Smart Business Moves with Guest Leslie Shepardson Fields 071620

hi good afternoon everybody tom stewart here smart business moves i've got liz trotter with me hey liz how are you today hey y'all i'm welcome and we've got somebody who's really a friend of the family who's uh with us most days here leslie fields from uh what part of california are you in i'm in northern california now i've lived in various places but i've been in northern california for 20 something years what what city leslie i'm in auburn so i'm between sacramento and tahoe okay we have an auburn here in washington so that just made my brain go glitch i get calls from you guys sometimes oh i'm funny i've learned that um is this auburn california or because there's two other ones washington and i want to say like well there's one in alabama wow yeah it's uh like there's auburn university is in alabama yeah i get i get calls from the weirdest thing tom knows the weirdest things how do you know where all the auburns are why would that even be on your radar that's so i live in one and i don't even know that yeah i mean i understand leslie knowing it but how do you know again and again i never cease to surprise you when i demonstrate that i don't know something that probably 98 of the population does so that happens every once in a while too i gotta give you oh ernie's here leslie um if you look on your screen we'll see on the right hand side where it says private chat there's another tab for you that says live comments okay yeah then you can see when people comment all right hi ernie it's a long time on my phone because i can't comment and tom's busy doing his thing over there so i usually pull it up on my phone okay let's see hey ernie hey thanks for the good stuff uh i got by email today appreciate that so we gotta wait for a few people to come on before we start talking leslie but tom maybe you could give us a quick yeah we'll just kind of the rundown of uh what we're doing this week and and and next week this was our schedule for this week and leslie's with us today and we're going to talk about round two covid and doing business in california and answering questions and who knows where we'll wind up tomorrow is on the spot with our secret guest liz do you uh have a tip for us a hint i'm clueless this weekend give us a my cat again yes all right he sent me something let me pull it up and see what he told me okay so one of the things that this man is um known for is automation he does a lot of work with automation automating his that's a good hint that's a fun one too i have some ideas now all right you're gonna you're gonna you're gonna want to hear from him because inside that uh is unique and and useful to anybody who's uh running and has aspirations of growing their cleaning business that is for sure so can i ask a question that's gonna lead to another hint of course because this is now a game for me so we might not ask if true does he run a completely automated business uh no it is not completely automated he has automated portions to his business okay different person then that was a good question his cleaning professionals were live human beings that part is so human okay we're i'm kidding i understand that yeah just answer your question i'm being silly yes yes you are okay all right so i finally got it liz i got a question for you in terms of next week's schedule um did we decide that we really want to stop making our guests secret on on the spot that people might get more value out of it they knew know who it is and yes is that what we want to do so starting starting next week we're not going to keep it a secret anymore right you like it being a secret yeah i think it's fun you do yeah i think it's okay so here here was my the reason why i was thinking that we wouldn't leslie was i thought oh people know who it is maybe that will encourage them um to come on and ask have an idea of what kind of questions they want to ask that specific person but if we have really good hints they'll have a maybe a decent idea anyway but they're always good so to me it's like you just want to be there on friday or possibly thursday moving forward but um you just want to be there because they're always good so i think it just adds an element of fun and i kind of like the fun part of it so i always like the fun part of it too that's how i end up with all this dumb stuff but i like it might not be fun it might not be fun if you don't know you know if you don't if you're not an artsy member or you know if you haven't been around a bit it might not be fun at all like what's with all these hints i don't know whatever right she would want to know oh but yeah oh i see you already changed it good job tom and leslie you could see leslie had some insider information there and she dropped dropped a little bombshell for us good job leslie yeah you know she's our guest and if she wants it to be secret it'll be secret for at least one other week that's right at least one more week so what have we got going on next week liz um you know what tom ah that is a mistake um i have sharon on for wednesday and i accidentally put her on that wednesday she's supposed to be on the following wednesday i'm so sorry tom i know you hate it when things aren't right i do have another about we're gonna have two secrets now you guys so tomorrow you'll have to see what birthday guest is okay so okay well this is kind of wrong but we know who's going to be here monday right we do yes let's let's approach it from what's right all right well you talk you invited greg back so why don't you talk about what greg's gonna be talking about and i will last time greg was here when was that a couple weeks ago he was doing his seo he was telling us i mean he's got two cleaning businesses and a really large market dallas texas and he wears two different brands two different models one is dallas maze and the other is is it emily's maids i believe yeah they both rank on the first page in a large city like dallas which is it's hard enough to rank one business much less too and he gave us a bunch of hints and he gave us some downloads actually back links to his website that we put on our resource page to to download which is kind of cool but through that discussion he was talking about you know the talent that he uses to do some of the things he does and he's got people working for him all over the world and you know he uses some of the um freelance websites to recruit people and he started selling it you know telling us uh some hints and it's like you know what why don't we decide on that we'll do a whole show on that so he's coming back monday to tell us um you know if we're interested in getting some technical help admin help you know help in a lot of different regards how we can uh use tools that are available to us to uh recruit and interview and select and manage overseas talent i'm excited about that i am too i'm really excited about it all right so tuesday's guest was a little bit odd you guys so um today's guest is my son beyonce and she is a um a nursing student and so she just has a different perspective on what she is seeing and um how things are playing out she has a lot of insider information about vaccines and what testing is being done and that type of stuff that i thought would be interesting for us to talk about and find out about um she and she can tell you more about her um what's going on but she's in a medical family her uh her mom is a veteran nurse i don't know how many years 20 years 25 years and she's got other medical people in her family so she's pretty plugged into what's going on and i thought hey that would be awesome to have somebody that can answer some of our medical questions from this other perspective not just for what are you doing what are you doing so i think it'll be fun yeah she's funny and she's always exciting and energetic and i had such a good time having my daughter on that i thought all right we're getting pass on too so that's what's going on there uh and then we got we got nothing else to talk about for the schedule next week sorry y'all but we will tomorrow bye friday we'll have a nice full schedule for you friday we got one more thing to talk about i know thursday's going to be on the spot and friday is going to be an off day that's a shift yep so we're looking at taking friday's uh off for smart business moves uh moving forward and giving you guys sort of a three-day weekend for smart business modes are we nice do you love that we're giving you guys this three day weekend doesn't have anything to do with me sitting in a hundred degree car on fridays no [Music] so hopefully you guys will still like this we know that we have a lot of people that are liking enjoying on the spot leslie you said it was your favorite day it is so yeah so um we're not we don't want to get rid of on the spot we're just going to move it up today to thursday if you guys see any kind of a problem with this let us know but we're thinking it should work out really well i mean yeah and we can go back to five days a week if yeah you know if if if we if we if the interest is that strong i'm sure that uh i know that we'd be happy to do it um we'll just have to figure out you know hopefully the weather will cool down soon so we don't have to worry about liz passing out in the car somewhere yeah that's just not working it's just getting hot here you guys we um and the hot deal is like 78 well hot for us was like once we hit 80 it's like wow we're dying in about 98 right now outside yeah no we can't do that no yeah we can't even function when people see on the on the weather channel that it's going to be like in the 80s i start getting calls from people what are we going to do how are we hydrating um are we going to have coolers in the cars what are we doing to be able to manage this excessive heat i'm worried about heat stroke on all of that too because we live in a pretty warm area yeah that's awesome leslie all right ah gosh i lost my page again ernie's suggesting right if unprecedented times dictate we can definitely go back to five days a week very good absolutely good job ernie yeah so yeah sarah 98 would be a cool day there i know i have been to phoenix enough times in in not hot weather i just don't even know how y'all the dry heat is much much better i have to agree yeah i lived in northern california for a while and and actually i lived in southern california for a while too and so i am used to those warmer temps but the drier heat is so much better yes than that moist heat but before i get off the deck i just want to take a minute and recap what we did yesterday because it was an unprecedented event for for smart business moves the inaugural uh deal day with cbt um we did it with three vendors just to kind of figure out how long it really gonna take and i think that we filled up an hour with three vendors so we're kind of rethinking this is probably more more than what we're gonna be able to buy it off but uh we got a couple of weeks to dial that in but it's a four-minute pitch and uh some pretty cool deals i think for you guys who were here yesterday or have have gone back and seen it um the offers expire in today tomorrow though so those offers are still out there and if you're curious and want to know what it is just basically go to um i need to figure out how to copy that link basically go to our facebook page the same page if you guys are watching this on now scroll down a little bit and you will see what we did yesterday and watch it you'll uh get turned on to an opportunity to save a bunch of money on uh clean team speed cleaning employee training system or uh advap ladybug uh the phc training program and i give you a hint that's a bundle with a bunch of other cool stuff in it too and again these deals all go away in today tomorrow so if you're interested in that go to facebook check it out and if it's something that you want just make sure you do it before end of day tomorrow i really want to say just one thing real quick tom and i know we're not the call isn't about deal day but i talked to two people after our call yesterday that were reaching out to me about the speed cleaning the entire program and i haven't seen the whole entire program but everything that i have seen of it is not prescriptive it will work in your company and the thing that i wanted to say was if you're going back and forth and you don't know i promise you that that price you will get that amount of value out of it it it it's inconceivable that you're not going to get what is it 450 400 oh i'm not supposed to talk about the deal okay whatever the deal is is it possible to not get that amount of value out of it's not possible so if you're going back and forth stop stop going back and forth get on there before end of day tomorrow just just stop now is this is truly how i look at going to a convention or buying a program like that or whatever yeah if you get one or two things out of that if i get one or two things out of it that saves me steps saves me time saves me money builds a better relationship it pays for itself so i don't you may love the whole thing but the truth is if you just got a couple things out of it that changed your game up it's well i mean that's just not that much money in the big picture yeah it really isn't back when i had a real job i started off as an industrial engineer the clipboard stopwatch kind you know shot floor type stuff and speed cleaning basically is that you know it's time to emotion economy of motion type stuff where you know if you get more work done and fewer steps and i mean you're eliminating all the stuff that all the calories you burn that's not producing output you know getting better outcomes and less time and and less effort and yeah that transcends it's really about efficiency i i don't like the name speed cleaning and when i train my employees i tell them it's called speed cleaning every all the professionals have been using it from the beginning of time but i wish it were called efficiency because we're not here to train you how to be fast fast breaks things it's efficiency you take one around a room one lap around a room you're not running from the east wing to the west wing to go get toilet paper you know you figure out how to be very efficient in your work and i i really think that's what it's about and the other piece of that is efficiency equals profitability money you know not not not not forgetting that piece the reason why you want a better efficiency is that's where the money is y'all because there is not a huge um profit margin in in this industry and we have to eke out every little bit we can efficiency is i don't know i would i would hazard that it's the number one way to make impact on that on that profit margin there absolutely and honestly i have another equally as important point around that and that is that i've had employees with me for years now and they're getting older and efficiency saves their body um i have employees that never want to leave me but they may just have to because you know their bodies are breaking down in their 40s i've got a couple 40s a couple 50s lots of 20s but you know we focus a lot on switch arms you're going to vacuum this room with this arm vacuum the next room with that arm if you're going to go this way with this one you're going to go this way with this one you know you have to try and wear your body down equally or it all breaks yep at the same time it's just like rotating your tires is what you're telling me it's exactly like rotating your tires it's just wear down evenly yeah all right well it's not supposed to be about deal day today but i really wanted to say that because i don't think that especially since i had two people asking me about it i'm like gosh it feels like such a no-brainer to me if you're slightly interested just do it pull the trigger on that all right i really want to get to today's we talk about return on human capital and how you look at like all service industries and house cleaning the amount of revenue you can generate off of a cleaning technician on a given day is about as low as any service industry you're going to find it's through training is is how you attack that and you're living in a world where you know people are getting squeezed on the wage side and the expectations are that people need to be making more money and we as employers need to be paying more money and the only way that you can pay people more money is for them to be more productive and for them to be worth more money and we do that through training and the better trained they are the more skills they have and the more productive they can be and the more diverse things they know and having the understanding of you know i'm not just doing the rote test because that's what they're told to do but the deeper understanding of why they're doing it the science behind it where they can make the more complex decisions the more abstract thinking if you will critical thinking is is a term often applied to that let's do training and that's the world that's where it is going people we're going to have to be able to pay people more and we can do that if they're able to do more and we do that through training i got to make one more point i really wanted to shut up go ahead i could talk about this all day i love this topic i know but also along with what tom is saying when people understand the why and the reasoning behind it they can achieve a higher level of autonomy and autonomy is one of the top drivers of job satisfaction yeah and job engagement so yeah i would have added to what tom said is that job satisfaction culture which everybody knows liz is the queen of culture i don't do what liz does because that's not my personality but our culture is very very important to us and that's kind of my job like i really work on creating loyalty and you know we pay well we you know there's a lot of things that we do and my employees don't leave you know everybody talks about turnover i don't have turnover unless somebody's body can't do it anymore that's when i lose somebody so yeah i think culture not only does it make um our jobs more meaningful not to mention their jobs it also saves a ton of money because we all know it costs at least four thousand dollars to acquire and train a new employee properly by the time i pay my trainer and the trainee and the time it's gone into because i have a pretty extensive program that we wrote um it's very expensive so turnover is a real thing and it loses your clients as well so keeping keeping your employees might just be the number one thing and yeah and that's a key piece of that people don't do not really fully appreciate how important training is builds confidence they need confidence you're defining as an investment you know you spend money on training you're going to make more money as i guess the the long and the short of it and really here's the other piece of that too is um you know i hammer a lot on the main things that people need to be happy they need matter measure and accountability and the thing about training this is just all four do you know how few things hit all four of those needs matter meaning measure accountability yeah just so you i mean you can do so much with training yes uh stress is on there too she says oh starting to get hot with that uh almost 100 degrees over there on my foot yeah i had to get that hair up all right let's talk about um and we can always come back to this topic um because it it it is an evergreen topic we're never going to get sick of this topic but i do want to get to why we have leslie on here specifically because i really want to hear more about what's going on down in california and you know where are we going and let's see i know that one one great thing about you having been in business for forever is that you are um able to go with the tide a little bit um as things are not great you've been able to bounce back a lot and and do more you you were telling us that you closed for six weeks you said right almost six weeks i think so yeah so i i love to hear about um actually all of that so we didn't have to shut down i chose to shut down i chose to shut down because my employees were concerned um as you all know there was a lot of questions in the beginning about how is this being spread and you know we just just didn't know a lot i mean we still don't know a time but we know a little bit more um and so i felt like it was the responsible thing to do at the time if i could go back i might do that differently but i can't and i did the best i could with the information i had uh it seemed pretty alarming and pandemic-like um so i shut down all my residential cleaning so um i waited until we started back up out of i don't know 250 clients i think because something you need to know about me is um i'm not trying to be the million dollar business i'm 60 years old i'm happy where i am stress is a huge factor for me like i just don't want to stress out i don't want employees i don't want clients i i just don't i don't have either of those things i just i want to keep it really manageable so i keep it at about 14 employees about 250 clients is always not going to erupt i don't think any of us want them but you're disciplined enough to decide not to have them yeah she makes it happen yeah i have no problem telling a client you know i'm i'm sorry we're not going to be a good fit you're asking for something that i can't produce and i don't think you're ever going to be happy with us so therefore you should probably move on and and my internal dialogue is to somebody new who's willing to promise you a lot of things that they nobody can produce so um you know i really manage um the quality of my life matters a lot to me i'm pretty i'm pretty much um out of you know i don't work in the office i don't have office space in my office i do work as you well know i work but i work from our tent trailer in the mountains which is where i'm headed tomorrow where i've been for the last month um i came home because somebody's on vacation and i had to be here but um you know i work from belize we have a little shack in belize so i work from there so um that's what i want if i was 40 it would be a different deal that's where i'm at at 60. like this is the way i want it to be so you need to know that right up front because i am not a gangbuster build my business million dollar blah blah blah it's just not my job you're not just driving hard on everything everybody if i were younger it would be i i respect that i admire it it's just not where i am um so i made the best decision i could at the time might have done it differently in retrospect because it's a little harder to get people back than i thought it would be and our clients love us i mean love us but it was still it has still been more difficult to get them back because just because of apprehension you know it nothing to do with us um so might have made a different decision but i didn't so here we are um right now we're our state is shutting back down so restaurants can only do i would call it a partial shutdown but that depends on the industry you're in because my hair stylist it's not a partial shut down for her she shut down my nail gap shut down i haven't had any of those things done in since march uh as you can see um well they never came back then no hearing it okay no they came back for what two weeks oh long enough for you no i was up in the mountains not caring about those things um uh i don't think they had more than two weeks so and and you know it's it's pain i mean i love my community i'm a very big part of my business community i've been in the chamber for 20 years i know and love the business owners in my town i have great um love compassion support for my business community as they do for us so um i feel bad for her because i think she's just gonna have to make a life change she can't be on this roller coaster she's a little younger than she really can't be on this roller coaster so anyway um so things are partially shut down in california so nails hair out massage out uh restaurants outdoor seating pickup um take out um is that the same thing pick up takeout pick up delivery um my town is gracious and they've shut off streets and put dining in the streets in our we live it's called old town because i live in this great little historic darling town so our chamber is amazing and they're all working to try and we've all made a commitment through the chamber that we will support a local business once a week some way somehow so oh i don't dine out but we're gonna get uh old town pizza delivered because ritz is my buddy and i want him to stay in business so we're gonna get that delivered once a week whatever i don't care if i give it to a neighbor we're just committed to using a service in my town once a week whatever it is um so i'm very fortunate to be in a community that's so supportive um so when we did start back up i guess if i have something to offer you all because i don't know how interesting all this is really but uh i did send out first off i took the time when we were shut down i probably have never worked harder in in a long long time i got certified in probably seven different certifications i just educated myself i just stepped into this and i wanted to learn everything i could about how to clean properly for covid cleaning i got certified by gbac by issa by osha a i knew those certificates were going to look well and be good look good and be good marketing material and they are they're in my advertising right now um but i also wanted to know what i was doing so that i could confidently tell my clients and my employees this is what we're doing so when we did start back up i had this knowledge under my belt your guys's course was one of them obviously um and i sent out an email it was a long email i started it was saying this is a long email i've edited every word out of this i can i'm asking you to read every word of it because it's important there's no fluff in here so let's go and i just listed like these are the protocols we're going to be doing now we've sanitized all our handles you know our caddy berber berber burr our um our technician is going to come in to the nearest convenience sink they're going to wash their hands for two minutes so everybody knew what to expect they're going to meet you at the door with a mask and for any discussion that might need to be taking place and then i'm going to ask you to go to another room go to the backyard leave your house whatever you need to do we require social distancing because i'm not going to ask my client my employees to work with a mask on in this kind of heat it's just too laborious in my opinion i know lots of people are working with masks i'm not asking my my gals to do that my guys and gals so i set up a whole thing like this is what you can expect from us so that built a lot of confidence in my clientele because it was obvious and i put links we're using the who method of washing your hands here's the link i linked a whole bunch of stuff like this is why we're doing this we're sanitizing it here's the link in how we're doing that so i feel like that built a lot of confidence um and also with my impress and trust too yeah they feel like okay telling me all the stuff then okay i can trust you to be keeping me safe and to be thinking about what's good for your employees especially in a little small comp community like that i'm sure that the people are that the whole community is worried that the employees are being treated well it's not just about themselves oh yes my clients love my employees and what they love even more is that i love my employees so that's a huge thing and i did have people pay i had a whole fund the people that chose to pay for cleanings they didn't receive literally went into you know this virtual account and i distributed money to them every week i just divided it all equally the company took none of it and they could come in and pick up 80 bucks whatever it was um so i felt really good about that and so did my clients they wanted to help yeah they know they know us you know so the other thing i did that was significant that perhaps you would benefit from knowing is i created a a pretty good survey that i'm still giving my clients today so i just sent one off a couple hours ago so you can't schedule it with us if you don't fill out our covid um survey and it just lasts about your exposure and that kind of thing it might be i don't know i didn't write it up but you said it like every time you go to clean leslie before every cleaning do you send it out no i send it to every client for the first clean either returning or the first clean ever it's probably not a bad idea to send it out every time and i may wind up doing that because the climate's changing a bit here uh initially i was just trying to get people back and this was you know also my um employees take their temperature every single day and they have a time card they fill out online and there's a column they have to put in their temperature every morning when they clock in so we bought thermometers for everybody we have one at the office um so everybody logs their um temperature every day before they start work so those are some of the things we're doing you know where this is going to go i don't really know but i know this time i'm not going to shut down um we are considered essential i think that's from every state i don't know but in my state we are considered essential but we always were i did it to be extra cautious i probably shouldn't have sounds like you made a lot of good i don't know leslie i know you're thinking that if you have to do it again and it looks like you might have that choice again you might make a different decision but it looks like your first decision might have been really good because you had the opportunity and the chance to make all those changes like you said you worked so hard you might not be in the position you are today to be able to stay open on this next one had you not shut down that's actually true the fact that i shut down allowed me to get all this education okay you know i would argue you made a good decision when you decided to shut down and you very well might be making a good decision if you decide not to shut down the second time based on what we know now that's where we are with it we shut down you know castle keepers as as well we didn't know what we didn't know then there was a concern about like overrunning hospitals and right and we've kind of got a lot of that figured out now and you've got much better data and you know yeah the risk of of of spreading covert or catching cove and doing house cleaning is really low compared to a lot of other you know occupations so you know doing when you don't know anything you can be cautious but once you have better information you can make better decisions right and what we're learning now of course is you know this virus is it's very small particulate it's also very heavy in relation to its size so we know that it's landing relatively quickly um i think that's good information we also are learning that it doesn't sit on surfaces like we once thought like surfaces aren't really that big of a concern in terms of contracting this um it really is and now they're saying it's not even um droplets it's simply airborne just talking so that's the whole mask argument which i'm not going to get into but i wear a mask and i think that also is a smart business move right there yeah yeah whatever it's your freedom thing whatever but um i wear a mask uh we're both 60 plus and have a lot we want to do so i'm just playing it safe period um uh our meetings we're having meetings again it took us a little while after we reopened to have meetings actually have meetings like in office which nothing can compare to that a zoom meeting just doesn't compare when you're all in the same room and my employees their favorite part of the whole week is our meeting because they really like each other it's nothing i do i don't do anything special they like being together so we did start and and we weren't even wearing masks for a couple weeks yesterday we all wore masks like it's that way again so that's kind of you know where where we're at i i'm in a business that's essential you know i have friends who aren't i have restaurant people who went out and bought tens of thousands of dollars worth of beef and are looking at being shut down again you know it just makes me so sad it's so hard for everybody you know yeah yeah it's so hard yeah but i do love that your community is standing behind everybody and working to support everybody because if everybody just supports one business that's a lot of support plus if i'm i don't know for me if i'm supporting one business i'm going to be thinking about every time i want to buy something who else can i support right i'm getting into that mindset of how can we help each other especially that's in those small communities yeah going to our hardware store instead of you know going to home depot when i just need you know some basic little thing but then you get in there and you're like oh we could use that for the camper or whatever so you know we're trying to we don't go out a whole ton but we are really trying to ask ourselves with whatever we're purchasing can can we support a friend can we see a world or a neighbor can we support a business in this in whatever decision it is i've been trying to order um like my ppe locally even though it was more of a weight than going other places where i can get it faster and sometimes cheaper online but trying to um when i needed to get some stuff quick i had to go somewhere else but um i'm trying to order earlier so that i can support local unless this is not all altruistic if you don't have you know your local hardware store if you don't have your lo local one of my best friends has a you know great pizza place here in town that everybody loves you know where are we all going to be when we don't have these things like it's not all just virtuous it's like no not only do i care about my friend and fellow business i really care that our town is not completely vacant yeah property goes down you know and then we're not going to have these great services like these people can't afford to come back from that if people don't have businesses they don't have jobs right they're they're not for cleaning i mean it's it's a whole circle right there is no there is no it starts or stops with one person it's cyclical for sure it's just the right thing to do whether it's a for selfish reasons or altruistic these reasons it's just the right thing to do for me i am we're going to have a vaccine they're doing therapeutics i mean we're going in a direction i mean we're you know we might be a year or more out but today's coming where we're not going to be concerned about probably nearly now we're going to be thinking about you know going out and going to restaurants and doing the things that we used to do back when things were more normal and is it going to be there right are we going to have brick-and-mortar anything i mean restaurants i don't think are gonna go anywhere but i don't know i drove through our little area yesterday and i mean everything is closed except for bevmo that was open and i kind of chuckled oh uh it's where you go to buy um it's all alcohol oh alcohol like that probably they're probably doing good yeah i'm sure they're doing fine but everybody else in there was not there was nothing all of our pot shops are are open and yeah if you drive by a pot shop you can guarantee that their parking lot is full so when you put one before you guess it's the pot shop when you see a bunch of cars you're like oh they're missing yeah they already know that yeah exactly i think at least part of it is it's someplace you can go right i can go there it's better now i mean we're we're in a pause status here in my state um we our governor was opening in phases and so you know every two weeks was a new phase was opening and so we have paused we're not opening any more phases but we're not going backwards which is why i wanted to hear how what i wanted to hear from you is what you've been talking about but also like with them um starting to lock back down again how is that impacting your your clients are the customers that came back to you are they sticking or are they are you beginning to drop off again not yet but the announcement came out but sunday evening so monday everything shut um so far so good but you know it's friday or thursday of the first week diane's making a point here that she had employees that needed to home school because you know the schools were being closed what are the plans for for schools in california going into the fall well my husband's a teacher if you don't know that i remember yeah he's a seventh grade algebra teacher and um there's been a lot of right now it's really up in the air so there was a plan for him to go back to school and then a couple just because the numbers here are just they're insane right now i mean every day eight to ten thousand new um people say well they're they're testing more okay but hospital beds are filling up so that to me is maybe a different thing who knows but um we thought we had a plan for him and now it looks like there's a few big districts around us that are not opening up they're doing all virtual so i'd be very surprised if his school opened are they now i mean all virtual for you know a month or two for you know the balance of this year for the school year they are they giving i don't think anybody knows i don't think anybody knows it's really expensive right now to open up schools because of all the restrictions the ppe the distancing you know you take into account that a lot of teachers may have um you know some health issues or live with a parent that has healthy issues or a child that has healthy so not all teachers can even go in to uh this situation uh we're not one of those but still um you know they they only want what i don't know 15 kids in a classroom at a time and he's used to having 30 plus so i i would not want to be tasked with trying to figure out how to educate people in this environment i have no idea i know that my husband when you know when everything shut down and um he was teaching from home you know he learned a lot of cool stuff we were both on a learning thing you know he learned a lot of really cool stuff he found some programs that are great that he's probably going to use even moving forward in a in a regular environment if we're ever in it um but doing that for a couple of months to bridge a gap is different than edging normal child who's depending on this information to move forward in their scholastic you know education in the future it's different you know to try and bridge that gap for a couple months but i think his school did an amazing job i don't know what's going to happen i think kids are going to get screwed up because there's you know especially seventh grade well all school like social is really important to these kids in fact it's probably the most important thing to these kids but especially middle school i i would say especially middle school yeah that was really critical so i don't know how you solve that problem i mean you can't solve the problem this is a pandemic and i don't know how you solve that problem like right now you just can't do that babe sorry you get a vaccine i mean yeah we work on vaccines and we we try to get past that yeah uh yeah um t what area are you in she says homeschooling is going to impact how much and work outside them absolutely that's just me i think right aren't you in vacaville or fairfield or solano or something i think she's really close to me while we're waiting for that answer i want to go back to liz day because i have to find out grass valley has a few schools open but only the small ones i have two questions for you liz hi liz where is where is grass valley and how far is it from festus grass valley's right north of me my daughter lives in california not available of the world is nevada county seriously that's why they call it grass valley no i don't think so now she says she is in grass valley leslie well we should have lunch yeah y'all should have lunch yes so uh leslie um everybody's talking about you know pivoting and what are you doing to pivot um what what is your thought on pivoting and um i see that part of what your pivot was more around communication um communicating this new message and what you're doing as far as residential and how you're pivoting in your service um is there anything else that um you can tell us about that anything else that you're doing that we can maybe learn from or moving forward that we might learn from well education i mean i'm i always want to be the authority where i live um when it comes to cleaning and the science of cleaning which is my tagline and always has been and it's very fitting for me the science part of cleaning is the thing that that i enjoy the most you've your time is now you're so right about that it's really true i mean i don't wish this on anybody but this is the kind of thing that gets me kind of going because i really wanted to learn about how this virus behaves and how i could best remediate this and you know rectify these problems for my clients so it really does you know it really kind of is my thing so um it's a bigger opportunity for you than for people that are are fighting it more for you with the science of cleaning being um like you're tagged into your whole reason of being yeah um our tagline is opportunity science to clean for health that's been our tagline for 18 years or something but um so yeah i i felt i hate to say a little bit invigorated by this situation because it prompted me to go figure out how this virus ticks and what i can do about it so um i uh you know moving forward honestly i just don't get too caught up in fear i just i can only do what i can do in a given day i take good care of my employees i communicate well with my clients it's all about relationships which i happen to enjoy and i'm decent at so that is good i think it's much harder if you're somebody who doesn't like to communicate you know is uncomfortable you know i'm lucky like that part's easy for me um so i'm not gonna do anything drastic at this moment i'm just gonna kind of do this one day at a time as they say and uh you know for me i just do the next right thing and assume that everything is going to fall into place i've been through you know 2008 2009 2010 the whole market here just dropped out from underneath it i survived that if only did i survive it i actually survived it pretty well um so i've been through other hard times so i have some confidence that i'm able to get through some hard times um yeah that confidence matters too oh confidence i'm not talking about arrogance i'm talking about just confidence in your knowledge and your skill you know i'm not good at a bajillion things but i'm really good at this i'm really good at that leslie if you were arrogant you wouldn't have taken all that training right there would have been no need for you to take seven different trainings right but yeah i have a lot to learn but confidence is different than arrogance confidence is just knowing like i can honestly say to my clients if i were you i would not call anybody but us i really wouldn't because we do know what we're doing yeah i i feel 100 confident in that leslie you can be confident and humble at the same time and it's obvious yes so obvious yeah i'm looking at it it's one of the things that i've always admired about you leslie it's always that's yeah and a lot of times people you know been around for a long time they do tend to get a little arrogant but that does not that word does not describe you in any way shape or form um i i'm an applaud person so i have many many flaws but i am passionate about this work i love lions i love people i like helping people i have just the right perfect storm to be good at what i do it's not gonna you know change the big world but it's what i'm good at being a former person doesn't make you unique on this show believe me oh i know tom hey well we're i'm sure you do hey we're getting close to the top of the hour here let me ask you leslie though the next time you come back maybe you could do this on your phone and maybe walk us around your house and show some of your paintings oh yeah okay so i do want to pull down penelope and show everybody um so they can see her up close because they can't really see her i love her i do love her no me too i really do like i can't get her too close let's see it's her little headdress that is amazing oh yeah so i know you guys can't really see i wish you could but like this is all um paper that has been torn and put together to make her headdress these are little these are little um she just really loves penelope as well uh these are like little sticker type things that are on that all of this this is paper more paper these are like musical notes you can't see it there but all of this stuff this is all detail work on here that you there's a lot of paint obviously too but there's a lot more there than paint anyway i you know i i i talk about her all the time because i just love her and um i just felt so grateful to you for sending her hurts me that just came to me out of the blue you guys yeah diane you've always loved it i know um so imagine you guys that you you love this painting and you see it and then all of a sudden one day you get this huge package in the mail you're like what the heck is it and it's penelope can you imagine such a such a wonderful feeling anyway i have a rule that i don't sell my artwork a i don't know if it's cell worthy but i just don't sell it i give it away to people who love it and you loved that and i love her there we go i love her i love her yep she makes me happy every day i'm glad yeah you too awesome ah well yeah we are over overtime but we're playing cleaning business today you know it goes fast leslie go fast um download still works but we shortened it to sbm it's supposed to be smb we'll get that fixed no after this bmw's my smart business moves nevermind resources.com i get this way around six o'clock yeah it's late for you we will catch you slack time yeah and it's got a lot of resources here um the world health organization hand washing procedure leslie you mentioned that if you haven't watched it it's an awesome video it will show you how to wash your hands in a way that i think few people wash their hands so it's important um remember we've got uh like one more day like 24 hours plus to take advantage of the deal day um deals that we announced yesterday you've got uh an offer from uh debbie sardone with um her her speed clean program advap's got a a discount they don't normally do discounts but they got a discount on on ladybugs and we've got a bundle with discount pricing plus additional stuff and i'm not going to tell you anymore you're going to have to go to the deal day facebook live yesterday to get the details but go watch it and if you see stuff there and you recognize you got a deal that you're not going to get anywhere else you need to buy it in 24 hours leslie you are so much fun thank you for joining us today it's a pleasure thank you thank you so much anytime well i'm thinking that we should bring leslie back for um on the spot yes it's because it's been around for forever right i would love on the spot i have an answer okay you can count on it you're you're you're you're in and it's going to be a thursday but we're not telling anybody when because i'm thinking that we're still going to keep our surprise and i'm just going to give good hints sounds great sounds fun real quick before we go liz i just looked you up on facebook and i didn't see you so um look for me leslie's cleaning services and let's have lunch i think that'd be fun okay liz did you hear that liz day she's talking to you not me oh yeah yeah liz day yeah i love that name by the way i wish my name was liz day what a what a great name now that would be so fun i would be having liz day like once a month guaranteed it would be we are fighting over apology sorry i'll people see you guys tomorrow at five o'clock bye bye bye everybody thank you bye-bye