 Good afternoon, Tom Stewart here. This is Smart Business Moves. I'm with Liz Trotter and Trisha Lakes going to be joining us here in just a moment. We're working out some last minute technical issues. All right. We're hoping it's on Trisha's end and not on my end, right? That's what I'm hoping for anyway. So Liz, what's going on in your world? What you've been doing today? Um, I don't even know. I've been doing all sorts of stuff today. I am, I don't, you know, Tom, I've stuck in you for a good hour today. You tell me what I was doing. I'm going to go with the answer, but the audience might find it a little more interesting if you shared it. Maybe not. I'm working on stuff. Ooh, it's Trisha. I wonder why. Speaker. You know what? Trisha, mute for a second. Tom, we used to have this way back in the day and you and I would just mute when the other person was talking, remember? And when we're talking, she'll mute. All right. So that's got to be our plan. Trisha, when we're talking, you mute. When you talk, we'll mute. We all got to be on the mute button. So actually, I think she can talk and it is not an issue. It's when we talk. I hear it. She doesn't hear when she talks. I don't hear anything, any issues at all. So sweet. So you can talk, Trisha. What do you want to say? Hello, Tom and Liz. I'm trying to hold the laptop now. You can talk. Are we live right now? Yes, we are. We are live. Hello, everyone. We're technically challenged over here. Yeah. Don't know why. All right. So Tom, what are you? Good job, Trisha. So Tom, what are you going to share with us today? You're talking about the idol, right? I don't know about idol. Here we are. And guess what? My PowerPoint is not working. This is one of those days. This is one of those days. And it's awesome too. We spent some time this afternoon pulling this together. And I did a little bit of research and, you know, for it's over with, we might have an opportunity to hear Tom use profanity. How about that? That always does make me laugh. I have to say Tom. I do get a kick out of it. You never fixes anything, but... But always makes me laugh. Back in the day, you used to be like fake frustrated with people and you would call them all the B word. You used to correct me up all the time. We'll see. We'll see if we're going to have it happen. What about Edward when he always says garsh darn it? Who's that? Edward. Who's Edward? From Foundations. Oh, Ed. Ed Wright. Yeah. I got you. Yeah, I don't think of him as an Edward, but you're right. On Facebook, his name... Hey Tom, whatever you did, you fixed it because I'm not hearing the feedback anymore. I did something. Oh, you did? What'd you do? I turned down my volume on my laptop. Oh, good job. It worked. I don't know. It's nice. Hey, TJ. Hey, TJ. Hey, Linda. Dennette. So, yeah, whenever Edward attempts to swear, he always says garsh darn it. It's just the funniest thing ever to me. It's really funny. I didn't know that. Very kindly swearing like a sailor, but not quite swearing. The way you're saying garsh darn it, I'm kind of feeling like we need to give him some spinach, too. Yeah. Oh, shoot. Sorry, y'all. All right. Who's all with us here today? Well, it's the three of us right now. Poor Tom is, he can't talk. He's trying to fix technical difficulties. He's trying to get his PowerPoint opening down this presentation. Did anybody else get the email I did saying, hey, there are more idle funds available if you're interested? Hey, Susan. Did anybody else get that email? I don't think I've seen it. No. I got it yesterday. I am going to have to call an audible. How about that? Oh, didn't eat. You got it, too? Yeah. Tom, you don't need to show it, do you? I do, because it's got some points that are worth pointing out. This is what we're going to do. And bang. I need to get rid of this. You guys just have lots of time just to hang out. I don't think I've been up here. This is tragic, isn't it? That's awesome. It's not as bad as the time. I cannot remember who the guy was that was a guest. He was going to talk about it. We had several of those ads. We had like two right in a row of my guests. I was like, okay, that's it. I'm not inviting people from Olympia anymore. We are technologically challenged. You don't want to have internet service in Olympia. You know, when the new infrastructure bill goes through and you guys have internet service like the rest of... It's going to be awesome, Tom. It is going to be. The rest of the developed world. We're probably going to get internet around the same time that we get like Chick-fil-A and, you know, all the fast food. CCs. Yeah. I don't even know if they're viable anymore. The one here... We had two here in Charleston actually. I think they both went out of business. Oh, really? That's a bummer. Gosh. This is important stuff. People are going to get emails with this content in it from the SBA. If you do, you want to take a look at it. With most of us who got idle funding, that's what we were able to get was $150,000. There's some people who got in right at the beginning, got wacky amounts more than that. But they figured out that they were going to run out of it so they were capping everybody at $150,000. And there's a calculation. When you applied, you gave them your gross revenue for, I guess, 2019. You gave them your cost of goods sold. And for those of you who went through the KPI 10 death march that we did at the beginning of the year, that the difference between that would be like the operating expense and profit. And there was some formula around five to six months of that number would be what they would give you idle funds for up to $150,000. But they've changed the rules. And this was effective yesterday where they raised the limit from $150,000 to $500,000. And in order to figure out how much you were entitled to before, they only did it for six months of idle funding, so to speak, based on that formula. Now they'll do it for up to 24 months. So even if you qualified for less than $150,000 the first round, you might qualify for arguably four times or three times that much since you can go from six months to 24 months worth of assistance. That's a lot of money, isn't it? Yeah. So that is a really, I didn't pay that close of attention, Tom, and I was talking to one of the MMA groups and they had a lot of people that had gotten less than $150,000. And so I gave them faulty information. I'm glad that you are bringing this up today. Hi, Molly. What I thought it was, Tom, this is just not your day. I'm enjoying being here with you guys today. No, this is one of those days. This happens every once in a while, Tricia. You just gotta roll with it. I love it when it happens to Tom, though. It's so much better when it happens to Tom. You all from PowerPoint tech all built out with stuff that's just completely gone now. Go ahead. I'm sorry, you gave out fallacious information. I did, unfortunately, because I didn't read through everything. And I was, I told at least, I told the whole group, somebody said that they had only gotten like 120,000 or something like that, 123. I said, well, it's probably not going to impact you if you didn't hit the cap anyway. Raising the cap won't matter, but with the change in timeframe, it absolutely does matter. You could argue if they got 120 for six months, then if they could get an extra 18 months, that would be another $360,000. They may be entitled to. Yeah, depending. Gosh, I'm right now going over to the group to tell them, hey, remember when I lied to you guys earlier today? Yeah, make sure they know that. Because there's really something important here. I'm going to get to in just a second, but I want to cover the obligatory, you know, disclaimers first. Okay. Anything over 25,000, the SBA, the UCC filing on your business, which isn't really a lot to worry about, which means you got to pay them off before you can quote unquote sell your business. They're not really securing any real property or anything. So that's kind of a trivial exercise. Anything over 200,000 or they're going to want you to personally guarantee it. And that's for everybody who has a 20% or more equity position in the business. So, you know, I guess that's kind of a personal thing. If you have a problem personally guaranteeing it, there is no, it's an insecure personal guarantee loan. So it's not like it. You have to put your home up for collateral or something. So if you default, it could be like a credit thing loan, your personal credit, but, you know, at some point, if you owe enough money to enough people, then it's really, it's not your problem. It's the bank's problem. Right. So anyway, that's that's not one of those things you want to say lie. That's theoretical there. Words of wisdom by Tom. But with all of that being said, it's like, okay, so what do I do? This is what I advise everybody to do at this point because this is a zero risk thing. We talk about risk and reversible decisions. What you want to do is go to this email address and you want to provide the following information in an email. You want to include the 10 digit application number you used the first time and you want to give them your application loan number, your business name, business address, business owner names and phone number and do not give them the financial tax records or anything else. You just want to do that. And if you do, they're going to get back to you. What they're saying here though is it's first come first serve. It's going to be a really long line. So you want to do this today and then you can figure the rest out later. And if you decide that you don't want the loan, you can say, you know what? I was just kidding. I'm really not interested. But it cost you nothing to send this email today with this information. At least you're in line and they'll get to you sooner. If you wait three weeks to figure out if you want to do this or not, the line is going to be really, really, really long. Hey, Tom, can you copy and paste that into the comments for everyone? The whole thing, yeah. The whole schmiel. Well, I'm thinking at least that piece, yeah, that you're saying for them to do. Yeah. I can do that. Seriously. I, you know, I give out advice and so well, you know, there's ups and downs and pros and cons to a lot of things. But I see absolutely no reason at all for, you know, at least try to get it all in today. Okay. You're not agreeing to take it from the money or you're doing as you're getting in line while you're trying to figure out what the heck's going on. There's also a website here. If you have any other questions, go ahead and drop this in chat as well. What are you dropping? Oh, the relief thing. Okay. Yep. Yep. Yep. All right. I love that. And so Tom, what are you saying to the people that are saying, well, I just returned my money anyway. I didn't need it. I didn't spend it. What are your thoughts there? That's personal decision. And, you know, that gets into an area where there's pros and cons. I mean, a lot of people sleep better at night not having debt, you know, and there's, you know, the whole Dave Ramsey, you know, thing about debt, you know, being debt free and, you know, that's a personal preference. I have a different philosophy personally and this isn't for everyone, but, you know, most publicly traded companies, most large businesses have debt and they don't look at debt as a bad thing. They look at it as a tool. Personal debt and corporate debt, company debt, are different things, completely different things and, you know, a lot of successful companies are able to use debt to build and to grow and to, you know, be a contingent on whether, you know, bad events and storms. These loans, the interest rate is 3.75% with a 30-year amortization, which means you're paying this loan off over, you know, 30 years. So, you know, even at a $500,000 loan, your interest, I mean, your monthly payment is what, a couple grand, not even a couple grand a month. 15 times a little bit more. 15 times a little bit more. Yeah. And this is, you know, this is kind of a, you know, who knows what's going to happen in the months and years ahead in terms of inflation and interest rates. But, you know, every day more people are coming out saying that with the trillions of dollars of money that's being printed and throwing out the economy all at once. And if you just kind of look around in terms of how much we're paying for things now versus what we were with a couple of months ago, and it's everything from the labor wages you're paying for the people that you're hiring to a 2x4 to a gallon of gasoline, and those numbers are going to be going up more before they ever go down. 3.75% interest might be 30 cheap money two years from now. That's kind of what I'm thinking. You know, I'll never forget one of the devices that you gave me since when we were, I think we were, one of the things I said is I needed to grow when we were growing and so forth, but I said I was struggling growing as fast as I could with company cars. And I was always a big believer in paying all debt off completely, so when I had purchased a company car, I would always pay for the car in full. And so, if I didn't have enough money for a company car, I would purchase a company car. And I remember a conversation with me when I was talking about that and you just looked at me and said, well, what an easy solution that is. Just go buy a bunch of cars and you do loans on them. And now, you know, and so we do that now. All of our company cars have loans where we pay like $213 a month on them, but it allows us to grow with no company car issues versus me trying to take all my funds for my savings and paying every car off like that. So that's kind of really similar to what you're saying with this is that having capital in general is just a really good thing when it comes to this. It's just definitely how you use it. Why? You really have to stop. Yeah, I'm not sure what that was a little bit of feedback, but it's really, it's a cool and the story you're sharing, you know, thank you because I presume your business is larger and you have a personal balance sheet. You have created more value and more wealth for yourself by using debt as a tool. Yeah, at that particular time, I think I was being held back in my mindset by not wanting to buy or not having the funds to buy additional cars, but we had additional work, we had additional employees, but the cars were holding me back and it was just such a simple solution of, but in my mindset it was just hard to get over that owing and now it's not a big deal to me at all because I just look at it as a very small fraction of what our monthly sales are for that team, you know. This is called return on investment. So if you're going to borrow money and invest it in your business, I'm talking about taking these idol ones and barring them and just setting them to the side for a moment, you know, maybe putting them in, you know, some type of fixed rate, interest rate, you know, thing where you can get a little bit of, you know, interest on it, but don't do anything crazy with it unless you've got a real plan, but at least you have it at dirt cheap rates. If you're going to be investing that money, you need to be thinking in terms of return on investment. And like what Trisha was talking about, she knew how much revenue that she could generate off of a car each month and what her monthly cost would be for that car. If the calculation was easy, it was a no brainer, you know, see by cars all day long, as long as you had homes to clean, you know, with those cars. So but you don't want to I do want to point something out here real quick along with what Trisha is saying. For those of you that heard that if you go to foundations, Tom is going to tell you to go into debt. Some of you heard that. No, good debt is one thing. Bad debt is one thing. Right. And I just want to make sure that when one of the things about foundations is that the conversation is a one on one conversation. This is a conversation that Tom had with Trisha about Trisha's business. Trisha's finances, everything. Yes. All of those things. And so that was a smart move for Trisha. We're all about smart business moves. And what is smart for Trisha might not be smart for you. Right. So and that's one of the things that you hear us rail against a lot. Right. You hear about these Facebook groups and people go in there and they say, well, I saw on Facebook that so and so does blah, blah, blah. So I'm doing that too. Yeah. That's one of the things that we are fighting against. Right. That that is not a smart business move. You have to be taking the whole picture and figuring out the best move and also your your risk tolerance. Right. So we all have different different needs and different strengths and different you know, different businesses. Yeah. So I just want to make sure that we say that because I've heard I've heard people come back later and say, well, I heard that Tom tells everybody that they need to go into debt. No. Yeah, that's I think it's just I think it's just Tom or like for me in my individual situation, it was him helping me realize what a big difference where I can invest my money wiser you know, instead of spending that $15,000 on a company car. I can utilize that money in advertising which is going to fill that company car with staff and jobs versus me just trying to stay debt free perfectly always you know, and now that we as just one example of a thing that we learned through you know, just having someone else looking at your business from the outside and was beneficial for us and also giving you that advice because you are so good at at, you know, driving on things yeah, you know, it it can make sense for someone like you to invest money because you're going to do all of the other things that are required to be able to get the return on that investment. Absolutely. It's not just a matter of, you know, let's just spend all of the money and I know I know most actually a lot of main service owners, you know, and I don't think that that would be good advice that exact advice for other people wouldn't be a great option, but my how my business works and my financials and my just my strength and advertising you know, utilize money in different manners was really positive for me. Yeah absolutely. And that is one of the things I wanted to bring Tricia on today. Oh, so Tom, did you see Denise question? She has a question in here while you're popping that over. I want to let you guys know that Tricia has three different locations and you all know that she's a big proponent of foundations, but she she does a lot of things. She does a lot of things well. And so we really wanted to bring her on here and talk about the PHC program because that's one of the things that she really invested in to grow her business and you'll hear when Tricia's talking. She talks a lot about growth, right? She's driving on growth, pushing and getting bigger, better, faster. So I thought it would be nice to have her on here so that you guys could ask her any kind of questions around that and talk about those ideas. But I did want to also talk specifically about PHC just because they are having that special this month. Are you able to pull up that special Tom? Which I didn't even know that was a special going on. That's a great deal. I'll definitely be utilizing that. Right? First phase I would say yeah, but today I, you know, who knows. But the boring the money thing though is I just don't want to let this go without us making one last point. Tricia had a plan and we weighed the risk, we weighed the rewards. We understood at what points it could be a reversible decision and it was a very rational thing to do. There are a lot of tragic stories out there where people borrowed a whole lot of money and wasted it and had nothing to show for it. Boring money doesn't automatically equate you know, financial success. No. The tool. If you use it right it can. Which is what we're always talking about about being strategic. It's not just about doing what other people are doing. It's looking at your business and where you want to go and then building strategic success for your business. Personally, it's not about you doing the same thing as everybody else. You know, Milton did not build Walmart based on somebody else's model. The biggest and the people that are making the bigger changes they're doing it their way based on their information. So same thing for you. We all need to be more strategic in what we're doing. Not just follow the crowd. Not just I hate to use the sheet that's negative right now. But it's easy to fall into that crap of what everybody does. That's not a strategy. That's the hard thing too is that just because everyone else does it it doesn't mean it matches your company's core values and everything else. I think every company has a personality behind it. If you are just kind of winging things of everyone else's, you have this jumbled mess in your business that really doesn't reflect anything. I always go back to core values and I say does this fall in line with our core values of our company? Yes or no. You can absolutely get great ideas from other companies. There's nothing wrong with that. But not all those ideas, great ideas are going to match your company personality and it doesn't mean they're a great idea. They might be great for one type of business but doesn't mean yours. And it might still be a good idea that you have to modify for your business so that it matches up. So that it can sync up with your business. But just taking it's like me over in Olympia Washington asking Tricia and Fargo what should I charge per hour? If I didn't do what she tells me to do that is not going to work for my business. I'm not going to have a true understanding of what's going on in my business. And then when things fail or the opposite if they are going really well and I get lucky, right? Either way it will just be luck and I'm at the whim of the environment not at myself. I'm not great. At the end of the day I won't know what Liz has for her unemployment rate in her area. What is going for? What is your market analysis in your area? How many competitors do you have? There's such a variance that you can't just copy people's models and have it work for you. We all are different in different areas. Even if things will change and then you won't know how to adapt and then it won't be working. It won't run at all eventually even if it works initially and then it won't work. There's this whole thing of predictable outcomes. We've talked about that before where publicly traded companies can tell you from one quarter to the next what their revenue is going to be, what their profit is going to be and they're really good at that and that's because they have a strategy they have a plan, they execute and they know their numbers. And so this is also this is one of the reasons why I was thinking about this last night this is one of the reasons why Tom and I are routinely pointed at as people that don't sell very hard. We are really really soft sellers but the reason why one of the reasons why and Trisha I think you pointed this out as well. What happened guys? Why can't you sell harder? One of the reasons is neither one of us believes that there is a right answer for everyone in all areas. So it's really hard for us to say listen foundations is right for you. Every single one of you you all need to sign up for foundation because we know some people it's not right for. This is the example of the PHC program. Now this special my initial response is if you have more than five employees you need to go and buy the $500 special period. But some of you might not really have $500. You might not be able to for that. You might know that in six months you're not going to be in business. That's the case. Don't post then $500 but if you know you're going to be in business in six months and you know that you are going to still be struggling with employees like the rest of us are and I'm saying chances are really good that this is a smart business. We're all going to be needing some something to help us get an advantage over the other businesses in our marketplaces y'all. We are you think it's hard now? I'm sorry but buckle up folks. This isn't hard. Wages will be fine Tisha. Wages are going up. The economy is really hot now. We haven't figured this out yet. The whole inflation thing is going to start kicking in more and it's going to get white hot. You're going to have to be awesome employers. You're going to have to have awesome jobs. You're going to have to do an awesome job of recruiting and onboarding and training being good is not going to be good enough. If training is not a part of this solution it's not the silver bullet. You can do classes like PHC all day long and that itself isn't going to be enough. It is a significant way of differentiating yourself against other employers. There's a lot of hourly hire people that get jobs that have never gotten training in their life and they say this is awesome and it's theirs. They own it for the rest of their life regardless of who they work for. They own it. It might be the only certification they've ever earned. You know? Anyway, the whole point is that you can look at what turnover costs you. You can look at the lost revenue and the opportunity costs of not having enough people to claim and you can look at how programs like can it make a marginal improvement in the outcomes when you're thinking about investments in ROI and PPP-1 and PPP-2 and Idle-1 and Idle-2 Honestly, if we don't have $500 laying around we are trying very hard. It's not about being able to fund it. It's about one of the wise ways that we can invest in our business so we can grow and be more successful. That's a decision we all need to make but this is a program done in the context of a larger strategy and we keep going back to that. One of the things we talk about in foundations is if you're the CEO of your business you've got a job description and at the very top of it big black letters you're the chief strategist. It's all about strategy. Execution is a part of it as well but if you're executing on the wrong things you're not going to wind up in the right place. So this really has an opportunity to be successful. Speaking of strategy look at my brand new board I just put up. That's a nice big white board up there where you can be tracking over there. I'm actually excited to know what we're going to do is I have a senior meeting tomorrow with our senior management team and we'll be in my office all day long restrategizing everything. From our pay structures to just everything in our company. That looks small. That's four foot wide. That's a lot bigger than it looks. When we get locked up in the war room in Charleston that board is a lot bigger than that. The war room definitely is. Good. I love that. Who are you bringing in for your strategy session? My senior management team consists of our human resources manager and then myself. We have a weekly meeting every Monday to go over the weeks and strategize but this one is going to be a big one because we're just reworking to go over everything and redo job descriptions and redo just wages and everything. We're going to be announcing some wage increases across the board for our company and we want to do so for our current staff to be respectful first of them before we start pushing it out to the public for what we're hiring at. That's a strategy. Good. What made you decide to do this now? Is it because it's the beginning of the second quarter? Is it because 2021? No, it's because I feel the applicant pool is diminishing and I like to be involved. I like to have people knocking on our door begging to come work here. When people are no longer begging to come work here, it's a red flag for me. Because our applicant pool is so small in our area as it is, we had a tiny unemployment before COVID hit. Now with COVID and stimulus packages and everything else, there's no employees in the market in our area. It's just a strategy that ultimately we're going to be losing clients and leads and everything else coming into us if we can't fill those positions. One of the things that I'm loving that you're doing to Trisha, I preach on this a lot. You heard me say this a lot in foundations is bringing your people in on that strategy session. They are invested and invested in the work that you're doing and they're driving it. They're pushing it. They're motivated by this bigger vision and bigger strategy. I love that. We have to be together and agree upon these things. I told them be prepared for us to bicker for the whole day long of why we should do what we should do. At the end of it, my goal is to be able to all be on the same page and have worked out any what-ifs and be able to put it out there to the rest of our team. That's what we love about how it's supposed to work. You're facilitating the strategic planning. You're basically setting the tone to get the strategy set but you have to execute that and your team is going to be doing it. You can't do everything yourself. You're not doing it yourself. You're just going to execute. If they're part of the planning process they're invested. They're much more motivated not only much more motivated they're much more knowledgeable. They understand the why behind it. They've got better information to execute. Yeah, absolutely. We got a couple of questions. Let's get Denise's question. She wants to know did you need to receive a certain amount in order to qualify for more? They're very unclear as to what the criteria is and the rules are going to be and all of that. It implies that you should be entitled to a lot more funds than what you originally were. The only advice that I have that I would say is a pretty sure thing. Take that email address that we dumped into the chat earlier and give them the information. You're not obligated to go any further but at least you're going to have more information the days and weeks ahead and they'll be able to answer your questions as well as they get to that point. You just want to make sure that you're six months out in the line because you waited too long to send that email in. And so reminder everybody you heard what Tom said earlier. I just want to drive this point home. Everybody do it today. Do this part today. Remember you're not getting any money today. You're not having to make that decision but get your information in so that you are at the front of the queue. So everybody do that piece. Front of the queue, get it in there. You can decide what you're going to do with money or no money or whatever later but get in there. Yeah. So Robin Trisha wants to know you provide cars for cleaners. Do you work teams of two? Do you have solos that provide their cars? How do you pay cleaners with company cars versus solos with their cars? If so, what's your favorite flavor ice cream in these princesses? Hold on a minute. Yeah. So touching base about what Liz, what we just talked about is that I'll tell you what we'll do but again that doesn't mean it's going to be right for you. So my market is different compared to a lot of people's because we are in small towns. I'm in the state of North Dakota where we have less than a million people in the population of our state. So we tend to go farther radiuses than a lot of main services do. So we have three locations and each location has a 30 mile radius around it. My second location is in a very small town about 30,000 people, a lot of lower incomes but a very seasonal place to where the people from my first location get lake houses and so and sometimes they live in both throughout the year. It's only about an hour away but in that area I know that my staff have a 30 mile radius and the houses are very spread out and so they work solo and they drive company cars both. So that's not normally how a solo will work but that's how it works for us just because of the radius that we do and the mileage that they put on and so we chalk up the company cars advertising expense in that ratio in that area. In my third location, which is a larger location probably 100,000 people again it's solo straight to houses and company cars. So again we have a larger radius that 30 mile radius that we're going. Most of our work is more internal but we just open that location in September and so we want all the advertising we can get and so those company cars running around town are again we chalk up as advertising expense for us. Our first location is our largest location and it's a hybrid. So anyone that knows, my company knows that we do a lot of different things. We don't just do just the typical made service of weekly, bi-weekly and monthly cleanings. We have a lot of services and we do a lot of hybrid situations. So we have teams too. We have solo cleaners that come straight to the office every day. We have solo cleaners that go straight to their houses every day. We pay typically hourly for all of our staff however a few of them do commission. So there's so many variables some good company cars, some don't get company cars. There's so many variables based off of that particular person and that's one of the things that we'll be discussing when it comes to tomorrow on our strategy meeting of what is going to be our game plan going forward because we know we want to pay increases. We just need to decide how will the company cars look who will be getting those how will the tiers look in our company just that kind of stuff. So there's really no right or wrong answer in my opinion it's based off of what's best for you and for us we just we utilize it. How do you equate the solo pay to a company car? For us our solo cleaners are very efficient far more efficient than team cleaners and so when I look at the mileage that we would be paying them that's about 50% of our car costs and then when I look at the advertising method of it as well and just the staff that we have from it it works out just fine so but again how we strategize company cars is I have a competitor in the area that leases $50,000 cars for the company cars I don't yeah I think they're like Nissan Muranos or something but I don't I look at each vehicle as a dollar amount of how much can I fill that with staff and how much can I get from sales and revenue based off of that vehicle so we purchase Chevy Sparks and I think our car payments are $213 a month and so I look at I can buy four cars for the prices of my competitors one car which I can then fill with across the board and then we run our cars we run our cars till they die you know so our original first cars are 2010-2012 and we still are running those too I want to point out something for Patricia that you kind of alluded to like when you went through foundations we would have told you we would have had the conversation that if you are running solos you can't be running company cars right we would have said that but I want to point out that this is a different time these days things are completely different we have to be looking for what is going to serve us best which is why I think that it makes such good sense to be having your strategic planning meetings bringing all of the people in and re-looking at this this is why we do a SWAT analysis periodically so that you can find out what makes sense today because y'all in case you haven't noticed unprecedented times until it might be time to be doing things it is time to be doing things differently and then the job is to figure out what you should be doing within the new landscape or whatever I'm trying to say the baseline is that you want to have a certain percentage of profit at the end of the day how you get to that profit margin is up to you so you can do that in any multiple different ways but you have a pot of money and that pot of money has to be divided by in certain categories so you get to choose where you want to spend your pot of money I can choose a billboard or I can choose company cars or I can choose whatever you want and you still have that one pot of money to pull from I'm totally picturing you with like a little leprechaun that's kind of what I was going with just now actually good job we talk about that with our staff because one thing that I think staff doesn't understand a lot of times is that pot they kind of think it's an unending supply of money and so when we talk about our workers comp and our different things they often forget that ultimately those prices are coming out of that pot of money and at the end of the day that does affect their pay increases because you don't have that funds available so every time that we have a staff member that does slip and fall that should be wearing their non slip shoes and they're not they're hurting their pot I think somebody on here might be Linda but one of you guys I think did the $100 bill challenge one of the weeks you take $100 break it down into $1 bills and for all of your staff to see help them point see where all the money goes using percentages so if 3% of your money goes to cleaning supplies and equipment you take $3 off and you put that there and your employees $55 goes there maybe it wasn't one of these guys but somebody did it I remember and when they got down to the end of all of the money they were holding $2 so you remember how much money you guys made here's what's left over for me I need to be making more money $2 is not enough you guys made more than $2 I need more than $2 and it's really helpful exercise to get people to understand wow that money goes way really really fast looks like you're making a ton of money every day you're bringing in thousands of dollars you have like you said a limited pot just fills every single day no matter how much it goes out I think we had more people concerned about that when we were smaller I definitely feel like when we were smaller we had more concerns about that kind of stuff but as we got larger I think that our staff just see it as a company they don't have as much as that anymore but when we were smaller they thought the office was sitting on their butt not doing anything and I don't feel like our staff think that at all anymore but when we were smaller they definitely did it's a really good point because when your company is small your employees don't see it as a company if you are in there every single day it feels like it's relationships and you're making more money than I am but when your company when was the last time you went to Walmart and said what I'm not going to pay them $7 for a shirt they're getting so many millions and billions of dollars I'm just going to steal this shirt well I don't often say that so hopefully you don't either Liz I thought we were going to talk about here on live stream anyway not again Tom not again Linda has a question she wants to know is there a magic formula to determine the market value of having a big car TJ I know TJ okay we got to take Linda's question seriously what are you thinking about that I love it all right all right so Linda Tom is there a magic formula there's always a magic formula I mean I'll go back to the discussion that Trisha and I had you know the math is there's a lot of different ways you could do it but we kind of figured out okay we're going to be able to put two people in the car to clean four homes a day and you do it and say okay well they're going to do maybe $3,000 of revenue a week so that's over 12 grand a month and as long as I've got the demand for the work and as long as the labor market is tight and having a company car is going to give me a larger population of people to hire people because some of them are capable of working but they might not have a driver's license or they might not have a car and if you're doing teams and putting them in a car there's more people you can hire so bottom line is I spend $200 and some on dollars for the car plus I throw in the insurance and some gas and some maintenance maybe I'll pay for $400 a month on that car I'm getting free marketing from it plus I'm generating $12,000 more in revenue that I wouldn't be without it you buy cars all day long until you get to the point where you don't have the demand there to fill them up with people and have homes for them to claim and I think that it's okay that if that demand comes and goes too because I know a lot of business owners that have gotten company cars a lot of them and then started selling them off too because they no longer needed them and that's okay again Tom, you and I have talked about that reversible decision making it is reversible you can sell the company cars you're not stuck with them forever if you do make that decision but each decision that you do make within your company you need to think about is this reversible or is this irreversible before you make that decision and then revisit all of your decisions on some sort of a time cable I don't even care what the time cable is but you have to be revisiting all of your decisions checking your KPIs looking at your numbers if your net profit is sitting at 25% it will change a lot okay? just don't be changing a lot of stuff unless you have one employee then change absolutely but if you are sitting at 2% profit you probably need to be making some changes unless you're bringing in 25 million what's Amy saying? Amy, my company is called TLC Cleaning and so if you click on my profile I'm not sure if I'm tagged into this or not but if you click on my profile you'll see my three locations and our TLC Cleaning Fargo is our first location and biggest location and we typically do a lot of stuff through Facebook a lot she's a very fun to follow on Facebook y'all because she has just like she said she has her own story, her own culture she's very true to it she, you will see her personality I love that Tricia I one time posted a picture of myself in a towel on my page if that gives you any ideas yeah, I can't remember why you were in a towel in your car and you were yeah, so she definitely, oh Tricia there's another question here about when you add a car do you have one person going out to build a team for a day is that for me or who is that for you so if we add a car right now we have no rhyme or reasoning of exact why if someone gets a solo gets a car or a team gets a car we kind of look at each individual employee and each individual job type so we have a solo that doesn't come in here and whatever he goes to all of his jobs is right local and town but if I had a solo that's driving 60 miles out to a job I'm probably going to want to give him a company car so it really just depends on the financials at the end of the day of what is that person bringing in and what do I need to do to make him happy but that's again something that we'll be talking about we'll be talking about yeah, Tom I think that they're wanting to see our Facebook I don't think they want to see our website well that was a good picture you can see her logo there because one of the things that Trisha does that's awesome is she uses her logo a lot of times for her profile picture she does this in some groups that she's in like next door and those kinds of things so people just get used to seeing this this logo and think of her company I love that idea I have people I'm in the news a lot for random things I was reading this article or this thing on the news or something like that and someone was complaining about how often I'm on the news they're like seriously this lady again I couldn't help but laugh a little bit at that so awesome if I'm driving at home and annoying them then that means a lot of doing the work do something right I can't forget me even if they want to I just go ahead Tom sorry I just dropped the link in the Facebook page one thing to make note of you know there's 10,700 people who like the stage there's 10,500 followers I mean that's insane now go and look at your Facebook page and see how many followers you have and how many people like your page this is in Fargo North Dakota are there 10,000 people in Fargo? I know that not many more and maybe not all adults the cool thing is is that people follow our page from Tripoli all over the United States and we often get people asking us can you please open a location here can you please open a location here so it's pretty cool pretty cool branding well when you came to Foundations the first time Trisha you only had one location and I mean you were always in Powerhouse you were always of course to be reckoned with but you did not have anywhere near the confidence that you have today you have really come into your confidence from living these things and doing and growing and moving forward so yeah when I went to Foundations the first time I was in a depression in my life you know that I had hit that major milestone that one million dollars and I thought where the heck am I going to go from here to a goal that every maid service is trying to get and once I hit that goal it was like a devastating feeling for me because I'm a person that I want to wake up every single day and have a goal and I want to crush it and then I want to make a new goal and yeah going to Foundations was really something that was beneficial for me because we had those conversations of why does your goal have to be this let's recreate your goal and once you hit that hit a new goal and a new goal I think that's really helped me to drive myself but I don't need to hit the goal of everyone else like I have higher expectations for myself and so when I hit those I want to go to the next you know about just the accomplishment of climbing that mountain getting to the top of the mountain and then just having that good feeling you know you know we were talking today we had an open call we had an open call and one of the MMA groups today and one of the members wanted to know from everybody else on the call what is your two-year goal but business but also personal and how what are you going to get personally from this goal and I was like that's something that we don't talk enough about and there were a lot of people there was somebody on there that said I want to spend three months and I think she said Asia you know she's like I'll be okay if it's only one month but my goal is three months that I want to be able to be there and be away from my business I was like that's awesome there were so many people that have really amazing personal goals and sometimes we forget you know what am I going to get personally out of this we're just driving on these numbers and that's not motivating or as motivating as it could be especially like in your situation when you hit that number goal and then you're like now what anymore one of my personal goals in life well after foundations we really had to break that down of what our goal is going to be and that was a hard thing for me to look at truthfully because I had sunk myself into my business so much that I kind of forgot looking at my personal life you know I was the lady that brought my babies to work two days after I gave birth and I was back in the house in the office so after foundations I really looked at that and said what am I and what are my personal goals and I ended up every summer so I call it lake season every summer I take off Thursdays and Fridays with me and my husband and we work Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and then we enjoy lake season in a camper down at the lake Wednesday night until Sunday night and it's something our family now has looked forward to every year and it's something we really enjoy I love that I really love that for you Linda had a quick question I don't know if we have time for that we're going to squeeze it in because we're having a good time I have four teams no cars thinking of one car and then team player of the month voted by the staff we earned the use of the car for the month that's kind of cool yeah so when we used to get a new car we used to whoever had the highest scores in certain areas we'd get the new car so we would tell them we were getting a new car and over the next 90 days whoever got the best scores would get that new car and nobody else got the other thing and then we weren't getting enough new cars we only had a few cars and then it was vacuums high scores and it was motivating so I don't know if it's exactly that way but people like to earn what they get it is motivating to earn what you get when things are just given to people they are not as appreciated which I think we all know so if you're going to be getting new vacuums or new cars or new something create an opportunity for people to feel like earning them rather than just handing them out yeah absolutely especially nowadays while we all need new employees to be really feeling like they love our companies and they're engaged especially in I've dropped the link in for the PHC special and you're never going to find a better deal to train your entire workforce for 500 bucks this is good for the balance of the month so save that link and a reminder about this sorry time I just have to say it one more time real quick because people get confused about this even if you already bought seat you can use those seats for up to a year yeah this is all you can eat for four months so you would still want to hold onto those seats buy this and train every single person in your company at the $500 price point then as you bring in new people after the four months then you use your seats I know Tricia that's what you said you were doing awesome idea Tricia this was fun this was awesome thank you for your help today yeah absolutely thanks y'all there's no smart business moves tomorrow we got a new format coming out Monday it's going to be awesome we'll see you here Monday 5 o'clock eastern take care bye bye bye