 We're here, Liz Trotter, our guest today is Laura Smith. This is smart business, Rose. Yay, hey Laura. Hey, thanks for having me. Yeah, we're glad you decided to join us. We know you're super, super busy right now. Well, actually, I guess you've kind of been super, super busy for like the last, what, two and a half years or something. Yeah. Yeah. I'm so sorry. We need to find out what busy it is. Hey Denny, good to see you. Denny, it's up there. So what's been happening since last time we're on here? I'm just barely coming out of like a two week fog. So I haven't even had a nap today. You had way too much fun in Las Vegas. Oh my gosh. I really wish that was true. I've heard a lot of Las Vegas stories. I don't know, we might need to drill on this a little bit. You didn't hear any interesting Las Vegas stories about me, Tom. It was not an exciting Vegas time for me. I was sick way too long. Can you believe it is December? I feel like every month, Tom, you just try to abuse us by telling us how much closer we are. Well, minding us how quickly time's going by. I mean, it's crazy, isn't it? It is. So we're going to be doing budgeting and goal setting in December, which I guess is what a coincidence, because normally those are good things to do in the month of December, right? If you haven't done them by now, December is kind of your last chance, is my thinking. I kind of like to start with at least goal setting in October and November. But if you haven't done anything by December, come on, y'all. You need to get it together now. Get on it. That's right. You've got to get on it. And it's the last month of the quarter or two. So we're, yeah, you know, hopefully. People are hoping for it. These are the schemes that are like 2022 coming in a month, and I'm still processing 2020. But I still feel like I'm stuck in 2019. Amber. Amber, you do not have interesting stories. But Amber, I think I might have been a little bit sick when we were sitting in the hallway talking. But that was big. Convention's very large, lots of air there. So I haven't heard of anybody else coming home with COVID. I would definitely feel guilty. Well, you know, I guess there's more than one possibility as well, so. Yeah, I would still feel guilty when I was speaking into a little avalanche, especially on the last day. I really did not feel well. And I told the guy that had mic'd me up. I was like, yeah, I think I have a cold. So make sure that you disinfect this really well. And when you took it off, I didn't seem to disinfect it. I was like, dude, if you have COVID, it's your own fault. I told you to just disinfect it. You know, it's not good. Well, I normally have a lot more energy, so. So we are going to be talking about goal-setting today. And Laura, you have kind of some thoughts that you're going to share with us in that regard. Yeah, I would love to share the way that we do goal-setting with you guys. I think that we have a very structured approach compared to a lot of people I've seen. And we're very good at it. So if it's OK, I'll share my screen with you and show you guys what we do. Awesome. OK, let's see. Tom, did you notice Laura's eyes on Zoom? Those eyes are so bright, especially since you're wearing that shirt. I'm like, man, they're so pretty. They look like you're off of some TV show or something, Laura. I do love Zoom just for that reason. Yeah. Can you all see my screen? Yeah. And you should, like, turn the green screen function on with your dress and everything else. That would be wild. Tom, what are you talking about? That would not be good. I mean, it's not like it makes a discipline. It'll have a little background. It's not like you're just in the glasses and you just lie out in the back and, you know, in the comments. Tom, you can't win here. I'm just going to keep laughing. OK. Why do you want to see Laura without her green shirt? I don't know, but at least not going to like her. Derek's not going to like that. Yeah. All right. So, Laura, we can see your screen, but it's too small. Oh, it's too small? I can make it a little bit bigger by doing this. I'm like, oh. Oh, now I'm having a crush on it. How about that? Any better? Well, it's I have like a 52 inch screen and I can't read the words. OK, I'm going to give you all a really weird view by going back in the stream yard for a minute here and see if I have other sharing options. You might just need to like zoom into one smaller area. We've got so much. I'm going to just give it a big command. Hold on the command key and hit the plus button and it will zoom in a little bit. OK, how does this look? Any better? We got to share. Here we go. Hit command plus again or control plus. Come on. You must have you must have control. The bottom left hand button. OK, that apparently doesn't work on Macs. No, that's why she's mad. Oh, crap. We're we're we're screwed. Laura, do you have a command button? It is my plus on the Mac. I don't know Mac. OK, I'm zooming in manually. Is this working? Yep, it is. OK, is this good enough? Do one more. OK. There. Really good. I can see it pretty good online. How about you, Tom? See better? It's awesome. OK. OK. You have to square it. So the first thing that I want to tell you guys is that this is in progress. It's not a new thing that we do, but we have been moving it into air table because that's where we're hosting all of our documents now basically. That's where ops manual is. All of the other things that we used to do in spreadsheets, we do an air table. So Aja has actually been working on this today. She's been moving our documents from other places into this air table. And she actually broke it right before I got on. And we were kind of freaking out, texting each other. And she fixed it. So I could show you all of it now. But there are like, you will see some things that have dates and things like that in them yet. Oops, that's not because they don't have them. It's because it hasn't all been moved in yet. So anyways, this is basically how we break down our goals. So we have an annual goal setting meeting every year. And then, sorry, this Zoom thing is kind of rooting me out with how my mouse works. Shoot. Trying to figure out how I can move. Oh my gosh. Sorry. Well, I can tell you a really good way to fix this. Just go get a real computer. OK, I haven't figured out. So we have an annual planning meeting every year for the coming year. So you can see some of our 2022 stuff is starting to go in there right now, because we had our meeting in November. And then we have a quarterly meeting every quarter to basically kind of keep ourselves in check. Are we making our goals? Are we not? What needs to be altered? Things like that. And then every week, we have status meetings with every position within my company. So I'm just going to walk you through real quick what this looks like. You can see here, this is the stuff for our WIG project from our most recent meeting that she's in the process of putting in right now. This is just books to read, just stuff we keep track of, things that we're going to talk about. And then we have different areas of the business. So stuff that needs to be done with, stuff that happens in the office, stuff with teams, stuff with marketing, stuff with clients, stuff with quality. And we have one called Made Central wants. So this is where we're listing out all the things that we wish Tom would do for us. I don't see anything there. Oh, there's lots there. Just do that number. Does that little number on the left mean there was like 20 things that you want? All. Well, that's all that's in there so far. Anyways, obviously you can see there's different views here. You can see it in this sort of view. You can see it based on due date. We have a thing called Maybe Sunday that we do where we put projects that we're not working on right that moment, but that we would like to do at some point. And then you can see incomplete or you can see complete. And then for each project, again, I'm going to use my little bar here, we'll have a category, status, kickoff, all of that. So then here's where our actual goals start coming in. And here's where you can see, like I said, we're building this right now from our old, we actually started this process on paper originally and then it moved into a spreadsheet. And now we're moving it into air table in advance of the class that we're teaching. So it'll be easier to share with people. So that's why some of this is not done. But you can see I can filter by AJA or I will be able to filter it by any individual person who works here. We can see incomplete, complete non-recurring. And then within each goal, fine ones that has some subtasks, we can open that up and it will link the tasks related to it. So here's our goals. Man, she's been working on this today. Let me find a better one. Here's a better one. Okay, so like here's one of the goals. One of the things we talked about is that we felt like we weren't making the best first impression with our clients because their communication or their expectations were not always aligned with ours based on our communications. So one of our goals is to improve that this year. So here are some of the tasks that we're going to do to improve that. So we're making client folders, anniversary present, calling all the initials before the first clean and discussing with them, checking all of the initials, altering our sales script, et cetera, et cetera, you can see. So we can open all those up and those all are under tasks. And again, you can filter them by the person who's responsible with them. And then you can see for each task as well what all of the subtasks for it are. And we can assign multiple people, we can add notes. We can do all sorts of stuff there. So that's the general, these three tabs are the general. What three tabs? Growth projects, goals and lead measures and tasks. Gotcha, of the time. Are the three tabs that are, that's what are basically our annual goal setting and our quarterly meetings revolve around. And then we've got status reports. And so these are weekly and this is what it looks like. So this is the sales report. So my sales person would go in here or does go in here. As I said, this was on paper until recently, but they go in here and they fill this out prior to meeting with me every week. I have been doing these meetings since Aja is transitioning out right now. Soon our new GM will be taking these over. But as of right now, they're meeting with me. So- Rohan. I'm answering Rohan's question, it's air table. Oh, okay, yes, it's air table. So my sales person goes in and fills this out prior to our meeting. So then we get together. And this is what it looks like when we get together. I sit down with them and I go through and read all of his KPIs for the week. So how much is in collections? How many clients are over 30 days? What's our close rate stats for the week? All of these things. So we're gonna go through and look at all of that. And then what tasks are you working on? So they can link a record from tasks here to show me what they're working on and we'll check in on the status of that. But then what we can do is, while we're having this meeting, so I just sat down with him, reviewed all of his stats, reviewed the tasks that he's actively working on and got an update on those. But then let's say we decide, okay, well, I really need you to send out another email newsletter this week because we could use some more spots filled next week. So then I just add a new record and I can assign it to, okay, I'm gonna assign it to Aja, Colton doesn't have one on here yet. And then we can put anything in here that we want about that and we can go ahead and say that. And so then that will show up in his tasks for the week. And so then next week, he's gonna have to report back on the completion of that. Does that make sense? I'm understanding the accountability piece. The part I'm not understanding yet is, maybe you could break it down for us a little bit better as to how you set the different goals. Do you just look at what, kind of the things that you've shown us so far, kind of like you just look for problems that you're having and then you decide that that problem is gonna turn into a goal or do you actually set like real goals, revenue goals and client count goals? Do you set goals like that also or do you just set like problem solving goals? We do. As I said, a lot of this is kind of in progress. So being moved into air table. So I'm showing you what we have in here so far but we do set those goals. We try to set all of our goals based on true data. So a lot of you have seen my all the things spreadsheet before which is also hosted in an air table but that's something that we fill out every week that tracks our daily, weekly, monthly KPIs. And so typically what I would be doing in the meeting in the weekly meetings with the operations manager is going through those APIs and looking for ones that we don't like. Like is our attrition creeping up? Is our attendance getting really bad for our cleaners? Do we have enough cleaners based on the revenue? How much are we rolling? All of those sorts of stats we're gonna look at every week. And if they're off, then we're going to in the status meeting here we're going to create tasks to address that over the next week. In the annual meeting, we're gonna take our previous years or current years results and then we're going to think what can we do from here? What is possible? What are we going to work on the most? That's gonna move the dial the most this year. So we use Derek's made service what if spreadsheet which I know a lot of you guys have seen before but typically that is how we come up with those goals is we plug those in and we decide what's gonna make the most difference for us to focus on. All right, so let's start there. So for an annual goals, you sit down with who? Everybody who works in my office. Okay, which is who? I have Aja is the current GM who is on her way out right now. Alex is going to be my new GM. Nancy is my field manager. Brandy is my QA who she does not always join our meetings but she does if she can because she's in the field a lot and Colton is my salesperson. Okay, so this meeting here, this annual meeting, it's just once a year though. So Brandy would be at this one, right? Yeah, she was at the annual meeting when we just did it recently. She thought I was at the quarterlies. Okay, and so at this meeting, this annual meeting, how long is that meeting? Laura, I'm trying to help people understand like some basic structure of what it might look like. Who's gonna be at that meeting? Who's deciding on the goals? Where do they get the numbers? Or what types of numbers are they looking at? Kind of taking it down to a more granular level. So typically our annual meeting takes the entire day and we will rotate people in and out depending on what part of the business we're talking about so that we have phone coverage. But everybody does participate in it, typically takes an entire day. Quarterly meetings typically takes about three hours to do our follow-up and then our weekly meeting takes anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour depending on which position is being met with. The meeting between me and the ops manager is about an hour every week and then me and the salesperson is about an hour every week, I'm always the one who meets with him because he does our marketing and I was the marketer before Jano got sick. But then the typically the ops manager meeting with the field manager and the QA is gonna be more about 30 minutes a week just checking on KPIs. Okay, so for the annual goal setting this is gonna be an all day event. You're gonna be there all day, like eight to four, eight to five, something like that. And you're gonna keep bringing people in and out. Is that what I'm hearing? Like start me off. What is eight o'clock look like? What is the morning? So if we are talking about field related stuff the salesperson does not necessarily need to be there for that, so he will go cover the phones. When we're ready to talk about sales, we bring them back in. All right, so this morning thing where you're talking about the field related stuff is this from like eight to 10, eight to nine, eight to 11, eight to noon. What are we talking about there? Oh, you're getting real specific there. Okay, so here's the problem that people have with goal setting. It's not that they don't know what goals are. They don't know the how of doing the goals. Like who do I talk to? How long does it take? Do I just sit down and say, okay in 10 minutes say, here's our revenue goal and here's how many clients we wanna have and this is how many employees we're gonna need to get there. All right, have a good day y'all, is it that? But so you're saying it's an eight hour event. That's why I'm saying, oh, you're gonna have to break that down for people because they're thinking it's like a five minute meeting where they just tell everybody what the goals are for the year. No, our goals have to make sense to us from a data standpoint. Again, if you just throw something out there in the dark and are like, hey, I would like to have 200 more clients next year. That doesn't really tell you anything about how you're going about getting there or if that's even a realistic goal. So I mentioned Derek's what if spreadsheet that does belong to Derek. So I can't show it to you. I think most of you have seen it at some point though but basically it's showing you the difference between if you tweak the number of leads you're getting, the total amount per average cleaning that you're charging, the attrition rate and one more. I can't remember. I can't remember. Anyways, so we go through with our real data which I'm gonna show you in just a second. Recurring service frequency? Oh yeah, I think that is it. How many times they're clean for a month? Yeah. So I mean, this is what we've just did is we brought up that spreadsheet. We went through all the things which I'm gonna go through and show you guys a quick overview of here real quick. So we took our historical numbers, plugged them all in and then for each one that we would play with, well, okay, if we can improve this one by this much, if we can improve that one by that much, we decided the formulas could make the most sense for us so that we're focusing our energy in the right places and then we went down from there and broke out, okay, well, how do we do that? What are some of the things that will make that happen? So this is all the things. Why do you guys have seen this before? We just put it in this new interface so it looks a little different than it used to. I can show you the original as well but we've got a dashboard for quality so you can see this is my goal this year. My attrition is too high right now. Anything over 3.5% is way too high for me. So this is where the majority of our goals that came in this year. But we can see how many weeks in the last six months have been above 90% what our response rate is. So that's quality and then we've got hiring, revenue and sales. So these are the things that we're using and I'm actually gonna go and show you guys the non-interface version because it's a little bit easier to see. So this is where they put in their numbers daily. All of the other, this is the only one that we alter. Everything else filters in itself from this sheet. But then you can go in and see weekly stats and then they add themselves up by month. And so we can go through and see all of those. And then I've got this little handy dandy guide here of where we get those numbers and made central. But effectively this is what we're basing our data on. We're looking at this and going, wow, this number right here is not okay. You know, like this number is pretty okay. I'm not gonna worry about that one. So we're not setting goals around this. We're averaging exactly 40%, which is what I want. I don't think people that aren't familiar with what you're showing us, Laura, don't know what you're talking about when you say this number is okay. Like that's what you were talking about, your direct payroll percent to revenue, I think. Is that right? This is direct payroll percent to revenue. So we're averaging 40%, that's what I wanna average. So this is not a big focus for me this year on goals. I don't think that I need to work on how to reduce my payroll percentage to revenue when it's exactly what I want it to be. Whereas my attrition is where did that one go? Averaging 5.7% for the year. God awful, so I need to fix that one. So yeah, we go through, you know, this is another one, scorecard average. We average 98% most of the time. I don't think that that is necessary for us to fix. So that's kind of where we're starting is we're starting with all of our real data and then we're looking for where do we need to make improvements here? Once we identify the improvements, then we're breaking it out. Okay, we know the end goal, but what are the steps to get there? All right, Tom, why don't you ask some questions for some things that you think people might wanna have a little bit more clarity about? Also anybody that's on a call on the call right now, I know Linda's on here, Amber's on here. Actually, we got a couple of different Lindas to meet. Do you guys have any questions about how you might start or what you do or what you might wanna do differently? Yeah, we've got a lot of people here. If anybody has any questions, just go ahead and drop it in the chat. We will take it. It looks like it's a fair amount of ongoing maintenance here. A lot of numbers that are being entered. What is the process that you use to maintain this? My experience is a lot of times, companies will start implementing a process like this similar to the same idea concept, and it kind of breaks down because people don't really take ownership of it and do the things that they're supposed to do at the time that they're supposed to do it in order to make it work. And you're constantly chasing people around trying to get them to do what it was that you were hoping they would do. So how do you actually make this work day in and day out? So if you're referring to getting all the data and ongoing maintenance in regards to all the things that I was just showing you all of our reporting, that does have to happen daily, but it takes under 10 minutes. It's not a huge thing to do. So that's a non-negotiable for me because I am entirely absentee. The only time I have anything to do with my company these days is like two hours on Fridays, I hold meetings. So I need, ooh, sorry, I'm sorry for my daughter's afternoon meds, but she's not here. Some things are just non-negotiable in my company because I am completely absentee. So I need to be able to look at what's going on without having to hound people and ask them a lot of questions. And how often do you look at that one particular form? Do you look at those numbers daily? All the things? Yes. I do not look at it daily. I look at it at least twice a week though. Okay. But the reason we do it daily is because otherwise you're gonna get behind just like you said. It just, it had to become a non-negotiable thing for me. Once we built it, it is, and it's not, I mean, it's a really core part of our company. It's a really core part of how we operate. So it's not something I'm fighting people on. We all need that data. So they fill that out daily. That's the only tab in there. They're filling out the rest auto-generates from pulling data from the daily KPI tab. So that happens with that. This, like I said, this is not, so just to explain a few more things that are gonna be in here right now, we have the growth projects, the leads, tasks, and then the status reports where we do the weekly meetings. And that is really a big part of how we hold people accountable to doing what they're supposed to be doing is we check in about it every single week. Every single week we're going through all the things that are assigned to them and they have to give us updates. And so if something is going awry, we're gonna figure it out really quickly and we're gonna have a conversation about that. I'll tell you, I don't really have that problem. My office people are amazing. Like I am so blessed, but I truly don't have that problem. But the other things that we're going to be adding in here that we are moving over from our spreadsheets and things right now is our annual planning structure. So coming in here, showing you this report, again, this is the weekly report. Well, we have a whole annual structure of the things that we go through when we're doing our annual planning. So those are all things that are still kind of making their way in here. As we're consolidating our use of software, I guess. But yeah, I mean, that's the short answer is just there are some things that are not negotiable in my company. All the things is one of them because I do, I have to know what's going on. And if I'm sending them a million questions a day, being like, how's this going? How's this going? How many staff are we short? Are you, did you fill up next week yet? Things like that, I'm gonna drive them nuts and they're not gonna be able to do their jobs. So they spend 10 minutes every morning filling that out so that I know what's going on. And so they know what's going on because if they're not monitoring that information, then we're not scaring, you know, we're just floating. I think it's a lot like, for people that aren't familiar with how this works, I think a really good way to think of it is you don't really have to remind somebody that drives their car to look at the gas gauge every day when you get in the car because if you don't do that every day, you're going to run out of gas. So you have to, it's part of the job of driving is to watch your fuel consumption. And you really have to keep reminding you to do that because you're used to doing it every single day. It would just not occur to you. And it's the same thing as like putting on your seatbelt, Tom, is another really good example. You know, somebody might forget to put on their seatbelt one trip to one place. They're in some kind of a weird thing, but the minute they have a chance, they're going to jump right back onto putting their seatbelt on every single time they get in the car. Is it okay if I turn off my share and come back to the camera now? Sure, of course. Okay. Sorry, I can't stand it when I can't see myself when I'm talking. No, Liz, you know, I don't check the gas gauge every day. I just kind of cover it up. I actually know that you do, and then you ignore it. You look at it every day to see how many more miles you can eke out of that 10th of a gallon that's left in your tank. You know that gas prices are going up, though, I fill it up more often. It's when they're going down that I try to wait another day to... But you still look at it every day. You still watch it. So the whole idea here that Laura I think is just trying to get across is it's not anything that it shouldn't have to remind people to do it. It's not something that she has to say, hey, did you fill in your all the things? No, because that's the normal part of their job. Just like you don't have to call all of your technicians every day and say, hey, did you clean the toilets? Of course I cleaned the toilets. Why wouldn't I clean the toilets? My normal job. Yeah, my company is really, really built on structure and it has been since before my daughter got sick and I had to basically abruptly quit my job. But we've always had this... Well, I wouldn't say all this, but for the last six years, we've been working on this foundation of structure and it's much easier to get people to comply when it's already laid out. When they know exactly what they have to do, when it's really clear what they have to do and how they have to do it, I don't see as many of those compliance issues. It's just part of the job. Like you said, it's how our company runs. We have some questions we want to get to, but... She didn't answer, Denetia. Oh, okay, you want to get back to that. Take a point that Matt's here in Charleston. We're working on some main central stuff and you take the late flight in, so we dropped a car off at the airport, the drill and doesn't have to look at the gas gauge, though, because my staff is awesome. It's clean and it's got a full tank of gas. It's just like a rental. And you don't have to worry, Matt, because don't forget, Tom always checks the gas. You're going to be safe for at least a few days. All right, so Denet actually has a question. We actually have quite a few questions coming in, Laura. But how about this one for Denet? Okay, so yes, my attrition needs some tweaking, so can I elaborate on the start of the full setting for that issue? Let me go look real quick and see if all this stuff is in here or not, because I might just be able to show you. We can share your screen again if you'd like. Yeah, yeah, give me one second, okay. You did have a bunch of stuff in there. I do have a bunch of stuff in there, so let me show my screen again. So I think one of the messages that Laura really wants to get across to people is that when you're doing your goal setting, that you're using actual data. Find the data, start there. Don't just start with, okay, how much money do I want? Okay, I want to be a million-dollar company and so I'm gonna, that's gonna be my goal. Those are wishes. Yeah. Those are wishes. You have to know that it's possible for your data and then you need to have a plan to implement it. So this is a little bit of our attrition project that is in here so far. We're not sharing yet. Oh, it's not sharing? Not yet. Okay, hold on. How about now? Yep. Yep. Okay, so this is a little bit of the attrition project that we have going right now. Some of the things that we decided when we really sat down, again, remember this meeting takes a long time and part of it is because we really spend a lot of time trying to brainstorm what the core of the issue is. So we can look at it and go, oh, we're having a lot of client turnover but we didn't know why we're having that client turnover if we're gonna fix it, right? So one of the things that we came up with is that a vast majority of our clients that were leaving us were leaving in the first 90 days. We have found this to be true both with cleaners and with clients that if they make it past 90 days with us, they will typically stay for a couple of years. Almost all of our cleaners and almost all of our clients leave in the first 90 days. So we started brainstorming like, why, what's going on with that? And we decided that we weren't setting clear enough expectations, that we weren't always making good first impressions. We had a issue with, we had hired a bunch of new people after COVID. Not everybody was like 100% on doing initial cleanings because we don't actually do almost any one-time cleanings. I don't know if you guys, if I've mentioned that but so our people don't get practiced with initials other than at initials because we're really not doing any of those. And then client communication. We had some people, we went back through all the people who canceled the last quarter. We had some people that were canceling because they were frustrated with us because of different communication things on the office side. So from here, we made some subtasks of things that we thought we could do that would prove that 90-day retention. So that's our measurement is the 90-day retention rate, number of initial clean complaints, numbers of initials who cancel before the initial which that one is actually about looking out too far. And then our response time. Okay, I'm like, I don't know what just happened. So those are our measurements and then these are our tasks related to that. And then another one for us is scheduling, flexibility and consistency. We are by far the biggest company in our area. We're over double the size of the next biggest company after us. And so we're really in demand. And one of the things that we found is that if we don't keep hiring paste well enough with client demand, then we end up getting really far out. Like on average, I would say most of this year we've been booking more than a month out. So if they call and want a set of cleaning with us, we'll be like, yeah, we can get you in for your initial in four to six weeks. So what we were finding is again with those 90-day retention rates, we had a lot of people that would sign up for service with us and then lock us out of the first clean because it was six weeks later. So we needed to figure out what are we gonna do about that. We also were in the middle of a big role train for a while, which a role train for us is when we're bumping clients off the schedule because we don't have enough room for them. We do have a system for how we handle that so that it doesn't happen to the same people over and over again. But we were starting to have that problem. And then we realized that we were seeing no to almost everyone who asked for accommodation for us. If people called and said, hey, tomorrow's not gonna work for me. Could you get me in on Thursday instead? Our answer was pretty much always, no, I'm sorry, you'll have to wait until your next cleaning because we just didn't have enough staff for it. And we were adding clients so fast that even when we hired people, we would just fill them up and we wouldn't leave that room. So I don't know that I see it in here, but one of the things that we decided is that we're going to always keep four more people hired than that we're not booking, just to fill in those gaps. And then quality consistency, staging, we're starting to notice that there's some gaps between our cleaners and what people are doing from a staging aspect, not necessarily from a cleaning aspect. So we're going to be running a staging contest about that. All sorts of things. I mean, you can see it's just the start of it. But that is kind of the process that we're going through when we see that we have a number we don't like, we're going to go through and be like, okay, but why? I think you gave some good examples. Denny, was that helpful? I feel like she gave you exactly what you were looking for there. Oh, she wants, Denny wants to know, follow up question, what does staging mean? So staging is something that I'm sure you all do, but maybe you don't talk about in a sense, but it's the way that you arrange things, not the way that you clean things. So for example, we really like to do staging for kids. And oh my gosh, I have a quick story to tell you, it killed me, but we love to do staging for kids. So we'll like set up all the little stuffed animals in a ring and then have one reading the book to them and, you know, things like that. And I actually did a comp clean a week ago for a gal who was, she actually worked for me like 10 years ago or something like that. And now she's a mom and she has tons of kids and they care kids and everything. So I did a comp clean for her in exchange for she was going to do some social media posting for us. And so the team goes and they leave and they did a great job, but I'm like, okay, first thing I want you to go take pictures of is kid staging. And she's like, they didn't do that. Do you want me to go do that? I'm like, how does somebody who works for me not staging for the kids? So it's things like, you know, instead of letting the shoes be a pile at the front door lining them up by pairs perfectly straight and, you know, having all the bottles facing out with the labels facing forward and, you know, things like that. So that is a really big focus that we tend to put on in my company is staging. All right, let's see. I know that C had some questions too. Yeah, this is a multi-part question. Yeah, you're gonna have to talk for a while here, Laura. I'm glad you're getting some water in you. Okay, are all of your core office crew full-time employees? Yes and no. So typically we have three full-time in our office. We're doing about two and a half million a year right now. Our run rate is actually closer to something else, but we'll do two and a half this year. And so typically doing two and a half million dollars, we would have three full-time people in the office, and then we have a QA who does not work in the office. She works in the field, she floats around does quality checks, she does additional training, and she does clean for us if we're short staffed. So she's not full-time by any means. But typically in the office we have the operations manager, we have the field manager, and we have the sales person who also does recruiting for us, reason being that issue of the hires and the demand not always keeping up, we gave him both so that it's his responsibility to stay staffed enough for the demand he has. So typically those are the three roles that I have. Right now it's a little bit different because we are in transition, my general manager is leaving, and we are promoting our former field manager into general manager, and we brought in a new field manager from the outside. So she's training right now. So currently the field manager, the new GM and the sales person are all full-time, and Aja is working from home, mostly on projects like moving all of my stuff into air table, and she's in the office once or twice a week, but that's a temporary situation. She's leaving at the end of January. So hopefully that answers the question about how many full-time employees they have. As far as how we split up the roles, again sales is also doing marketing and hiring. Our field manager is generally taking care of everything that has to do with the staff. So she manages the trainers, she manages the QA, she handles all client complaints, she handles breakage and damage, she orders all of the supplies. She basically does everything that she needs to do in support of the field. And then the operations manager is effectively me. I mean, not anymore, but it's who I was in my company before I started hiring for that role. So they do all of the things that I would do if I was there. They manage the managers, basically. They manage our numbers, they manage our goals, they manage the other managers. They take escalation calls from clients, but Aja typically doesn't ever really answer the phone unless there's a big problem that someone below her can't handle, which is very often. So, sorry, I stopped reading out dirty questions. So I have the three in the office, the one in the field that's over the field. And then I wanna say that we have like maybe 40, 45 out there. We used to actually have more, but we used to be teams of two and we switched to solos during COVID. And we found that we can clean the same number of houses with a lot less cleaners as solos than as teams. So it's probably closer, like 40 now. And then what is my office company culture like? I mean, I think we're awesome. My people love each other. They love going to work. People always comment that we laugh a lot and loudly in my office. We're kind of rambunctious. And so when people come visit us, we always get comments about that, but we're just a really good solid team. I've cross trained just about everybody on everything. So they have 100% ability to back each other up at all times and they do. So hopefully that answers your question. Sweet. You know, we are kind of getting towards the top of the hour. We have a little bit of time left. This is a lot of information that you're sharing with us. And it looks like you've got a very elaborate system built out in an air table. I know that a lot of folks are probably watching this wondering, gee, that's awesome. I wish I could do that myself or had that. How does one go down that path? Do you want me to tell them the easy way or how they can do it themselves? No. You can get as wide open. Okay. So Ash and I are actually teaching a class on this in January and four columns at our office. It's going to be January 6th, 7th and 8th. So it's just a little over a month from now. I know it's kind of the last minute. But basically, I feel really passionate about sharing this with people because if we hadn't had all of these things in place, then I don't think my company would have made it when I left. And just in case there's anybody on here who doesn't know me and know my story, my daughter has cancer and was diagnosed two years ago. And I basically called my general manager and said, I quit and I've never been back since. I've been completely absentee since then. And I didn't have a choice. She was in the hospital for over a year after her diagnosis. And so I think if I hadn't had all of this stuff in place, that it would have been really hard for my company to make it and through COVID and everything. So I feel really passionate about sharing this with people. So we are holding this conference. It's going to be Ash and I teaching it together and you're going to get all of our stuff and we're going to help you customize it to your company. So you're going to get all of our goal setting stuff and our meeting structure. You're going to get all the things that I showed you. You're going to get our operations manual and we're going to customize that to the way that things are done in your company. Yeah, I didn't need saying. We're already like half full. So hop on it if you want to get it in. But so that's going to be in January and then we actually have a follow-up online in February. And the February can be a follow-up or it can be a standalone. So if you can't come to Colorado in January, you can take the online course and you're going to get all the same content through that time period. It's 10 weeks. So by the end of 10 weeks, you'll have gotten all of the same content that we did in person. But the reason the other kind of part of it is that if you come in person, you can do the online part for no additional charge too. I go to conferences all the time and I get so many ideas and I go home and I don't do it. Or at least that used to be my life, you know? Because I would go and I'd be like, oh my gosh, this is so great. And then you get home and it's like, all this stuff's going on and you never get around to doing it. So the reason that we're doing the online afterwards is both for people who can't come in person, but also it's accountability. We're going to go through it all again online. We're going to give homework. We're going to have open question time every week. So we're going to make sure that you actually get this stuff done. So that's the easiest way to do it is to take mine. You couldn't build it yourself, but I didn't show you guys the operations manual on this call, but just the operations manual itself that we have an air table took Aja, like feel free to chime in here Aja. But I think like 90 hours or something crazy like that. And I actually think that we're still moving some things into it. So I know there's probably some people that aren't real familiar with air table, but that's like a online SaaS product that's kind of a cross between Excel and say some database application. Yeah. And so if I signed up. It's been closed 100 hours on it. She's still not done moving it in the air table with the reason we're moving everything in the air table. I think I said is both cause it's hard to break and also because it's easier to share with other people. So she says a hundred hours just on one of the documents that we're going to be sharing with you. So you will have to have an air table account though. That's a very... So I'm going to, you know, I sign up for your program. I get an air table account, which is relatively inexpensive, I presume, I guess. Do you know how much I... I'm paying $120 a month right now, but I think I have four seats. So I'm thinking it's $30 a seat. And if you don't have a whole bunch of office people, you don't need them any seats. You can do it for as low as about $30 a month. Well, and it's a free version too. And I'm testing it out with my sister tonight to see whether our stuff can be supported through the free version or like kind of what... Oh, Aja says $15 a month per person for low level and $30 a seat for the pro level. So yeah, I'm doing some testing with my sister tonight on the free version, but you will need an air table account. Once you sign up for the class, we will be reaching out probably beginning of next week to everybody who signed up with hotel information, all of that. And then also to get your air table information so that we can start transferring all of our stuff to you. And you're going to get the all star version. So you're going to get my whole operations manual, my whole, all the things, and my whole goal setting spreadsheet. You're going to get all that stuff with my data in it. And then we're going to spend the class going through and revising it for your company. And we're going to cover a lot more stuff other than just the air table stuff. That's just, that's the hugest part of the project. That's four years of Aja and I's work is an air table, but there's going to be a whole lot more than that too. We have a question. Where do we go to get more information? It looks like Aja just put the link down there. Tom, maybe you could copy it over to the other pages. Oh, effort. All right. All right. Also, Laura, I had somebody ask me about, well, what if I went to the Juneau event? Should I still go to this? Because didn't they already get all of the stuff on a flash drive? They did get all the things. That will be an overlap. Other than that, a lot of this is going to be different stuff though. And it's not just the stuff though, right? I mean, what I said was the whole point of going is, it's not just the stuff, it's the implementation. It's putting it all into place. A large part of the class is going to be editing the things for your own use. And we're going to go over a lot of goal setting, problem solving, leadership stuff, basically communication stuff, a lot of communication stuff. Basically, I want to give you all of the tools to be able to step out of your own business at a moment's notice, whether that be due to an emergency like I had, or just because you want to step back and work on the stuff that's actually important to move the dial versus just getting caught up in the whirlwind of the day to day. So there will be a lot, and a lot of it will be, yeah, as it says, tangible materials plus theory methods all together. So it's going to truly be more of a workshop. You're going to implement things out of this to help your business run from a stronger base. And another part of this, which I think is unique and new is the material now resides within Airtable which makes it shareable, it makes it a lot more usable. So that alone, I think is a tremendous upgrade. Yeah, versus the thumb drive full of flowers for sure. And another really great thing about Airtable too is everything is trackable, right? So you're able to see who's doing what, who's responsible for what, you're able to have that oversight without having to try and figure out, remember stuff. Everything's right there in a way that you can just see it. So, all right, so today this, for those of you that are on here thinking, what is this just a pitch for Laura's class? It's really not, it's not, it's not a pitch. This whole month we are talking about budgeting and goal setting, but the reason why we wanted, one of the reasons we wanted to bring Laura on is because she does have this program that does fit in exactly with what we're talking about. So- And everything we've done, you can recreate easily also if you wanna do, it's just, it's that hundred hours of work into it or not, but it's all- We're going around a hundred hours just into one form. One form, I know you don't wanna know for all of it. But yeah, the principles are sounding, you don't have to get it for me, so. And quite honestly, it's 2022 for goodness sakes and we're quickly moving in a direction that everything's happening fast and there's no sense in trying to reinvent the wheel and do, I mean, there's years of work and yeah, I mean, we're promoting, we're sharing with your product, we're sharing you with an opportunity, speaking to the audience here, but it is gracious for a lot of us, it is a heck of a lot better option in your next best alternative when it comes to putting together a planning tool. And one more thing, Tom hit on it here too. You know, it is, we're looking at 2022. If you are still doing things the same way that you've been doing them, the way you were doing them five years ago, y'all need to upgrade. You're moving in a direction where you're going out of business and you don't even know it. The world is passing you by. Yeah, and quickly, ever since COVID hit, things have really escalated and there's been a new velocity right here to everything that's going on. So you need to be looking at what do you need to change? What needs to be improved? What needs to be upgraded? And I don't know. You can see that Laura's on the front end of that, trying to figure out ways to make that work in a bigger way, not just here's a new form, here's this form, fill this form in. It's not that. Okay, so for goal setting, because we got one last minute here for goal setting. Bottom line is here we are at the end of the year. You need to be setting your goals for 2022. What? We have a whole month left Liz, 20 a time. But you did hear what Laura said too. She had to do it all in one day with all of those people. Over 30 hours of planning time was put in with all of those different people. Actually, yeah, over 30 hours of planning time was put in to her goal setting. And she's not done yet. You heard her say she's not even done yet, right? So you guys need to jump on it and get going with what are you gonna do for your plan? And then one last thing, just to tie in what Laura said repeatedly was get your annual plan and then keep in mind that then you're going to have to quarterly updates and then monthly you're gonna have to do check-in and then every single week, you have to make sure that you're on track. And I guess this is actually a plug for the strategic success groups because that's what we do in the strategic success groups is we keep you on track every week toward your goals. I just wanna say all of my managers are in Liz's strategic success groups. All of them, including Asha who's leaving. I mean, every person in my office is in Liz's groups and we love it. It is a huge, huge tool to keep you on track. Keep it on track. It's not easy to stay on track. Things move so fast. So thanks, Laura, sharing all of your stuff. And I know a lot of you guys are out there going, looking at some of that data going, wow, wow. Yeah, CC, all that data in real life in January too. Great investment, great investment. We are at the top of the hour. Laura, this was good stuff, very useful, fun. We love our numbers. So it was good. Yeah, absolutely. Awesome way to kick off a budgeting and goal setting month, but we're not done yet. We're just getting started. We're gonna be back Monday, five o'clock Eastern, two o'clock Pacific. And you guys can figure the rest out from there. Guess who our guest is gonna be Monday, Liz? I do not remember, Tom. Cadmah, oh. Oh, that's right, Cadmah's coming on. She's gonna be talking about budget planning in 2022 and she's been, you know, a guest a couple of times on smart business moves. And if you've seen her before, I don't need to say anything more. I know you're gonna be here. And if you haven't seen her before, do yourself a favor, catch Cadmah, she likes. Well, and if you haven't seen Cadmah before, you need to make sure that you get a nap 30 minutes before the show starts, because she is gonna work your brain out. I know, I know I won't be. Yeah, yeah. All right, y'all. Thanks so much again, Laura. Oh, Laura's frozen. At least she froze. Here you go. Freeze. The internet, at least the internet hugged with you for the last hour here. So. That's right. Thank you so much. Thanks so much. See you there, guys. Have a good week. We'll see you there. Bye-bye. See y'all later. Bye.