16.5: Bonus - April Host Meetup

 Hey, welcome back to the Huge Transformation podcast. Guess what? Today's a really fun episode because I got Sheila and Gabe here. Hey Sheila. Hey, Gabe. Hey. Hey. What's up Syd? What's up Sheila? Alright. Is everybody home or are you still on the road? Gabe, you were in Oklahoma City last week. What's up on the I'm back home before I get back on the road next week, but yeah, back in Nashville for this week.

And then is Sheila, are you, like last time we spoke you were just, you had just gotten back from an epic snow trip into Idaho, which is like right up in anywhere. Yeah. Idaho back country, yes. Oh, cool. It was fun. Yurt stays and. Wood-burning saunas and solar and totally off the grid with no cell phone, no internet.

It was fabulous. Tons of snow. It was great. Exactly what I needed. God, that's beautiful. I saw the pictures. How, how you, you mentioned it when we were, uh, texting how many miles you guys back? Country cross country speech. We were just having fun. I mean, we did like 26. Smiles, 27 miles, something like that.

But it, but there was a lot of, um, I mean we were pulling those, uh, what do you call the sled that you pull? What do call that? Yeah. It just, I don't know what it's called. Your gear is that all your gear on it and you're trudging and pulling that huge sled full of all your stuff. I mean, it was, I got a heck of a workout.

That sounds like a void. It was called a fun. Called a Yes. How far in did you have to, to, uh, pull your gear to get to the yurt? About three miles. Oh, we lost you, Sheila. Oh no, there's your miles. I'm back. Three miles. Three miles? Yeah. It was three miles. Yes. Not far. It was fine. Okay. Yeah. That's cool. And then Gabe last week, you're in Oklahoma City and from what I understand, you're considering moving there.

Is that right? Absolutely not. It's the flattest place on earth. Like literally it, there's nothing blocking the wind and dust. And so, uh, my flight got delayed 'cause there was a dust storm. And even when we went to fly out the, uh, stewardess said, Hey, I don't wanna scare anybody, but just make sure, double check.

You have a barf bag in front of you. Right. I. Um, and everybody was like, what? And it was because it was so windy when we took off. The plane was shaking as we were going on the runway, but it was fine. But yeah, Oklahoma City is fun. Cool little city, like a lot of cool stuff to do around it, but would would never live there.

Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. They kind of flat, great Plains, high Plains area. Um, I grew up, you know, close to Amarillo, which is. Uh, roughly the same terrain. It's not that close, but it's just, you know, we go, oh, it's gonna be windy today. What does that mean? That means it's 50 mile an hour all day long with gusts up to 80.

That's windy. Not like, that's when blocking the wind like nothing. No freeze. You can see, you look right and you see everything that's to the right or the east of you or the west, whatever direction you look. Mm-hmm. Like, I can't, I look in my backyard and I just see my trees. I can't see my neighbor's house.

Or like, whereas here, you could see the entire city of Oklahoma City. Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy. So let's, let's catch up a little bit. So, six weeks ago was the last time we saw you guys. We were all together in Nashville at the huge Mastermind and we actually recorded an introduction to this podcast. This podcast in a phone booth.

We were like stuck in this little bitty, bitty phone booth. Bye. In the last six weeks. I mean, we've kind of, how seasonal is your business, Sheila? You're in, in North Carolina? Yeah. Uh, our, we have really four slower months, but my goal is closing in that seasonal gap. Right. And just being slam ball the heck of the wall all the time.

Yeah. Um, but uh, yeah, I mean, so January, February, and then we get a little slow down August, September because we have hurricane season, but you know. Yeah. It, it starts off slow the first couple months, and then otherwise we stay pretty, pretty solid. Okay. So you kinda, do you have, do you have a distinct spring rush?

Oh, big time pollen season. Okay. Um, yeah, we, we are entering from really April, mid-April, all the way through August 1st. Um, yeah, we're, we've got 300, 350 calls coming in the office a week. Wow. Okay. Yeah. Something I wanna loop back around to that in just a minute. Let me ask you, Gabe, so the majority of right hand rhino is, is storefront window cleaning?

Is there a seasonality to it? No. I mean, the springtime, I think it's a little busier because that's when people pay attention more or the patios are getting used more and the dust and pollen, especially in Nashville, is really bad. Like, I don't know if how it is with you guys, but you go outside right now and your, your car is yellow.

It's just so covered. Yeah. So, so yeah. But, um, yellow gold. I like to call it yellow gold. Yeah. It's, it's awesome because I, I think people do pay more attention to it, but we don't see any kinda spike like that that is Okay. 350 we get, on average, I think we get 53 calls a week. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, and it, so, and I'm in Montana and we get like, it's very seasonal.

So December, like we worked into mid-December this year 'cause it was pretty mild, but January, February, ain't nothing going on. Like the phone is not ringing. We have some winter contracts, but not very much. And even those that we have, you know, like. It's eight degrees or it's minus 10. It's like Yeah, everyone's just trying to not die, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Surviving the winter. Right? But so, so we were at, uh, we were together at the Mastermind and one of the concepts we went over, not this most recent, but prior we, we talked about, we learned about total addressable market. Yeah. And then, you know, the past, um, mastermind in February, was it February?

Yeah, February when we were together. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Um, we are looking at strategic development and mm-hmm. On our other podcast, the huge insider, somebody shared, um, Mike Dalkey, he's like, when we ran blue skies, you know, $5 million, you know, winter Clinic company said, this is what we did every February to bring work forward and to pre-schedule and to try to fill, you know, like he was in Minnesota here in Montana.

You know, March is a shoulder season. It might as well still be winter. Because you might have a sunny day, but you might have, you know, eight inches of snow and it, you don't know. But I, I, uh, was so excited. We, I talked to my office manager and Emily and I'm like, Hey, I want you to do this. We always try to pre-book our, our, uh, all of our commercial work, like we do that in February.

And pre-book 'em. It doesn't matter when they book. We booked for the whole year. So all those big jobs are secure and they don't get, uh, you know, muscled out by the flood of phone calls when people start wearing their houses cleaned. And I did not check up on her, but I shared the, the episode of the Insider and like the end of February, I said, Hey, how's March looking and context?

Last March was our biggest march and we did like $52,000 of revenue. In March. Mm-hmm. Which to me is phenomenal because it could be zero. 'cause it could be, you know, frozen. It's so cold. Yeah. Yeah. So when I checked her I was like, Hey, how we looking? She said, we have 84,000 booked for March. Hey, good job.

Nice. Yeah. Oh. I was like, oh, that's amazing. So we just, between she and I, we didn't talk to the team about it, but we set a goal. It's like, if we can make a hundred thousand for March, that'll be, you know, a big record and uh, yeah. She ended up, she scheduled 102,000, and then the, the 31st was on Monday. We had a job on Friday for $2,500.

They canceled because they, they started construction project, so we're like, oh, we're, we're like $600, nine.

We finished the month at $100,060, so we, we beat the goal. Oh, you so beat the goal. That's great. Yeah. Not the, and then everybody got, we, we bought, um. I bought a fancy coffee maker for the cave, for the cave. That's our warehouse called the Cave. Um, it's like a $900 coffee maker that grinds and does all the, you just push a button and it's like Zo.

And, uh, day one, our production manager, he went from drinking two coffees a day to seven. He's like just living by the coffee maker. Going go, go, go. Oh my gosh. But so a hundred thousand. Everybody just drinks seven cups of coffee a day. I love it. I know it. We got a thousand dollars of coffee a day going down the go through the crew, but man, their production rate jumped.

I tell you that. Caffeine? Yeah. Yeah. That's exciting. Sid. Congratulations. Yeah. Congrats. That's awesome. Thanks. So, um, Gabe, I know you guys are in heavy growth mode. Tell me what's going on there. What have you, what have you seen, what have you learned in the last, you know, four to six weeks? Um, I think, uh, the value of doing something like, you know, taking the, the other thing Dalkey calls it, uh, is you know, your ip, like we're all generating IP in our businesses.

And actually using it. And I think like that's one thing that a lot of times even we, we fall victim to not doing is we know we should be doing something or we know this happened last winter or last December, um, but we forget, or we don't systemize or we don't make it something that that happens in Q4.

So I think like always trying to think through that is just super helpful. But the one thing that we did do really well was that a couple years ago. We got slammed in December by a lot of companies wanting to close out the books, and then they had these huge balances because their AP department is separate from the onsite sometimes.

And so the general managers hire us and they're just letting the bills rack up and then their AP department has to pay it off. Mm-hmm. So it was just such a mess, uh, for, uh, my office manager, for our admin, they had to take a ton of time, but also. We realized, hey, let's get on that really early in December and November because these people wanna pay their bills off.

So let's get like, let's get them caught up and let's get everybody paid off. And it's less stressful for them and their AP team. And so we did a really good job of that. So we, uh, we collected, uh, in every month of this quarter, in the first quarter, we collected more money than we actually even produced.

Because we were collecting Oh, wow. Stuff that was past due. Yeah. So it was really cool. March we collected I think 170,000 and we produced 150 or, or a hundred some close to one 60. But it was pretty cool. 'cause typically in our business there's a lag. We never collect everything we produce. Yeah. On net thirties or net sixties, so Especially with storefront, right?

Yeah. I mean, yeah. Yep. It's all delayed typically. What are you guys seeing or what are you doing personally with your business with there? There's, you know, there's so much volatility in the marketplace right now, and like we had tariffs and everybody hated America and then they delayed it for 90 days.

But like, and we, I've saw, I would just watched my little stock portfolio go down 20% and then back up to, you know, like it's just all over the place. Um, with that kind of economic uncertainty. Like what do you guys think about that with your business? Number one or the, or just with accounts receivables, like how you're manage managing that?

Or are you doing anything to shorten the cycle so you don't have a lot of ar? Yeah, it's interesting. I've been trying to dream up this kind of tagline, slogan that is something to the effect of labor does not have tariffs. Like labor does not come with tariffs. Like spend your money at home, right? I mean.

I don't know what that looks like, but, um, we've heard it a little bit from our clients. And our clients are typically, um, retirees that are living in their dream home and, you know, so they're on fixed incomes and things like that. Um, so we're hearing a little bit, but I gotta tell you, we have a huge uptick, um, from collecting, um, credit cards upon booking.

Yeah. Um, so that we can charge like immediately when we're done with the job. We're selling service agreements where people are paying in full for an annual service agreement. Really? Um, we're seeing huge uptick in that. Yeah, I mean, we, we launched service agreements, um, two months ago. I think we've sold 20 plus right now, but I mean, Hey, I, I'm happy with that.

So we have a goal, um, uh, of selling. So each of my salespeople are supposed to sell 10 a month. At an average of $2,000 each. So they're, they're starting out pretty good. They're starting out pretty good. Yes. That's great. Would you mind walk, like, kind of walk me through the process or the, the sales presentation?

How do you do service agreements? How do you break it down? How do you sell it? Yeah, sure. Um, service agreements, really what we're trying to do is, it's a, it's a, to enter a service agreement, it's a minimum of four visits per year. And those four visits per year probably are gonna be quarterly. Some clients on the ocean front may want 6, 8, 12 visits per year just doing their, um, you know, ocean front, main view windows or whatever that may be.

But what we're doing is we're, um, when we go and do an estimate, we're doing a full site assessment, property assessment, and we're identifying all of the services that we can provide to that client. So we're giving them what they're asking for on that estimate, right? What they called for initially.

Originally, maybe a house wash or whatnot. But then we're also presenting to them a actual service agreement package that shows them how by us coming this frequency, they're actually buying labor hours instead of full blown service rates. So we're selling them labor hours at 95 to $110 an hour, and we're just building visits into that service agreement.

They get one big number and all they're seeing are these visits and what's being done on those visits, and we're trying to create a holistic cleaning package for their property. And, um, and then they have an option to pay all up front, which they get perks and bonuses for that. Um, they can do monthly billing.

It's all set up and it's, I'm somewhat spoiled because it's all a function of ServiceTitan. Okay. So we have the capability of doing all this through ServiceTitan, so it's. It's pretty trick. It's pretty trick. That's cool. That's cool. Yeah, and I'm really trying to incorporate, um, you know, being 25 years in business, it's like, okay, let's think, how can I reposition and think outside the box of just cleaning windows and washing houses?

Because I'm leaning into our southeastern climate, being next to the coast. We've got oxidation, corrosion. We have these, what I'm identifying as like these environmental threats. And so all my new marketing positioning is around these environmental threats and how we can build services in that help protect the long-term investment of the home.

Mm-hmm. I'm calling it our 10 x dream outcome. Um, and so like you kinda get the gist, I could keep talking about it for a while, but that's, um, it's something very exciting because obviously you're building recurring revenue, you're building, um, you know, great relationships with your clients. And you know, I mean, I'm always thinking about my employees too, and back to the seasonality, like how do we get these services when people don't typically call us?

We have to sell 'em. Yeah. We have to sell services in the off season and roll 'em into packages because they need things done at their house that time of year. They just don't know it. So yeah, we have to, we have to educate them. Right. So. Yeah. So that's a, that's a big new launch for us and we're getting ready to do a whole new creative and rebranding and everything around that.

Um, and this kind of re repositioning that I've dreamed up. Okay. Yeah, that's really great. And especially like if you're selling into the slow season, you know, like an ideal time to do that is when it's really busy and they're thinking, oh, I need to have this. Yeah, like selling wintertime, cleaning in April as a bundle or a, you know, a service agreement so that they've already said yes.

Because, you know, we have a hard time selling squat in the wintertime because it's winter. Nobody's thinking about it. Think about other stuff. Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's really cool though. Sheila, sorry to cut you off, but I just, I remember you talking about this idea, I think it was maybe a year ago or you, when the first, like the inception came up and you like had said, I'm going to do this and we're gonna reposition and this is what I'm thinking.

So it's cool to hear you talk about, like, you guys doing it now. Yeah. Thank God. Yeah. That's, no, it's, that's cool. No, it was cool for me to hear from like the, when you hear an idea. Just as in like the, the hatchling of an idea to now like executing and what you're doing with the service agreements. It's like, oh man, that's so cool.

Yeah. Subscription model. I mean, um, it's just, I feel like it just solves a lot of craziness, right? Um, to be able to automate things more and. Just to be able to forecast your revenue. I mean, who doesn't love going in and looking at the revenue you have set up in your future months? I don't know about you, but that's one of my very favorite reports to run.

It's like, where are we? Okay, what is the gap to where we need to get? How are we gonna get there? But I love seeing the jobs on the schedule ahead of time. Like there's nothing that gets me more excited than that. Yeah, for sure. So here's some cool, um, I was speaking to an accountant a year and a half ago, and we are talking about our regular revenue versus recurring revenue and the value of the company.

And this is what she told me, it broad strokes, this is not accounting advice for anybody but. Here's what I learned. That blew me away. So let's say you've got a million dollars in revenue and your, your EBITDA is 150,000, and hopefully it's more than that, but you got 150 net. And so as a business, you know, you own the business, it can run on its own.

You sell that, it's worth two to three times that ebitda. So just say it's worth. 450,000. That's it. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That's, that's nice. But that's it. She said if you took the exact same revenue from the same customers and made it monthly recurring, like a subscription model like you're talking about, and nothing changed, like million dollar, top line, one 50, bottom line, now it's worth eight to 10 times.

Woo. I like that. You go from four 50 to possibly 1.5 million. For the value of your company if you wanna sell it, just because you changed the way people pay. Is that crazy? Nothing else is different. That is crazy. Awesome. Yeah. So service agreements, service agree. You need to start marching. Yeah. Service agreements.

Yes. Yeah. Essays. We call 'em essays. Yeah. But, um, we've, we've started doing those. We, we do not have 20, we've sold two. So far since we started and, but it's like, I, I don't know that it's difficult to sell it because it's difficult sell or it's just 'cause we've done it a different way for so long that we're not confident that people should switch.

Yeah. Or they're just used to. What are you, what do you I think it's, I think it's scary to ask people, um, and you know, from a sales positioning, um, 'cause I can tell you my salespeople are scared to start and I have one CSR that's like, I still don't wanna touch service agreements. I'm like, well, we're gonna have to because, but I'm telling you, as soon as they got their first, like, yeah, I'll do that.

And sure, I'll, I'll, here's my credit card. I'll just go ahead and up upfront pay. Then now it's like, oh my God. We're gonna ask this all the time. No problem. So I think it's just getting over that hurdle and it is a different conversation because you are talking about long-term care and maintenance and, you know, it's, it's a different conversation and I think you have to build the value in that.

Um, but I'm gonna pull up, I actually have a service agreement dashboard on service type now. Okay. And so, yeah, I'm gonna pull it up really here real fast. I think I'm switching to a ServiceTitan owned company, by the way. It's called Field Routes, but they're Oh yeah. By ServiceTitan. Yeah, I think we're to 'em.

Cool. That's cool. Love that. Give it to your storefront. Is it all service agreement or is it just month to month? It's all month to month. Um, so we don't do any agreements, uh, I guess except for just month to month agreements. Um, but we have, I think 30% of our customers prepay. So I think we're, or close or we just surpassed the 40,000 a month in prepayments mark a couple months ago.

Um, so that was really cool. And you know, what was, what was helpful, um, was, I don't know if you guys have this with like how you guys are launching the service agreements, but I used to like, I. Uh, not paying attention to this 'cause I'm just not like a marketing guy and I don't think that way. And, but naming it, like giving it a name.

We used to just say subscription. Hey, can we put you on subscription? Yeah. And like at the Mastermind in July last year, shout out to, um, Kyle, uh, Kyle Ray from Austin. 'cause he said you should name it. And so we called it the always clean. Always clean program. A CP. Yeah. Uhhuh. And, and then we, we got rid of the word subscription.

Yeah. And we said nobody ever says subscription, say membership. And um, and I didn't realize how powerful that would be for my people. Like, I'm confident having the conversation I don't like, or, but for my admin, she is just crushing, putting on so many people on, on prepayments, on subscriptions. Because she's like, oh yeah, let me get you on our best program.

It's the a CP membership. You wanna be on this because you get X, Y, and Z. And giving her that name or that like title of it, just, she's rocking 'em out. It's been awesome to see that. That's cool. Love that. Yeah, that's very cool. And I like when you're so close to your business, like we did this, we, we kicked around two or three years ago, like, we need to get subscriptions.

And so we called it subscription then. Our company name is Spectrum. So we, we named it Spectrum Select like you could be on the Spectrum Select program. We thought that'd be great. And everybody's like, we, every time we bring it up, they're like, what is that? I don't get it. Like, it didn't make sense. And so now Gabe, we call ours always clean plan.

It's the acp, just like we just copied cotton. Like yeah, we tried probably five different names like Clearview. Co connect. I don't know. We had, you know, trying to make it catchy. Yeah. But nobody cared. And we, as soon as we said, always clean plan, it's like, set it and forget it. It's like the most convenient thing you can do to always make sure your home is maintained and people go, oh, I'm in.

That's it. Yeah. I mean, all two of them, we haven't had, we haven't sold 200, but the first two went. Love it. Thank God I never have to think about this again. It's just done. Yeah. Well, I'm looking at the dashboard. We haven't sold 200 yet either, so, but we're, we're in motion. We're in motion. I see numbers on this, on this dashboard.

We're, we're good. We're gonna keep rocking and rolling. That's cool. Um, yeah. I love that. Yeah. We're ours are clean and protect. Clean and protect service agreements, but. Um, I'm terrible when it comes to creative stuff like that. I either have to hire it or I have to, you know, chat. GPT is probably one of my best friends right now.

Right, right. Really great for stuff like that too. And so there, there are many ways you can do it in marketing world. Sometimes doing a catchy or making sure that you have alliteration. So it's the Spectrum Select or the Clearview Connect, whatever. Uhhuh. Sometimes that's right. And sometimes. It's just keeping it so basic.

Like if you go and a, a buddy of mine, big marketer, he said sometimes like if you're selling a horse, you don't need a headline, deadline, call to action, all that. You just go horse for sale, call this number. That's it. Yeah. You don't have to complicate it. You're like, you know when, when people have dirty windows and it's pollen season, they already know they want it clean.

You don't have to. Do anything. Yeah, you just go, we clean windows. That's, yeah. I literally just went out and trained one of my guys 'cause he's really good at talking to people, but his close rate is down and I had watched him on a couple doors and I was like, oh man, you just, you just gotta simplify it man.

Like it is maybe not as complex as the industry you came from. 'cause he was selling like some environmental service something. But, um, but yeah, it was just like, hey. You wanna get your windows cleaned? Alright. Like, yeah, we do a lot of the neighbors and so, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Years and years ago, well, 23 years ago when we started, we started with a simple flyer.

It was so ugly. I, I, I, I'm embarrassed to think of how those are the best ones. And yeah, it was like this stupid logo that like I made with Mac paint or whatever on old laptop, but it just said dirty windows we can help. And then Spectrum, here's the phone number. Fast estimate, whatever. It was just simple.

And it always, like, every time we distribute 'em, we get a one and half to 2%, uh, call, you know, response rate. People call Uhhuh Uhhuh and uh, like, and it's, we use the same message now, but a prettier picture and still it's a one and a half percent response rate no matter what. What was the best postcard you ever did, Gabe?

Best postcard. Yeah. Um, I don't think we've done any, we've never done mailers 'cause with the B2B. Okay. Whoever we, if it goes to the business, they typically, like the, the decision maker will not get that piece of mail. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Um, but I'm trying to think of one of the best pitches or something that we've done.

What about you, Sid? What's the best mailer you've done? While I think about our mailer. Okay, so it, it, it is not a mailer. It is one day, I, I had taken one of my vans to the car wash and it was early in March, mid-March, and I just thought, well, I'm gonna make a, a quick video and just put it on Facebook and promote it a little bit and just see what happens.

And I don't remember if we saw that this is a, a holiday or it's a made up holiday. It's clearly a made up holiday. March 23rd is National Chips and Salsa Day. So I literally, I stood on top of my van and did a face video of me with the mountains in the background. I'm like. Hey, one week from day, it's national chips and salsa day.

We know you love chips and salsa. It's my favorite snack. If you call this week and schedule the winter clinic, I'm gonna bring you a jar of homemade salsa and a bag of organic corn chips and that's it. I put it out and we got like 15 calls just from that, but one of them was a bank we had been trying to establish a relationship with for 10 years.

A guy called, and he is, we at that point, they had one big branch and we cleaned it once every year, and he's like. Let's schedule it in March instead of July. And I'm like, sweet. We went and I brought him his chip and salsa and he goes, you know what, we need this thing scheduled. And I was like, you need it twice here?

And he is like, no, three times we need it spring. And I'm like, fantastic. And then he's like, you know what? All the other branches, how often do you clean 'em? I'm like, only on request. We, we would love to do 'em. You know, like twice a year. He's like. I do 'em twice a year and they're like six other branches.

So that one bag of chips and salsa turned into a $900 job that day, but turned into a $9,000 a year contract for the last eight years. For less than $9. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Gimme that. Chips and salsa, we do it every year. We, we have so many that we give away now. We go buy salsa from this place by the gallon, and then we, you know, pour it up into jars and hand 'em out.

It's our big commercial contract. It's such a, such a great idea. I love that. Yeah. That is like, people just need a reason. It doesn't really matter what it is. Yeah. Okay. So the very first postcard mailer that I ever did was, you remember, and I'm probably WCR still do, does this, but you remember how like when you signed up for WCR R back in the day and like you had access to all their marketing stuff?

Yeah, and it had like the templates and all that. So I did one of their templates and it was. The spring cleaning checklist and it, but we modified it, so it's me, my face, like here up and I'm holding the clipboard. And then on the clipboard is like the spring cleaning checklist and I'm holding it like this.

Yeah. And we, we printed it on an eight and a half by 11. Postcard. Like a huge like regular sheet of paper size. Yeah. And we sent those out just to our customer database. Okay. Just to our customer database. And I'm not kid you customers, like I would go to clients' houses and they filed them away 'cause they were a regular size piece of paper.

So they would put 'em in their file cabinets and they pull. We had those things circulating for years. I'm not kidding. Oh, that's awesome. For years. And so I thought like, oh yeah, mailers, mailers, mailers. I've never had another one that had that much hype. Yeah. You should do like a follow up off that like, Hey, if you still have this thing, you get a discount.

Whoever's, I really feel like it was the size though, because like they felt like it was big enough they needed to hold onto it or something. I don't know. I don't.

We got a, a mailer in our mailbox, I think it was two years ago, and I swear, like when I opened the mailbox, there's just this thing, it's just a, it's a letter with a handwritten signature on it, and it was from some tree service like. Hey neighbor, this is Bob's Tree Service, and we've been doing a lot of work in your neighborhood, and we're gonna be working in your neighborhood for the next week.

Yeah. If you need any, you know, any trees taken down or stuff taken away, just let us know. And it was signed and I thought somebody just stuck it in the mailbox. And as a business owner, like I went to call the guy and say, Hey, you, you know, you're gonna get screwed. The, the fines for sticking people's, you know, stuff in people's mailbox is obscene.

Um, you might not wanna do that. Uh, and then I turned it over. It was, it was a, an EDDM. Yeah. Every door, direct mail, but it was just a sheet of paper, thick paper. I was like, that is brilliant, because it, yeah. I was like, everybody's gonna pick it up and read it. Yeah. Good job. Yeah. Alright, love it. So let's shift gears a little bit and, and then, um, I do have to wrap it up.

So let's start landing the plane with, what do you guys have going on? Like, we're first quarter's over, we're in the second quarter in Spring Rush. What do you focus on? In April and May or a quarter two, generally, we were talking earlier about, you know, the, it's the same cycle year round. You go around, the same things are coming up.

You need to remember what happened last year, the year before. What are you focusing on now for this quarter? I, I'll tell you what I'm, oh, go ahead, Sheila. Okay. I'm focused on revenue, revenue, revenue. I'm focused on quality. I'm focused on creating the. Because we see the most amount of clients this time of year.

And from following that whole entire customer life cycle, creating the absolute best high class experience for them from the lead generation all the way through to getting them back on the schedule again. And so quality and just like turning. 'cause if I can turn all of these customers that we're getting ready to touch into recurring clients, like that's, mm-hmm.

That's my goal. That's my goal is to, you know, hit a certain percentage, turn 'em into recurring clients, make sure that all of them know about our service agreements, all of them know about how to rebook again, that it's just happening throughout that whole customer life cycle. Um, that's what I'm focused on right now.

Hell yeah. Okay. Gabe. Um, similar to Sheila Revenue, just looking at what we did in Q1. So the big thing is where do we fall behind? And if we did, how are we gonna get caught up? Especially because this is an easy time to get caught up where customers are thinking about it. Like we were talking about with the spring cleanings and the pollens and the patio washes.

So that's our big focus. Um, where did we miss, like in Nashville, we missed our sales goal per week. By one salesperson. We have two full-time and three, we had a third that would fall off and on. And if we just had that third locked in, Nashville would've hit its sales goal every single week. Mm-hmm. And so that's the big push right now.

And then I think, going back to your question earlier, Syd, like the economy and how people are feeling. Um, that's one of the things that we've been pushing in the company because I think. I think we could feel it from our customers. We, every January I, I typically see it where the end of the year and the beginning of a new one is when a lot of businesses we're all commercial.

So that's when a lot of business owners decide, we're not gonna do this again. Like December is like, we're gonna shut our business down. Mm-hmm. And so, um, I think in Q1 we had 60,000 in annual revenue cancel, and 30% of it was due to business closure And. Another 30% was due to people just cutting back expenses.

Yeah. So the big push for us has been, hey, like people are looking at their dollars and what they're spending it on, and we gotta make sure that they don't question the value that they're getting from us. And so we've been pushing, like Sheila mentioned, just, Hey, we gotta do a great job every visit. Um mm-hmm.

So that people don't start to think about, maybe they could cut this. Maybe they don't need to go without it if they're already right. Giving us their dollars. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. We, um, same here, you know, revenue. So like the, the biggest time of year for new clients to, like, the easiest time to catch a fish is when the fish will buy.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. And that's spring cleaning. And we've never been able to expand our capacity enough to take, you know, like to capture all the leads that come. We end up booked too far out and people are like, I had to call somebody else. So we're working really hard to make sure that we've maximized our capacity.

Yes. And one, one thing we're doing this year that's been pretty effective, we, one, we did a 15% price increase for all of our residential clients. And if somebody says, if they complain about it, they're not happy, like, oh, blah, blah, blah. We, we give 'em an option. Right? Then it's like, if you wanna keep your same price book now for July or August, 'cause that's when we dip.

We're like, we will not raise your price if you book in August. Mm-hmm. And plus in August we donate 10% of our, our proceeds to a children's shelter. So like it's a double win for you. And so what we are doing with that is if we can push off our spring rush, you know, if we put 10,000 into August, that helps August.

Mm-hmm. But also gives us $10,000 more space for people that do not care about price. They're new customers and they're calling in, they're like, we go, here's a quote. And they go, let's do it. Yeah. They're not price conditioned to a lower price. They're just like, that's price. Let's go. Um, and then figuring out how we can push capacity.

We've, we've get like our, uh, everybody on the team this year is required to be on call one Saturday a month. So that gives us eight more days Yep. Of cleaning it for April, may, and June that we can push more capacity so that. Little things. We're having the same conversations. Yeah, we're having the same conversations and strategies in my company, Syd.

And it's like just coming in 45 an hour earlier in the day, like how can we just squeeze the most out of, um, that, and we, and having minimum stop charges this time of year is a no-brainer. Um, you won't go do a job unless it's X amount of dollars based on like, you know, what you just said. Um. Why, when, why, when you can keep the schedule open for that customer that's gonna pay your premium.

Why are you gonna book a $200 job to go do something? And we also took some of our services that we don't wanna do this time of year because we can be doing a lot of more lucrative services this time of year and just said, we just don't do 'em. Between April and July, I think it was said, um, May 1st through August 1st.

We just don't do that service and they're booking anyway. For later. For later. That's great. Totally. It's like, no, it's crazy. We don't, we just decided this is not a great service for this time of year and, um, we, it's better off at this time of year and they're just booking. I love that. It's so we, I, hmm.

We tend to, I complicate stuff or I'll go, oh, nobody will go for that. And then you turn out, you just offer it and people go, yeah, that sounds great. Yeah, just do it. Hey, well, I'm gonna look at my crystal ball into the future over the next, uh, the next few weeks, the next six weeks. We, we've got episodes are already already recorded and coming out.

Uh, Sheila, your interview with Jared Skinner, you got Larry Benham? Um, Greg Hiller. Greg Did Gabe, or Sheila, did you interview Greg? I interviewed Greg. Greg. Okay. Yeah. Great. That was such a great conversation. Oh. What a good guy. Yeah. And then, uh, James Hatfield, he's the Chief Revenue Officer of Live Switch, that he's got a really interesting story.

Um, and then John Zen and, uh, Gabe, you interviewed him, right? Oh, yeah. I've inter interviewed John. Yeah. Yeah. What a good dude. Those are just, that's just in the next, uh, few weeks coming up, and then I'm looking forward to. More interviews, more fun, more stories about growth and transformation from folks just like you and I that like started with a bucket and a dream and then they got crazy.

Now they've got two buckets, like you're really killing. Yeah. Yeah. You're, I loved your conversation with Brandon Vaughn. Syd. That was great. He, he's such a great guy and, and like he's got a big story from. You know, one guy to 40 trucks or 70 p what? Like a lot of, A lot of growth and lot of pockets. Yeah.

And then when you talk to him, you go, oh, he's just a regular guy. He did that. I could do that. Yeah. Like, I thought you had to be super human to grow something cool. Nope. You know, well just have to know what to do. So, so I have one more que I have one question. Yeah. How do I get a cool background? Like you have a cool background.

Yeah. How do I get that? I, I will send you this image so you can use it for your, yeah. Okay. Does it show up forward or, or reverse type the way you're seeing it, right. Can you read it says the huge mm-hmm. Yeah. It's, it's for me to read Yes. Left to right. Yep. Yeah. For, for me, it's reverse like you're looking in the rear view mirror, reading it backwards.

I'm like, oh, what does it say?

This is the huge. Well, cool. Well it's, it is great to see you guys. Thanks for spending a little time for, uh, just to catch up. As the host of the show, we're always asking the questions and getting other people's stories. We rarely get to share our story. Or, you know, nobody's asking the interviewer. Like Sheila, like you said, the interviewers are interviewing the interviewers today.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't try this at home if you're driving. Yeah. Don't this, not that out loud, aneu. Alright, everybody's listening. Thanks so much for spending your time with us. It's always a ton of fun. Um, hopefully you find value even in a silly conversation like this because we're talking in real time about what's working now about.

Things that we're seeing in our own business and not just, you know, with the interviews that we do. Um, and also, you know, we're like, I'm, I was taking notes, Sheila, while we were talking about your service agreement and am like always learning from you guys. Thank you very much. Yeah, thank you guys. This was fun.