 Hey guys, good afternoon everybody Tom Stewart here. I am with Liz Trotter This is smart business moves our special guest today is our good friend Matt Ricketts. Hey Matt. How are you? I'm awesome You know, I feel energized because you know, we didn't work yesterday I Didn't do a dog on thing yet. Well, that's not true, but we didn't do I Did feel weird, didn't it? Yeah, I'm feeling like I was forgetting something that I Did have a little bit of anxiety thing And I usually have people hitting me up in the afternoon and then they start apologizing oops I'm sorry. You got smart business moves and I wasn't saying anything Yeah, I ran into a little bit of that too so I Was happy to to have it happen, but it did feel It was a little nerve-wracking after I have to say it's a little nerve-wracking Did it okay, who's on here is didn't eat on here? I can't wait for her to get on here Where is she? Oh, I hate when sometimes it shows my comments and sometimes it doesn't see her here yet Yeah All right, so before she gets here how long before she says something about Tom's haircut just who wants to get 30 seconds she shows up You know one of the things that we need to be talking about sometime and not today because that's gonna be helping us with with sales and When I think to be kind of a unique perspective on on some of the important parts of sales, but you know, I'll let You know, I'm not gonna kind of jump the headline. Oh that'll let that get into all of that But this whole wage thing and wage It's Linda's birthday. Sorry Tom's gonna grab his hat I should go grab my hat too. All right, I'll grab my hair I don't have any props It's DJ. How are you man? I Have no props. I feel left out. That's okay, ma'am. You do this long enough. You will I don't know if I could do a weekly web show a little on when you guys did every day for like a Year Matt. It was only a year. Yeah, yeah There you go, Linda. We also have Trisha's birthday today, too. We have two people in growth of birthday today. Oh, very cool. Yeah. Hey, Robin so we really need to do a deep dive about what's happening in the labor market and No, we've been having some some some discussions, you know behind the scenes, but I think there's a whole lot to to unpack there and where wages are and where wages are going and How it's so much bigger than just wages basically it's the needs and expectations of the workforce and You know, I'll go as far as to say that, you know We've we've done we do business in various parts of the country and we kind of lament over how some parts of the country The labor market is just Different and they just don't want to work the way they do in the rest of the regular country and I guess what I'm seeing is that That is coming to all of us that it's not just an isolated pockets anymore. That's That's the new normal as part of the new normal I agree. I think that we we should have been paying better attention and recognizing that That's the trend. We just were recognizing that we were it was the beginning of a trend. Yeah It was like, well, you know, I really want to deal with that. So we're we you know, but No, we should you know retrospect. We should say, okay, we got we got to solve this problem because It's a problem. We're gonna have to solve everywhere But but time you mean you made a mistake. You're not perfect. I didn't well. No, God knows about not perfect, but you know, I Do kick myself when When something obvious is staring at me and I don't say it and I I certainly miss that one Well, we were I I think a lot of people think you're perfect. So I like that you're pointing out that You're not For those of you who work with me on a more close basis. No, the reality there is is quite a bit different So we were all partners in Portland. We should all be well prepared for what's going on now. So That's it feels a little bit Portland-esque about, you know, some of the the demands people are making as they walk in the door and You know, I had somebody yesterday. Maybe we should have been more sensitive to the fact She only works 25 hours and asked to go part-time mean we kind of We kind of weren't as sensitive as we could have and she quit on us and she brought her friend with us So we lost two employees over it. I think we all need to probably have a little bit more Appreciation for the fact that people are a little more sensitive to those things I mean, I have a meeting tomorrow with my staff where I'm gonna probably say, you know Some of the kind of military style rule that I've kind of applied across the business for my airline days Just can't you know, those really tight rigid rules just aren't gonna apply as much anymore. We're gonna have to Rethink some of the things that we do. So I'm right there with you. I'm feeling that Yeah, I do think we're going to still have to have a Structure that we follow and there are still going to be parameters because people are are really Just hardwired for expectations. So I think we will have to do that. They're gonna be different Oh, they're gonna have to be much more lax We're going to have to we're gonna have to be more flexible than we've ever been Instead of these are the hard and fast rules. No exceptions It's kind of like well, this is the framework and if we can work with inside of the framework We can find win-wins You know, we've got some work to do to figure out how to do that but You know, it's not a matter if I mean it's it's it's it's do that or you know I don't think I don't think that that we're gonna be competitive as an industry or players within the industry if we can't figure that out because You know the world as we knew it pre pre COVID from a from a workforce standpoint and That's just that's just rude V mirror stuff. It's never going to be the same yeah, I was on a one-on-one coaching call today and The this business wants to make some significant changes to the way they're doing business but they weren't focusing in on the employee portion and We had to do a quick You need to be thinking about this for the next year This is going to be a hot topic and it's never going back to the way it was So you need we all need to be starting there It's me the first the first thing that we're looking at. Yeah, and I actually think even about this You know, I'm gonna I'm here to talk about sales today But but a lot of that is selling jobs that are priced well enough that you can pay your employees a wage That's competitive. I mean we can dive into some some numbers in my in my software later And if people have questions, but you know, I I average out over $19 per hour per employee And it's you know, that's my like that's from clock in to clock out. We pay pretty darn. Well, yet I still maintain high profitability You know and that's because I sell my jobs that I'm averaging out almost $70 per hour You know, I don't have that as my advertised rate I don't have it. I don't tell people what we charge per hour per hour. I don't even have like I don't even have that We're just you know, we're just selling the jobs to make as much profit as we can and looking to get rid of jobs That aren't profitable so we can pay our people more Yeah, I mean, yeah, we've got more work We know what to do with and we're going out with another round of rating creases and You know, we've got people that are getting rating creases that it's been six months Since they've had their last one and and the increase letter We're letting them know that this might not be the last one We're getting this year that in order for us to be the service that you trust the service provider Do you want us to be and in order for our team members to be the employer that they want us and need us to be? This is necessary and all we're doing is just you know reacting to the reality of the post pandemic World the new reality Well, we're not the only ones. I mean everybody is used to it and what hasn't gone up. We were just talking about it Gas has gone up what they say one point two point nine percent and month over month Everything's going up. Um, I know in my brother's business their Lumber one one of their lumber packages has gone up four hundred percent So they're dealing with a lot of Inflation the lumber is just off the charts So matt To the topic at hand we will we will dive into this whole labor situation thing Maybe as early as next week. I don't know. I mean that's that's a possibility, right? I actually think I actually think it ties into a little bit what we're talking today We could probably do some follow-up with it. I actually think sales and fulfillment Are actually related to labor issues And if we don't have time today, I'm happy to come back next week and we can talk about How they interact by by again making sure you're selling jobs That are as profitable as possible to get people paid as well as possible. So I think we are in a period of of really Um, you know shifting thinking about how you price jobs and how you think about paying your people So, yeah, we can we can do some follow-up on that if we just don't have enough time today So do you want to just dive into this and yeah, we do Robin has a question about when you pay 18 18 hour text using their cars Or benefits in the 18? That's just direct labor Robin. That's just uh, it's about 19 You know, that's not even including tips either So like you know another dollar 60 per average and credit card tips Uh that I collect through my through my thing So my my text actually probably make closer to $22 an hour by the time they get cash tips And uh and credit card tips. I don't know. I don't I stay out of the cash tips Um, but that's just direct labor. Um and against about 36 percent Um, um payroll to revenue. So I still run a very profitable operation. So, um, again Just direct revenue based on paying people percentage Because when you're managing, you know, the productivity and scheduling in a way where it's efficient and Generating the right amount of revenue per technician per day. You can pay those wages. Yeah And you have to be able to Yeah, and honestly, you know, I'm looking for customers, you know to replace cost I I fired a $13,000 a month customer because when I tried to give them a price increase I got a lot of pushback and I gave them 30 days notice and it's scary But I'm like that's three employees that I can deploy that I can make $18,000 a month with Versus $13,000 a month. That's $5,000 additional that that I wouldn't be able to get it because they're Tied up in a job that's not as profitable. So How do you price your initial deep claims matt season wants to know I shoot for 75 an hour at least Like is what we want to generate on our on our initial deep things flat rate or range Uh, we we give a flat rate, but we what we tell people we price them high enough that actually we usually are Are more than 75 an hour to be totally honest And I'm not selling any one-time jobs at all right now I'm only selling to people that are that are booking recurring service And if they book recurring and they book Either weekly or bi-weekly I give them a discount on that first cleaning But only if they book weekly or bi-weekly not for monthlies Um, so and again, we're shooting to before any discounts to be averaging about 75 per hour cool awesome, so You want to uh share your your your deck. Yeah, it's just down below just click on it and it should be Should be available there. Does yeah all right, so What I think about when I think about sales is sales is definitely related to fulfillment because they kind of drive each other Right if you have a good if you have good sales You can easily go out of business quickly if you don't fulfill your promises and You know, how do you define fulfillment? Meeting meeting customers expectations, whether that's the time you promised them the team you promised them You know the the notes that they have on their job Um the rooms that they have things like You know things like you know detailed notes on you know pets and anything really I mean, you know Getting to their house on time like by having a good system to to to have directions and you know send them to the right place And uh, you know the right keys and all that all that's fulfillment And then making sure that their expectations are met and that they give you a good score You know that uh would be fulfillment and then to to to really the real goal is To make them stay longer as a customer because if you lose customers out the back Right, what does that cost you? You know, so so for me, we'll talk what we'll talk about a little bit more Let me go to the next slide here, but uh the goal is See if it'll click through So basically fulfillment is just doing the work Yeah done making it happen whatever the client thinks they're paying for You're making that you're giving that to them getting it done and tom and I use the term scope of work And making sure that the scope of work that they are expecting is completed As they expect it with who they expect it if you know, they have requests so um You know and that's that's kind of the that's kind of the idea here, but so the the for me selling jobs is Is really just you know the bare minimum, right? So this is an iceberg Most of us are all very concerned with booking jobs scheduling homes getting your technicians scheduled cleaning homes And then what's missing on here is getting paid, right? So those that's what that's what most of us are focused on with sales, right? But for me my my goals are to improve productivity, right? So make sure that i'm hitting the target time that is set Right and not going not going over that time. In fact, maybe even being a little under that time Maybe not a whole lot, but again I want to be above 100 productivity to be totally honest of what i've quoted and what my employees are doing Improve efficiency efficiency is tooth is two things It's how well you schedule your technicians by having them Um, you know, you know have low drive time Um, you know no wasted time between jobs, but it's also it's also how they use their time Are they taking wasted breaks things like that? So efficiency is how well do they use their time during the day and how well do you schedule them? And that can definitely cost you a lot of money if you aren't efficient in your scheduling and how they use their times um I'm very concerned with improving the lifetime value of a customer because You know if you're losing a lot of customers at the back Your lifetime value of a customer decreases dramatically. So me and liz have talked about this before um, I used to bench mine benchmark my uh churn at 3% a month and I worked really hard over the last couple years to get it down to 2% Which increased my lifetime value of a customer from Around eight or nine thousand dollars to 15 thousand dollars So I can spend more money on marketing to get more customers. I make more money longer on that customer, right? So all of my sale when I talk about fulfillment fulfillment is really about Um about really getting that customer to stay as long as possible, right and spend as much money as possible with me because The sale doesn't end with the sale the sale ends every time you do a job for that customer Like that's a new sale every single time and making sure that they stay and that's what fulfillment is. It's not just that first job It's keeping those promises over the long time being so my my uh philosophy for my business is to be consistently delightful But that that word consistent is very important to me um So then lowering loaded direct payroll to revenues So making sure that that the jobs that we're doing are those most profitable jobs And making sure that I stay in those in those those ranges that I want to be at Because if i'm doing jobs that are that are exceeding that i'm not making as much money on each one of those employees times And I can't pay my people as much The next thing is lowering operating expenses. That's that's a more a function of uh of some other metrics But it's it's on the slide. So we'll go with it um, but Everyone focuses on these elaborate mousetraps For their marketing and sales and it's really not about that, right? um It's consistent. It's consistent follow-up and fulfilling promises. So Simple predictable consistent processes are better than complex mousetraps And I mean things like infusion soft. They're great But if it complicates your business and it doesn't talk to your other software Then it's then it's a mousetrap and it's just creating friction To delivering great service now. You need a follow-up process and if that is infusion soft or whatever is that's great But don't let the complexity of what you're doing dictate what you're really trying to do which is be consistent Okay, what I what I hear you saying there mad is that sometimes we lose sight of what the true goals are which would be to generate, you know profitable revenue because we kind of get lost within Building the mousetrap. Yeah, I'm a tinker. I'm a tinker at heart I remember having this game as a kid and I loved building these elaborate mousetraps And that's how I kind of felt about infusion soft I'd be like, oh if I actually If I do this when a customer quits Um, and and I market to them for a year I might get back some of those customers and it's pretty it's pretty, you know Pretty awesome if I could get you know three back a year, but here's the thing um, you know I did the numbers on it and basically Um, you know if we if we were losing about, you know, 20 customers a month with, you know When we were at our full, you know, largest size 18 customers a month at two at two percent when we were like, you know Pretty good size before pandemic Um, you know over the course of the over the course of the year, you know over, you know over the course of the year We we would be churning out like Um You know, that's that's probably too. I mean it's 15 customers a month But either way the number would be like we would have a chance to maybe interact with about 180 customers Over the course of the year we'd get back six of them. It's three percent or less It just wasn't worth all that building and tinkering to get back six customers and that's at a pretty large size. So um There's other ways to do that like facebook marketing or some other things that are Less interactive. You're the economic term called opportunity cost Which is basically what what return off of your investment where you're getting and could you to spend the same amount of time Engaged in other activities that would have created more value and a lot of times Yes, and I think there's other ways to do it. There's those you can use your facebook marketing to pixel You know old customers you can do some other things that are less You know less app to breaking less app to needing, you know interaction between two different systems So again, you know, keep it simple keep it reliable. Um, that's more important to me Um, you do want to have a lead magnet a lead magnet on your site now That doesn't have to be like a report for most of our consumers It's just they want to know how much what what it costs, right? Like they've already probably decided to do business with you based on reviews or other things online They found you now you got to give them a compelling reason to give you their information. So Um, you know, it could be instant price get a quote book now But make it easy for them to call you as well have your phone number out there and available for them I feel like that is something of a lot of the new websites kind of overlook is that a lot of consumers still want to call you um, I use this get instant price as as our lead man lead magnet and it uh It captures our lead and um, you know, you want to make it as simple as possible long form captures um Cause friction. So if you have like this big form that pops up They're not going to fill that out like even this might be too long, right? This is five fields That might be too long You know, there's actually a lot of thought that maybe just the email address is all you should be asking for and then it opens up A two-step form. What do you think tom? Like there's five fields too much. Is that would that be friction for you? No, I I think that's about right. I wouldn't go any further than that but I mean For there there are a lot of people that would argue that for every piece of data Additional piece of data you ask for you're going to lose Some amount of of the traffic Yep, I don't know what I don't know what that number is. I've read studies and things like that But but I agree like you got to balance it with you know, what value you get with that extra piece of data Don't ask questions that aren't going to create value but You know having somebody's first name without having an email address doesn't help you much So it's you have to at least get some basic contact info Exactly. Um, so that's kind of the thoughts on this. So, um, we have some questions too, tom. Are you seeing them and waiting or? uh um We'll get we'll get to this. This will be this will be kind of like the next slide after this season. So, yeah Yeah, so so then um Sell online you're done now. I'm just kidding. You really you really need to consider this to your process though Almost 50 of our sales are not completed online and This really takes a lot of time off of our back office support and actually people pay actually more than when they call us and You know because we price it a little higher online because we don't have all the variables that we would necessarily get If they if they were to call us on the phone So really consider this into your process. You're not done when this happens though. I'm just kidding Um So make sure that your leads are coming into a crm It'd be ideal if it's going directly into it from your website This is critical so that you can create reliable and repeat repeatable processes And that gets to your next point linda, which I believe is Contact your leads fast. All right, so consider automating some of this, but whatever you do do it fast. So immediately um Through through the crm. I use which is made central an email gets sent out or you could send out a text um immediately now Um, I don't like sending out text like without I actually like humans to send out text. I don't like automated text. So um, I actually don't use any text automation because I just feel like It it always feels like it's from a robot and like even if it you're talking about the sales process Now there's everything such as reminders and so forth that you would Yeah, those I do those I do Automatically yes, but like for for the sales process before we've had any contact with them. I don't believe in using automated Thank you. That's a good clarification And so according to the brevet group up to 50 of sales go to who responds first That that's still a critical thing to think about is Especially if you're using thumbtack or something like that for a lead generation source Uh, I think thumbs thumbtack has a study that it's that it's almost 80 of the sales go to who contacts the lead first Through those lead generation sites Well, because they're so fatigued by the number of calls because like like they literally like get hammered with calls Like from four companies when you fill those things out. So um, yeah So you need follow-ups so we talked about it, right? So in the simplest sense Um You know studies show that up to 80 of sales still take at least five contacts So for me a contact is like a phone a text an email Seeing your facebook ads after they visited your website. Those are all contacts Um, but 90 of sales still happen in part over the phone. So brevet group again This is is a form of sales automation. That's in made central. That's the simplest form of of automation that can be It's just you you haven't contacted this person and or or you haven't followed up with them yet And it forces you to follow them up. Follow up with them. Um, that's better than what 90 percent of us are doing Anyway, they get a lead and it's probably on a piece of paper and you shuffle them around on your desk And you can't do that anymore. You need some sort of way to remind you and pop this, you know, pop this up So this is how made central does it in the simplest form in a more complex form Is that allows you to build blueprints of follow-up? And whatever you do, you need a blueprint. You need a consistent reliable blueprint Of how you're gonna follow up with your leads and again, ideally they come into your crm and your crm tells you Hey, you need you need to contact this person. So for us immediately Linda, so we we actually send them We get a quote once I once a lead or a quote comes in We send them a text immediately and say hey, this is katie from from better life maids Is this a good time to call and uh, what that does is it does two things is is it if they reply to it It kind of puts them through the speed filter in uh In an iphone or or their device so that when you do call some some some phones now Block calls from companies the first time so that kind of preempts that from getting blocked So there's two there's two reasons behind that Did you have any other questions that leads susan while I kind of i'm on this slide you're you're asking about Yeah, I think most everybody really likes to talk to the people susan We're all kind of on that same page, but it's not as easy as it once was to to actually talk with someone Yeah, this new iphone update makes it like really interesting because like they will they will block your your like Your phone won't even ring to them. I'm not even sure. I'll even go to Um Yeah Um I think you need to customize your service to your to your people when you are selling to them You need to make your service as customized to that customer in that unique customer as you can And creating a unique scope of work for them as you can so the more data you capture At that point is is what you would use in the fulfillment process for better outcomes So um, I mean we capture data all the way down to like the rooms and try and generate, you know, um Allowed minutes and fees for rooms We're we're doing things like capturing pet information Capturing things like time. What are some other things you capture that that are important like uh people live in the house um Certainly, you know square footage Um, actually we we we have the ability to kind of customize that and you know, some people Will capture You know how much flooring is hard versus carpet There's a lot a lot of variations of that. Yeah, and so, um Is there any way you can make this bigger we can't really or at least I can't really see This you mean with two monitors you can't see it Even on my 42 inch monitor. It's It's it's uh, what we'll do is if people have more questions on seeing this it's we'll we'll we'll look at the software a little under the hood Um, so but other things we other things we capture is preferences like what time do they want service now? If we're going to do that, I think we should charge more for that So if someone asks us if they want for you know, they want first of the morning We can capture that preference. It'll create flags in our software if we're not meeting that preference And you know, we we'd like to charge more for that for those sort of things. So Yes, thank you matt. I love that I I think that people get really hung up on. Oh, we don't do that. We don't do that y'all If you can charge for stuff Be flexible if you do a system around it If you have a way to track it and fulfill it Yes, now if they don't have a way to to keep that promise then they should not do Because broken promises are Is worse than is worse than saying no you want to say yes, Liz. I love that I love that what you're saying Find ways to say yes and then find ways to charge for yes And we charge for it though and we've talked about this like over the years You know one business model is to offer say three variations and if somebody wants you to deviate on more than three things from so pay you Say that well, we really can't do that um Yeah, there was a time when that made a lot of sense There was a time when the yellow page has made a lot of sense But I think times are changing and consumers are expecting more I mean technology is enabling us to do things that we couldn't do in the past and In order to be competitive and to again the lifetime value of a customer You know, I think that you know being more adaptive to doing these You know a site specific scope of work. I guess it's kind of a of a of a nerdy term for it but you know Given it give give the customers what they want and Point which made a really important point Tom That technology has advanced to the place that we can do a lot of this stuff reliably Back in the day. Yeah three three variations or three exceptions You were going to fail if you did anything more than that You were going to let the customer down But nowadays we can do so much more but we kind of get stuck in this old thinking You don't want to make promises you don't want to make promises you can't deliver But with today's technology you can promise more than you used to Yeah So I went back a slide because what you talked about because I it got me thinking about this customer that used to have very specific notes And we had like this long list of notes and it became problematic because you'd have to read through the whole thing And now actually with with made central is like actually if I want to put detailed notes on like a certain bedroom Like this customer wanted certain lights off and certain lights on when we left You could actually like put very detailed notes and even pictures of how this customer wanted the trash cans a certain way And I mean we charged them crazy money because they asked for all this stuff And And it was and it was very profitable job But it was also stressful to the technicians because we didn't have all this technology to do this back then So we're like you have to spend 10 minutes reading the notes every time before you go in there And that was part of how we used to build them out But um, you know you want to track and celebrate success with your with your team So, you know, I think you know having a way to share and visualize, you know, how many recurring sales you've had How many one-time sales you've had You know, that's that's really an important part of of sales and making that public through your company through Some sort of dashboard would be something that I would would highly recommend And that gets into sales fulfillment, so All this stuff is great You can build like a great mousetrap that brings you all the leads you want and all the you're closing all these sales but um, you know Promises met promises made promises kept times teams notes access more The promises you make during the sale need to match what's delivered to the customer Or else you will lose that customer. Maybe not the first time maybe the second time, but they will not put up with it for very long so This is this is why you know You know, these are all notifications from our system. That's like We're not meeting some preference here. So this employee preference flag is not being met for these two customers And these time preference flags are not being met. So these things need to be adjusted Looks like we also have a couple houses outside of their notification windows. They've already been told something different And we've changed them. So we need to get back with these people and fix this, right? So this is going to help us meet promises or if we have variation We should we should reach out to these customers and tell them why we're not meeting these promises at the very least Would you agree? I mean, I think, you know, if you can't meet it. Sarah's off. She's on vacation Um, hey, mr. Smith. I know you've requested sarah Um, I got a notice that actually sarah's off tomorrow. I just wanted to let you know your team is great You have so and so Um, if you know, we've we put all the notes on there. They should do a great job for you If you have any concerns about that, let me know it'd be better just to get a reschedule than to have her unhappy, you know You know, as much as that's a pain in the butt. We don't want to do that stuff Um, it would be it would be better, you know to to keep that promise So the next part of it is Is quality measurement you need to you cannot be afraid to ask your your clients or customers, whatever you call them How things went right? How many of you aren't even serving because you're scared to know What your clients have to say? I think that's a very common theme I hear people that are very successful and very large companies But but like when they get down to it, they're stuck They're stuck in a place where like other companies have gotten past and I feel like a lot of it is They just they're they're losing cuss. They're losing customers because they don't have a quality management system and measurement system in place And and quality management quality measurement are critical to increasing the lifetime value of your clients and keep them longer So you did all this job on fulfillment to hit those things now You should be you should be asking them how it went and make that part of your culture is to ask on on every visit how it went so You know, we had a 95.8 8 scorecard rating here if you're using a five point system that'd be roughly like a 4.8 With about a almost a 50% response rate. So I know some of you could hire For me 50% is good. I can I can come up with good data based on 50% response rate. That tells me, you know, what I need to know I do I do want to say that we're all going to have to be looking at how we're going to be modifying this if you are Sending out your daily scorecards every time somebody's clean if you haven't gotten to that point yet Come on now get on board. I know there's still a lot of people that are thinking I don't want to bug my clients That's too much. They're going to be hassled Nope, uh, some of us have been doing it for a decade now and it works but Things are changing in this area also People are getting a little review weary. They're getting review fatigue. They're being asked to review every single thing How how many reviews are you? Do you get review request you get a day now? I get four five a day sometimes Everything I do they want to request. I mean they want to review So we're going to have to all be looking for Ways to get this measurement from them that they think it's valuable that it's in their best interest Not in our best interest a lot of times The message message that we get is I have to do this for you So I'm really highly recommending to everybody that I'm working with right now Getting this message across to the customer. How is this for them? Not for you So I just want to point that out real quick because that's a a key shift A lot of times these subtle keys make make all the difference. That's the small stuff. That's a good point Um The next point though would be the quality the quality measurement is not just to get that data It's to it's to put it to use so and this is where it benefits them So what good is that data if it's not readily available? So it needs to be integral integral part of sales fulfillment so that every member of your team has it So the the picture on the right is from one of our technicians dashboards Where where they have the job information on the left tab on the right tab They can look at the history of all the jobs that's ever happened no matter who's been there So it's not just their scores at that property. It's everyone. So if there's a problem the last time They'll they'll have that there and then we visualize our scorecards everywhere everywhere So on these little jobs even on our dispatch board We have you know, those little it's hard to see in the image, but the little green square there Is a is a little happy face, which is our which is a thrilled And so again, we're visualizing this data everywhere So that you know, if there is if there are red flags anything like that We immediately do this and we can create we can create reports based on Like last visits and upcoming jobs to make sure that we're hitting these things and really Working hard on the customers that haven't been as happy to either bring them up or if they're going to be a drag on profits Maybe they're not a good fit and bring them out You know if you just you keep going to a house and it's that's very discouraging and you're you're spending all this extra time That's probably not a good fit. I mean, unfortunately, I know liz would probably tell me otherwise But I I would probably rather not have that customer and let them be happy elsewhere Um, at least in this particular market. It's just it's very yeah, I wouldn't say that right now Things are different. We can't we can't even take on all the work that's coming our way. Absolutely Don't be you know, don't be tripping over gold to pick up pennies That that's not smart Susan, uh, you have a schedule you have it in click up to call your clients I'm guessing that that's for response rate to increase your response rate. That's awesome And yeah qts going out. I'm guessing you're doing it weekly for everybody for the week Uh, yeah, that's that's a great strategy too as long as everybody's getting it. Yeah qts has some awesome Uh stats that you can watch that can really help you out. So that's awesome Yeah, and you know Happy dry happy customers are what really drives sales. So so perceived quality is directly relating to is directly related to meeting those expectations And then you know meeting those expectations is how you lower your client churn and increase the lifetime value. So Um, you know, I see on this right hand side, we've got a bunch of these inconsistencies So but but if we you know if we're focused on consistency That's probably the one Measure that I think is probably the the key to meeting expectations So giving clients the same team even though we don't promise that stuff on the same day at a consistent time at all is possible Even if we can't promise all those things It really does actually reflect on keeping our clients longer term And actually I think it really helps keep your employees longer term longer term too If you're giving them inconsistent schedules, they're always working with different teams They're being thrown all over the place. It's stressful So consistency is actually winning for your customers and it's it's a winning measure for your team members too So I would say having tools to help you be consistent is is going to help again with this really Tough labor market make the people you have feel better about their job. I mean, um You know, most of our most of our employees grew up in homes where change was a bad thing, right? Like oh, we're moving to a new house It probably wasn't as nice as the one they were in before like whenever whenever it's when everyone says Hey, I've got this great new thing. I'm gonna it's a big, you know, it's a big change. You're gonna love it Didn't always go that well when they were growing up. So like, you know for us to throw change at them It's we think it's great But change for them is oftentimes detrimental So that can drag on your on your happy customers too with with unhappy with unhappy employees. So And going along with what you're saying Matt, I think a lot of times especially new and uh companies they will They will focus on quality before anything. They think that quality is king But really there's a lot of evidence a lot of research out there that says consistency is king So consistency first and quality after that. That's your main thing is that consistent burger the reason why McDonald's wins in their market is not because their burger is the best It's because it is consistent Exactly. So don't forget that piece Yeah, so, you know measuring reduced client churn. That's important, right? So keeping clients longer means you make more money off of every sale, right? The old saying is that, you know, you make more money from an existing client And it's it's it's cheaper to market to an existing client than to go get a new client If you think of every job you perform for client as an ongoing sale You're gonna win Right because you're gonna be keeping those customers If you if you take the customers you have for granted and you're constantly losing them That is that is a a losing strategy. So, um, you know for last the previous quarter, um, you know back to kind of more normal times here We got it down below 2% You know for for our churn our revenue was horrible Because of snow days and covid cancels and all kinds of all kinds of things and our pre-covid I mean, that's that's almost half of our pre-covid revenue right there Um, but you know, I'll take it. We still we were still out there We were still profitable and we were we were adding jobs back on and we're not losing customers out the backside The difference between 1% improvement in churn can oftentimes double Just think about that that can double what a client is worth to you the difference between 3% churn and 2% churn Almost almost doubles the value of that customer takes it from in my case based on 166 per clean With an average of 1.75 per you know visits per month multiply that out by you know Losing my by by by the number of months they stay Which you can figure out by Dividing 100 by by your churn rate. So all you multiply those out. I'll give you the formula if you need it That'll tell you how how how much your customer is worth over time And for me, it's about roughly $15,000 But if I if I had a 3% churn rate, it's around 8,800 bucks. So not quite double But I mean it drastically increases what they're worth to you So you're wasting money on all these sales processes if you're losing them out the back So I guess the important point is if you aren't measuring it, you really can't manage it and We work with a lot of a lot of businesses and a lot of businesses don't even track that match, right? Yeah, that's scary because that's that that's one of the number one metrics that I Checked out every month to tell me whether I was successful the the month before. So Um, yeah, I think that that Yeah, what's the old saying what what's get gets measured gets managed, right? So, right? I don't know who who came up with that saying but it's It's it's very true I think that was a Peter Drucker thing if you can't manage it. Yeah, that sounds like a Peter Drucker quote It does So problems to solve, right? So this is what we what we're kind of getting to is have a compelling reason for people to choose your company and give And give them your give them have them give you their information, right? Um, keep your sales process simple and consistent. Don't build an elaborate mousetrap The sale just starts when you get their credit card fulfillment of the sale happens on every cleaning visit And that's that's an ongoing part of the sale. Make sure you are able to fulfill the promises And customize the service you print you promise And then um, if you're focused on activities that reduce churn and keep cut clients longer Each sale is worth more and you can invest more in your marketing and sales activities and grow faster And you're you're going to grow faster because you're putting more customers on and you're losing more losing less out the back, right? So you will grow that's that's really what stops people from growing Is is churn to be totally honest churn is the number one reason the company's peak So That's really it. We talked about this slide the beginning, but this is why we just kind of refocus on it Success lies beneath, right? We do these things to clean homes and we do these other things to make profit Same thing with the sales process, right? We need to be focused on the the fulfillment and consistency To make sure we make more so Um, I have a pitch for you if you want to copy I guess I'm copying this link and see if I can put it I can can paste it in the chat Yeah So I am doing a webinar tomorrow um on kpis and using them to manage your your business and effectively, you know, um, You know control growth and use those kpis to make predictable management decisions in your business I'm going to try and connect the dots for you make it make it as easy as possible I would love it if you actually came Ask questions and you know, we're there to learn. I think it'd be awesome If you want to learn more about how I run my business and and learn about made central You're welcome to schedule a one-on-one demo with me at made central.com And I will be doing a group Demo the following week, but you're only going to find out about that if you come to the kpi webinar so Join me for the kpi webinar And if you want to jump on a made central demo sooner Go ahead. I've got a little bit of availability left this week. We could uh, we could show that to you as well Matt, are you ever going to change that time frame so that it doesn't compete with the mma groups? Because that would be awesome I I can look at that. I can look at that. That is so awesome. You have coaching calls all day though. Liz. I don't know how I can hear I don't know, but the mma I mean, I want those people to be able to go those people are You know, they're committed. They they will show up. Look how many mma people we have on this call today They'll show up One demo and then we can if they've got a couple friends that want to have one of them schedule a one-on-one demo with me And then if they want to invite a couple friends, I will make it a personalized group demo for a few of them Okay, so that's what we'll get around that All right, give them a day off so they can do something fine. Yeah uh-huh They are doing something fun. You're forgetting that part I love Mike. I love so what you're saying is you're not going to practice what you preach right here I'm going to have to change my thing That the customers are going to have to this adapt I'm customizing for them by giving the maid central.com link All right That is good. And you are saying that you're going to give me like a one-on-one type thing I think I like that if they want to invite a couple friends Just Come on come on tj. So so come on to it invite a couple friends. I've got a couple more I've got a little bit of availability later in this week. Not tomorrow. You have forum tomorrow Forum tomorrow. I don't even know what I have tomorrow. We know us tj Tomorrow is um, it's a requirement. They can't miss or they will have to well I would say I will record this and I will share it with your group lis, okay So if they can't make it but uh, it's more these things are always more fun live They are really it's just like coming to this. I know but getting a recording the thing that's really nice about that Is you can fast forward through too Yeah, it's true and then they can call you and get a one-on-one. So yay. Thank you mad Yeah Don't worry We got it tj. You can take back the share and uh, if we got the links out there But ma'am, maybe you could show there were a couple of those screens that I really would have liked to have been able to see more Oh, sure. Let let me uh escape Yeah, just show the main central piece just the window I know we don't have a lot of time but No, I've got I got Oh, yeah, this one right here. This is my favorite. This is Yeah, this is uh this is a report kind of built off of one of our users requests and um, really It kind of shows the power of like the smart thinkers in the made central group, right? Like, you know, we're not going to take every idea, but man when people come up with good ones We're gonna we're going to implement it and make it happen. And this was this was a good. This was a good report. Um And it shows, you know, a lot of things that all of the things even uh, revenue Uh, payroll to revenue, right cleaning hourly, right? Some of the things Can you can you blow it up? We really can't see it. Oh my goodness. Is this just me? That's a full screen. We might have to we might have to get rid of our face So what tom could do is get rid of our faces and blow it up. If you do, yeah And if you do control plus you might be able to do a little more and zoom in a little bit matt I mean, it's It's already pretty big on my i'm looking out on a 27 inch screen I guess i'll zoom in in a little bit and see if that helps a little bit, but uh Yeah, so I'll go I can read this now. I can see revenue customer count payroll the revenue There we go. I can see it now. So, you know, the big ones for me are payroll or revenue All right, keeping that around You know keeping that around 36% really 38 percent 38%. I'm fine with but this is great extra An extra one percent one and a half percent. That's money in my pocket Um and yet my technicians are still making Pretty good money averaging over 19 an hour 1955 last week. That's before tips. Um, that's before bonuses. That's before you know, they're you know, they're, they're doing all right, you know. So, is that, is that for labor hour or is that working hour? That's for every hour they work. That's clock in to clock out. Nice. Yeah. So for those of you that are spending a lot of time tracking, you know, their drive time and all that little stuff, trying to change out ways and stuff. This is one report and then another report that I, that I kind of showed before was the sales KPIs a bit. So I'm kind of nervous to look this week because we haven't really been selling because we have no availability. So I'm pulling up live data and I'm probably going to be embarrassed by how bad it is this week. But, you know, we'll, we'll see. Sometimes everybody loves like, like data. Well, it's going to be a surprise to me. Oh, good. We've actually, we've actually netted a customer and yet there you go. We still lost $200 per week, though, because the customers we lost were probably more valuable than the and what we gained so far. Right. So, so sometimes that's an important thing. Like we're all focused on customer accounts in, in our business. But sometimes customers aren't all built aren't all built equally. We lost to, we lost an every two week customer worth $223 cleaning. So that hurts a little bit, right? Like, you know, so the stuff we've added has not been as valuable as the stuff we've lost. You know, this report has some square card stuff built in. It has some lead conversion. Our lead conversion is super low because the numbers don't track the website sales. It's only tracking the phone calls. So all these ones in yellow aren't getting tracked. And if you can look what's going on guys, I'm selling way more online than I am over the phone. Yeah, like way more. We see that happening all over the place. And those numbers, that number, that ratio seems to get bigger as time goes on. So, so my, my my internal staff are making only, you know, 8% conversion lead, you know, lead to sale. That's way, that's way different than the truth. So this report needs to probably eventually be a separate report for just web, you know, web traffic, but we haven't built that yet, but it's going to happen. It's just, you know, that's coming, you know, some sourcing, you know, not a whole lot of different sources this week. I need to parse mine out a little bit better as far as that goes. I do some more advanced stuff with my marketing agency. So I don't really look at this as much as some people, but you can parse out your lead sources better than I do here. And I can see who's making my sales through the software. But the truth is, my website's making most of my sales these days. You know, that's awesome. What else did we want to look at? Do we want to spotlight dashboard? I saw you had that up for half a second, I think. I think I have it over here open. Yeah. So spotlight dashboard. I'll zoom it in a bit. So, you know, like I said, we got crushed last quarter, but our efficiency factor was good. You know, our recurring service sets are different than client counts. We have a lot of customers like commercial customers that have a lot of like service sets. So this number is not your customer account. My customer account is probably a little different than that. I will show you, this is my favorite report that tells me that I'm winning on sales that we didn't talk about this at all. And this actually helps you forecast how many employees you need. And honestly, I think, Tom, we should really talk about building a KPI report based on a couple of these working together to forecast employee hiring needs and things like that. But this service set tracker report is my favorite report to look at to really tell me if I'm winning over the course of a month. This takes a minute to load because there's quite a bit of data here. But this is, I think, one of my favorite reports, as far as a sales related report. My favorite report is the rate increase report and just being able to add charges to people with the click of a button. But so this report tells me how many, you know, weekly, bi-weekly monthly service sets that I started with, and then totals it and then also totals how many jobs per week I'm doing. So, you know, you can see we're trending up. We've added 11 customers so far this month. And then six, and then six jobs per week has been added. And if you think about it, right, your employees probably clean on average between eight and 10 jobs per week. So you know for every, you know, you have your number based on how many your employees average out. When you sell a certain number of cleanings per week, you need to hire somebody, right? So basically somewhere around 8.5 to 9 for us, depending on how well things are going. And, you know, really it's closer to nine for us right now because we're not taking any much one-time work. But we're basically in need of hiring one more person just based on sales so far this month. Does that make sense? Does that kind of in line with your guys thinking on, you know, an employee can clean, you know, two jobs a day? Kind of, you know, we get a little more than that out of our employees. It's more like two and a quarter to be honest. But you know, that's, we're very, we're very efficient. We're very productive. So that might not be ever easy. That's really easy. Like that's an easy way to be looking at it. For sure. I think a lot of people really struggle with, how do I know when it's time to hire, especially if they're, you know, smaller in the valley of despair, especially I guess. The thing about this stuff is, is this stuff makes me more money than all my sales activity. The data that I use to predict like what, you know, there's, there's this rate, this rate report could be related to sales. We might want to look at it. We might not, you know, but the reason that that's an important thing to look at against sales is, is that it's not the sales you make. It's the sales you make that make you the most money, right? It's not, it's not about just putting on vanity metrics. It's that whole concept. And I guess the fancy term for is digital transformation. We have the ability with technology to do things today that we couldn't do in the past. And, you know, sometimes we have a hard time as business owners catching up with that. We're doing a lot of things here by capturing data at the lowest levels. The cleaning professionals are doing all their time, time tracking and all the customer interaction and all the sales and all that's being managed in one platform. When you pull all that together in one database in real time, you're able to do all this cool stuff. And you really, you know, just physically from a technology standpoint, we wouldn't have the ability to have done this too many years ago. Yeah, true. You know, we are at the top of the hour though. If they want to see some of that stuff, they'll see it in the demo tomorrow. So why don't we save it for that and, you know, kind of stay on track on your guys' time. Sure. Matt, thank you. This was fun. Appreciate your help and participation today. We will be back Monday. Do we want to talk about, you know, changes in the workforce and how we need to be we'll have an agenda for next week before we get to next week. How about that? Yeah, sounds good. But we will be here Monday, five o'clock Eastern that I promise you. So we'll see you then. Bye-bye. Bye, y'all.