 Thank you. Hey, good afternoon, everybody. Tom Stewart here. I'm with Liz Trotter. This is Monday, the 7th of Goodness Gracious July. And this is smart business. What do you say, Liz? How are you? Hey, Tom, I'm doing well. I'm excited that it's July, but really 4th of July is already coming gone. What's going on? When you get older, you don't fly. I believe it. Okay, why are we getting the funky feedback? What funky feedback? You didn't get it? You talking about sound? Yeah, I'm hearing it. Let me turn down my speaker to see if that helps. Does that help? You didn't hear it anyway. I'm not hearing it on my side. Can you hear me? I can hear you. Can you hear me? Oh, get out. Let me see if I have just a little bit of speaker. Yeah, we're starting the second half off here at a, I guess, unsurprising. Hey, we're having trouble now on StreamYard right? I totally know. We've been doing this for a year and a half. We got this down cold. We got this. We can't get StreamYard right. We just need to hang it up. Pack it in. All right. So you're going to be doing a presentation today, right, Tom? Well, we'll do it together. It's a team effort. And this is a participation activity here. So please help us out by asking some questions and chat. We can go with it a lot of different ways. But we're going to be talking about this whole entire month is going to be about production planning and scheduling and some of the more nuts and bolts operations logistics side of the business. And, you know, I don't know about you guys, but I think it's going to be fun. So much fun. Hey, Tom, maybe we could start with what is production planning? A lot of people don't even know what that means. I have a piece of news, though. Can I share that? Oh, please. Yeah, yeah, please. Last month, about this time, I shared a Facebook post and you can't see it because I'm not sharing my screen. I know that. I know that. It's coming. It's coming. Here we go. All right. Wow. It's called the Joltz Report in its job openings and labor turnover. And basically what it does is it measures in terms of like thousands of people, the number of job openings that are out there that are they're going unfilled. And last month's report, which came out, I guess at the beginning of June, actually has the April numbers in it. And it set a new record of 9,000, excuse me, 9 million in change. And I don't know if you can see that or not. Trust me. It was the biggest number of, you know, unfilled job openings that they've had since they've been doing it. So they can talk about, you know, unemployment and all of that. We know the whole deal about the job market being really tight and it's hard to hire people. And this is just another number showing it. They come out with these numbers this time every month and they came out with today's numbers as well. And since this is the actual spreadsheet, I can blow that up a little bit. You can see April's number was 1.9 million 200,000. And May's number is a smidge higher, still about not being 200,000, a little bit higher. Wow. Fact of the matter is there's still a ton of jobs out there that aren't being filled. Yeah, a lot of work out there. What was the highest number before, Tom? You said this is the highest it's ever been. Then I don't know. But I remember seeing that last month that this is a new record. Now they haven't been doing it forever. They've been doing it for about 20 years. This is a relatively new thing. But for the last 20 years, last month's was the highest. I don't know what the previous number was. But it's a pretty cool report. And if you go to, I'll drop the link actually in chat if anybody is, she says it's blurry. That was, is it still blurry Susan or was that when he had it, when he had the little tiny version? It looks pretty good to me right now. Okay. Yeah, I dropped the link. It's a bureau labor statistics. They got a lot of really, you know, cool stuff there if you're, you're, you're, you're nerdy. If you want to look at this and you know, I don't have any, I don't have any sage advice in terms of, okay, now this is the actionable takeaway I have from this. It's it's interesting. You know, it's kind of an affirmation. If you're wondering if you're the only person out there that can't hire anybody, then well, the government is confirming that you're not. There's nine million plus other jobs that are going unfilled as well. Wow. That is crazy. But you know, at everywhere you go, you can really see it not just because of the, the help one that signs either. I'm noticing it in a lot of different areas. For example, one of our favorite restaurants doesn't open now until five PM, I think they used to be open all day long. But now they only open at five and they only they, I'm pretty sure it's five and they they're open until like 10. That's it used to be it didn't really matter when you, I didn't even know they closed. I mean, I had no idea that they even closed. But now they're very clear that they are not open the majority of the time. And there are quite a few places like that that just can't, can't stay open. Or when they are open, lines are ridiculous because there's just nobody there to work. It's takes so much longer. Everything is just so constrained, labor constrained right now that even if you weren't in a business where you needed to hire labor, you're going to feel it. You're feeling the pitch. Yeah, I was reading an article the other day. Can't remember what it was that I actually found it on LinkedIn and clicked on it. It was an article on maybe in Wall Street Journal, something like that about how so many, especially kind of the hourly pay, lower quartile type jobs, like the ones that we provide are automating and, you know, more and more cashier jobs are going away. And, you know, some consumers are like revolting, you know, they'll all they had situations like in a Walmart somewhere down south. I forget where like everybody refused to use the automatic checkouts and they had one, you know, person running the manual checkout line and people were like backed up all the way to back of the store. And I don't know. There's nothing at Walmart that I want bad enough that I was staying in line that long. If I didn't move the automatic checkout, I think I would go to target. But anyway, that's going on. But like some fast food places are putting in like voice recognition, ordering through the drive through more and more of the jobs that you can't hire for with the salaries going up is becoming more economical to use artificial intelligence, robotics, whatever, to make it go away. And there's no speculation that, you know, the pressure on wages that we're feeling and we're having to raise wages that in the end, this might work out okay for it's going to be it's hard for us to automate house cleaning. So we're just going to have to deal with it. But with this automation and other other areas, there's going to be fewer jobs available for the population from which we'd be hiring. So, you know, yay for us, you know, we want Walmart to put in, I don't know if this is politically correct or not. But if you want more people, you know, who might be interested in working with your cleaning business, the more automated checkouts that retailers put in and voice recognition in the drive throughs and so forth, that'll be good for us. Gosh, I really hadn't even thought of that to that level, we're not having that here yet, which I am shocked because we are so employee friendly here over here on the in the Pacific Northwest. But I don't want to go to a cashier. I hate going to the cashiers. I love the self check. And here, at least where we are, self check is definitely busier than the cashier lines. Once again, Liz, we're on opposite sides of the issue. Yeah, this is almost up there with cheese puffs. What intrinsic value does checking your scanning your own groceries? Want to check your own groceries? Because I'm not 12 years old, I mean, the lights flashing and the lasers and the beeping, you know, when the kids were small, that was awesome. But I'm getting the point where I've been there done that. Okay, well, I hate to tell you, Tom, but at least where I am, the majority of the people are in the self check lines. It's faster. That's my thing. It's much faster. I don't have, if there's a problem, I know how to handle it. I can handle it quickly. I know stuff correctly. And you know what, I mean, okay, I digress here, but truly, this is something that I really struggle with. It's like, if I'm at the grocery store and I'm checking myself out, and I see I've got some type of weird ass, excuse me, some weird produce in my car. Yeah. It's like, oh crap, there's no bar code. I've got to flip through all the pictures to kind of figure out what this, you know what I'm talking about. I don't have that problem. I know what everything I'm talking about is. That is stressful for me. It's so funny. Anyways, I'm just joking. That's why it's funny. If I've got three things and they have a bar code on it, okay, I can handle it. But if I kind of like, look at pictures and figure out, well, is this the organic one or not? I don't, you know, it's just. Okay. I don't have that problem. I don't put things into my cart that I don't know what they are. I buy things that I know. I'm like, I want jalapenos, so jalapenos is what I put in my cart. But you still don't know the code. You still got to flip through the pictures to find it, right? Look at that yellow thing right there. That's pretty. I'm going to buy that. Oh no, I can't. It's too hard to check out. I don't mind to find that yellow thing in the pictures. See? Okay. Well, well, Susan is with you. She prefers to check out. Let's people. Everyone does. Tell them everybody prefers to check out until I know that you are not a lazy person. Okay. And I know that you're intelligent, but until I heard that you wanted to have somebody else check you out, my thought was always, oh, those are people that are really tired. They're lazy. They're, they're not right. Well, you know, God blesses us all differently. Okay. And maybe, you know, this is just one area that there's a gap. You got me going good here today, Tom. I kind of feel like you're, you're, you're poking me a little. Given the choice, all things being equal, I will let somebody else check out my groceries. Yes. If I've got one thing in my hand and it's got a barcode on it, yeah, maybe I might do the self-checkout. If I can just go peep peep and, you know, credit card. But not if it's a vegetable. You are not a vegetable. Forget it. No, no vegetable. And if I have like a full card, like if it's like, you know, a couple hundred, a few hundred bucks worth of stuff there, there is no way I'm going to sell. I'll stand in line forever before I'll deal with that self-checkout. So I wonder if that is, I wonder if that, I wouldn't have thought it before, but I wonder if that is a regional decision. I don't know. I guess it depends what type of service you get to, which kind of, we could talk about your deli experience at Harris Teeter, but we, we don't have time for that today, do we? Want to talk about, want to talk about production planning a little bit? Yes. Yes. Production planning. But first, you were going to explain for people what production planning is for the people who haven't heard of it, don't really know much about it. Okay. That's a, that's a, that's a really good question. Okay. Production planning is kind of the process you go through in advance, looking ahead over the next several weeks, trying to figure out, you know, do I have enough technicians to cleaning professionals to handle the work that I have on the schedule? Do I have enough jobs on the schedule to keep all of my technicians busy? Are those jobs scheduled in a way over the next several weeks where the actual labor hours to complete all of those jobs matches up with the technicians I have? Are the jobs scheduled in a way where the drive time is managed and hopefully as small as it needs to be? Are the teams generating the appropriate amount of revenue each day? Is their, you know, efficiency factor, and we'll get into what all of this means here in a little bit, you know, where we want it to be? Do I need to do more recruiting to find more cleaning professionals and get them trained? So a month from now, I won't be short in factoring in things like, you know, whatever your average turnover rate is. And another calculation is basically looking ahead, playing what if and making decisions today. So you'll be in a better position, you know, two weeks out a month out or further, rather than, oh my goodness, I don't have enough people or I don't have enough work or I don't have enough something else or I've got way too much work today and I don't have enough work tomorrow. Fixing that the day over, the day before is a whole lot harder than addressing it a month out. So that in general is what we're talking about with production planning. So this is how I think of it. I think of it as budgeting for your scheduling. So it's just like the budgeting process. You want to do it in advance. You can do it day of absolutely. You can just spend your money willy-nilly. You have money. Great. You spend it and you're good to go. And some days you're like overdrive your checking account. And other days you're like plenty of money left over. But if you do production planning, you plan in advance, you do your budgeting in advance, you know exactly how much money you have, exactly how many jobs you need, exactly how many employees you need. I love doing production planning because it just makes every day easier. Don't have to do it, but sure makes your life better. Hey, Tom, I like this new deck. Is this really new? Did you create it for this? I did. I created it just for this. I guess full disclosure, what we're talking about here is kind of a bridge mini version of material that we go over in a lot more painful detail in foundations. Is it okay for me to say that? It's not painful, but we're going to give you an overview today of some material that we do a deeper dive on in foundations. How about that? Well, you know what? Since you pulled this up real quick, I'm just going to real quick case you up with, I'm redoing all of my decks for foundations right now. Do we have a new template that we want to use? Are we just going to use? The answer to that question is no we don't, but yes we should. Let's make sure we do. All right. You're the one who usually creates these. So when you get one for us, let me know and I'll get all my decks moved over. Yeah. And you know, I've got aspirations. You told me that you were going to redo all your decks. Yeah. Kind of get this all ready in July, right? Yeah. So we're like one weekend to July. How's that going so far? I have pulled up one. But then that's what came up for me was, uh-oh, I'm pretty sure we're going to have a new background and everything. That's why I'm bringing it up now. I think we need a new background. Yeah, well we'll do that. All right. See what happens when you guys don't comment? Tom and I, we just talk about whatever we got. This is self-inflicted here. We could be going in a different direction if somebody want to ask a question. All right. I'm going to let us get back to production planning because I really do love this topic. I really, really do. Okay. So this is kind of another, another, I guess, you know, definition of production planning. You know, several objectives. You know, you're trying to maximize profit by, you know, finding the right balance between a number of things. So one thing that production planning will do for you, if you are like consistently doing it, you know, having the discipline to do it, and you don't have to be perfect with it. You know, the idea of you'll know exactly, you know, how many, you know, cleaning technicians and exactly, you know, how many jobs and, you know, stuff changes and you might not know exactly because you're going to know a heck of a lot better and be a lot better prepared than what you will if you don't even think about it until the day of. So you want to maximize profit and find the right balance between, you know, the number of technicians you need. And really what you're trying to do is, is, is, is maximize the lifetime value of your cleaning professionals or your technicians. We've used this fancy term, human capital. Now, in a perfect world, you can maximize the return on your technicians. At the same time, you know, the lifetime value of customers, you want to maximize that. At the same time, you want to maximize your return on just capital in general. And capital is the stuff that you, you, you, you buy. The materials stuff like automobiles, for instance. And, you know, you can say vacuum cleaners and equipment and stuff like that. And, and even, you know, your, your, your office space and stuff like that should be considered as capital as well. And I used to have this slide that said, you know, maximize, you know, your, your, your lifetime value of your cleaning professionals, maximize lifetime value of customers maximize return on capital. But the fact of the matter is you can't maximize all three of those at the same time, because you're always kind of playing one off against the other. And the real art to this is getting all three of them as high as you can, and still kind of keeping your other commitments together. And, you know, we'll talk a little bit more about what that looks like. And it's important to know that when you add additional resources and in what quantities basically. So, you know, how many cleaning professionals, how many homes, how many people in your office staff, we call them support staff, how much equipment, being able to predict, you know, what, how many of those that you're going to happen at any point in time? And do you have surpluses too many? Or do you have deficits not enough? What decisions you need to make to make sure that you never have large amounts of too much of something and large amounts of not enough of something else? So that your morning isn't chaotic yet too many jobs and not enough people are too many people and not enough jobs. You know, that's a good point. You ever, I mean, I remember this, you know, the alarm go off and you're hating the idea going to work. The morning, the morning. Just dealing with the morning. Absolutely. I absolutely remember that. Yeah, it was terrible. And this was back when there was like an answering machine. When somebody was going to call in, it was going to be on the answering machine. Yeah. And you'd look at the answer machine and have that little red LED number that was like how many messages were setting there. Six, six, six. It's blinking. Remember that. The last thing you wanted to do is push the button. Who's not coming to work today? And you're always praying, please let it be customers. Please let it be customers. I know I want the money. Ah, it's so much less chaotic if the customers call out than if the employees did. Truly. You know, there have been times it's like, if one of them was like, you know, I need to skip my cleaning today, it's like, yes. I'm like, oh, I'm so glad business is so much easier when we don't have customers. If we didn't have any customers, this day would be a breeze. I wouldn't have to do it. I do think we're going to have to to look at this term human capital. Tom, I have a feeling that term is going to get us in trouble before too horribly long. Could be. And just like maybe it has some, some, it could be perceived in a negative way. Yeah. Yeah. That it's not that we're not seeing people as people. We're seeing them as commodities or, you know, I'm open to that. Maybe we should do something different. Just clean professionals, the vast majority of the time, just to make sure that we're, you know, I didn't I didn't invent that term. Oh, I know. Um, if you go to that link that I sent you from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, you'll find that term all over the place. So you blame them. Anybody that doesn't blame or blame our federal government for that. Yeah. Department of Labor uses that. I'm not thinking we're going to have trouble from cleaning business owners so much as we might start getting a little bit of pushback from the human capital themselves. I just got a little twinge. I was like, ooh, starting to get sensitive to some of that stuff. But anyway, it's important to look at your, the, the, the, the, the, you know, your cleaning professionals as an asset, though. And one of the objectives in production planning is maximizing your return on that investment. You know, you want to generate as much revenue per hour per salary dollar as, as, as, as you can. And still, you know, getting at, giving, you know, adequate treatment to what the customers need and what, you know, your cleaning professionals need themselves and, you know, your other stakeholders. So there's just several things in terms of ground rules and, and, and, and parameters. And there's a lot of different ways to do this. But this is kind of a, I'm going to be a little bit prescriptive here. This is the way that we've taught it in foundations for the last 10 times. And this is where we're going to be teaching it in the 11th time. And, you know, maybe the 12th time, who knows. But it's also the way that Castlekeepers has done it for the last 25 years. And it's also the way that we do it in Made Central. It's what we call the Made Central way. And when you're, you're, you're selling recurring service, we strongly recommend that you do all your production planning. And another dimension is this is about production planning and scheduling, you know, the other and dispatching. Let me define the other two things. Scheduling is, is, is, is, is what you do more short, short term, typically the day before making any refinements of, you know, who's working, who isn't, what teams that you're assigned to, what homes are being cleaned that day. And, you know, do I have all the equipment? Is there any special considerations that we need to do? Who needs to be, you know, communicated with and about what all of that's kind of the scheduling thing. And dispatching is what we call gain day. That is the stuff that happens day of when the work instructions go out and your teams, you know, get in automobiles and go out and clean homes. And, you know, if that's happening between the hours of nine to five, then whatever support monitoring and coaching and modifications you're doing for the jobs and the teams that are being scheduled for that day, that's the dispatching component. So we're talking about production planning. That's the longer term planning. We're talking about scheduling. That's, you know, the day before or, you know, maybe a couple of days before you start that and dispatch is day of, that's game time. So it's all important. A lot of times when you're like picking between multiple priorities, you know, if there's a dispatching issue that needs to be dealt with, then as a rule, that's what you deal with because that game time, you can deal with the scheduling thing or the dispatching thing. The production planning or the scheduling thing, once you deal with the dispatching thing, but the dispatching thing, you've got real people on the clock and real customers who are getting clean. That takes the priority. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. I love that example of it. And just to point out that one of the things that happens in our businesses is as we get busy, we drop the production planning part first because, you know, it's so far out and it doesn't seem as urgent. Well, it isn't. And then the scheduling piece can get pushed aside a little bit. And then pretty soon, here you are in firefighting mode, dispatching, dispatching, dispatching. And every day is chaotic. So the way to get out of that, one of the ways to get out of that chaos is to do the production planning, which is a big, big part of why we're having this discussion today. So one of the things that we strongly recommend is you do your recurring schedules on a four-week rotation. And I've got a spreadsheet. I'll show you a little bit more about what that looks like. But if you take the year and look at it in four-week segments, there's like 13 four-week segments in a year. 13 times four is what, 52? So I want to be clear real quick. He's not saying that he's recommending that you schedule your jobs every four weeks. That's, oh, hey, Lisa. That's not what he's saying. So for those of you that are checked out right now, arguing your heads like, what? No, I want bi-weekly or whatever. Stick with us. We want high-frequency recurring revenue. If we can get a bunch of weeklies and bi-weeklies, that's preferable. That's awesome. I guess what I am suggesting with you, though, if you've got customers that want to go like every three weeks, every five weeks, those are decisions that you need to make. And depending upon your situation and where you are and the competitive forces within your market and your particular business needs, they might be rational decisions to make. But I can tell you from a production planning standpoint and a scheduling standpoint, you're making your life a whole lot more difficult. And at some point, when you get big enough, it gets easier, at least my assessment, my experience, it gets easier to say, you know what? We're not going to do any more of those every three-week jobs or every five-week jobs or whatever because it blows my entire schedule up. Whatever money I'm making off of that job is creating too many inefficiencies and too much loss of productivity in other areas. I do have to say, though, Tom, I think you know about one of my MMA members that they schedule primarily every three weeks over 60% of their business, big company doing close to 2 million right now, and over 60% of their businesses every three weeks. So their standard schedule is weekly three weeks and six weeks, which is very interesting. You know, that actually might could work. What would your scheduling window be that wouldn't be every four weeks? Would it be I should ask 52 divided by what it doesn't even have to be exact. I mean, I guess you could have three-week scheduling window in the option or six-week scheduling window in the options. But in that scenario, I'm assuming they don't do every two weeks or every four weeks. They do, but they just have a lot less of every two and every four. Those are the ones that blow up their schedule. Right, right. And so the reason I'm bringing that up is because it goes to your point that you want to be setting up your production planning in a way that makes sense for your business so that you know what you're trying to build in and you also know what you're trying to build out and push one way or the other. So I'm sure that when they get people that want to go E2 every two weeks, they're pushing them to weekly. And if they really don't want weekly, then they're going E3 every three weeks. So it's just an interesting way of doing it. This is way too small. There we go. We're getting better. I can see it on my very large screens. How about that? This is just a spreadsheet I whipped together before we started today's show. And I started with Sunday the third of 2021. So for this calendar year, this would be the first week of 2021. Your X's in the middle. I can't see what's happening here. Sure. Goal. I got you. I didn't even see that first every week. I thought, okay, it doesn't matter. That's good. Thank you. Yeah. And so this is week one. And this is the week of the year. Week one, week two, and all the way down to week 52. And this is the Sunday. And you can start your work week on any day of the week that you want. Our SOP for that, the way that we do it at Castle Keepers, we started on a Sunday. That gives us a little bit of wiggle room. We believe over the course of year, we save a little bit of overtime doing it that way. Because if you got work that didn't get done by the end of day Friday, but you got to get done before Monday, then if somebody hasn't reached 40 hours in that week, they can get it done Saturday. If working Saturday puts up an overtime, I'll tell you what. We're going to schedule that for Sunday. And we got the whole rest of the week to figure out how to manage the hour so they don't get into overtime. That's nice. But there's other reasons to do it for other days of the week, too. But that's, we do a fair amount of work that takes us into the weekend and we're able to manage the overtime a little bit better that way. But this column here is the week rotation number. And see how it goes one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, and it just keeps repeating itself. Yep, yep. And if we counted it does that 14, excuse me, 13 times. 14 times. I knew that. I knew that. So if I have a home that goes every week, then they'd be going every week. How about that? Yeah. If I've got a home that goes every two weeks, and I just happened to schedule the first job on, you know, this week here, week one, it doesn't go week two, but it goes again week three, week one again, which is five in a year, week seven of the year, which is week three in the four week rotation. You notice what's happening here. And I took the even number weeks and didn't highlight them. I took the odd number weeks and turns them this peach color. So these guys are not going on the non-colored weeks. They're always going on an odd week. And put a little P in there on that week number two, and you did the same thing, then you would have the, those people would be going on all of the even weeks. Yep. We do the exact same thing where, you know, here's another customer here and we would schedule them on, they started on an even week and they never skipped or got bumped or whatever. They would always be claimed on an even number week, either week two or week four. So a lot of you right now are thinking, yeah, we all do this. I don't understand. What's the, what's the point? No worries. He's got some good stuff coming here. Every four weeks, I get scheduled to the thumb, whatever week I'm on in the rotation, if I never skip bump, whatever, I'm always on that number week. So if I go every four weeks and I started on week one and I never miss a cleaning, I'll always be cleaned on week one. So the cool part of that, I'm trying to build a spreadsheet to show this and I don't know if I'm doing an awesome job of this or not. This is kind of like the master schedule and across the top represents the four weeks of the four week rotation and each one, these are teams. So this is like team one, team two, team three. Let's pretend we're scheduling for three teams and these are five days of the week that we're scheduling for. And if you notice here, what's wrong with these week numbers here? Can you see that? Yeah, very good. 1-3-2-4. 1-3-2-4. I can't count straight, can I? Well, I think it's really good for the master schedule, but not really good for math. This is one way of looking at your schedule where if you've got a home and I'm just going to draw some graphics here and show you how you can schedule, say... Who are you, Mr. Facebook user or Ms. Facebook user that says Tom looks weird? Because gosh, that's not right. Oh, look weird. I should say, I look weird. They say that. Oh, did I get that wrong? I'm sorry. I don't look weird. I don't know. I might look weird. It's Pam. Hey, Pam. Hello, Pam. How are you? So if I wanted to schedule an every two week customer and my schedule is wide open, I could schedule it wherever I wanted to, but I would show it on my master schedule like this, where team one, first job of the day is getting done on weeks one and week three. And I cover both weeks. If I wanted to schedule... What happened there? If I wanted to schedule a monthly customer and try that again, and we'll make our monthly a different color just to make it a little bit easier, Thank you. He would only take up one day and maybe we're going to schedule him on the fourth Monday on team one. And if I had an every week customer and we'll make him a different color too, we'll make him green because that's money. That's the best one. And he would go across all four weeks. So it's every four weeks or every one week. It doesn't really matter if I do one, two, three, four or one, three, two, four. But for most of us who build a business primarily off of recurring work, we're doing it well. And if we're doing it the way that Kerry Knight is encouraging us to do and training it to do, we would have more every other week customers, every two week customers than anybody else, right? Right. So finding homes for those other week customers kind of gets confusing if I'm looking at a slot here on week one and looking for another slot on week three if they aren't together and there's a home in the middle in week two. And if you're scheduling this way, or are scheduling something that looks like this, it gets confusing. But if you put weeks one, three, two, four together, it's really easy to see where you've got a hole that you can fit two jobs side by side on. So Tom, what is the big value of looking at your scheduling in this way or your production planning probably more in this way? Because this isn't something that you normally see in scheduling programs. Right. Well, if things are going well, you're always scheduling new work, right? And you always have that new customer that wants to go on the schedule and they want every two week service and you're, you might be doing phone estimates, they may be on the phone with you and you're trying to figure out, well, where am I going to schedule them? How am I going to make that work? An approach like this can lead you to the answer really quickly. You can look at the openings for all of your teams on all the days of the week. And there could be other color coding that you would do in here where you might be scheduling by zones and each one of these bars might be a different color representing a different geographic region of your market. You might break it down and say, okay, I'm doing the south side of town on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and the north side of town on Mondays and Fridays type thing and you would kind of know where to go there, but you're still looking for a hole, right? This makes it a lot easier to find a hole regardless if it's every week, every two weeks or every four weeks. Can you, Main Central does do this, Lisa. Can you, can you show it, Main Central? I feel like Katie is going to be doing a presentation on this. I don't know when, she's going to show the Main Central. So we probably don't need to get into all of that today, especially it's 247. But if we have the date, Tom, where we can tell, let me see if I can find it here real quick. You can pull up Main Central and I'll try to find when Katie's going to be here because she's going to give us a real good tutorial. On this, Pam, you've already seen this tutorial. We're going to do it a little bit different than she did before though. I think you saw it in Vegas. Is that you saying I need to try this? That's what she showed in Vegas, but she's going to show it a little bit different. Let me find it. Okay, so this is, oh yeah. Yeah, you can do this on a spreadsheet. You can do this on a magnet board. You can do this. I'm sure that there's other tools that you can make like little post-it notes. And there was a lot of different things that you could do. You can even do this on a dust calendar if you really want to. We used to do it on a magnet board before we automated it, but this is the way it works in Main Central. And if you can see, I don't know if I can blow this up or not. This is week one, week three, week two, week four. And these are the actual dates. See, I've got a hole right here. If I had an every two week customer I needed to schedule, I could put it on team one on a Tuesday. Starting on the 20th or starting on eight, three, the one, depending on which day I want to do. But that every week customer, that every two week customer would be on the even weeks. If I needed to find a hole for a every week customer, I've got something over here on team four because I've got all four weeks open here. So remember if you're looking for weekly, you have to be looking for four holes in a row side by side because you want them, if you want them to be with the same team. So, oh, so that you guys know, July 26th is when Katie is going to be, Katie loves Main Central. This was a, she used to use a spreadsheet that Laura Smith created, actually Aja created for Laura Smith at All-Star Cleaning. And so Katie was very familiar with that. And when Main Central created it, Katie just lost her mind of how much she loves this. So she's going to do a quick, not a quick, she's going to spend a good half hour answering everybody's questions and helping people to be able to see how this works. I'm drawing a blank at the moment. Who's our friend from St. Louis that is the accountant? Kathy, it's my understanding that Kathy Gage actually introduced this concept to the industry. Kathy did this on post-it notes on a wall. So she had the, each team was up on a wall, like on a big, like, you know, this big huge post-it notes, like that, something like that. But it wasn't a post-it note. And then she had all of the days out, filled out, you know, the week one, week two, week three, week four for each team. And then she just had post-it notes with the customer's name on it. So if it was a weekly customer, they would have four post-it notes. And if it was a bi-weekly, and I think there were different colors, and if it was bi-weekly, she had two post-it notes or every two weeks. And if it was weekly, they had, I think I said that backwards, if it was monthly, they had one post-it note. And so she would just write their name on and then put them on the, put them on the board. And then it was really easy to see where there was no post-it note. So I feel like if you look at this that way, that these are like post-it notes that are on the schedule, it kind of helps to be able to see what it is that you're looking at. We used to do that with magnet boards and they're like one by two inch magnets. And you'd take the little piece of paper and you'd write their name on it. And we had little decals you put on the back that the customer number would be written on it. And we had a little color dots that would go on it that would let you know what zone it was in and the actual color of the paper on the magnet would let you know if it was every week, every two weeks, every four weeks. And we had like a six-foot board for like every day of the week. And we had like what was analogous to the ward room, the war room in Charleston now with these magnet boards. And there were four weeks, weeks one, two, three, four. And if you were weekly, you had four magnets, like you said, two magnets, if you're every other week and so forth. In a perfect world, magnets never moved. All you would do is once you were finished with week one and you moved to week two, you used like a raceable marker and you would erase the date, the Sunday date from week one and you write the Sunday up there four weeks out and that would be your next week one and the magnets never moved. Now, people skipped and bumped and all of that. The more magnets moving, but you'd always put them back too because they would have their number on a sticker on the board and I digress and I don't know how useful this is but it was really awesome. If you are very tactile, you would love the magnet system as well. And Kathy's Post-it Note system was really good for those people that really love. Tom, why don't you like to check your own stuff out? I've just got to go back to that. You are very tactile. Why don't you like to grab that gun and do your own thing? Is it the gun? I mean, you're actually like holding cans against this. No, they have a gun. They have a little gun. You just point it. Not at our grocery stores. Oh, really? You know, at like the home improvement stores like Lowe's and so forth where you got like all kinds of weird things that they're making you check out. There's a gun. Ours has a gun. Our grocery stores have a gun, a little handheld thing and it is easy. You just point, point, point, point, point. Well, man, that's part of it. I had a gun. Maybe I'd feel differently because, you know, I'm up here with this watermelon with this little barcode on it trying to. We digress. Sorry, folks. Let's go ahead and add it. Where are we at? Yeah, let's move forward. Reasonable conclusion. We find value and creating a hierarchy when we have a customer that, you know, we live in Charleston. There's a lot of customers here that will have like more than one home actually. They'll have like a hometown and something else on the beach. And it's one customer, two homes. We also do a lot of like vacation rentals and Airbnb's and stuff like that where you might have a host that has a whole bunch of homes. So, oops, we start with the idea of you have a customer and that's the person or company that commissions the work who says, hey, I want you to clean for me and I have the authority to ask you to clean for me because I'm responsible for this home or multiple homes. And they're the person who pays the bill. You send the bill to the customer or charge that customer's credit card. Underneath that customer, you can have a home. And a home is a place that people live, sleep in bay then. It's the property that's controlled by the customer. We schedule using this thing called service sets. And you can actually manage this with just pieces of paper and a scope of work and have two scopes of work. Service set is basically a unique scope of work for a particular home. And a service set might be I'm going to clean the entire house, do it like a general clean. Another service set might be I'm just going to clean the downstairs of the house. And the downstairs of the house is going to have a different allowed time. That's the time that you would expect your cleaning professionals to take to clean the home. It would also have a different bill rate because it would be less work. And a lot of times you can get more work. You talk about lifetime value of a customer. You want to get that high recurring revenue off of them. They might have rooms in the house that they don't use very much and they don't want to pay to get the whole house cleaned every week or every other week. But you give them the option to say, I'll clean your whole house maybe every four weeks and then the off weeks from that I'll just clean these rooms that are really important to you that in essence you've made them in every two week customer you're just doing two different you're doing different service sets. Service sets, two different scopes of work still going every even week or every odd week but just it's like two every four week customers as opposed to one every two week customers really one every two week customers being treated as two every four week customers or homes if you will. And the job is one particular date where you're scheduled to go out and perform a particular service set or scope of work at a particular home. And if you think of it that way you can create more opportunities for yourself especially at the service set level because it's just another variation that you can use to encourage people to do more work with you and still do it in a way that fits within whatever scheduling logic you do and if you're doing a four week rotation it's easier to get them to fit in with that if you give them the extra option of service sets or if you're doing something like every six week rotation and pushing more times every three weeks or every six weeks that's really kind of cool it would work there too maybe even more valuable being able to do multiple service sets with a with a rotation like that. So that maybe is what kind of what it looks like. Another thing that we believe it's important is we schedule to teams when you're back looking at the world on a magnet board with weeks one two three and four and the magnets are there all over the place and the objective is once you place that weekly customer there or that every two week customer there that you never have to touch those magnets again assigning everything to teams makes it really easy at that point because your homes get assigned to teams your cleaning professionals get assigned to teams equipment gets assigned to teams where you've got a set of equipment from a vacuum cleaner to a caddy to a bucket all this belongs to team number one all this belongs to team number two and so forth cars are assigned to teams supervisors are assigned to teams if you're big enough where you have like multiple supervisors you expect them out in the field training and coaching and so forth you can assign supervisors to teams and everything's assigned to a team if something changes you just basically change assign some other resource to that team and everything works whereas if you're scheduling to like cleaning professionals there's some approaches where you know I sign the home to a team and it's assigned to to Betty and that's really awesome until when Betty doesn't come to work and then things can kind of break down it's just everything works when you have to make a change if everything's pointing towards a team all right and so I'm going to clarify just a little bit a team does not mean in the context of of made central especially it doesn't mean it's two people a team is is the it can be any size it is this set of stuff people equipment car it's all of the stuff that is going to service that home that's the team all right so the team is not about a lot of times people hear team and they think too no you can have one person teams yeah yeah one person if you if you do if you do solos if you do solos the way that we and we do we do solos and castle keepers as well and we do teams we kind of do a hybrid thing and a lot of that evolved over covid because we're dealing with all these unprecedented events and they're still assigned to teams and these are solo teams but it's easier to do that because when that a particular cleaning professional you know is taking vacation or whatever reason if they're not available you don't have to move anything else you just assign another cleaning professional that team and everything else stays the same so that's why I really like to think of teams in terms of all of this stuff the cleaning professionals the equipment the car the supervisor all of that is the team that's what it is required to to create the team and if one of those things is gone well the team still exists you just need to put a new one in if the piece of equipment is broken from team one it doesn't mean everybody we have to change the customers and we have to change cleaning professionals a new car none of that has to happen we just need to get another vacuum cleaner to sub in for team one team one's vacuum cleaner so I really like the idea of thinking of teams in terms of everything that is required to the team that is required to I want to say clean the whole home but that's not the term I was looking for but to clean the home to do the job yeah to do the job to clean the job deliver the service that's what I was trying to say deliver the goods yeah okay it's past the top of the hour oops Lang it's quite late y'all you know we could go on for another hour or more but we're not today but we're going to be doing production planning and scheduling for the entire month of July so you'll be hearing more and you know we get a window of opportunity we might jump into the deck and do a little bit more because I'm you know I have to remember this stuff anywhere we're gonna need it back over right okay and for anybody that's interested the 24th Katie's going to be on she's going to be doing a deep dive into that master schedule and how to she's not going to be using made central so don't worry it's going to be just made central it's how to use this concept and how to actually fill holes and to be able to schedule do production planning way in advance by using this this method super helpful if you hear your production planning right you're scheduling the amount of time you have to spend scheduling goes down you know it's just you're making a tweak here and there but most of it's set for perpetuity because you've got your defaults for your your cleaning professionals and your homes and everything else with default teams and they've been already assigned based on what the master schedule is telling you and it just and y'all know that if your scheduling is on point even dispatching is better and we all know there's going to be some chaos around dispatching right but even your dispatching is better if your scheduling is on point so today's Wednesday right today's Wednesday you know this is just so weird you know Monday was like Monday I know yeah so we're down for the week but we're going to do that Monday what are we doing Monday Liz let me pull it up and see Monday the 12th oh we have Chris Willett he's going to be talking about scheduling efficiency especially since COVID right things are so much different now he's going to be talking about solos how to how to optimize using solos reduced work times because people don't want to work as much he's got a lot of different things he's going to be talking about and basically reinvented his business over COVID he did he did he did this is I know Chris Chris Chris has gained there's a lot of things to be learned that Chris is going to be sharing on Monday you don't want to miss that so any any FYI you're going to be in and Chris's new group Pam's moving over to success group and Chris is in that group you're going to love it yeah so are we done for the week we're good that's it Monday five o'clock eastern we'll be here you guys take care bye bye bye y'all