 for asking me again. Appreciate it. Hey, this is Tom Stewart. I'm with Liz Trotter. Our guest today is Debbie Sardown. This is going to be awesome. This is live with smart business moves. We haven't done this forever, have we? No, because we were at Foundations for the last two weeks, so it was, yeah, we missed out. Oh, Tom, are we getting the bad sound from my microphone again today? No, so far, we're awesome. I made a slight tweak, we're going to hope. OK, that's all good. Debbie, how are you? I am doing great. Maybe just a tiny bit stressed out, because I've got my event next week, and gee, I got to figure out what I might want to talk on or something. My gosh, you're better than that. Oh, my goodness. That is not a Debbie move. No, I've been working on my talk for months. My husband is going to be so glad when it's over. There's two versions of Debbie Sardone. There's before CBF Live and after CBF Live. And those are the only two versions. So right now, I'm in the before CBF Live mode. Well, I'm going to tell people what you're talking about. Yes, thank you. So next week, we literally will have, hopefully, we're going to break all records. We will have the largest residential-specific in-person cleaning business conference that's ever happened. We have over 466 people registered right now to attend. And it's all residential cleaning companies and their office managers. This year, we invited them to bring their office managers, of course, their spouse, their business partner, anybody that's in the residential cleaning industry, because this year's theme is all marketing. It is marketing, branding, and sales. Because in a recession, that's what we need more right now is more customers, more leads, more conversions. Yep, absolutely. And I did create a coupon code just for smart business moves. So if you register, even though it's coming up on next week, it's exactly a weekend, two days from now. If you are a weekend, one day from now, April 13, 14, and 15, if you use SMART 50, you get half off the registration. So SMART 50. So apps or anything, Debbie, lower case, does it matter? It doesn't matter. Just SMART 50 and CBFlive.com. Y'all heard that, right? Half price. Half off. Half. SMART 50. 50% off. Yeah, see, that's a good deal right there. You have on there. I'll take the link to the sign up website as well as the 50% off coupon code and drop it in chat. So if you want to be part of, I guess, a record setting event in the residential cleaning industry, this is your opportunity. Yeah, I love that. Be a part of setting records. Yeah. What's the number you have right now, Debbie? We're up to 466 register. That includes about 30 of our vendors. So we do have a really small vendor fair and just hundreds of residential cleaning business owners that are just fired up and excited about taking their business to the next level. I just saw a comment come in from Denet, one of our former CBF members. Denet, I would love to see you there. She's been to our conferences before. Just love her. I think she might like you too with five exclamation points. I saw that. I'm like, oh, she made my day. Thank you, Denet. Oh, we got Dom in here. We got a bunch of people. Sean's in here. Whitney's in here. People don't usually talk in here. They don't usually say hi. We find out that they're here later. They're just lurkers. Well, guys, if you're excited to be here on Smart Business Moves today, then just type in happy into the comments. And that way, we'll be able to see that you are there. You're wide awake and you're ready to take away some gold. Sean Day is one of our vendors. We're so excited about Blue Skies being there once again. Yeah, he's been to that too. I haven't seen this new logo that Sean's wearing. Just wondering, what are they? That's cool. Very cool. Yeah, it's cool looking. I don't know what it is. The badge has got wings on it. Fancy schmancy. Yeah, it looks like they're starting an airline. It's too small to be able to see on my screen. I want to know what it is. So, oh, it's a new podcast. That's what it looks like is a podcast. That makes perfect sense. OK. All right, cool. Higher, lead, and chill. Higher, lead, and chill. Cool, HLP. Nice, Sean. That's awesome. All right, so we are talking about today, though. What were we going to talk about? You guys told me, and I don't remember. Come on, Liz. Nope, we're going to wait until you remember. Oh, man, Liz, you are on the hot seat, my dear. It's slightly controversial. Not everybody does things the same way. All right, solos versus teams versus, right? What's the right way? What's the wrong way? You know all that. Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. Can we throw in there along with that? Can we throw in office, no office, cars, no cars? Can we do the whole thing? Oh, the whole thing. We can talk about all of those models. Those are different business models for residents. All-relief versus commission versus job ticketing. You're not going to have to talk about this. None of us have strong opinions around these, so let's talk about it. Rump rights versus backpacks. Oh, my gosh, if you bring vacuums into this, I'm sorry. What toilet bowl do you recommend? Oh, my goodness. Yeah, we're not doing that. Don't anybody come up with your vacuum suggestions. Sorry, can't do it. All right, so Phyllis and Debbie, what are your thoughts here? Okay, so I wrote down a few notes, so I thought I'd just pull up my notes to keep myself on track. But obviously a lot has changed since the pandemic, and you guys know I have followed a very unique model my entire career. And one of the things I ask people is, do you ever feel like your business is broken? Do you ever feel like your business is like nonstop chaos? And here's the thing, if you're growing, you're always going to feel that way. If your business is growing, you're always going to feel like there is chaos. At times you're going to feel like it's broken. And I would go so far as to say, if you show me a calm and peaceful business, and I would say my business runs pretty smoothly. I believe, Liz, your business runs pretty smoothly, Tom as well. We're all relatively absentee owners. In my case, I'm fully retired. But a business that doesn't have some broken pieces, that doesn't have some chaos, I'm going to tell you that business is in decline because it's not moving. There's no moving parts. So growth creates a deficit and success basically creates complexity, period. So the more you're growing, the more deficits you end up creating in different areas of your company. So if you feel broken, if everybody listening today watching on us on here live, if you feel broken, you're probably growing. I actually talked with somebody today who said, oh my gosh, Debbie, my business is broken. They're doing a million dollars a year. But they were in crisis. Their business is broken. Just feels that way. You also spoke to something Debbie that I think is really interesting. So last week we did foundation scale 2.0. And so we had a bunch of speakers that were talking about how to scale your business. These are all coaches that have coached multi-million dollar, one even billion dollar companies. And what you said about the complexity was really important because they all mentioned how your business will naturally become complex as it grows. So your job is to be vigilant with reducing that complexity. You have to stay strong on making sure that you are simplifying at every single turn. Because 100% it gets more complex. It actually becomes your primary role as the visionary to work extremely hard at making the complexities become more and more simple. Because the more simple that you can keep your business, the faster and easier it will grow. And that seems counterintuitive because we have a natural tendency to complicate everything as we grow. From doing the laundry to fixing the vacuums, I mentioned it, vacuums to buying the supplies, to managing the staff, everything becomes more complex unless you work hard at keeping it simple. Simplifying it, yeah. Well, this is actually a perfect time to bring up Made Central because I had said earlier that I know Tom wants to talk about the new process that you've created in Made Central that helps with Debbie's pay program. And it does simplify things, wow, to an amazing degree. So Tom, maybe now is a good time to talk about that. Yeah, I like the idea, like roles of a CEO, one of them should be the chief simplicity officer. You should be the person trying to figure out how to make things more simple. Yeah. We did roll a feature out last week which made tiered pay within Made Central. So part of our discussion with solos and teams, I presume, is gonna be talking about how you compensate those solos or teams however you do it, incentive pay is important. And Debbie, I know you and I have talked about this for a few years of making it really easy to do tiered pay. And really now with the click of a couple of buttons, you can actually give tiered pay for people based upon the number of hours that they worked or the number of jobs that they did or those types of things. So no more need to dump stuff out into a spray sheet and kind of massage it and all of that. So if you're the chief simplicity officer, that would be one item off your list. Yeah, I love that it's going to be easier for at least for those 466 people, right? Exactly, and here's the thing with the solo model. And not everybody is gonna use the empowered pay system that I've created or some other version that other people have created. But with the solo model, when you're talking about should my business be filled with teams of three, teams of two, teams of one, and in some business models, even a franchise that many of us know, teams of four, right? Where they put four people in a car. It's like, what is the simplest model? So when I go back to the early days of when I used to clean houses all by myself, Liz, I don't know if you ever cleaned by yourself or not. I know Tom, your parents own the cleaning business. I don't know if you cleaned them, but did you clean Liz? Oh yeah, absolutely. I cleaned for eight years. How many years did you clean? I don't know, too many. Well, I cleaned houses for eight years and then I struggled for another seven years to try to figure out how to get it to a million dollars. I got the million dollar mark at year 15, but one of the things that happens with a business once the owner stops doing the cleaning, right? We call that in CBF world, once the owner becomes mop free, right? And they put down the mop permanently as they begin to make everything complicated, right? And this is where they try to duplicate themselves, but they can't because nobody can clean like me, right? As a private housekeeper, I did everything the way I was supposed to do. I didn't cut corners. I didn't cheat my customers. I didn't call in sick when I wasn't sick, right? When I was a solo, but then I started hiring and I started having all these problems and complexities and I play the Wacomole game, right? Though you have a problem, you whack it, another problem pops up, you whack it, another problem pops up. And so we begin to complicate our business. And one of the ways we complicate is we make our team size too big. And if you think about it with the solo model, especially in a post pandemic world. So one of the things, I've been passionate about the solo model. I know people are curious about it and have been curious about it for years because it is a very unique model. And you and I, Liz, have talked about this a lot. There isn't one model that says this is the only way. It is the only way to be successful. If that were true, then you wouldn't be as wildly successful as you are. Tom wouldn't be as wildly successful as he is. So there isn't one way to do business, but whatever way you do business, it better be the way that you absolutely believe is the best way for your company and you're getting the results you want. I agree. Without a doubt. You know, gosh, I do think that the solo model is superior in one way for everybody is that it's the easiest way to make more money. It is the fastest way to scale and it's harder when you're profitable. You realize if we all just jump on the solos, the best way to do this bandwagon, it's just gonna be a boring show. I've got some arguments for people in my circles that well, why they don't want to go solo. So... Well, do you want to hear a few reasons, a case for it? Yeah, sure. Let's go through a few reasons for it. Now, one of the things I did, Liz, during the pandemic is I beat the heck out of my competitors. I beat them up with a stick during the pandemic because I was able to say, oh, by the way, we social distance every day, that's a part of our business model. So we were able to use it to our advantage during the pandemic. We were able to say, oh no, we don't stuff three people in a small car on our way to your house. We've had social distancing since we started. So that was like a little plus for us. We were able to tell our clients that, don't worry, you can disappear into another room while we clean. And so that was just kind of handy, right? We were able to pivot our messaging. But some of the things I wrote down, what was that? What's the thing? You really didn't have to pivot your message. No. That had always been. Exactly. Elevated it. Always, yes. We elevated it. And it really did help us with our messaging, with our employees who you gotta remember during the worst part of the pandemic. Now, later on, people started getting a little more comfortable and realizing it wasn't quite what they were saying. But in the early parts of it, we were all scared. We were gonna just look at somebody and die. It was that scary. And so we were able to assure our employees that one of the reasons why they should be glad they work for us is they don't meet every day in cluster with 30 or 40 people in a room. And so we even used it to our advantage with our employees and it got them to work. Yeah. And they came to work. So a couple of things I wrote down in my notes is number one, and this one's a big one, hands down, you can create more revenue per person with the solo model than you can with the team model. Period. One highly incentivized solo cleaner can generate 90,000 to 110,000 depending on what market you're in and what your average billable hour rate is. One solo cleaner can generate nearly $100,000 a year in revenue. And that's if you're around 55 an hour, there are lots of companies that are charging upwards of 60 and 65 an hour. They're billing out $100,000 to $120,000 to $130,000 in revenue per solo cleaner. That's significant. I work for quite a few companies right now that are charging 75 and 80 an hour. Per person. Making bank, yeah. Per person. So yeah, it's significant. You know, we're getting ready for an MCA live event tomorrow and Friday through Charleston and we're pulling our core KPIs, our benchmarking information together for that tomorrow. And one of the things that we track is this metric called efficiency factor, which is the amount of time actually on a job cleaning a home divided by the total clock time. And we've not watched that number. We've been doing these events for about a year now. I don't know, we've done it like five or six times. And every time we do it, the efficiency factor number gets better. And one of the things that we teach at this May Central Live event is, you know, if you want your efficiency factor to be high, you know, solos give you that. And it's currently across all the companies that are using May Central, it's 88%. And it was down a meaningful amount lower than that. When we first started doing this and we see more and more people switching to solos because they are, you're getting more revenue per technician, more revenue per hour. They're making more revenue per hour so you can pay more, you know. And with the technology, it just makes it really easy so they can just do so much with their phone now that they couldn't in the past that. Exactly. It's now, and you fell into safety issue of COVID, my goodness, you know. It's just crazy, the benefits. The bigger the team, the harder it is to make a profit. The bigger the team, the harder it is to be fully optimized. And of course, the smaller the team, the more you can optimize the individual. And I think we all agree here that manpower is the most precious thing we have in our company. So why wouldn't we want to get the most billable hours out of each individual cleaner that we possibly can? So the bigger the team, the harder it is to make money in this industry. And I also wanna say for the people that are hearing this thinking, oh, you're just all about the money, all about the buck. That's not it at all. The more money that the company is making, especially by this day, like Debbie's calling, empowered pay or job ticket hour, allowed hours, percentage pay, salary pay, whatever you're calling it, both entities make more money. It's bad for the cleaning professional. They're making more money. Yeah, that's my next point. And this might be my favorite point next to, maybe it's my second favorite point, next to the highest revenue potential possible. The next point on my list is solos make more money. Period. You cannot afford to pay teams what you can afford to pay solos because you're buying so much wasted time that you don't get to bill for when you have teams and the bigger the team, the more wasted time. I have an argument for this one. All right, so if you live in an area where all of the homes are large and all your homes require two people, so you're sending a team of two to two houses in a day, then you are in a better place. Now, if your two houses are close together, awesome, but still one person going between two houses, that's only one person driving, two people still got double that drive time between even if it is just those two houses. So you can make it work, but it's gonna cost you a little bit of money, so you have to be thinking about that. Exactly, exactly. And with the solo model, you gotta figure that 90% of our clients, 90% of our recurring jobs, I'm not talking about first-time cleans. You never use solos on first-time cleans. You don't use solos on moveout cleans and deep cleans, right? Those jobs are nine, 10, 12-hour jobs. Of course, you're gonna always use a team, but our typical solo recurring house, right? A single house typically is four hours or less, man hours, typically. So most of our homes are three, three and a half hours or less in terms of man hours. And so any solo can go and do two of those a day without even breaking a sweat. And I think most companies are in that same exact boat, right? That's what most companies are planning. Once you start being in a house more than four, five hours, people are looking at live and help and there are other options. The gigantic castles, as I like to describe them as, typically don't hire us, the professional cleaners that charge at the top of the price scale. The gigantic castles that are lived in by the Uber rich, just like you said, Liz, typically are looking for somebody to come three days a week. They're gonna make beds, do dishes, clean the house, maybe start the laundry, and they're not looking to pay 55, 60, 75 an hour like you described. They're looking to pay somebody who's a private housekeeper 25 an hour. Yeah. Yeah. We've done those studies. We were actually looking at some numbers today on that. And when you look at household income for various zip codes and various markets, you get around north of 100,000, 150,000, you can really start getting some traction. And then as it gets higher than that, you start losing it. And there's some zip codes in this country and some of the markets that we help people in that are $300,000 plus per household. And there's not much demand at all for the type of services that we offer. Because they don't have a psychological stomach for paying $300 and $400 per cleaning when they want service every week or twice a week. They don't have a stomach for it. So they might live in a 10,000 square foot house with six or seven bathrooms and they have four kids and four dogs, right? And they just don't have a stomach for paying for 10 or eight hours of cleaning every week. And they're looking for a much broader scope of services than what a professional cleaning service would be offering often. So I always argue that's not really my market. So the cleaning companies that think they should be going after the biggest houses in the neighborhoods have it backwards. That's not my market. It's a smaller percentage of homes anyway unless you live in a certain part of the country. And they're not my avatar. My avatar is the exhausted busy professionals, the CPA, the spouses and attorney, the kids are in soccer and piano lessons and they're so busy. They don't have time to micromanage or hire a cheap independent. They're like, you know what, any meanie, mindy moe, whoever has good ratings and answers their phone and says, yes, you're hired. Those are the people I'm looking for. I just have to point this out. Debbie, you and I know back in the day when Stephen Rao was around, right? Blast from the past, he was seeing the person that answers the phone is gonna get the job. You remember that? Yep. How is it that we are still dealing with that? People not answering phones. Because there are too many business owners out cleaning. It isn't their choice. They're just not making it happen. I mean, if the business owner is out cleaning, number one, they're not building an empire. Number two, hire an answering service. Hire a VA. There are VA's all over the world that will answer your phones for a very affordable price. Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy that we're still doing that. A lot, right? We're still doing a lot. Exactly. I've been coaching every now and then to get hired by some franchisors to help them with their businesses. And I've been working with one in particular that said they desperately try to get their franchisees to use their answering service. Why not? Because when they use the answering service, the phones get answered 98% of the time. But they did a study that the franchisees that say, no, I wanna save the money. I'll answer my own phones. Their live answer rate was like 48%. And businesses are not answering their phones and they are losing money. Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. All right, you wanna hear another reason for solos? Yeah. This one's kind of interesting. Not everybody thinks of it this way. But with solo cleaners, when you fill your company with, you know, 85 to 90% of all the revenue we create is recurring business, right? It's not move out to one time. So with solo cleaners, you actually have to employ all team leaders. So with the model where people have teams of two, teams of three or teams of four, they have the luxury of filling their company with half or two thirds of the staff that aren't quite leaders. Kind of like one knucklehead and two, or two knuckleheads and one A player is what ends up sometimes happening. I'm certainly not saying that's always the case, but what happens is you can be very loosey-goosey with what you tolerate with your staff. And you can tolerate C players as long as there's one A player on the team to micromanage them. But with the solo model, everybody has to be independent and mature and responsible. All right, so the argument for teams then is that because of that, you have a much wider pool, right? Especially if you have people that are good at managing B players. Not, I'm highly not recommending any C players. But there are quite a few great B players you bring on that if you manage them well, we'll become A players. Exactly. They're managed well. See, that's too much work. And we're not therapists, we're house cleaners. So leave the C players to somebody else. Exactly. A's and B's, so that is a good, you have a much wider pool. It's a much deeper pool if you're hiring teams. So that can go both ways, right? Exactly. Now, I also will say that a lot of B players are just hiding C players, right? It's like we kind of suspect, but we keep giving them a second chance. So oftentimes, because we need them, we will classify people that we know in our gut are truly C players. And they do just enough to keep from being fired, except they do everything to get fired the day before I go on vacation and they wreck my trip. Ah, yeah, those people, ah, I'm not gonna. And you know, sometimes they might even be an A player, but they're lacking the transportation. Maybe they don't have a driver's license that by putting them together as a team, you know, they're able to produce revenue for your company where they had to be a solo they could move. Exactly. I've also seen some really amazing A players that lack the confidence to know that they are A players or to go out as solos. So a lot of times those people, great coming in as a team and then waiting to split them up. Exactly, exactly. You can develop them with different types of leadership training and, you know, personal development programs, which I think is so important. But I think one of the problems with teams is it just ends up allowing us as business owners, especially the business owners that really struggle and don't have a system. They don't have a proven system. They're just winging everything. When we have teams, it sort of allows us as business owners to get away with tolerating too many of the wrong people. And you don't have a choice when you have solos. You absolutely do not have a choice. And so, yeah, I agree. If all of us had A and B players, it would be a perfect world. But in most cases, we have A and C players and we have a lot of B players that we just tell ourselves they're B, but they really aren't in many, many cases. It sort of allows us as business owners to tolerate things we shouldn't. And it really forces us to run our business in the way we always meant to, but somehow it slips away from us during crises. Yeah. Yeah, I would agree with most of that. I know that we do run into people that I run into a lot of business owners that a large part of what they want to do is develop people. And they want to do that. And I know you run into that a lot too, Debbie, where they want to develop people more so sometimes than make money or other things. And when you say develop people, are you talking about trying to turn them into something that... Like fix them? Or maybe they can't be, yeah, fix them. They fix them, right. And then you hear them saying, I'm just too nice. Exactly. So here's what I call bull crap on the owners who say, oh, I'm just too nice. I will put them on the spot and say, you're not just too nice. What's happening is you have no leverage and it's humiliating that you're tolerating things that you really wouldn't tolerate if you had leverage. And how do you gain leverage? You create a job that is so compelling, people don't want to quit and they're terrified of being fired. I don't mean terrified mean you're a tyrant, but I mean they don't want to blow it by their own dysfunctional and bad behavior. And so a lot of times owners give themselves a pass by saying I'm too nice when the reality, I used to do it too, Liz, because I was too humiliated to admit, no, I'm not too nice. They're walking all over me. They have no boundaries. They're walking all over me. And I can't even put up a boundary. My rude awakening almost 30 years ago now, it tells you how old I am, was when I realized I had this one employee that had had 30 absences in a single year and I still couldn't fire her because I didn't have anybody to replace her. I needed her that badly. That was my rock bottom moment. And I had to look myself in the mirror and go, it isn't that I'm too nice. I would fire her but tomorrow, but I don't have anybody to take her place because my pay was too low and my teams were too big and I couldn't afford to pay well. And it was just this dysfunctional cycle that was wrecking my life and made me want to quit and go do something else. I mean, man, Debbie, that was down and right there. It was painful. I can remember it like yesterday. I remember she had long red hair, 30 absences and I still couldn't fire her. Now I have an eight absent policy and obviously there may be an occasion every now and then where there's truly a legitimate reason why we would bend that policy. But for the most part, the people who don't wanna work, I've been talking about quiet quitting without knowing that was a term before, now, for 15 years, ever since I started coaching 17 years ago, I've been talking about quiet quitting. And quiet quitting is people who take a job and then spend every opportunity they can to work as little as possible, right? And that's what happens to us in this industry because we've created a job that's not worth it. And so they get hired and they figure out every way to Sunday to not work. This ties back into what Liz, you were talking about earlier in terms of profit. It's not about profit just out of greed, but it's like it's a virtuous circle. If you can create awesome jobs, you're gonna provide great service. You're gonna build a company that's worth owning and operating and all of that's kind of fueled from the profit. So it's almost like an all or nothing thing. If you're not hitting that on all fronts, you know, you have bad jobs, you're providing bad service, you're miserable in your business and you're not making any money either. It really isn't all or nothing, Tom, because the business owners that are not making this business work because it's so labor-intense and it's so personal. When you work with people every single day, lots and lots of people are delivering your success or delivering your failure, it isn't all or nothing game. You either have to get this right or most people will secretly say, I wanna go do something else. And I know you talk to them almost every day, Liz, and I talk to them nearly every day. People that are like, this is my last chance to fix my broken business. Otherwise, I'm going back to real estate or I'm going back to teaching or selling Mary Kaye. Don't even care what, but it's not gonna be this. Yeah, people get burned out. This is not a business for the faint of heart, that is for sure. And anytime you're working with people, you know, that's a huge part of your job. That's another message from the scale workshop last week was, you know, one of your main jobs if you are going to scale. Yes, you've got to grow yourself. You've got to, you know, it's an inside job, absolutely. But you got to grow that team. If you are not committed to growing your team, you can't scale. I think it's very hard to grow a team. I think it's impossible to really grow a solid, healthy, happy, long-term team that literally attracts people who will make cleaning a career, which is unheard of in our industry. Everybody thinks cleaning is a stepping stone to a real job, but it doesn't have to be. And I think the goal of the owner as they scale their business, besides keeping things simple, which is absolutely vital, is to create a job people love to show up for. And most of us accidentally create a business nobody wants to work for or certainly doesn't want to work long-term for. And we hear things like, oh, I'm just burned out. I don't even believe in burnout, not for residential cleaning. We're not, you know how hot it gets here in Texas, Liz? We're not nailing shingles on a roof in a Texas heat where it's 110 degrees up on the shingles. Okay, those people might get burned out and they do it all day long. So this is a myth where people say, well, my cleaners are burned out. We have our cleaners, we hire them as full-time only. And you talk about shrinking the labor pool. Oh yeah. I shrink my labor pool on purpose. I don't want the C players, I don't really want the B players. I get them, but I don't want them. And I only want people who are willing to work full-time. So people say, well, with a solo model, they can work full-time without getting burned out. Full-time. And we expect them to work full-time. You're not gonna bill out 90 grand a year per person with part-timers. You'll need double the staff. You'll have double the chaos, double the overhead, double the taxes when you have a whole bunch of part-time workers. And so that's another case for solos. They can work full-time. Do you find it harder in 2023 to find people who wanna work full-time? You hear about work-life balance and all kinds of things? I hear people ask that question, Tom, but that is the same argument I've been hearing and telling myself 30, 40 years in this business. Was there ever a time in your business where people didn't, people wanted to work full-time and wanted to work hard? No. It's no different. I've had that experience. People always did until recently. We never had trouble getting people to work full-time. We had people wanting to do overtime and why more hours? Yeah, we never ever have felt like everyone is raising their hands saying, I wanna work. I mean, it's always been a struggle to find those people who do raise their hand and say, I want to work and I want to work full-time. My argument is the same people 20 years ago that would say I'm available full-time, but they always made sure they never worked 30 hours because they would call in a half a day on Friday or they would call in on Monday or they would turn down jobs on a Wednesday. They would always make sure they never worked a 35 hour week or a 36 hour week. I mean, they paid lip service to it, but that's another case for the solo model. With the solo model, I can ensure that they work and clean and bill out about seven billable hours a day and still have some time for drive time without going into overtime. So Matt and I, when we were in Portland together running this office, this is before COVID. I can't tell you how many people told us this exact thing that it was inhumane to work a 40 hour a week and that that is ridiculous. That's you spend more time working than you have living your life. What that, yeah. You mean owners would say that or homeowners? No, cleaning professionals. Meaning the house cleaners or the owners? Can you say cleaning professional you're using the term loosely? Yeah. Yeah, I don't know who says that. Yeah, every single person that applied and this was before COVID was like, what? They said that's inhumane. Inhumane. I mean, I'm sure people have told us that before but they're not my avatar. I would love it if an employee, if a job candidate would say that in the interview, they would save us so much grief. It's like, oh good, I don't need to waste any more. Now you don't say that verbally. You simply say, oh thank you so much for your time and best of luck to you. But it's like just like a bad fit customer. I love it when a bad fit prospect on the phone for service tells us upfront. Oh, that's ridiculous. I would never pay that. That's the perfect end of the conversation. It's like great. 15 minutes. You're not going to waste my time. So that's the perfect candidate that will reveal that upfront. The problem is there are people who take the job who say, oh yes, I'm available to work full-time and they never mend it. That's very true. Yeah, I would rather they raise their hand early on in the process. So that is part of our vetting process is are you available full-time? Are you willing to work full-time? If the answer is no, it's like they don't even make it to the interview. So one of my favorite questions around that is instead of just asking, are you available? Are you willing? Is what do you think about people that work full-time? 40 hours a week. What do you think about that? Oh, that's a good one. Hey, wow, that's crazy, that's too much. Good to know, thank you very much. Exactly, exactly. It's interesting that people will say stuff about other people that they won't admit to about themselves, right? Exactly, no, that's a really great one. I'll have to tell my team that one. Just ask that great question. What do you think about people that work full-time? I actually fired an executive for one of my companies that I will not name over the last 20 years. And I truly believe his plan, he was on salary, he was paid very well. I truly believe his philosophy was 40 hours a week, that's for workaholics. I really believe that. And as soon as I figured that out, he was gone. I'm like, no, 40 hours a week, that's part of the week. Yeah, I have been saying for at least a year and a half, maybe two years now, that I do not think it's very far down the road before overtime is gonna kick in at 35 hours. Because that's a big push that we're hearing that 40 hours is... Are you hearing that on the West Coast, Liz? I mean, you guys usually start all that discussion. Isn't that insane? It's kind of like all these dumb people who have never written a paycheck are trying to make rules for all of us who write paychecks. It's like, we all just go back to doing all your other dumb stuff. Leave us alone. We got this. You know, kind of a lack of logic on all of that is that we know objectively that the workforce is shrinking due to demographics and everything else. So who's gonna, you know, there's gonna be fewer people to do work. And then if we're telling all of those fewer people that you should be working fewer hours, that's not helping the situation. No, yeah. Well, again, it's dumb people who had never hired employees in their lives telling us how to manage our employees. That's another subject, though, isn't it? It is. It's another subject. All right, what do you got? What's another point there, Debbie? You got a couple more points on there? You know, with the solo cleaner model, here's what I love about it. Obviously you have to have a very unique formula for business. I have a very unique approach to business. It's not for everyone, but with the solo model, if you follow the method that I teach, the CBF way, you can literally assign your A players their houses and they can go and do their two jobs a day and bill out about seven billable hours a day and go home. So there's less time for even the employee who's going to the office and picking up equipment and meeting their teammates and then chit chatting and grabbing coffee and then out the door and then back at the end of the day and dropping off stuff. So you can literally reduce at least two trips a day to the office and back to the office at the end of the day. If you use the solo model and you do the CBF model that I teach, which is unique. So we have less drive time for all of our solos. They're literally, if they do two jobs a day, so a typical solo will do about 10 to 12 jobs a week, depending on how many billable hours per job, a small house they'll probably do 11 or 12. But if they do just 10 jobs in a single week, they'll probably bill out close to that 35 job ticket hours if the homes are sizable enough. And technically they'll only have one trip between house A and house B because they can leave from home to the first house. Now there's a layer of complexity to make sure everything is set up correctly before you do that. We could spend all day talking about that. But it does allow you to eliminate those two trips a day to and from the office. So their work day starts when they get to their first house and their work day ends when they finish the second house. So their efficiency is really high. Their clock hours is relatively low. The revenue per hour is higher. Their pay per hour is higher. It's a beautiful thing. It's pretty crazy. And I hired an attorney out of Washington State because I know Washington's probably one of the strictest places on the planet to just give our CBF members some guidance about, you know, all right, well if there's a vacuum and a bucket in the car is the trip from home to the first house is that considered legal time? And he said, he said it is not, but obviously you always wanna make sure that every time, every minute that a person could legally be perceived on the clock is covered by minimum wage or above. Or above. So even if you're on a commission structure, right, and people aren't paid for drive time, you have to know exactly how many legal hours they spend on the clock. And I think morally you should know this, whether your state mandates it or not, you should know if your staff are putting in 40 hours with drive time or 30 hours with drive time or whatever. So that you are completely assured that you are fully in compliant with your state laws for minimum wage. That's federal anyway. Yes. Exactly. That's federal. You have to be compliant and you're obligated to be compliant. So the solo model allows you to pay commissions, you have less drive time and to be compliant in certain states that don't like the commission structure, you have to make sure that they are paid in such a way that you are compliant and then you can bonus them, your different structures and your different levels on top of the minimum wage. And the cool part about that is in 2023 with the technology that's out there, all of that is basically managed by your cleaning professionals just doing the stuff that they do on their phone every day and it's all on the internet. So back to being the Chief Simplicity Officer, it sounds hard when you talk about it but it rolls out there where it's really done for you. Exactly. And because my model is so different, I have like 47 to 48 cleaners on any given day, could be 46 today or 45, but I have about 47 to 48 cleaners on any given day. We service about 800 recurring clients. We do our run rate right now is 3.1 million and that's all done with 45 to 48 cleaners. Most companies need 45 to 50 employees to do about $2 million in revenue because of the time loss. So with all those people, I don't have to park a whole bunch of cars because I don't buy cars for people. I don't have cars to maintain oil to change, tires to rotate. Insurance claims. Insurance claims, cars to wash. We don't have any of that. We have none of that. They drive their own car, they're responsible for their own equipment and guess what? People don't lose stuff when they work solo. You know, when there's a team of three who broke the vacuum? Not me, I didn't. When there's a team of one, who broke the vacuum? I guess I did. And I don't have any numbers around this. Oh gosh, I'm not supposed to be for that. I'm trying to not be. You're supposed to be taking the other side of the car. Yeah, you're supposed to be sticking it off with the team. I'm trying, I'm trying, but I do have to say this one. When you have solos, again, I don't have numbers around this, but I would bet big money that there's less theft when there's just one person. Sure. And how? I mean, I have no- That would be an interesting concept. I think the other way people ask is, aren't you worried about theft when you have solos? That's usually the question that comes up. And I don't know that I can prove that there's less theft, but without a doubt, a team of three, each person in that home cleaning is alone in a room. And so if you have a thief working for you, they are going to steal, whether they work alone or they work in a team of three. If you accidentally hire a thief, they will steal. And being in a team doesn't prevent that. But it's easier to figure out who the thief is if you're doing so. Exactly. So I do think you can hire a couple of things. If you have three people in a house, you have three times the risk that you have first off. And then if you have a thief, they might choose to steal other places because they're the only one in the house. So I think that the chance of theft goes down with solos. Again, I don't have any numbers there. Right, I don't have proof. My gut tells me that is possible because, I mean, in 40 years of business, I probably haven't had a dozen theft, legitimate theft claims. I bet I haven't had five or six legitimate theft claims. Now I would say we've probably had a couple of dozen where the customer over the years called up and said, my such and such is missing. And then a week later they called up or the day later they said, I found it. But it is rare. And I think it could be because in the solo model, there's only one person to point the finger at and they know it. Yeah, they're on the hot seat all the time. So, it's possible. There's one other point about solos. I wanna make sure that we get it in here before the hour completely gets away from us is it makes it easier to get the same cleaning professional back to the same home on a regular basis. And that does a couple of things for you. You get customer retention, the lifetime value of your customers go up because they're happier when they get the same person back. And you're cleaning professionals like it better. And we were running numbers getting ready for the MCA live event tomorrow. And it's over 50%. I can't remember 54, 57, something like that. Percent of all made central companies have a customer churn rate of 4% or less. Which we know doing this for a long time, the average is typically five within the industry. We've been seeing more and more of those companies, large part of the companies are made central and doing this, doing your model basically, Debbie. A lot of them do tiered pay as part of the incentive off of, we call it loud hours, you call it job ticket hours, but it's the same. Sure. And technician turnover, this is really crazy. Traumatically lower. Yeah, the top 25% of the companies have annual attrition rate of 82.5% or lower. So it's less than 100% for the larger companies. I don't know what the average is because we don't have all the numbers pulled together yet. But your churn on both customers and employees is gonna move in a meaningful way if you successfully implement. Exactly. And so I will do a little tooting of the horn for the CBF model because it's easy for us to kind of toss out all these tips, right? And random advice doesn't usually transform a business, right? We really do have a turnkey system to make the solo model work. You can't just rip the Band-Aid off and create all this disruption in your company and not expect it to explode because there are dynamics within the solo model that you gotta be aware of. If you don't do it right, just like your other model that maybe wasn't working and that's why you shifted, it won't work either. So the whole CBF model, we have the empowered pay system, which is completely unique to the industry. We have an entire system around how to manage, motivate, train, solo cleaners, how to pay them. Without the whole concept around it, it's a little scary to just anecdotally tell people this is a great model because like you, Liz, you have a whole turnkey system in your business and it works beautifully. And you couldn't just rip off parts of it and say, oh, I think I'll go do that or you'll break something else. And so there is a case for if you're gonna do it right, if you're gonna transition to the solo model, go all in, don't try to guess your way to what works and then start stepping into landmines and explode your business. Just look us up, go find cleaning business fundamentals and talk to us after our event and we'll help you transition. And just to make sure that everybody knows the opportunity, it's CBFlive.com, the link is already in chat, but we'll drop it again. And we have a 50% off code. When does this event start? It's next week, right, Debbie? It is April 13, 14 and 15. So it's not too late and you've got more than a week to get there. It starts Thursday, Friday and Saturday. And Thursday, we're talking all day about branding and really how to power your brand because in a recession, you had better stand out, you can't lower your prices. You have to stand out from the competition and we will do a Cleaning for Reason Gala Thursday night. So Cleaning for Reason, obviously you guys know that's my signature program that I really love and we do a Gala. This will be our second annual Gala where everybody gets dressed up and the ladies wear pink ball gowns and some don't, but they wear a lot of pink and the guys get all dressed up with their pink ties. And we do a really fun Gala that Thursday evening and we recognize the top Cleaning for Reason partners from around the country that are in attendance. So we have awards and trophies and all kinds of special recognition for the ones that have cleaned for the most patients all year long, as well as awards and recognition for those who have raised the most funds because not everybody is a part of Cleaning for Reason and can serve cancer patients for free, but they do fundraising. And this year, John Barrett, Executive Director of ISSA will be at our Gala and he'll be speaking and thanking and helping us honor the Cleaning for Reason partners. That's Thursday. And then Friday, we have a keynote speaker, the world-renowned memory expert. Some of you may have heard of him. He's done Las Vegas shows. His name is Ron White. He is literally the world-renowned memory expert. You remembered his name, that's good. Yeah, I can't believe I remembered it because I could really use his help. So he is on Friday. We also have Josh Latimer coming and speaking. He's one of my favorite people. He and I are business partners in another business and he'll be speaking. And then we have, all of our coaches are speaking at the conference and I'll be speaking. So it's three full days of branding, marketing, and sales. And of course, you guys know and love Derek Christian. He'll be speaking. He's got a killer talk. You know how good he is. He's got a killer talk on sales and how to convert higher and faster at the highest price points. That's his wheelhouse, I don't care if you're bringing it. He will bring it. All of our coaches will bring it. They're really great. All right, well, we only have one minute. Tom, I know you wanted to talk about the ARCSI event. Yeah, we're big advocates and supporters of ARCSI, Division of ISSA. And they're having a regional event in St. Louis and that is at the end of month, April. Actually, there's several events. On Thursday the 27th, we're doing an MCA, a main central, what we call Discovery Day and it's an opportunity to spend some time at Matt Ricketts office seeing, you know, how he runs his business and how he uses main central as a tool doing it. The following day is a regional event, an ARCSI regional event. You get to tour two businesses. You get to see Matt's business and I noticed here earlier that Stacey Willan was on the call. Stacey Willan is like the cross street neighbor. Weiland is across the street neighbor of Matt's and gets to tour both of those businesses on the same day as the regional event. And Saturday, Sharon Tenberg is going to be doing a training event on, I guess the technical aspects of cleaning, forget exactly what it's called but her approach to responsibly removing soil from a surface and disposing of it in a responsible way. So a lot of neat stuff packed in there for three days, 27th, 28th and 29th of April. If you're interested for more, I will drop the link off of the ARCSI website here in chat and you can sign up for that as well. So that'll be a great field trip, Tom. Stacey Weiland and Matt's business. So Stacey converted to the solo model. She posted here and she couldn't believe how significantly happier her employees and her profits became. And so that'll be a great contrast for people to see, well, how does the solo model look? What does the business look like? And she's in our elite group in CBF. So she does over a million and a half dollars in revenue. So that would be a great business to kind of tour and see what does the solo model look like? Well, I wanna chime in here real quick because we didn't get to Dean's question. He really wanted to know about how this culture impacted by the solo model but Stacey's business is very, very culture centric. Very. If you're going to, Dean, if you're going to this event, you'll be able to see firsthand exactly how you can have a strong company culture and run solos. Absolutely. And I'll give you a hint. Companies that are doing this well are using technology in some very interesting ways. Exactly. And you can't rely all on technology because humans need humans, right? But technology is one great tool but you can have a toxic, very bad culture with teams and you can have a toxic, very bad culture with solos and vice versa. You can have an incredible, strong, warm, loving, caring culture with either. It really does start with the leader and the core values and how you live them and teach them. Truth. All right, y'all. Here we go. This was fun. Thank you for doing this. Yeah. Thank you for having us, Debbie. We did. Always always. I really appreciate it. Yeah. Matt runs his business in solos as well. So if you do the regional event, you'll be able to see that at Matt's business. I see people switching. Castlekeepers, we do solos now. Sold a bunch of cars. No way. You sold some cars. Oh, we sold almost all of our cars. We sold a ton of cars back in COVID when used cars were getting crazy. I sold my car. I told my husband, I don't need a car. I work from home. I was like, I'm selling my car. We had three cars at that time. Good for you. I'm so happy to hear that. So, all right, Liz, the solo train is moving. I've been solo for a couple of years. Have you really? Yeah, since it's open as well. Yeah. There you go. Oh, during COVID. Make the most money with solos and so do they. Yeah. That's my case and I'm sticking to it, guys. Come find us at Cleaning Business Fundamentals if you want to learn how to do it. Absolutely. Holly, Holly recommend that. So, without being said, we're kind of done for today. We'll be back next Wednesday, five o'clock Eastern for another Smart Business Modes. Yes, we will. And I'll be full on conference mode. Thanks, everybody. Have fun.