scheduling software, of course you'll have to pay for and sign request. And other than those three things, everything else is pretty much free. There's a couple of like optional things, like if you want that pop up on your website, like we use get site control, but there's all kinds of them. Groove jar, there's another one, I can't remember what they're called, those pop-ups are typically cost money, but I'm gonna click up, no, click up's not free, it's just so cheap, I forget it costs money. It's $9 a month if you have the highest plan possible. Wow, yeah. Yeah, that is really cheap. And they do have a free version. They do have a free version that's free forever. I just always recommend the paid one because there's certain bells and whistles that they're gonna want, like automations and stuff. So the most expensive plan is nine bucks a month. So that's it. Yeah, that's great. Oh, and I'm on the back end. So they actually asked me to be on the click up team on the back end. So I'm a certified click up consultant on the back end to click up, which is freaking awesome. So they let me have a special code for my students so they can actually get 15% off. Not that it was expensive anyway, but there you go. Wow. I bet you're the only click up consultant in Festus. Guaranteed. Yep, Christina is just saying that and you'll get a discount code from you. So it sounds like you only really have four things that you're ending up having to pay for month over month, little bit here, a little bit there, everything is free. There's some bigger, some upgraded versions. What is the minimum people are going to have to pay to completely automate according to how you're teaching them, Courtney, like what will they end up paying per month? Do you know? I can figure it out in two seconds. It's like, no, but not a lot. Not a lot. Not a lot. Not a lot. Not a lot. Not a lot. Not a lot. Not a lot. Not a lot. So obviously your scheduling software will be a different price for everybody because that's all based on whatever platform you use and how many employees you have. So beside your scheduling software, $36 a month. That's nice. That's nice. And I think there's different price points for quality-driven, so that's not included as well. Oh, no. So your quick ones are good, right? These are just the automation pieces that you need to add on top of whatever the other stuff is that you're always using. Gosh, I see why everybody says all the time that they love that you have this nice inexpensive options, that you work to keep that price point down. A lot of people really, really appreciate that. Well, so where is Courtney going with this program, the boot camps? You said that you've done two back-to-back, and it's been a lot of work. Do you have a plan for scaling this? Are you teaching some people to be able to teach the course for you? So what's your next phase here, Courtney? I know you're not never having the same old, same old. What are you talking about? Yeah, I always want to know. Too much to do and fastest to get lost in just one project. Nothing to do here. Why do you think I do so many things? Well, I know you're trying to get out of doing this. No, I love what I do. That's the tough part, is because for me, it's fun. I don't think I will ever. Here's what I might do, is I might have times where I just step away from having live classroom experience. I might take big breaks in between those. But once I get just the videos out where they don't have the live classroom experience, that can scale, obviously, to whatever, because it's just a video course. So that's that option. But I love the live classroom experience, so it's going to be really hard for me to stop doing those, because I love that. So yeah, we'll see. That's your favorite part. It is. It is. I love it. It's really hard to stop doing fun stuff. I know. So for people who want to learn more about you and what you do, is this the website we send them to? Yep, and if you look at the team page, that's all of the people on our team. So I do have help. It's not just me. Like, I have an amazing team behind me, so that's on the team page. But if you go to Training Vault right there, the Access Training Vault, that's where they can go to get on the list and sign up to be in the know so that they know what's going on. Do you have a YouTube site where if somebody wanted to see a little bit about how you do something like this, they could? No. No, uh-uh. No. Sorry. Sorry I asked. But you will. I bet you one day you will, and it's going to be awesome. Everybody keeps saying that. I'm not ready to add another thing to my play. That's a whole other world. So yeah, I don't know. It is. Maybe one day. It absolutely is a whole other world. All right, so basically what we said for the people that are not in Courtney's class, and they're not going to be in there at least until the end of August, beginning of September. Get into MailChimp, get hooked up with Zapier, and then there was one more. What was the other one, Courtney? Customer guidelines, maybe? Customer guidelines. Oh no, it was your own software program. Get them linked, right? If you can, get your software program linked with Zapier, right? Wasn't that what you said? Your scheduling software? Yeah. Yes, if you can get your scheduling software linked with Zapier, then you're in a good spot. So yeah. OK. And like Flint. OK, well, thanks a lot, Courtney. You gave us a lot to think about. I kind of feel like I have a lot of great stuff to learn, but you're kind of a little bit of a tease. Yeah, here's this great thing, Liz, but yeah, you can't have it. It's horrible. I mean, I can't just let anybody in whenever, or else it'd be chaos. Well, you know what? Once you're on recordings, wouldn't you be able to do the things build on top of each other? They do, huh? They do build on top of each other. But once I have just the video course instead of just instead of the live course, then anybody can do it anytime. Yeah. There's Paul Fried right there on the screen. Paul, there you are on the screen. We'll be coming, right? You and me next time, August, September. Do you have a lab partner? Can you put Paul and Liz together so they can work on projects together? If he's on techie and I'm non-techie, we need to be linked up with techie folks. That's all we need. You guys, you guys, it'd be fun. So if you miss a class, is it recorded so you can go back and catch it later? Is that the way it works? Yeah, and the live calls are not new information. They're there for all to bring their questions. So it's not, yeah. Just we're right against the top of the hour here. So if anybody hasn't subscribed to Cleaning Business today, it is one of the most easiest things that you could ever do for yourself in your cleaning business. And there's a lot to be learned here, too. Automations are important. It can save you a ton of time. But reading about industry-specific information can be useful, too. And we make it really easy because we curate it and present it to you. And you give us your email first name, last name. This is absolutely free. And you'll be on our newsletter. Tomorrow, our guest is, oops. Ernie. It is. I just wanted to get the whole week out here so you can get your calendar out and plan what you're going to be doing five o'clock Eastern for the rest of the week. But Ernie works with us. He's our director of marketing and sales for Cleaning Business today. He's going to be telling us about customer service. And he's got a wealth of experience. Ernie's an amazing guy. I love Ernie. I'm so jealous you guys get to see him all the time. He's done so many things. And he's got so many different experiences. And it's going to be fun. We're going to have a lot of fun with Ernie. But he's going to be sharing with you a really cool new program that's coming out from Cleaning Business today. And we'll just wait till tomorrow. I don't want to front run his big news. But I'm just telling you, if you haven't subscribed for Cleaning Business today, we're going to be giving you more really big important reasons to do that tomorrow. So you want to be with us at five o'clock tomorrow. And here's our page with all of our material that we've pulled together through Smart Business Moves during the coronavirus. If you want downloads from anything that we've been doing for the last few months, you can find them here. What about Ms. Lewis? Also, if you are thinking, I am signing up for a Courtney's class. So I'm not going to do anything until then. I'm going to say, stop. You need to keep working on your business. And then soon as Courtney's class opens up, you'll be even more prepared. So tomorrow, we're going to be talking about customer service. You need to know what your customer service standards are and what you're going to be doing so that Courtney can help you automate it. Right, Courtney? Yes. Yes. All right. Anybody who knows customer service questions, let us know. So we'll call it a day for the moment. Thanks for joining us, Courtney. You're awesome. Thank you. Thank you so much. You're adorable. Thank you, Tom. Thank you. Tom's horrible. Come back any time. What are you doing? OK. Tomorrow, we're going to watch a fathead, Courtney. It doesn't take much. It really does. We'll see you guys tomorrow at 5. Bye-bye.