 Hey, good afternoon, everybody. Tom Stewart here with Liz Trotter. This is Smart Business Moves. Wednesday, April 28. Wow. April's gone, isn't it? Stop talking about it, Tom. Every time you say it, you give me this weird feeling like, oh. It's just, it is. So sad. We came to that realization two days ago, didn't we? Yeah. We got a special guest today and he's here today. Hey, guys. Hey, Matt. I'll probably click that a minute before you wanted for 30 seconds, 15 seconds before you wanted me to. Fine. I'll give you a chance to sit down. How about that? Yeah. That's a terrible camera angle. I'm going to go back. The angle is good. The coloring is bad. Yeah. It's a very old computer, so I'm not sure what the angle is. I need to shave. It's been a busy week. I've not done any shave grooming. So yeah. I'm happy to be here, guys. What are we doing? What's going on? We're just talking about personal hygiene. Take a shower today. I did take a shower. Why am I so foggy? You came back. Hey, there's been some news happening here in the last couple of days. You guys want to talk news a little bit before we jump into our program? I do. I guess the CDC came out with some new regulations, guidance about mask wearing and the president actually spoke about it some yesterday. So if you're outside, as long as you are in a very densely populated activity, say like a sporting event or a concert, there are no longer recommending that you wear a mask. So that's kind of cool. I know a lot of us, like at Castle Keepers, we have meetings outside whenever weather permitting and living in the south. More times than not, but we still wear masks and we probably will for a while, but it looks like that's becoming optional, so that's a good step in the right direction. I'm hearing a little bit of feedback just that echoey thing. Are you hearing it? I'm not. Okay. No, I hear it too. Probably me then since I don't hear it. I don't hear myself, but I don't know. It might be just as interesting. You never know. Well, that is definitely muted and the echo is gone. So I don't know if you could turn your volume down more and still talk or not, but anywho. How's that? Is that any better? I don't know. Let me talk. I guess we're open for the moment. A couple of other things. I just want to share. So we're in the loop on this. Let me here we go. Bye. The president is putting forth some plans. We're going to hear more about this tonight. Actually, I suspect where he wants employers to offer their workforce like paid time off for the opportunity to go get a COVID shot. We mentioned this the other day, but I didn't have any documentation on it. So I've got this Society of Human Resources Management article kind of explaining some of the details. And you'll get tax credits back for giving your employees paid time off for getting a COVID shot or even paid time off after they get their shot if they're not feeling well. And you'll get reimbursed through tax credits. So that's pretty cool. Here's another perspective of that. I'll just share these. The president is giving a speech tonight and it's not really State of the Union address, but it's kind of like his version of that and he's going to be introducing some new legislation that he's putting forth and some of the things that he wants to do. I think it's like another one-point-something trillion dollar plan they're wrangling over some of the details. But one of the things he's going to be talking about is extending the child tax credit. The employee tax credit. And basically these are funds that a lot of our employees are able to get to subsidize their income and the number goes up quite a bit if they have children. Well, they bump all those numbers up as part of the last COVID relief package and he wants to make them permanent. So that's one of the things and actually as an employer I see those are good things because you don't get those tax credits unless you're working. So that's kind of an incentive for people to work when they get more and more value out of the exercise of working. What else are we doing? This is big. He's also going to be proposing a 12-week paid leave plan where employers would be offering their employees. It would be kind of mandated that they could get up to 12 weeks of paid leave and hear an article about that. Now we would be reimbursed as employers by the federal government for this paid leave that we're paying and the government's going to pay for this paid leave by increased payroll taxes kind of like how they do unemployment insurance now. So we're going to get reimbursed for it, but it stands to figure that the amount of taxes that we pay on our payroll will go up to pay for it. So net net money out of one pocket and put it in the other maybe? Sounds like a wash the way you're describing it. That's the way what the article is explaining it here. But the president is speaking tonight and I'm going to be watching and I encourage everybody to do that because there's going to be a lot there that's going to be impacting small business and we need to know what's going on so we can make smart business moves, right? Yeah. It sounds like all good stuff. Again, Tom. That one's a little tricky because it's like other kinds of insurance or work comp or things like that that have good consequences if managed well. But some states have much higher rates than others like California like work comp and things like that. So it just depends on how it's written, right? You know, managed at the state level for certain states like Ohio or Texas and you know, tend to be low insurance but then they can be very expensive and hard to and cumbersome for business at certain levels. So it's a mix. That's a mixed one there for sure. It could be just depends on how it's rolled out. And you know, the article that I dropped in chat refers to it being similar to how the federal unemployment insurance works. Has anybody gotten any feedback from both? I mean, typically, we pay more in state unemployment insurance than we do federal unemployment insurance. Does anybody really know how all that's going to shake out after all the unprecedented events we've been dealing with in the last year? I haven't even looked at my rates yet. I have no idea. It would seem to figure that, you know, they're going to be going up, maybe sharply. And I would imagine both are going up. Hmm. So all really cool things to look forward to, right? Yeah. All right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, Leslie, California is not Leslie. It's dusty this time. Same thing. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, California. I mean, who knows how all that's going to shake out. So common theme behind several of these initiatives that you're going to be hearing about tonight is really making the whole work experience for all workers, but, you know, especially for I'd say the lower quartile of wage earners, what's often referred to as our early hire workers, providing them with more benefits, more, you know, more flexibility in their schedule and, you know, there's a lot of discussion. One other thing that came out yesterday, and this was just an executive order that the president is going to be mandating, this isn't going to affect until January of next year, but if you're a federal contractor, you have to have a minimum wage of $15 an hour. So, you know, there's a large companies, you know, Raytheon and all those guys, but there's also a lot of really small companies that provide food service, cleaning service, stuff like that. They're all going to be impacted by that as well. I'm just thinking how that whole thing is, I guess that's why it's January. Like, wow, how are they going to get everybody in alignment with that? But there's a hundred thousand, like, employees basically, so it's you're saying contractors have to meet it too if they're on government contracts, huh? That's my understanding. I don't know. I haven't seen the actual reg yet. But all of this is just kind of creating an environment and an expectation that, you know, workers are expecting more now than what they did a year ago from their work experience. Is that a fair statement to make? 100% Tom. The people are the same, but their belief systems have completely been modified. So, we're going to be talking about a couple of things today. We're going to talk about, you know, some of the forces that are driving the changes in the labor market. We've just touched upon a few of them here, just current events and things that are happening in Washington and things you're going to be hearing about more tonight. And then we're going to be talking about what are the smart business moves to be making in light of these changes? What do we do about that? Understatement, right? Right, Dusty, you are right. It's unprecedented events we're dealing with here. We shared this the other day, and I actually stumbled across this picture where McDonald's in Tampa was offering $50 for somebody to come in and do an interview. And there was an interview with the manager in a news interview saying that he wasn't able to get people to come in and talk to him. They went to think, you know, the $50 just to come in and talk to him about a job wasn't enough to entice people to come in and do an interview. Wow. And I wish I had taken a picture of it. There was a sign in front of a McDonald's in North Carolina that I saw Sunday and said, $500 signing bonus. And I asked one of the teenage kids who was working at one of the drive-thru windows how that worked. He says, well, you work here 90 days, you know, three months and you get 500 bucks. I was like, wow. That is not really new. I used to do a $500 signing bonus and it was not effective. But I would definitely try it again in this new environment because we do have a different situation now and completely different situation than we have in the past. I could see it working maybe. I'm not sure actually. It certainly depends on the market and the labor force. When I was an airline pilot, after I was hired at my company, we were offering first officers like $20,000 sign-on bonuses. That was paid out in increments, paid out over two years. It just depends on the industry and it can be effective. I'm not saying we can afford to do $20,000 signing bonuses, but it may need to be higher than $500 to be as effective. That's what I'm thinking. $500 is low. You could do $10,000 and pay it out over two years and just do it in increments. I'm not saying that that's the way to go either, but we even have to go that high, but I do remember there was a time where pilots would pay to take their first job. They'd pay the airline to get their job. This is how crazy it was. You'd pay the airline $20,000 for your job. They had a glut of applicants post-Vietnam era pilots to get your first job. You might have to give them money. But that's not the big challenge. Obviously the tables turned in all labor markets, at some point. That's where we're at now, especially in the more entry-level workforce. You know this is a weird thing that I just heard about that is similar. Slightly off. Around here we have a lot of what they call Bikini Baristas. I don't know if you have those will wear the baristas will wear bikinis or lingerie. One of those two things, like small amount of clothing. And I know you're wondering, where am I going with this, Tom? Well, no, I mean, I've never heard of this. You guys don't have these. All right, well, they're very busy. So anybody that's watching, that's in South Carolina. So this is like competing with Starbucks. Yeah, kind of. And people love to work at bikini baristas because you make a lot of money. You make a lot more money working at a bikini barista than you would at another coffee drive-thru. But one of the things that has been happening recently is there are certain shifts that are really good at one of these baristas. And so what's happening is to be able to get these really good shifts, the people, the employees, are paying all of their tips and sometimes their money to the person that's doing the scheduling to be able to get these amazing shifts. And to be able to keep the shift, they are tipping out the person that does the scheduling. And so I just thought, wow, that's just a brand new thing that's happening there. I haven't heard of that before. Matt talking about pilots paying for their jobs is the first time I've heard anything similar to that. So does Hooters do something like that, Susan? Oh, you're not talking about that. I have no idea. I'm not. You're asking me, but. Is that not a thing everywhere else? Matt, how about in St. Louis? Never heard of it before. I mean, it's probably something that would have done well in Portland when we were out there. That seems like. We have so many, y'all. No fast food, but lots of Bikini Barista's. OK. Bikini head shop, you know? We have lots of head shops, too. Maybe they go together. I don't know. Yeah, so interesting. One thing you did say that actually circles back to our conversation a little bit is the tips, right? I think that's kind of an underlook thing in our industry a little bit about how we can increase pay for our employees. I can tell you to the number that my employees make about $1.66 extra in credit card tips that I track through my software through Made Central. And I think giving the ability to give tips is one way that you can increase higher pay and put it on the customer. And I have no idea what my cash tips are. But yeah, this goes right into kind of things that we're going to talk about today. So what do they want? What's going to get these people to stick other than Bikini's? I mean, we've got to think about what's going to make our workforce stick with us. So I'm happy. I would be interested to hear what you guys out there are hearing. It is up in chat with the feedback that you're getting from the people that you're talking to, from the people that we are talking to, the candidates, as well as the other businesses that we work with. It seems like there's some common themes, though. It looks like there's an expectation of higher pay. The whole idea of $15 an hour is the minimum wage, regardless of what it really is or what part of the country you're in. There's inflation on the wage side. Everybody is kind of feeling that, right? For sure. All right. I can tell you for a fact that that's the case. But I can share. I'm in a demo account. I'm not in my live data here, but I've got a tab open that might be kind of relevant if we want to share that really quick. Sure. So what I will tell you is this is a report that I look at every week through Made Central. And so this is just a demo account because I want to actually look at some employees. I didn't want to accidentally share one of my employees phone numbers to the world. But everyone's always worried about what their revenue is per week, things like that. But what I really want to know is what my cleaning hourly rate is. And I'm only zoom this in so we can make it a little better to see at home. That cleaning hourly rate has a lot to do with what I can pay my employees. So for us, we should all be, what can we do as employers to make sure we get these higher wages and things like that? We need to be making sure that all the jobs we do are profitable and that we're generating as much per hour as we can. And so if you look over here at the one that says average hourly rate here, that's in the software and this dummy account. It's about 16, 19 an hour. My average technician makes $19.55 an hour because our average hourly cleaning rate is well over 70 for my company. So I mean, if you're afraid to push your prices higher, just know this. I'm getting close to $70 per hour and we're booked out till June. I don't think you should be scared. I think you should be thinking of this as an opportunity to increase your hourly rates and thus increase your wages. But that's only one part of it, right? So what we pair employees is one piece, right? But don't you think they're looking for something more? Like what can we offer them as an employer, Tom? What do you think would be your biggest takeaway from your slideshow as far as you had on there, like scheduling and PTO and some other things? Maybe go back to those slides. But the pay is definitely a big part of it right now, maybe more so than what it has been like pre-COVID. And it's doable. It's just purely a matter of knowing your numbers and you have to be charging more. And you're right because we've been raising rates. We've been raising rates over the last several months and we're telling customers that we did a bunch of rate increases over the last two weeks. We've got more ready to go out next week, actually. We're telling them that this might not be the last one you see this year. But we're explaining it's primarily going to pay and time off and other benefits. Customers, for the most part, feel good about that. We've had more customers thank us for doing it and feeling good about it than we have who've pushed back and said, I think there's other things that I can't afford it. And for the ones that push back, you can negotiate a little bit. You lose a couple. But for everyone you lose, you add it all up. You're generating more revenue and cleaning fewer homes. I mean, I'm looking at it from all kinds of angles. Like, if we're driving and we're inefficient in our days, that's taking away from what my technicians end up making because they're commission split for the day. So that decreases their effective hourly rate because they spent time driving at a non-commission producing time, right? So we really need to be doing a lot of things on the efficiency side, on the productivity side, making sure that we're getting as much per hour out of our customers. There's a few things we can do, levers that we can do to control pay. But there's only so much efficiency you can get out of your employees. There's gotta be drive time. There's lost time with that day. So the very easiest lever you can pull right now is rate increases and maybe think about doing it a second time this year. You have time to do one now and perhaps six months from now before the year's up to get two in before the year's up. Or you could start doing rolling price increases where you go through maybe a set number of customers every month. And again, that's something Made Central can do automatically for you. But if you're not using Made Central using some other software, you need to probably be thinking about executing on that right now and not waiting because there's probably a window where you could get two price increases in this year if you got them done now. And for those of you that are afraid to do price increases, we have a lot of conversation about people being afraid to do price increases. Just have that conversation with somebody today. Matt's talking about doing two price increases. If you're like, that's crazy, at least one. Try at least one. Overcome the fear enough to just do half of the amount that Matt is suggesting. Hey, Sharon, good to see you. And I really wanna say to Sharon's idea, this is going back to the tips. Absolutely, if you don't have a way, like, you know, Made Central is really fancy and it does all of this cool stuff. And yes, you can get the extra tips through Made Central. But if you don't have that, at least do something like this. At least get the envelopes and make it easy for the clients as easy as possible for the clients to tip. The reason why they tip so well when it's on a credit card or going through, it's so easy, right? They're like, it's already right there. They're doing it. The envelope, absolutely. Next best thing, get it out there. Make it easy. They love it. And you're setting the expectation. Yeah, Sharon, if you actually share that with us, as long as it's okay with Paul, we could put that in the resources after the call. Absolutely. I think Paul shared it once before. Okay, I think that's good. It would be awesome to get it on this call. The envelope? Sharon, it's so funny. You have to buy the envelope, y'all. So it's not entirely free. You have to buy the envelope. I wanna point out something else around the higher pay. When we're talking about higher pay, there are two other things to keep in mind. The reason why higher pay matters right now, why it's important, why people are really just needing all of this extra money is because of, well, I'm gonna go back to matter, meaning and measure. So this is the way that people currently are measuring whether or not they matter to your company. So if you don't pay enough money right now based on what they think is reasonable, rational, what makes sense in your area, people think that that means you don't, that they're not going to matter to your company. And so the higher pay is hitting on both of those areas, you really have to pay attention to anything that's hitting matter, meaning measure and autonomy, right? So that's the first thing. The second thing that I wanted to point out is, it's higher pay that we're talking about. You don't have to be so afraid of this. Once you get the people into your company and you bring them in, yes, higher pay is going to have to be a part of that, but once you get them in, now you have opportunity to do so much more than just focus on the pay. So nowadays, and that way, not a lot has changed. Not a lot has changed. Yes, you need to bring them in with more money, but you're going to get them to stay with your company, not buy more money by the other things that go along with it. Go ahead, Tom. No, there's two, there's two sides of the equation where higher pay would imply higher cost to get sold, higher payroll expense, but turnover contributes to higher payroll expense as well. And there's a sweet spot where if you raise your pay enough to reduce the turnover, then you're actually keeping your costs down. Now, the pay's not the only thing to deal with turnover. There's a long list of things that we've talked about that fall into the matter meeting and measure, but you can pay more and reduce your turnover. You still have lower labor costs. I agree. And especially in that first month, because right now what's happening is, in that first month, you don't have enough, that's not enough time to be able to prove all of the other things that we're talking about that are outside of pay. So you have to have high enough pay that for an entire month, while they're still job hunting, your pay holds up. So that's what you're looking for there. Yeah, and I coach on a couple of different things like vision, systems, talent and tech. And I talk to people like the four things that I kind of think they really need to have kind of going together for them to have a successful company. And honestly, the vision that you paint for your employees when they come in the door, so like our new ads kind of describe the job, like it's like, do you want to get your kids off to school every day and be home every day to pick them up? Do you want to never work another night or another weekend and be home for every holiday? Paint the picture of what we really do offer. And those are all things that really are critical to getting that new kind of employee. So I do like this. This is a great little format. It's a great gratuity envelope. Notice the gratuity, I like that. I do, I think tipping ads, I used to always say, when customers would call, we'd always say tips are welcome and not required. We're like, now we're just like, oh, they love tips. We give you lots of ways to tip if you feel like they did a great job. You can leave them cash or we actually make it so right after the score card you'll actually be able to leave a credit card tips easily or you can automatically set up a gratuity that will be applied every time if you really love your team. So we have three ways that you can tip, make it easy. I think just from a norm standpoint, it was a lot of things factoring this too, but I think more and more people regardless of, you go to a restaurant, you tip your server, that's in most places that's expected, I guess in some areas it's kind of going backwards because the hourly wage for servers is going up as I understand it, but... In our state the minimum wage for servers is the same as every other job and everybody still tips the same, 15 to 20%. Well, that's awesome and that's good. And I guess that supports the thought that more people thinking that tipping is just the right thing to do and I mean, for a broader set of services more people tip today than did 20 years ago. Part of it and I'm sure it's because it's easier, part of it is, if you put the right, part of it's just the belief system, but you put the two together and give them tools to make it really easy for them, you can get a ton of tips. Okay, great. Which makes your job more attractive, which makes you a better employer. Actually, I think I'm going to create an infographic around how much should I tip and showing the different amounts that the different industries tip and include our main service in there. And make sure that the clients get that. And there probably isn't an agreed upon standard if you will to that, so you can make it really big, 50%. Yes. That would probably make our employees very happy. Yeah. Well, let's talk about flexible scheduling and like offering maybe a different, maybe we've always had full-time employees. Tom, you want to bring up my screen? Yeah, we will. Let's talk about it for just a second though. We, at least I first experienced this in Portland. I grew up in a world, I've been doing this for a while that there's always, some people that were looking for part-time work, but the norm was Monday through Friday, nine to five type jobs, but I guess we saw a couple of years ago, we saw this coming that in some parts of the country, people didn't want to work, would not work more than 30 hours away. And wanted to have a lot more flexibility in terms of when they were going to be working those hours. It's true. What are you guys hearing? I mean, we're hearing this from people all over the country now, right? Yeah, yeah, everywhere. I lost a good employee because we probably didn't bend soon enough on some of this stuff. Like I lost an employee that we might have otherwise saved had we accepted this in reality sooner. And now this is how we're managing, but yeah, I lost a great employee as an anecdotal thing. I mean, she came to us, we were kind of laughing because she's only got 25 hours a week and she wants to go part-time. We're like, you are part-time, only work 25 hours a week, but we weren't listening, right? Yeah, we were. I mean, I wasn't there for it, but you know, kind of that management by like how you think it's kind of passed down to your managers. And I know how, I know my managers would have seen me smiling in their head, like, oh, Matt's gonna laugh about this. Just like Matt would want me to. Exactly. And so I ended up losing her. I called her back the next day, I was just like, I was like, I'm really sorry we didn't really hear you out on this, but I can't hire you back because you walked off the job, but I really am sorry if we, like, I'm really I'm sorry we didn't listen better and just tried to like, try to mitigate the damage if we're like going on Google and blowing us up and, you know, but yeah, I mean, sometimes you have to shift and change and change comes to you, Portland is here. Yeah. So there was a time when, you know, being in the cleaning business, house cleaning business, residential cleaning, you know, one of the things that you could, you know, make as a benefit is that, you know, this is like Monday through Friday, nine to five, you know, no nights, no weekends. And that's not really good enough anymore. People aren't looking for Monday through Friday, nine to five. They're looking for flexibility. They want to be able to customize a schedule within that framework. So offering that and being able to run your business that way gives you a real competitive advantage, but, you know, saying it is one thing, doing it and making it a win-win. So you're able to honor the promise that you're offering that new hire and at the same time able to run your business in a way where you're able to meet your commitments to your clients and satisfy the demands you have and be profitable at the same time. It's a whole nother level of complexity. Yeah. And so this is kind of how we manage it at Better Life Mayhem, it's through Mayhem Central. So it's, you know, if somebody has, go ahead. I just said, hey Leslie, I didn't know you heard me. Sorry, Matt. Oh, so the, this example, like, you know, this is not my real employees because I didn't want to pull up anyone's private information, but they can set their schedule within Mayhem Central. And if you, if they say they cannot work certain hours, they won't even be available to pull them onto jobs that you have and even schedule them. So, you know, if this employee's got to be done by two and your jobs are going over that, they won't be an available resource for you to use on that job. So it's real-time availability on your schedule too. And it pulls from your available hours that you have available to sell. It's all interconnected. But we've found this to be really important and also giving them, we have unlimited days off, they can make off as many requests as they want as long as we can honor them. And we really try and honor as many as we can because then we have less call-outs for, you know, for things like that. I know Liz, you've been doing that a long time is having kind of unlimited call-outs. I might even have gotten the idea from you and unlimited requests off. They're unpaid, I mean, but they also, we also, you know, track their PTO, give them sick time, things like that. What else do we want to talk about on this, Tommy? I think, but giving the employees the tools to manage that, you know, that's really important. I have another thing that's really hard for people to sort of wrap their brain around here, Matt, is so how do I know what my availability is? So a lot of times people struggle with, okay, I can give people time off, but then how do I, so there are a few issues and we have this on one of the MMA calls today. So I'll give you the few issues that they talked about. So how do I know, like if they're changing their schedule, how do I know how many hours I can book for clients? How do I do my sales? Sure, I mean, so there's lots of revenue production tools within Made Central that do that. This isn't a live account, so I'm not sure what's gonna show here, what we're gonna see. I can tell you right now for May in Better Life Mades and if I were to pull up my reporting that we're like negative 24 for like per day, like in May, like I'm three hours short most, three employees short most days. So basically it's tracking how much revenue you have, how many allowed hours are for the cleaning? How many scheduled hours do you have as far as as far as technician? And then what are your unused hours? Now these are extreme examples here because again, it's a dummy account, but I can probably log out now that we're not looking at employee data and I'll stop my share and switch it over to- Before you do that, there's just a couple of things to look at that if those unused hours go up and down, if somebody is like taking a day off, those numbers will go down by whatever hours they were scheduled to be worked that day. So I mean, that's pretty much real time data and that's one of the ways that you would manage it. If you could go back to the employees in Jennifer, there's just a- Sure. And one more thing about this because I do want to, I don't want this to just be a made central pitch. Guys, if you are wanting to do something along these lines, you can do this exact thing in an Excel spreadsheet. You just have to, it takes a lot of work, but it absolutely can't be managed in Excel. You just have to, every time you get a job, you have to put it in there, the hours in and every time an employee needs time off or adjust their schedule, then you would adjust the available hours. So it's not completely unwieldy. It's not like something that you can't do. I want you to be thinking in terms of, if at all possible, not, well, I can't do it. I don't have made central. This, what we're talking about, smart business moves is you are going to have to be doing some of these things. This is one of the things that we really believe is going to be making a material difference moving forward. So you have to be thinking in terms of, okay, how can I do this? You're going to need to make this happen. Not doing it really isn't an option. It's not an option. You're going to have to do it. So you're going to have to figure out how to do it. And I'm sure there's more than one way to do it. I mean, yeah, if you're really good with spreadsheets and have the time to do it, I mean, you could probably do it with a white board and pen and paper. What was the last week? Leslie's like, she does it and it is a lot of work. We did it in Excel for years. Because we've always done flex schedules for at least 15 years. And that's how we managed it in Excel and it is a ton of work. And I'm totally with her that switching softwares makes her want to cry. Yeah, no, I totally, I get that. And I think, you know, not everybody's ready to come on to Made Central. This is software built for our industry. So it's trying to solve problems for our industry. I see that most of you will probably be on Made Central at some point in the future. Because we are gonna save you that time and that frustration and those things. But if you're not doing this stuff now, yeah, you need to find a way to do it, whether it's a white board or a spreadsheet, there's some- Yeah, I don't care how. You just start changing your mindset from I can't do this to I have to do this. This is something I have to do. That needs to be your new mindset here. We're talking smart business moves. This is one of them. Remember like when minimum wage would go up and it was like, I can't pay that much. Just like- Right. That's a, you're wasting your time having that discussion, except the fact that you're gonna have to pay that much and just figure it out. Yeah. If you're gonna stay in business, yep. Absolutely. Click on a- What is she been asking here? She's asking a question about how you do this with recurring clients. And we can answer that. If you click on availability and scroll down for instance, a little bit more. For this particular technician, she has a regular working schedule of three days a week between nine and two on Monday. And I guess nine and two on Thursday. And works a little bit later on Wednesday. And I guess today's Wednesday because that's colored a different color. But as a rule, the expectation would be that she works out that recurring schedule. And maybe she's on call because I see Sharon talking about how she would do that in her business, that maybe occasionally she works on a Thursday or a Friday. But we would try to schedule her recurring work for Monday, Wednesday and Thursday with an understanding that, as a rule, you're gonna be working those days. Being flexible doesn't necessarily mean it's like working in a restaurant where every week your schedule's different. Ideally is you wanna be able to agree up on a set working schedule of X number of hours and what days and you would schedule it like this. Yeah. We're talking a lot about the what here. Just one more piece of the how is a lot of times people are like, but it's so hard, I don't know how to do it. One of the pieces for the how is exactly what Tom said. Get them to decide on the schedule and have them and then you set their schedule so that you're working that schedule. If they wanna make a change, that's totally doable. Absolutely. With two weeks notice, I can make almost any change you want. If you wanna go from three days down to two weeks, absolutely put in your two weeks change and you will be able to have that happen. That's really no more disruptive to your schedule than if one of your employees, and actually it's less disruptive to your schedule than if one of your employees leaves. Yes, some of your jobs are going to have to be moved around. Different people are going to be cleaning, but doesn't that happen anyway when people leave? And the rest of the client won't have to have a change. And the other question was, how do you kinda make sure that they get that? Basically at the client level, you should create notes or tags or some sort of warning if they don't have the cleaner that they want, if it's that important to them because for some customers it is. And again, a lot of softwares have that solution, and Central has a solution that'll flag you, whether you're giving a customer a technician that they don't want or you can do all kinds of preference setting. So yeah, you should be meeting your customer's preferences still and managing that along with this. It becomes more complicated. You need to use more spreadsheets or more tools or software, but it is important as best you can. However, I think your customers need to be flexible in this environment as well. I just talked about it the other day with my staff. I was like, we had two teams driving out almost 15 miles from our office almost to almost like the houses that were on top of each other because they both wanted to be first thing on this day. And it would have been a much better situation had we've been able to negotiate with those customers and say, hey, we'll let one of you have first thing. It's gonna be $25 extra, which one of you want it? But someone would have said, I can be flexible for $25 less, but you need to find ways to make your schedule more efficient because I had four employees 15 miles from my office for no particularly good reason. And we need to solve problems like that. And when you're doing your rate increase letters, emails, it's a good opportunity to set those expectations. There's a lot of expectations that need to be reset with your clients moving forward that your prices are going up because all your expenses are going up at the same time. There's things that you're gonna be asking of them to do to help make it work. And if you've got employees that have this need to have flex schedules, they're gonna have to be more flexible as well. I mean, we took the opportunity to thank them in advance for understanding and working with us as we learn to do business in this new normal. This... Awesome, I like that. I like thanking them in advance. How did it go? How did your price increase go? Did you lose any customers? A couple, like... Just, you know, I'm thinking we've done it in Atlanta and in Greenville and in a percentage standpoint, you know, less than 2%. And more than that, more than that have sent emails back thanking us. And I can't remember ever having customers thanking us for a rate increase. Do you think that those customers were probably one bad day away from firing us anyway? I mean, it was like, this was just the thing that tipped them over the edge. So it's like, did it really matter? Were you eventually gonna lose those three or four customers anyway? You know? And some of these increases were, you know, a number of them were double digits in percentages. I mean, they weren't, you know, trivial. Yeah. I mean, you did a rate adjustment, not just a rate increase. You actually went to... Yeah, yeah, that's truly... I'm using the wrong term. These words, that's what... You got adjusted, not increased. This wasn't based on anniversary dates or anything else. It's just like, we're having to do more, and we're having to pay more, we're having to offer more benefits, and we're having to do it now. Yeah. This gets scarier and scarier the further you get behind this. So for me, where I'm at like $70 an hour, like 5% price increase sounds fun, right? I'm like, oh, let's see what happens. If you're really behind the ball, I bet this is scary, but you need to get that done. We keep talking about rate increases because it's just so important right now. I mean, it's just so critical. And it's like a lot of things in life. If you deal with it now, it's a problem. If you procrastinate, it just becomes a bigger problem. Yeah, that toothache that turned into a root canal, right? I mean, it's just, you know, had you gone in a little bit earlier and got the cavity filled, it would have been a little better than that root canal you ended up with. So... It's not going to go away and it's not going to fix itself. Yeah. We talk a lot about, we talk a lot to the people that are afraid, but for the people that are not afraid, they're just, they feel overwhelmed or it's daunting to do a price increase or a price adjustment. I work with companies that recently have been doing just a set amount and having much better success than they've had in the future. I know one company that did $20 across the board. Every single client, whether you pay normally $250 a week or you pay $110, got the $20 price adjustment. And that was to cover the cost for every client. And the letter was worded well, it went by email and it landed well. I don't remember how many people were lost, but it was, again, negligible. Not worth the conversation. Kathy Gage used to do that well. So I don't know, maybe people remember Kathy. She retired a few years back, but she was an old friend of mine for the industry. And she always believed that a set number was easier and she would do like six or eight or $10 a year and just do a set number. So I like that idea. That reminds me of Kathy. That's nice. Yeah. So there are lots of different ways. There's more than one way to skin a cat as the saying goes. And it's not a matter of, again, whether or not you're doing these things, it's a matter of, are you going to do them? And yes, you should be doing them. And how quickly can you get them done? Because if you are behind the trend on this, it's going to land much harder on you. The people that are doing these things in the beginning are getting the additional benefit from the employee side, which is what we really need right now, right? We really need that employee side. This is not just for you to put money back in your pocket. It's to make your business more profitable in the sense that those profits trickle into the employee's pockets and hopefully some gets left over for you. But obviously the real benefit is, is if you have higher gross profits, you can have higher employee wages that can attract better people, keep better people. It's not, again, it's not all about the money. It's, you know, you got to create a meaningful job. I think the scheduling stuff is really important. We're seeing that more and more with moms that will work a nine to two. Like we have a lot of nine to two schedules now, but it never done that a couple of years ago. I'd have been very opposed to that. I'd like to say one thing about the, going back to the just the set amount for all customers. Doing that is definitely superior over just saying this is too complicated and I'm not doing a rate adjustment. The problem with that is for your larger homes, your larger jobs that have multiple hours in it. When you do a rate increase, basically that, in the name of offsetting your labor, that increase has to be proportional to the amount of labor hours that you have in that house. So unless it's a really big number to cover even the largest house you do, you're going to find yourself getting behind on where you need to be for your larger jobs along with the, with the higher labor contact. So, you know, I'm on the surface, my heart races a little bit when I hear fixed- All right, fine. I got to throw out there, Tom. That does matter. The pay, your pay type, this ties into our call next Monday. So next Monday, we're going to be talking about the different ways of paying, whether you pay hourly, whether you pay percentage, whether you pay commission, whether you pay job ticket hour, the different ways of paying are impacted in much different ways by how you increase your rates. So we are going to be talking about that on Monday if you're interested because it's a much bigger issue now than it has ever been in the past too. You got to get that, you got to get that pay up. And so how, how is that working for you? How are you going to make that happen? And not everyone's looking at this as granular as me and you, Tom, like where we know like customers that are off by like, are we off by like a fraction of it, like a 10th of an hour and would we want to go up on that? Like, I mean, we're looking at this in a little different way. Like if they don't have this kind of data at this point in their business, but like it would be great if they did, right? Awesome. You don't. If this is where it's going, I mean, this is where we're all going to be at some point in time because this is just the competitive forces, but we're making it easier and easier. It's going to become easier and easier too. It was like advertising used to be the yellow pages and now we're doing, and we do in-home estimates and now we're doing online booking. This is just part of the evolution of where technology is taking the industry. Yeah. And you know, I know my variance, if my variance on a job, I'm looking at it on a more granular level. I'm looking at some reports like almost every day where I'm looking at it once a week. Somebody in my office is looking at it every day and somebody gives me a report of all the ones that are really off and that we need to talk to. But I mean, if you're waiting once a year to do this, you and I don't do that, don't do this stuff every day in our business, but somebody is looking at this every day and making sure that we're not waiting a whole year to price increase either if somebody's really off. You should be looking at those jobs in, you should be looking at those jobs really almost weekly and really finding any customers that are way off so that you don't wait a year if you've got some customer that's like, hey, those customers are bad for you because they're bad for culture because employees go to those houses and they're not happy and they don't make as much money doing those jobs that are way off, right? Liz, would you agree like, that's how we solve problems in our business? Like we give our best employees the worst garbageiest jobs that are like, oh, Mrs. Smith's house is a nightmare. It happens a lot. It happens a lot. I'll tell you that, that is very, very common. You use your, we use our best employees like workhorses, right? We, we will actually even say, yeah, she's a workhorse, put her on it. And you think you've solved the problem but you're really under utilizing your best people and the amount of revenue and the amount of profit that they should be generating for you and for themselves is less than what it should be. Yep. That's, that's my point is that, is that they don't produce enough revenue for the company because you're just giving them jobs that, you know, okay, they just solve the problem because now you're hitting your target at hour. But if it was any other employee, right? Like if it was any other employee, it like, let's see if this is, if this is all test data here. So it's like, like, so this, this job's taking super fast Susie three hours or supposed to take super fast Susie three hours. So Matt, can you explain what this, because people that aren't familiar with made central have no idea what these terms are. They don't know what allowed hours are. Oh, this is probably a longer discussion for the four minutes than we have left. Maybe we should save it. So this is a, this is a report that allows you to automatically rate rate increase increases or rate adjustments in made central. It's, you're looking at the productivity of those jobs and making sure that, that you're hitting like within the allowed hours. The allowed hours is how long you're, you're scheduled to clean that job. And the average hours is how long it actually takes. The normalized hours is it takes the productivity of all your employees and kind of just averages it out. So like, so if super fast Susie's not cleaning that house and your normal employees are, how long does it really take? Cause it helps you spot those jobs that are actually under bid, even though you're hitting your times. And, and you know, sometimes those can be significant. Sometimes those can be the ones that are the most far off is that, oh, it looks like we're hitting our times every time, but Susie, her production rates are so fast that it's, you know, that it's, you know, really being dragged down by this particular thing. So yeah. So you're gonna hear more about pay adjustments. So let's go ahead and put that on the agenda for next Wednesday. We'll do a deep dive on this because it really is important because it's through making sure that we get the billing right that gives us the ability to generate enough revenue where we can pay what we need to pay and provide the benefits and all the other things that we need to do to be the awesome employers that we need to be. It's really a virtuous circle cause if you're a great employer, you're able to provide great service and then you have a profitable company and all three of those kind of go together. But if the numbers aren't right and if you aren't generating the revenue and if you're making the profit, none of it works. So Susan, we'll do that next Wednesday. Susan, when you said pay adjustment, that's a different thing than what we're going to be talking about on Monday. What we're going to be talking about on Monday are the different pay types and how you decide on what type of pay you wanna have. A pay adjustment is- Rate adjustments, it's a risk adjustment. But you know, there's some, if somebody wants to know how to transition from say hourly pay to some type of incentive pay, like job ticket hour or commission, we can certainly help them with that on Monday. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, there's a lot to that, but you need to be able to track it and find ways to pay people by it. So that's a really important thing in ways to pay people by it. So that's sort of another way to do it. So make sure you create an incentivized program that you can actually track and manage because I have lots of good ideas, but I just can't figure out a way to track them. So if I can't measure it, then I don't do it. It doesn't count. Yeah, so just make sure you come, if you come up with a super way to pay people, make sure you have a way to track it because there are lots of ways to pay people that would be better than what's out there. And if you figure it out, it might be competitive advantage. You know, top of the hour. So we're good for today. I guess we're good for the week, huh? Yeah, is that it? We are. As always, Matt, thank you for your helping insight and sharing with us today. Any last matters of business we need to address? I don't think so, except everybody that got on this call late, go look through the thread, the comments. Tom posted some links to some really important information that you're all gonna wanna have. And if you wanna hear a lot about what we talked about at the beginning, tune in and listen to the president speak to Congress tonight. He's gonna be talking about a lot of things they're proposing that's going to be offering additional benefits to our workforce and it's going to affect us as employers and, you know, knowledge is power in this game and we're gonna have to make some smart business moves and you're gonna wanna know what's coming down the road. So have an awesome rest of your week and we'll be back here Monday, five o'clock, bye-bye. Bye y'all. Thank you.