 Okay, this is Time Stewart with Cleaning Business Today. We're doing our weekly five o'clock webinar on coronavirus, just to have an update in terms of what's going on and with the hope and goal of providing some useful information to house cleaning businesses. Let's go ahead and jump right in on this. This is kind of a slide that we've been starting off with with most of our discussions. I'll flip that around. Things obviously are getting worse, I guess, just in terms of the number of people are getting sick around the world, including the United States. A lot of major sporting events are being postponed or canceled. More and more schools are being canceled, starting to hit the tipping point, if you will. So a lot of reason to have concerns and to be afraid for our businesses. What I'm gonna be talking about today are some contingency plans that we should be thinking about in terms of how we should be planning and preparing to make sure that our businesses do okay through this or potentially we have the opportunity to even prosper and grow our businesses through this for some of the reasons that we have here. I truly believe that hygienic cleaning, cleaning for health, cleaning for something more than just making a house look better is gonna be important to consumers once this whole thing is over for years ahead. I've made the analogy before this is kind of like a 9-11 moment that when this thing's over, people are going to be thinking completely different about house cleaning. And it's gonna be a really great way to differentiate yourself in the marketplace. If you can do more than just run a vacuum cleaner and take trash out. If you can talk about how you sanitize and disinfect surfaces and really study and learn the science of cleaning. And we're working on some ways that we can help all cleaning business owners grow and pick their game up in that area. If they need help, if there's opportunities for improvement, we all have opportunities for improvement in that area. And in the weeks ahead, we're gonna be putting together some material that we believe will be very useful for that. The labor market should be coming back to us. I would be surprised if we don't see a lot of extra qualified labor on the market in the weeks ahead for obvious reasons. The press loves talking about coronavirus and they're looking for subject matter experts so we can get some good PR, basically free advertising for our business. Increase income, consumers seeing more value in professional house cleaning because of the health and reducing the chance of infection. It kind of goes hand in hand. More value means you should be able to command a higher price and you should. And that should equate to more profits as well, higher margins. There's gonna be some opportunities for non-traditional income. Some consumers might not want people in their home but at the same time, there's gonna be businesses, there's gonna be schools, there's gonna be a lot of other people that are concerned about taking measures to reduce the chance of infection. And if we are professional house cleaners and cleaning companies that have the right products, have the right knowledge that we can go in and reduce the chance of infection by sanitizing and disinfecting high touch areas and taking other measures to make indoor space safe. And that's a great opportunity for us. So, it's not, there could be a really big silver lining in this cloud, if you will. We talked about kind of our smart business moves plan and we play a really important role. We are as cleaning businesses on the frontline of defense against infectious disease. Obviously, there's a tremendous concern about that right now. So again, that's an opportunity. Plus, we have an obligation and role to make sure that we're being responsible and for the sake of our employees as well as our clients to know the proper techniques to keep everybody safe. Communication plan, we've talked about that and we have some examples on our cleaning business day resource page and we'll go over that a little bit at the end. We developing an action plan. And there's a lot to that and we've been going through some of those steps. Had a pretty good Facebook live yesterday. Matt Rick has helped us out with some of the things that he's doing in his business. Training is gonna be really important. We're gonna be spending more time talking about that next week. The public relations, we touched upon that. Continuously planning is what we're gonna be and spending a little bit of time on today along with, and after we do all of those things we need to assess what we're learning because things are happening fast and we're gonna learn more and more. We need to constantly be reviewing and revising all of those plans and then we basically start all over again. Few bullet items on contingency planning. I'm gonna start with working capital. Even with our best efforts, there's a real chance that we might find ourselves in the situation where we don't have the same amount of income coming into our business as we once did. We might lose some business at least for a while and when things, you know, schools close in your area and businesses maybe would be slowing down and if more consumers don't want people in their homes we need to be prepared for that. What fixed costs do we have in our business? Do we have leases or mortgages? Do we have car notes? Do we have, what bills and obligations do we have for a business and personally? And, you know, you need to also be thinking about your employees as well, your key people and everybody in general to make sure that they're, you know, getting the help that they need through these tough times that they're losing hours. Fortunately, there's a lot that seems gonna be happening at the federal government level that's going to be, or at least a lot of discussions that could be taken care of your employees which would be a huge help. But for your business, you know, you need to, one thing that I would encourage people to do is to be looking for sources of working capital, ways that you could have some money set aside and if you don't have any, see if you can borrow some. I don't know if you've got lines of credit set up, maybe an equity line on your home or just some line of credit. If things get really, really bad, those lines of credit can be pulled away. If you try to draw up on them, sometimes the banks, I mean, the banks, if you read the fine print and all of that, they can basically shut those down on you. I remember back like in 2007, 2008, when things started getting really bad, I maxed out every credit line that I had and borrowed every dollar I could find from wherever I could get it and scrolled it away in a bank account, knowing I wanted to get it when I could get it rather than leaving it there and trusting because I did have some lines of credit, like credit cards and stuff like that kind of got sucked down quite a bit by the banks. So if you can do that now while the money's still there, that's good, plus interest rates are really low. You also want to be thinking about what you're going to do from a labor standpoint. If schools are closing, if daycare is closing, you've got a lot of employees that really don't have a contingency plan or what they're going to do with their kids. So they might not be able to work. So you want to be having those discussions with your employees now. You know, do they have a plan? If they don't have a plan, maybe you can help them figure out a plan. Maybe your employees, you can get groups of people where maybe together they could afford to get some help or maybe they could help each other watching their kids. I mean, you don't have to do this by yourself, I guess is my point. Start having the discussion with your employees now in terms of what we're going to do with daycare. If they need it, again, contingency plan, it might not be an issue, but if it is, you need to have a plan. And I guess the other part of that is, you know, you might want to be recruiting, maybe not necessarily hiring, but at least recruiting to have people in the pipeline. And the thinking is you're going to be having more people out there looking for work as restaurants and hospitality and tourism and a lot of these other industries are slowing down. They're going to be putting some really good talent on the market. People who wanted to make a living being an Uber driver, really getting slammed. I mean, there's just a lot of people out there that I believe are going to be looking for work here shortly. You need to be planning on where you're going to be getting your supplies. And just because this is the last time you placed an order, you were able to get everything that you wanted. I wouldn't trust that to be the case a month ahead. Our typical operating procedure at Castle Keepers is to order like one month ahead. We've been, you know, every month we do an inventory and we buy enough product to keep us going for the next month. We've been stocking up like three months ahead. Now we're not hoarding stuff that we don't need but the really basic stuff that's important for us, we've been buying extra but just to have some on the shelf just in case supply lines do get cut off, something to think about. Now you wanna be looking around just for opportunities to cut costs. If you've got subscriptions to things or you're spending money in areas or maybe even, you know, your indirect labor, your office help or there are ways of getting the same things done a little more economically. You don't necessarily have to pull the trigger on it but you at least know what moves you can make if you needed to reduce that cost to basically save the amount of money that you would need to pay your bills. Non-traditional revenue streams. I believe there's gonna be a lot of those out there. Schools, businesses, multi-family communities. A lot of people are gonna be looking for help, sanitize, disinfect and make their properties safer. Which kind of gets us to the small business administration. I'm gonna share a little bit of information from the SBA website that small businesses, small business owners, house cleaning companies, we really all need to be spending some time this weekend and that's why I wanted to do this today. I want us to all be spending some time doing some research on what's happening on the government side. And the SBA is one organization that we, all of us that are here in the United States would have access to and they're doing some things. Let me see if I can pull it up here. If you go to their landing page, they've got a whole section here on just businesses that are impacted by the coronavirus and they've got several sections in terms of guidance for businesses and employers, disaster loan programs, we're talking about working capital. I would look into this, might not need it, but it's one of those things, I'd really have it, not need it, need it, not have it, at least find out if you might qualify and how that would work. I was doing some reading that I know like in Seattle, there are banks that are making zero interest loans to small businesses that can demonstrate that they've lost a certain percentage of their income. Sounds like a great opportunity. I would be looking into that and asking those questions as well. There's another thing here that I want to show you about local assistance and SBA has this program that they call SCORE. That's an acronym for basic, I forget what the acronym stands for, but basically these are retired business professionals, executives who help small businesses and that would be a resource that I would reach out to as well, especially if you're concerned about losing revenue. And one of the things that I would inquire about is what are the non-traditional sources of income that might be out there? Because if you look up here, just above, we've got government contracting. The government's gonna be throwing money out, hand over fist to try to bring the economy back. Plus they're afraid of basically just trying to contain the virus and infection control and they're going to one of the biggest things that you can do in that area to help is to clean in a hygienic way. Opportunity for us guys. You want to get out there and you want people who are looking for that type to help to know that you're there to be part of the solution. Networking with the SBA, figuring out how you can get recognized by the federal government as a contractor. This will help you there, but honestly, I think there's gonna be a lot more opportunities at the state and even the local level and your local SBA office in score contacts can tell you who the purchasing people are at a county and city level and what organizations within the local government might be looking for the type of help that you're providing and they could help make the connection. So, that's pretty much what we got today. We're gonna be back Monday at five o'clock Eastern. We'll be picking the discussion up. Wanna show a couple of things here with you. If you haven't subscribed to cleaning business today yet over here on the right, we're shooting out, we're gonna be starting next week. Derek Christian, my partner in clean business today, we're gonna start doing a newsletter on a daily basis for some of this information. If you wanna get that, make sure that you've got your email and contact information entered there. We got a really good article here that goes over a lot of the basics of the coronavirus and we're working on some more content there. If you want to have access to some of the resources that we're putting out here for download or some of them are, a lot of it's download, some of it are just links to websites that they'll be useful to you. Go to coronavirus-downloads and here's information down here at the bottom is the link to the COVID-19 page on the Small Business Administration. I hope you're finding this information useful. Let me know if there's more information or anything specific you'd like for us to be addressing next week. Again, we'll be back Monday at five o'clock Eastern. Thank you for taking the time to listen to this information that we believe is very important for all house cleaning companies to know and to implement. And you guys have a great weekend and hope to see you Monday. Thank you.