 Hi, good afternoon, Tom Stewart here with Cleaning Business Today. I'm here with my partner Liz Trotter. Hello, Liz. I'm Olympia Washington. We've got Joe Walsh joining us again today who's going to have a lot of really good information about SBA programs, loans, grants, and latest breaking developments and all of the rules changes that we as cleaning business owners are going to need to abide by. Joe's out in Portland or not in Oregon. We'll say the other Portland, we'll leave it at that. The original Portland, actually. Important. Tom, did I ever tell you that Joe came out and I don't remember why he was in Olympia, but he came to see us while he was here. And I knew he was from Portland, but I thought he was from Portland, Oregon, and that he had just like come up, you know, a couple of hours hanging out. I was like, oh, my gosh, I like monopolize this poor guy's time and he was flying all the way across. Shocker, Liz. That was a, that was a fun visit. I was actually in Seattle for a green business conference. That's why I was there. So. Oh, is that what you were here for? Yep. Long time ago. Bridget says she can't, I'm guessing you can't hear Bridget. Do you see anything on your end? I'm hearing everybody, Bridget. Joe, just double check that you're sharing everything you're supposed to. She spent on every single day and never had trouble. So. I don't know what buttons to push. I don't know. When it went in doubt, reboot the computer if nothing else works. I love that advice. I've been giving it so many times and it has worked like 99% of the time. That's just a joke. April Fool's. It's not really. Or is it? It is. Oh, good. Well, everybody else in here, that's great. They were making me a birthday cookie downstairs and I'm not sure exactly, you know, what the process was, but they got this big cookie on a pan and it kind of overflowed off of the pan. So the smell of cookie is like wafting through the house now, which smells kind of good actually. Yeah, I'm thinking that sounds delicious to me. I prefer a very, very well done cookie. So I'm so jealous of Tom's birthday. I'm every year I'm jealous of what of us, you guys, Tom and me. Which one of us do you really think should have been born on the on the first April Fool's Day? That's my birthday. He should have gotten the 31st. I should have the first. But OK, we'll let you have it anyway, Tom. We've all got bowed down to you on your birthday. I'm drinking special coffee just in your name. Yeah, happy birthday. Joe, what's going on in your world? When you were there, the last time we talked, I was had spent the entire day reviewing all of the aid programs that have been coming out from the federal government. And I spent most of today actually corresponding with customers. So for those of you that don't know, my company is GreenClean, Maine or Portland, Maine. I have 35 employees and we closed our operation in mid March. So starting March 18th seems like ages ago now. And we just yesterday made the decision to close at least until April 15th. So that's what we're looking at. And so today I spent a lot of time responding to customers. And one thing that we've done through the closure, we had so many customers who actually asked to continue to pay that I didn't want to be paying employees who were going on employment because that would jeopardize their unemployment. So we actually created an employee aid fund. And I have actually this is crazy. So when we first closed, I got about $3,500 into the employee aid fund from customers who just wanted to help the employees out. And that was without me even asking. It was just people offering to pay. I put it in the most recent announcement that there was this option. And in less than 16 hours, I got another $4,000 to put in the employee aid fund directly from customers. I just think this is amazing. People are also prepaying. So that's another option that we gave them. So some people are prepaying for service later, which helps us with cash flow. Some people are donating to the employee fund. And then what we're doing is we're we're buying grocery gift cards for the staff. And we are also I'm creating a little aid account. So if employees are particularly experiencing particular hardship, we can help them out. So I've been spending a lot of my day actually managing that, believe it or not. That's awesome. Cool. Yeah. And I know that you've got a pretty good, you know, explanation for your for your clients as to and I guess just the world, you know, all your stakeholders as to your rationale behind discontinuing service for for this period of time. And yeah, yeah, your your goals, your reasoning behind it and kind of giving them a roadmap as to what things you're going to be looking for before, you know, you reopen. I think it might be useful if you could share a little bit of that thinking. Yeah, I'm definitely happy to do that. So I think the easiest thing for me to do is just share my screen. I can kind of show you the the email that I sent out to all my customers. And, you know, anybody watching is is welcome to. You know, use any of this message. It's fine. It's all there for public consumption. Yeah, you know, when you're in school, they call it plagiarism, but when you're in business, they call it both practices, best practices. I love it. I love it. OK, so can you see my screen? You can now. OK, so this is our blog. And what I do is when I send email communications to customers like this, I'll cross post them to the blog and I say what I do. I just started this blog because of the COVID-19 crisis. It's like I've been wanting to do a blog for years and never really could figure out how to make time for it. So this was a great excuse to start it. But this is the email that I would that I sent to customers. And I think the important part here and I'll zoom in a little bit. I think for some people that might be kind of hard to see. So let me just let me zoom a little bit here. Some reason it's not. There we go. Um, you know, what I did first was I think it's really important that we're sharing with our customers and our staff alike what our goals are as companies through this because your goals right now are not what your goals and priorities would normally be. We all know that our our lives have been turned upside down. That includes our lives as business owners. So because we're in this time of crisis, I think it's super important to share the goals that you have both with your staff and with your customers. So these are our three goals here. So I started, you know, the email while I started the email by letting people know that we're closed for another two weeks. But I want to make sure I'm communicating the why behind that. So our goals are here. So first is to contribute to the community effort to slow the spread. Second, ensure health and safety of our staff and clients. And then third, ensure the long-term health and continuity of the business. And so those are my three goals. My staff know that now and so do my customers. Hey, Joe, yeah, can you make your screen any bigger? We're having people saying that. Yeah, I think that's better. Joe, I can do that. Joe, I can zoom in on my side a little bit, too. Is that better? Absolutely. Thank you. So your goals may be different because maybe you're not closed and maybe in your area that hasn't been necessary yet. But I do think it's important to to have the goals and establish those and communicate them widely. So social media, email, blast, things like that. And then the part that you were referring to, Tom. So one thing that I've really been searching for in all of this is, you know, now that we're closed, what is going to be our criteria for reopening? And I think communicating that is really important because everybody's super confused right now. People are scared. There's a lot of anxiety. People are worried about toilet paper for some reason. And there's all this wacky stuff going on. And I think as business owners, we can help to be leaders in this time by making some structure around how we're making our decisions. It's also helpful for for you as well. So having this structure, I knew I needed some structure in this to help me understand how I was going to be making the decision. I've never had to make decision to close my business like this. I don't think any of us have, you know. So I mean, I think it's really important to understand. Well, how am I going to know when it's time to reopen? So, you know, I came up with four factors that we're going to be looking at and I've outlined those here. So this was sent to our customers. I will also send this to the staff. I actually hadn't come up with this by the time I emailed the staff to let them know we were going to be closed. So this will go in my next staff update, which will be tomorrow or Friday. I've been doing staff updates every two to three days. So, you know, again, this is something that you'll share. I would share it with my customers and with my staff. So, yeah, our four things are we're waiting until we get to peak infection. We are waiting for clear direction on best practices. We are waiting until there is a lifting of the strict stay at home orders. So both our town and our state have now issued strict, you know, stay at home or shelter in place, whatever you want to call it. And then last client need. I think Tom made the point we were talking about this earlier. Client need almost seems like a given, but I thought it important to communicate to everyone that that is being considered because we have to remember that, you know, in the end, we all want to get back to serving our clients. And I just thought that was an important piece to include. So, you know, these are the four things. I'm happy to go into more detail in any of them. I'm not sure how useful that would be for everyone. Oops, sorry. OK, I took the link to that particular blog post. And good. Yeah, please share it. Yeah, people were asking if they could see it. So that'll be perfect thing. Just go there and look. Thank you so much for that great reaction. So I also just wanted to point out for people that maybe don't know Joe, haven't met him before. This is one of the reasons why she is on this Facebook Live. And he's been on here a couple of times and we're hoping to get him on again in the future fingers crossed, right, Tom? It's because Joe has a natural tendency toward leadership. And our entire industry right now is looking for for for leaders who are the people that are forward thinking, where do we need to be going? And so that's another reason why we have Joe on here. Go ahead and look at that. I know I will. So what's the old saying is lonely at the top. But when you can surround yourself and network and work with other people who are dealing with the same challenges as you are, it makes it so much easier. And really, I guess that's the heart of why we've been doing doing this every afternoon at the end of the day, because it's as useful for us as it is for for you guys who absolutely rejoin us. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm really excited to be here. Thank you guys for asking me. It's it's really great. I'm happy to share. And, you know, I appreciate being part of the conversation. So thank you for that. And I'm happy to elaborate and, you know, on any points that I made there. And like I said, I encourage all of you to just go to the blog, take what you want, you know, share it and use it. We we, you know, I guess we'll see where the where the question is going. We might swing back to, you know, some of the rationale and communication, you know, protocol that went along with the temporary discontinuation of service. Yeah, actually, Tom, I just want to make one more point about that. I did actually I also thought it was important to give people something to chew on. Like I didn't want to just say, well, we'll see in two weeks. So I did tell the clients they could email us and alert us to be put on a priority list for service reinstatement. And I've actually gotten a good response from that. I've gotten quite a few people who have said like, well, I want the service, but it's not a high priority. People are kind of self ranking in how much they want us back. But it's given us a way to interact with our clients in the meantime and get a sense of how interested they are. It's also helping me to try and project what, you know, how many staff I'll be bringing back when we first start up. So that's just another thing that I have found helpful that I threw in there as well. Have you had any clients object to you not cleaning their house? And, you know, I've anybody, anybody, you know, in a threatening way or say, OK, I'm just going to have to hire somebody else. Yeah. So we've had two who have already left, like already canceled. Now, keep in mind, we have like 400 and change recurring clients, but we had two and one of them, they were both not happy. One of them was nicer about it than the other one. But they're both not happy about it. And they've already gone and found other people. And, you know, I think, you know, what it sort of reminds me of, it makes me think of when you increase prices. And sometimes when you increase your prices, you have, you always have those few clients who are so mad about it, you know, they almost take personal offense to it. And here's one thing I've learned because I've been doing this for 13 years is I raise prices and people get mad and probably 20 percent of them end up coming back, 20 percent of the people who are so mad that they couldn't take it, they'll end up coming back. So I guess for the two out of the 400 and change that were upset about it, I'm not that concerned about those losing those people. Everyone else has been extraordinarily supportive. And this could be a whole other discussion for another day. But when you talk about raising prices, I know that you've gone through a series of rate increases that were material relative to what a lot of us would would would think that would even be doable. So, you know, it wasn't like just going up, you know, a couple of bucks of cleaning. No, we went up. So in 2018, we went up 15 percent across the board. Everybody 15 percent. No, that was a lot. That was a lot. But we needed it. It was it was a change that was needed. So and we've since benchmarked ourselves and we're not we're not like crazy expensive or anything. We're we're at the top, but we're not we're not. So we have a couple of questions. Let's and I know we're going to be getting a lot more. Linda would like to know if you'll share just a little bit more on your employee aid funds. Yeah, sure. Actually, I'll show you it. So a little background, the employee aid fund came about just because, you know, starting when we closed or actually starting before we even closed. So in early March, our customers started to suspend service because of the pandemic. And they were offering to continue to pay. I had never I didn't know what to do with that because we're not a charity. So I was like, well, we're not serving you. So and they were like, oh, maybe you can help your employees. And I'm like, well, I don't really understand how that's going to work. So anyway, we we workshopped it. And, you know, myself, my HR person and our salesperson was involved in the conversation to an HR person actually come up with the idea. She said, why don't we create an employee fund and then people can just contribute to the fund and then the money will go directly to the staff. So that's what we decided to do. So, you know, when I say a fund, it's basically an Excel spreadsheet that I have that is part of another Excel spreadsheet. So this is all very it's all very I can actually pull it up. And I think it's worth looking at because, look, it doesn't have to be complicated. Right. I mean, we're all kind of making this up as we go in terms of how we're responding to this in a lot of ways. So while you're pulling that up, Joe, I will share something that we did because we're still open here in Olympia. We started what we call our Corona cash pantry. Yeah. And we as people donate money, the company matches the money. And then we shop for the employees based on the list of things that they want. And we're giving them Corona cash. So everybody got 20, 20 dollars to start. And every house that you clean pays an additional two dollars. So you earn a couple of bucks every single day or that you can spend at the pantry. So and that's been working really well, too, which just sounds like it's a very similar idea. Yeah, people are very generous. We have we have a struggle figuring out how to get the money. How how did you do that, Joe? How do you actually get the money from your clients? Did they just call you and you kept their credit cards? Or how does that work for you? That's that's exactly it. I just I just call them and are sorry, they just let us know they want to do it. And we we tap their credit cards. That's exactly how we that's exactly how we do it. So I can just share this right now here. So and then this is it. This is the employee fund. So over here, you would have your client name. And then if there's a note about the intent and then we just put over here. This is the amount they want to contribute into the employee fund. If they want to prepay for service, that's the other option for them. They can prepay and that's here. And then over here is the total. And once it's charged, my HR admin person just puts a neat little Y in there. And there you've got your you've you've got your funds. Now, the way we're tracking this is simply in this spreadsheet right now. I mean, if this goes on for a long time, I might create different accounts and QuickBooks and things like that. But for right now, it's pretty informal. We're just tracking it in the spreadsheet. So as you can see at the moment, we're at $6,700 or $6,600 or so. I know that's going to go up because we I have about 15 more emails I haven't responded to yet. So we have a question here. Well, we have a couple of questions. The first one is how actually I'm going to do a little out order here. Nicole wants to know if the funds are going to employees that were originally assigned to those clients? Or is it just spread across the board? How are the monies being allocated? Well, I'm trying to keep it as simple as possible. So we're not we're not flagging it for particular employees. I just explain it to the customers and everybody seems to just go kind of go along with it. I'm just, you know, given the situation, most customers are fine. Yeah, put it into the fund and, you know, do what you need to do with it. We have had a couple of clients who have insisted on like sending money directly to staff. So what we've done is we have told them to send us a check to our business address made out to that staff member. And we will just forward it to the staff member. We don't want to be giving out our staff members' names and personal addresses. But, you know, we have had a couple of clients who have insisted. And, you know, I'm not going to argue with them. If you want to send money directly to a staff member, be my guest. But for the most part, everybody's, you know, pretty, pretty OK with that. And in terms of how we're spending the money, the way that we're doing it is we're buying grocery gift cards. Now, you have to talk to your CPA, make sure this is OK. So, you know, Tom and I were talking about this earlier today and, you know, he's gotten different guidance from his CPAs, whether or not this is like OK to do or whether you have to count it as income. I've gotten guidance that says it's OK up to a certain amount. But, you know, you want to check with your CPA on that. So I think that's going to Robin's question, right? Check with your CPA on that. Is the customer transaction recorded as income? Well, well, hold on so I can answer that. The customer transaction is recorded as income. But then when you buy the gift cards, you're offsetting that income 100 percent. So it's a wash for the business. So it doesn't really if that makes sense. If Cardi, it's like an expense under like employee relations, exactly. It's just an expense. So it gets like money in, money out. It's zero to the net zero for the business. So you're not going to pay taxes really on that income. I think the real question is, what are the rules in terms of at what point does that turn into something that they are or us would want you to clear as as as income? Exactly. That's the question you need to be asking. Yeah. All right, Susan also wants to know, Joe, how will you determine which employees to first bring back if they're making equal or more on unemployment? How do you figure this out? And none of the people are making equal, right? Where you are, they're all making quite a bit more on unemployment. Yeah, yeah, how will I do that? Well, OK, so the first part of the question is very easy. The first part of the question, who do you bring back? Well, we and our employee handbook, we already decided on this a long time ago. If we ever had to lay people off, the way that we're bringing people back is based on three or four criteria. And I don't have my handbook pulled up. I'm happy to share it with you. But basically, it's, you know, the dependability of the employee to date and the way that we define that is basically attendance and tardiness. So it's their attendance record. So it's the dependability of the employee to date, the skills that they have. So what that means is this, you know, basically it reads such that we bring back kind of your higher level employees first because they can do more stuff. So you're going to bring back first the people who are most flexible can do the most different things and then lastly, based on business need. So business need encompasses a lot of stuff. But, you know, if the business has a need for a particular skill and you only have certain people that can do that, then you bring those people back first. So that that part's pretty easy. So for us, that means I'd probably bringing back my field supervisors and my team leaders first as I start to bring people back and only the ones that are the most dependable. The second part of the question is more complicated because in terms of unemployment in our area, it's our state is paying roughly two thirds of people's wages. That's just kind of normal up to a certain amount. But when you add in the six hundred dollars from federal, everyone's going to be making eight hundred bucks a week or like more to stay home for a period of time. I don't have an answer for that yet. It's actually one of the biggest, probably the biggest question I have about reopening right now is how am I going to handle that? Because it's essentially creating a wage floor of like 20 bucks an hour for us. So I don't have an answer for that yet. Ask me in two days. Are we even 100 percent sure that when whoever meets the road, that it's going to be six hundred dollars on top of the state benefit? Or I mean, that's what we're doing. But do we know that for for sure? 90 percent sure. I mean, I've checked with, you know, my labor attorney who is staying right on top of this stuff. She's fantastic and her firm stays right on top of it. And from every all the guidance that she's seen and she even read the statute itself, it's pretty clear that it's six hundred dollars in addition to whatever the state offers. The only way it could change is there is some language in the statute at the federal level that gives the state some discretion on how to allocate the funds. So it's possible that the state could add a rule. But again, it's too early. No one knows yet. Like if you go to the state of Maine Department of Labor website, your own state's Department of Labor should be able to give you guidance on this. All it says is guidance is forthcoming. And that's all the information that we can get. I can't get anything from my state representatives or just because no one knows yet. So I'm giving it a few more days, I guess. I feel bad because one of the things that we keep saying is, you know, give it a couple more days. And since we started doing these Facebook lives, I think at least once in every single Facebook live, we say give it a couple more days, give it a couple more days. But we're saying give it a couple more days in different areas for different things. Right. We have clear answers about some of the stuff that seemed like we were never going to get answers about in the past. And so don't don't don't worry that we keep saying give it a couple more days. Yeah, a couple more days for this one. And we're going to be in a little bit better position, but try to try to gain some confidence from that. But it's only a couple more days until we're going to get more information. As fast as things are changing and it's like, oh, my gosh, every time you turn around, it's something new on the one hand that's kind of scary. But on the other hand, we're getting answers fast, too. So try to have a little confidence there. And also in a couple more days, there's going to be a whole another set of questions that we can't even anticipate now. So that's that's the fun part of this. I guess one of the one of the big things that, you know, has has come up here over the last day or so is is in some regards, a little more clarity about the payroll protection program. Yet again, there's other questions that have been spawned from from that. Um, Joe, what what do we know about the PPP? So the the payroll protection program is it comes in the form of a loan through a local bank. So this is an SBA program. It's part of the CARES Act, which is the most recent $2.2 trillion coronavirus aid bill that was passed at the federal level. And so it's administered through the SBA, who is in turn administering the loan itself through local banks. So when you're thinking of the paycheck protection program, think of your local bank. So like just today, I just before I got in this call, I got an email from my bank who's like now saying we're we're we're getting ready to accept applications. Most banks don't I don't even think the application is out yet. So again, it's another matter if it's going to take a couple more days. But the banks are starting to to get things ready so that you can apply for it. So that's the first thing to understand. And then what it is is it is a loan program that you can apply for. And the amount that you get is up to two and a half times your previous year's average monthly payroll. So take the 12 months before you applied for the loan and look at your your monthly payroll cost and come up with an average and whatever that average is, multiply it by two and a half. And that's the amount of the loan that you can get from the SBA. What's a couple of cool things. They're not requiring a personal guarantee, which is really significant. And also there is a portion of the loan could be forgivable, meaning you don't have to pay it back. And that won't count as federal income, which is a question that a lot of people had. So that's been clarified. So it won't count as income, even though the federal government is giving you all this money, it's not going to count as income. So that's another significant development. And what the Paycheck Protection Program does is it allows you to take this big loan to help you get through the crisis. And then if you're able to bring your your employment levels back to full employment by June 30th, then you don't have to pay back the first eight weeks of the loan that went to cover payroll costs. So that that's the forgiveness part. Now, if you can't bring your full staff back by June 30th, then they prorate the amount that they will forgive. And it's all about their they're all about forgiving the payroll cost because remember that the point of this is they want you to put people to work. That's the point of why they're doing this. So they're willing to pay you to put people to work. So so, yeah, if you don't bring the the same number of people back, they don't have to be the same people. You could hire a whole new staff if you wanted to. But if you get your numbers back to pre-crisis levels, then like the number of employees back to pre-crisis levels, they're going to allow you to like not have to pay back eight weeks worth of payroll, which is a lot of money, especially when you're in the cleaning business, this could be really good for us. But if you can't get back to pre-crisis employment levels, they're only going to reimburse you for a percentage of your payroll. So that's, I guess, the kind of the quickest way that I can explain what it is. So more information is coming out and we're getting more clarity as every day goes by. You know, I've heard I guess the official story, if you will, is banks, banks that do SBA loans, basically are going to be processing these and they're going to be open for business Friday to do these. Although I heard that some banks are taking applications early, some as early as this evening. So, you know, I guess in our local markets with the banks that we do business with, we should be talking to them and seeing, you know, where we're going with that. And I like, you know, I actually got some great direction on this from looking at the our own main small business development center. So the SBDC is a like a part of the SBA. So your state should have a local SBDC office or division. And you'll want to look there. And it was really cool because they gave some great links to some great resources. And you can also, through your local SBDC, get business counseling for free. They can direct you to either a score chapter or some direct SBDC counseling or other business counseling resources. So I thought the SBDC was a really good tip to look there. And then also talk to your local bank, you know, what they are getting their hands around this now and they're going to be able to help you a lot with this, you know. We have a couple of things to point out. Robin says where he is, the app is available now. So go in and check now for some of you, there might be. Before we get Linda's question here, I wonder if you can talk to actually, I'm going to go ahead and take Linda's and I'll hit my little thing in a minute. Do you need to decide between the PPP or an SBA loan? So from what I can see, you don't, which is different from the early guidance was saying you had to choose one or the other. Now, the guidance that I'm seeing is that you can actually apply for the EIDL, the Economic Injury Disaster Loan, which is the one that you apply for directly on the SBA site. So, you know, I think it's also important to understand the one that's up on the SBA site right now, that is the Economic Injury Disaster Loan that is not the PPP. So I think that's caused a lot of confusion from what I've seen. So just make sure you understand that. But if you've applied for and or received an Economic Injury Disaster Loan, the one that's directly online through the SBA, don't worry, because you can just roll that into the PPP loan. So you can apply for that now, which I would suggest everybody do because you can get $10,000 for free, no strings attached. So that's just go to the SBA and apply for the loan. You can always say no, but you say no strings attached. I mean, you're not supposed to take it to Vegas. And well, that's true. All right, I overstated that. But it basically you'll get $10,000 quite easily. And then it's up to you to allocate the funds appropriately. And if you later sign up for the PPP, you'll just have to deduct from your PPP reimbursement the amount of the $10,000 that you've already put towards these qualifying expenses. So but basically, yes, you can apply for the disaster loan and still get the PPP. It'll just roll into the PPP at that point, which is good. Because before it, the guidance was that we had to choose one or the other. So. So Winta is actually asking the question that I was going to ask. She says, can you take the loan later? Let's say I take the loan in June. Then will it be eight weeks from June? And the qualifier there for me is that the information was that there was a cap on the amount that they're giving out. So do I want to wait and and and take a chance that the money won't be there? Do you think the money will be there? Would it be better to take it now? Well, you know, what you're thinking around that whole idea? That's an awesome question. We've spent some time talking about that. Joe, what do you think? Yeah, that's that's a really good question. So then asking the right questions is 75 percent of all this. Anyway, I think from a business perspective, it makes a lot more sense to wait as long as you can to apply for this loan. I'll just tell you my thinking. And I have spoken, you know, Tom and I have talked about this. I've spoken with a couple of other business people I know in the area here. And, you know, there's pretty broad agreement that waiting as long as possible. And this all depends on your situation. But I know for us, since I'm already closed, the longer I wait, the more staff I'll have when I apply for the loan, right? So, you know, if I applied for the loan today, I have only one staff member working and the clock starts ticking from the time the loan is dispersed and they're counting those eight weeks. And so the amount you're going to get reimbursed is only for the first eight weeks that you have the loan. So if I apply for the loan in June and get it in June, I'll have a lot more staff by then. So I'll have the potential to get a lot more money forgiven, I should say. So, you know, there's a strong business argument given my situation and the situation of someone like Tom, who has closed most of his locations. I'm sorry, you know, closed most of the most of the residential portion of the business that, you know, wait as long as you can. Because when you take the loan, the assumption is you're going to be ramping back up and you'll have more payroll to be credited for. However, there is this question and this is something that's unanswered to the best of my knowledge. Is there a limit? I think, Tom, you seem to know about the fact that there is a limit to the amount they're going to be dispersing. But then there's talk about them adding to it. So that does complicate it, and I don't have a good answer on that. Yeah, I posted a couple of links here earlier. One is the SBA site that talks to PPP. The other is the Treasury Department, who actually the people who print the money. They're the one with the three hundred and forty nine billion dollars for this PPP program. Steve Mnuchin is the head of the Treasury. If you look at, you know, currency, his name is on all the dollars that they're printing now. He says that once we spend, if we spend that hundred and, excuse me, three hundred and forty nine billion dollars, we're going to go back for more. So, you know, Congress is going to have to approve that. And the president is going to have to sign it. But given the way the political winds are blowing now, I would find it hard to believe that any of those you know, people are going to say, no, you can't have any more money. So I'm betting that if they blow through the the three hundred and forty nine billion dollars, they'll be back for that much more or, you know, however much they need. They're not going to run out of money because they're printing it. Right. Right. Yeah, I think I would tend to agree with with that. I would think it's a probably a pretty a pretty OK risk to take to wait if it makes more business sense for you to wait. You know, in terms of will they have more money? I agree that the way things are going, it seems like they're going to, you know, allow more money to be put into the program. But it is a risk, it seems at this point. Go down the path of thinking, though, there's a lot of things that that can change. You're talking about, well, we can only do it for eight. You know, you only get the benefit for like eight weeks of payroll. Well, you know, could they extend that to 12 or some longer? And you get a lot of different ways with it. We talk about like paid FMLA and how many weeks you can get or the paid, you know, six time any weeks you can get. They could extend that to that. So I mean, they're not saying that, well, I haven't heard anything, but we're kind of got a lot of momentum here to, you know, hey, we can the faucets are open. We can print a lot of money. So, you know, it would, I fully expect that, you know, whatever a set of assumptions we're working under now that some of them are going to be changing from day to day, week to week, right, right. Well, and there is also this other piece of you have to have the full amount of people back to get all of the money by June 30. So how is that going to play out? Are you just going to start bringing people back on June 15? And hopefully all of those people that are on unemployment, that are making the really good money, are they going to be done with getting that money, that extra money? Are you going to have to bring them on at 20 bucks an hour? No, you know, all of those pieces. So again, not not financial geniuses, any of us in the room. Tom and Joe absolutely are good forward thinkers, but not our job, right? We're we're all still housekeepers on line. We're in house clean companies. So I think again, June, it feels like an eternity. And, you know, I'm working hard to focus on, you know, the coming week or two weeks. And in terms of how to thread this needle, there are other options as well out there. So if you just set the PPP aside and now that the the guidance that's coming out is saying you can take the economic injury disaster loan in the meantime, and they're going to be getting a $10,000 grant, it seems like the prudent step is to wait at least another week or two before I apply for a PPP loan because I can I have enough and this depends on your own personal your own business financial situation. But I've got enough with existing lines of credit that I can draw that down a little bit, understanding that I'm going to be eligible for some for some grant funds in one way or another from the federal government. I can draw that down a little bit if I need to over the next two or three weeks while I wait for a little bit of the dust to settle and wait for a little bit of the guidance to get clearer. And then I can make a more informed decision about the best path forward. And in the meantime, I can get the disaster loan. I can get the grant. It's not going to jeopardize my eligibility for the PPP. And one thing I'm going to be looking for more clarity on in the next few days is can I also take advantage of the employee retention payroll credit, which is something that no one's really talking about, but it's out there. And it's where you can get a refundable tax credit of up to five thousand dollars per employee for keeping them on the payroll. So I haven't even looked at that program. And the early guidance, again, was you couldn't do that if you were doing the PPP. But that may change. And, you know, you may be able to do the payroll tax credits for the short term until you're ready to take the PPP. So this is another avenue I'm exploring. It's all it's literally the plane is being built as we're flying it. Yeah, and we had talked last week, I want to just put this reminder out. We had talked last week about trying to operate within your circle of influence. So work within the stuff that, you know, currently take the actions that you can right now that make good sense and try not to spend too much time, energy, effort on things that you can't control right now, because a lot of that will just end up being wasted because it's going to change in two days. Yeah. So we do have a couple of questions here. And Greg wants to know, well, the eight week restriction. Well, I'm supposed to be something that popped it for me. Well, the eight week restriction push you against the wall if you take the loan in June. Sorry, Tom, did I cut you off? Yeah, no worries. I just wanted to piggyback on what Joe was saying with the employee retention credit. I pasted some information. I got it from my CPA, but I'm sure he got it from some federal website. But it kind of explains a little more detail, some of the caveats to how that works based on what we know today. It'll probably change by Friday, but that's what we know today. What we know today. Yeah, so I think what Greg's asking is if, you know, let's say you take the loan on the 15th of June, you know, June 30th hits. It's only been two weeks. Are you only going to get two weeks? I think that's what Greg is saying. Yeah, and so to the best of my knowledge and to everything that I've read and the guidance that I've gotten so far, the answer is no, it won't it won't restrict the eight weeks for you. The June 30th is merely there for them to say that you have to apply by June. You know, you have to apply before June 30th and June 30th is the date they're using as a deadline to be back to full employment. So that's that's the I hope that that helps. So you could get the loan on June, you could get the loan on June 29th and they would be, you know, eight weeks from June 29th. So you'd be going into August and from what I understand, that's totally fine. But you would need to be at full employment by the end of June in order to maximize the potential benefit of it. That's right, or unless you're already at full employment, you think you can just maintain it. So that, you know, like in our business, we really can't or I think a lot of us wouldn't be able to not in housecleaning, maintain your full employment level through it. So, you know, but if you're already at or close to full employment, then you could take it now and use it to keep people working, you know. And well, and I have heard an idea that some people are doing because they want to keep their people on the payroll and they're trying to keep the spirit of this. This alive, that the whole point is that to keep people employed. And so they're looking at this as maybe kind of a marketing opportunity as well. Maybe sending their people out to do things in the community. Not sure how great that is. If you're if you're saying, I'm closing down my business because I don't want to send people out into the community, but now I'm going to send them out to keep them working. And, you know, there's some conflict there for people. And everybody's dealing with how to how to navigate these waters because every time you turn around, there's a different way to look at things. But this marketing idea is another another idea that I've heard people floating. I think this is an opportunity for us to really think out of the box. So, I mean, we could do some extensive training and use, you know, Zoom to, you know, get all your your cleaning texts online to, you know, you could basically do your own in-house HCT training and take several days and go through, you know, a lot of detailed information. You could, you know, anybody has a sewing machine. You can hire people to make like face masks. You can, you know, you can hire people to develop training material for you or marketing material or, you know, fill in the blank. I mean, this is an opportunity to do a lot of things that you might not even consider doing or might think that you couldn't afford to do. But, you know, this is this is this is a new paradigm that creates a lot of opportunities to go along with with with with with with with the stress that goes with it. Yeah, because and I'm glad you said that, Tom, because, you know, I was thinking about this last night and, you know, think about it. How often in your lifetime has the federal government said to you, I'll cut you a check for 250 grand and I'll let you keep half of it. You just have to employ people like so basically I'll cover 100 percent of your payroll if you can get X number of people employed. I mean, there's opportunity in there somewhere. It's a matter of figuring out the best way to take advantage of it, you know, and it's it's an opportunity and in some way, shape or form, it's an opportunity. It's just a matter of unpacking it and figuring out how to how to make the best of it. So in my mind, if you're thinking, well, I'm going to have to shut down for a period of time, I'm not going to be able to hire anybody and I just can't, you know, I don't think advantage of this need to be thinking harder. It's there. We just might not we there's a lot of questions that we don't even have yet. And there's answers to the questions that we do have that we don't have yet. But in the days ahead, we're going to keep working on this. And we're going to we're going to find some some really incredible opportunities here to build stronger businesses when we come out of this. Yeah, agreed. OK, I'm going to pull us over here. I see we have some more comments happening, too. So Raina's question is if I have 10 employees working now and it's usually 17, does it make sense for me to wait to get the loan? I'll let you guys go ahead and. So, you know, I think that generally I would have to say, Raina, that I would really recommend that you speak with your bank about what, you know, the options are. And also if you have a CPA or someone you work with on your numbers, that would be the person to speak to about this. You know, I don't know enough about your particular situation and we're not going to we wouldn't be able to get into that in this call. But I can just say in general that my general take on this strategically would be that to wait as long as possible because you. Unless all right, look, the virus hasn't peaked in anywhere in the country yet, like it were not past the worst of it yet anywhere. So depending on what the virus is doing in your particular area, you may have to lay off more people between now and the worst of this thing. So, you know, I would be of the mind wait a little bit longer and see how this plays out, you know, another week or two weeks. And then maybe look at it more seriously. That's how I would deal with it if I weren't completely closed yet, unless you're so strapped for cash that, you know, you need to get a cash infusion. But if you're strapped for cash, that's where the $10,000 grant and some of those other programs are available. You know, if you're if you're if you're choosing between the employee retention credit or payroll protection plan, because they seem to be mutually exclusive, is that your understanding, John? Yes. So that's kind of a choice. But if you're going with the PPP, it would seem all things being equal, that the strategy is to take that loan at the time that your your employment is going to be at its peak. So, you know, you got to figure out when that is. Is that now for the next eight weeks or is that somewhere down the road? But to get maximum benefit out of that is the time that you got maximum payroll. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I did see a question over here, Liz, about the the unemployment from Linda. I could jump in. I was just pulling it up. Yeah. So Linda wants to know if the additional six hundred dollars for unemployment will come from the state or federal. So that comes from federal. And it's none of that none of that those funds have been released yet. And well, OK, let me be more specific. The federal government is releasing the funds to the states. So it will be distributed through your state unemployment system. That's the that's my understanding of it today. But none of those funds have been released yet. So all the states are scrambling to figure out how they're going to accept the funds, what's the mechanism for determining and all that good stuff. So if your employees, no one's employees will be getting the six hundred dollars yet. We have another question here about Tom, you might have an idea about this. Do you have a recommendation about the best way to educate ourselves quickly on the science of cleaning? Will be the best ways or? Full disclosure, you know, I was one of the people that helped put this document together. But the HCT manual house cleaning technicians, man certification manual is a really good resource for residential cleaning. If you want to get take it to another level of geekiness, if you will, Michael Berry's book can't remember. The title of something built in cleaning the indoor built environment. Liz has got it right here. Protecting the built environment, cleaning for health. That's kind of as good as it gets. If you really want to know everything there is to know about the science of cleaning, I would go with that book. That's the HCT manual. There's links on the CVT resources page that if you're interested in getting either one of those, you can it will take you to the appropriate place to do that. I just wanted to second that the HCT cleaning manual. That's that's the most digestible thing you're going to get. That's going to tell you what you need to know. There are more COVID specific resources that I'm still evaluating. I can't recommend any in particular, but I can tell you in terms of the science of cleaning, but I can tell you that the ISSA in the past few days has released some much more specific guidance on COVID. So, Tom, I see you're nodding there. Do you have the links for that stuff? They're tip sheets. They've got like tip sheet one, tip sheet two. It's very good, actually. You have to be a member to have access to that. I think it might. I'm not sure. I'll I'll see and I'll get you links if it's outside their firewall or the spade. Yeah, I'll take a peek while we're still here. OK, yeah, it's I actually can pull it up. So OK, I don't think I'm signed in. So yeah, I so the ISSA anyway, has some great resources that are very new, like just posted them in the past day or two. So if you haven't checked back in the past couple days, check back again. So we have a question here from Winta, which is on the surface sounds like it's really easy question, but it's not. How many kinds of loans are there to? Winta, there's all the loans. Well, there's a up the top of my head. First off, you've got the $10,000 cash advance grants, which isn't alone. It's a grant. You don't have to pay that back. Now, the expectation is that you're going to use that to cover payroll or pay your rent or other business expenses. But that's free money. You've got the economic injury disaster loan program. And those two things that grant that loan that in the economic injury disaster loan, they kind of go together, they go together because you apply. You go to the SBA website, you click the link at the top, and it takes about 10 minutes, maybe. And you fill out maybe I think it's like five different screens. And when you're done, you've applied for both of those. So that's kind of the lowest hanging fruit out there. The loan, you know, if it's approved and then we presume it will be, you'll be given the opportunity to decide if you want that money or not. If you don't want it, you don't have to take it at that point, but you still got to $10,000. You don't have to pay back. So, you know, for everybody that's listening here, I can't, you know, I can't I can't think of a single reason why you wouldn't want to go to the SBA website and fill out that one application for those two loans. The Payroll Protection Program is a third program and that's alone has potential turning into a grant. I guess all of these have the potential of turning into a grant if you you meet certain employment criteria. Payroll Protection Program, though, you have to work through a local bank that's authorized to do SBA lending. I understand that there are a lot of banks that typically haven't been doing SBA lending that have over this little matter of the last week or two have been approved to do SBA lending. So, you know, I think you'll probably have a hard time finding a bank that doesn't do SBA lending at this point. You got the it's not really a loan or a grant per se, but you got the employee employee retention tax credit program, which we just got through talking about a little bit. And that's just a matter of if you choose to pursue that. And we pasted some some information about a little bit more about how that works in the chat earlier. Are there any other loans or grants through the through the SBA or the federal government that you guys can think of? No, I mean, there are preexisting SBA loan programs like the title Seven A or something, I guess. I mean, there's there's the programs that have been there all along. And by the way, when this whole thing hit, I applied for one of the regional banks in the Northeast is doing this really good business line of credit deal. And it's like, you know, up to 50 grand unsecured. It's like a 10 minute application and you can get, you know, a fifty thousand dollar business line of credit. It's not affiliated with any of this disaster stuff. But as soon as this disaster hit, I just applied for it and got it because you just don't know what you're going to need. So there's also options through banks that existed before this that you could always pursue. But the advantage of these SBA programs is that they're not requiring a personal guarantee, which means it's not going to go on your personal credit and there's no fees. So, you know, most business lines of credit are going to have some kind of annual fee and origination fee and in all that. But these SBA loans don't have any of that. And I think it's also important to consider with the SBA programs, the the economic injury disaster loan, the one that gets paired with that ten thousand dollar grant, you can actually pay those back at terms up to 30 years, which is really good. It's like mortgage length loan terms. So for cash flow purposes, that's a really good tool to be aware of. The pay tech, the paycheck prevention program loans, the parts that aren't forgiven, those are 10 years. So, you know, the payments on those will just be higher if you do end up taking them. So, I mean, you know, again, this all this is why you got to talk to a CPA. A lot of this is going to depend on your own personal and business financial situation. So the information I saw coming out today, Joe, about the PPP was that any of the monies that are not forgiven, it'll be a two year, not 10 year and at a half a percent now. So that brand new information overnight within the last 24 hours. So that coming out, you're muted. OK, no, no, that that makes sense, actually, because they're trying to discourage you from using the funds for anything but payroll. So I can kind of make sense that they would do that. I just pasted it in the chat for the ISSA resources. And a lot of this is free to the public, I believe. I don't think that you have to have a membership. I might share my screen here just for a minute and show you this because this is this is really good stuff. You take the link that I just just just posted in the in the discussion, and I'll take you to this page. There's stuff here that this program that you can sign up for. And you have to be you have to pay for. But if you go down here, the some of these some of these drop downs have some really good information, precautionary measures, these tip sheets. Precautionary measures, these tip sheets are are really good. I would download all of those. Every one of these has has good information, but these tip sheets are good. Some of these other links are good. You know, cleaning in the world at the moment, if we're out there doing it, I think that we have an obligation to become familiar with with with all this good work that Arksy and and ISSA has has put out here for our benefit. I have another question that we haven't touched on at all. They don't we're going to say something directly to what Tom just posted. I was just going to say that those tip sheets, those are the ones I was referring to, Tom, thank you for that. Though they're they're new. They just came out here. I'm so glad you posted them. I hadn't even seen them yet. So, yeah, I guess I know what I'm doing when I get out this call. What I was going to ask this is something that we haven't heard anything about today or recently is about the $1,200 stimulus check that's supposed to be coming out to everybody. A lot of our employees are counting on that. Looking forward to it, et cetera. I recently heard that that money is not not given to you in addition to any of the monies that you might be getting, but it is going to come directly off your income tax at the end of the year. Have you got heard anything about that? It's all the major media outlets are reporting it as a check. They're literally cutting a check. That's that's what I know it to be. Is it a check or is it going to be direct deposit? Yes, direct deposit. I heard direct deposit. If they have that information, check if they don't. And then at the end of the year, when you do your taxes next 2021, you do 2020 is taxes that that will be deducted from any refund that you have coming. Yeah, I don't I'm I don't know any I don't really know that much about that. I haven't even looked at it, to be honest. So if you don't have a refund, you would have to pay them an additional $200, I guess. It's kind of sounds like that. This would be a good thing for you to tell it like it is on tomorrow. If you can find some information on that. Yeah, honestly, I've been focused more on the stuff within the circle of influence of decisions that we need to make for running our businesses. And that, you know, whatever the government does with the $1,200 is kind of beyond, you know, they're going to do what they're going to do. I that doesn't really influence our decisions one way or another. It doesn't. But I actually do see the point. It doesn't influence my decisions. But I do see the point about I would want to know about it to put it in my employee update, like to put it in my employee newsletter. So it would be good to know that we're doing updates. You know, like I said, every two to three days, that that is a valid point. If we knew that, hey, guys, you're going to be giving us $1,200 next Thursday, then that might change some other thinking and could be, you know, advantageous to our employees and, you know, our relationship with them. So I love to be the bearer of good news whenever I can. So I'd love to be the one to tell them when they're getting the $1,200 check. I got a feeling. The one that has all the information. I like to be the one that they when they are looking for, where do I get the truth? Oh, I'm going to go to my employer. So I like to have the information always up to date and as much as possible. So telling them they're getting their check is great. And additionally, if they need to know this other little piece that it's going to be coming off of your or income taxes at the end of the year, I also think that that's important for them to know, especially since right now, a lot of people are going to feel like they are swimming in cash. So if I don't I don't want everybody to be feeling like this is just going to last forever, you know, it's 16 weeks where these monies are, you know, it's short term right now. We don't know, of course, we don't know what's going to happen. But I want to make sure that people are at least grounded in this idea of what to spend, where to spend, how to spend all that good stuff. Did you guys see the question from Winta about how is the economic, the EIDL amount calculated? I'm not sure. I'm not sure about that. I don't have any information on that. Sorry. We had talked last week about and this might have been on the town hall, the ISSA town hall, that the recommendation was to apply for six months of revenue. Was that on the town hall call? Tom, do you remember? I'm not sure. Don't recall it being now. The only thing I know about that is that there's limits that they put on the website, but I don't know like about how much, you know, honestly, it's a good question, but I haven't even gotten that far yet. I just like put in the application and figured out, figured that out later. I think a lot of this is going to take a lot longer than what we're hoping or being led to believe. I just posted an article here in the chat from the Washington Post on the $1,200 checks. And Sunday, Steve Mnuchin, the gentleman that we were mentioning earlier, he's the guy that's printing all of the money. He said that we're hoping to be able to get those checks out within three weeks. So that would be, you know, that would have been from last Sunday. And there are some people thinking, according to this article, that that's awful optimistic. So, you know, it's the government, OK? It's a it's a tall task. There's no mechanism in place for us to do stuff like that. So they're making this stuff up there. They go, well, I'm really waiting to hear from that first person that gets either the $1,200 stimulus check or the $600 federal payment for unemployment, either one. I want to hear. I want to see somebody actually get some of this money that we're hearing all this stuff about. Also, Tom, I just want to point out it's three fifteen. You should probably put the CBT link up there and see what or sorry, six fifteen, where y'all are. And then maybe anything that we would like to talk about tomorrow, any questions you might have for tomorrow would be good to know now, too. OK, here we are with cleaning business today. Over here to the right is where you subscribe. If you're not getting our emails, just go ahead and drop your name and email there and we'll do that for a lot of the references that we're we're sharing here. If you go to coronavirus dot dash rather downloads and it has all the stuff here, Joe's. Response, you know, Covid-19 response, template, basically the disaster plan template is there. Work stoppage letters there will drop a couple more. The resources that we looked at today, like the ISSA information and some of the other links will drop in there tonight as well. So I'll drop that link here. Make this. Jenna, an answer to your question, has anyone received the $10,000 grant? I believe that based on when it opened, that the soonest anyone could be getting it tomorrow. But I don't believe anybody will have gotten it today. For tomorrow, I'm sorry, Tom, go ahead. Well, they said three days was my understanding. But, you know, I wouldn't I wouldn't I wouldn't spend that money until you had it. It's the government. And, you know, and this is all April Fool's Day, right? So who knows? Just kidding. As Tom's birthday is what it is. It's not April Fool's Day. In case anybody didn't know, anybody got on the call late. It's Tom's birthday. Happy birthday, Tom. Thank you. We all have fun. That is now. Bridget wants to know I did when I visited your business, I got to witness a celebration and I know how you do it there. And so I'm just wondering why we haven't done that for Tom, you know, with like the paper plate award and the the singing standing around him, I seem to remember something like that. And everybody reads a card. Yeah, we do read a card and we sing crazy to the people. So, yeah, for Tom, we would have to sing in a very serious way. So and if it was for Joe, we'd be singing like elves. Right. Leprechauns. We used to do in a jig. Yeah, let's see. We did see something on here. Bridget would like to talk about FMLA exemptions and how that whole thing is working if possible. We can do that tomorrow. Yeah. It's my. Good. That's what you're asking about. We're shifting gears. But yeah, we can we can we can talk we need to talk FMLA and maybe we'll have a little more information on that because we've, you know, we've spent a fair amount of time talking about that earlier today as well and have a list of questions for which we we need answers. Yeah. And we keep calling it the FMLA, but isn't it the FFCRA? Oh, boy. I don't know what I have to say. Everybody I'm getting my my phone's blowing up because my wife is in line at the grocery store. So we have the social distancing here. And so they don't allow more than a hundred people in the store at once. So now we're getting those like long lines of people standing six feet apart like you have seen in other places. So she's stuck at the grocery store. I have to go home and relieve the babysitter. So I'm going to have to sign off. Thank you. We'll see you guys. You don't have to go. But thank you. Thank you very much. This was this was a lot of fun. And, you know, great. Thank you, everybody. Yeah, we'll see you tomorrow here at five o'clock. We'll talk FMLA or the program formally known as FMLA and we'll talk part of that discussion. And pour your played as sick leave and. Any other new programs that come up over the next 24 hours. Talk to you later. Bye bye. Bye bye.