Hello and welcome to The Fight Club 4 Business podcast where everything we talk about is to help you succeed in your business and grow...

Kirk Slack is founder and owner of a landscaping company called Wellspring Landscaping that is located in Austin TX, his back story is insane compared to his good attitude and go getter mindset...

He was an investor in commercial real estate and when it crashed there was no money to be made from where he was at, so now he had to start a business but that's not all that was happening, his parents were dying and he had to take care of them and he was also going through a divorce...

now he's better than ever and trying new system's to compete with covid...

with all of this covid stuff around it's hard to keep good communication between you and your team, that's why I've put a couple links in to see to your needs...

We have Voxer Here...

And Slack Here...

For homework we have...

Find a way to keep your current employees...

Look into communication tools...

Look at what you were doing pre covid for communication and see if its broken or different now...

don't rush or worry about these, there only there to help you implement what this episode talks about...

And finally for the quote of the day we have "Good Communication is the bridge between confusion and clarity"

Michelle Myers pink callers Here

Meaghan Likes Accounting company Here

Martha Woodward Quality Driven Here

Taylor Meroni Pure Power Washing Here

Kirk Slack Wellspring Landscaping Here

intro 0:01

Talking about the things that make your home service business go. marketing, finance systems, people. This is the Fight Club for business podcast.

Michelle Myers 0:26

Here we are folks, welcome to fight club. Happy Tuesday. Happy Tuesday. Welcome back to my club, everyone. Super excited to be back with us Tuesday morning. As you know, we are a group of self employed industry experts. We're here to help you fight for your business. And we really cover four areas of business. So we've got marketing, operations, employee management and money. And this is really a casual conversation to help you find something to fight for this week to find an area that you need to push the needle forward on. And we're excited to have Curt with us today. He's going to be able to help you guys get some knowledge on what he's gone through and experiences with all four of these areas. And, you know, be able to give some homework, maybe we'll see. But we're excited to move everything forward today and kind of start with some introductions. So my name is Taylor Moroni, I co own a power washing company in South Florida with my husband and I have been marketing marketing for about six years now. So super excited to welcome back to fight club and welcome. Can you give everyone kind of a brief introduction about yourself and your background? Sure. Thanks a lot. So good to be here with you all. So it's a nice departure from the chaos of what is business it seems like today so so I'm so I'm Kirk Allen Wellspring landscape services in Austin, Texas. I started it about 11 years ago. Prior to that, I've been in commercial real estate, my entire career since I got out of grad school, I don't know decades ago and was in commercial real estate. And then when the market crashed in commercial real estate, I had a couple of things going on in my life, that that caused me to start or encouraged me to start this company. So one was the market crashed. And it just, it was clear that I wasn't gonna make any money in commercial real estate for a while, which was okay. also had some personal things, which I think some people be able to relate to, both of my parents were sick and dying. And so I was it gave me an opportunity to take over their care for them and work on their estate after they passed. Excuse me, and then I was going through a divorce, unexpectedly, so. So it was a kind of a dark period in my life. And then on top of that, I just always wanted to kind of stretch my entrepreneurial wings anyways. So all of these items kind of came together to encourage me and create an opportunity for me, where not just encouraged me to do that, but also to be honest, and I think some people will be able to relate with relate to this, I had no way that nothing else to do, like I had no choice, right, I had to make a huge change. And so that's what encouraged me or really pushed me to start this company. So I did a lot of research at the time and looked at buying businesses, I looked at a transmission shop, like I looked at all kinds of stuff, looked at franchises. And in the end of the day, I just kept this this idea of a landscaping company just kept recurring in front of me. So then I started researching that and and liked the idea that I'd worn a business suit my entire life. I love the idea of wearing shorts. I don't even know if I own it suit at this time. I hope nobody dies because I cannot go to their funeral. Them dressed appropriately. But uh

Kirk Slack 3:40

in anticipation of our growth this year, and I can talk more about that. And then we have about 19 people in the field. And y'all will appreciate this depending on who shows up every day.

But we have a we have 19 on the roster. I can tell you we don't have 19 today so and and then we're we operate mainly in south and southwest Austin. Our goal is to grow across all Austin add some more different services that we don't currently offer and just sky's the limit grow as much as we can given the constraints of the labor market and everything.

thing else we're facing right now that are really, really affecting our ability to grow sewing. I'm sure we're gonna talk about that more too. that's it in a nutshell.

Meaghan Likes 5:08

Awesome. Well, welcome to fight club Kirk. It's so great to have you. And my name is Megan Lynx. I'm the founder of bookkeeping Academy online, I educate and empower small business owners to know their numbers so they can live more financially rewarding lives. I also am the proud owner of likes accounting company, a full service accounting firm. So you don't like numbers. If you don't like money, you can outsource all those tasks to me and my team. And I'm the CO owner of Jeff likes and windows and gutters, and window cleaning and gutter cleaning company in Northern California. Thanks

to a lot of things you just

Unknown Speaker 5:43

shared that. I'm really excited to get out and

Michelle Myers 5:50

oh, at Internet, Megan, Megan, Got stopped.

Martha Woodward 6:59

All right. I'm Martha Woodward on co founder of quality driven software, and also an online course membership called culture first. And I also own a maid service in a neighboring state and operate that as an absentee owner. So I'm really happy Kurt that you agreed to be my guest today and join us on Fight Club. Because I know you from

service autopilot community as the biggest badass competition winner.

Yep, yep, you're famous. So I think you forgot that in your bio. Actually. Yeah. Yeah, I'm so honest.

Anyway, welcome to fight club and Tay, you can kick us off. Awesome. Um, so Kurt, I kind of normally talk about marketing, and we kind of talk a little bit about it. But sometimes sales gets wrapped into that as well. So we're kind of going to go a little sales direction today if that's okay. Because I found it very interesting that you started in commercial Realty. And that is a totally different sales process. And, you know, protocol you can say to transitioning into small business and selling landscaping and selling what you guys offer with through your company. So how was that transition for you? When everything when you knew that you mean needed to make that shift? You knew the market was crashing? And you said, You know what, let's change up everything. Let's jump into this new business and completely change everything that I'm going about, on how to sell the products that I'm now selling as a service. Yeah, so, so I should probably clarify. So when I was in commercial real estate, I wasn't a broker. I was on the investor side. So I'd represented private REITs for most of my career, so we had big, big deep pockets like we we had billions of dollars to spend. So when I called somebody, like say I called someone in Atlanta about a building downtown, were interested in purchasing, they returned my phone calls because they knew who they knew who my company was, they knew who my investors were, and they wanted to talk to me. So it was super, super easy. And then I transitioned when I moved to Austin, I transitioned and worked with

Kirk Slack 9:28

kind of boutique, basically wealthy individuals here that had money in or investing in money in Austin. And it was kind of the same thing, where when, when I called because of who I was associated with, I immediately got calls back at a great introduction into the market and it was super easy for me.

And the people I hung out with or I associated myself with were very well connected. So it was super easy. So you go from that environment where everybody wants to hear from you to the environment.

were basically your,

you know, scraping and climbing for every little client. And it started off kind of like guerilla marketing, right? I was literally on a crew, and the next door neighbor came out to take their garbage can. And so I would run over there with a business card, you know, and introduce myself, and then I, and it was kind of just building client by client by client. And we kind of fast forward to today. And then we were really think we're more cutting edge where we use a ton of video, where we have a big social media presence, we're still doing AdWords. But we're basically do AdWords, we do some direct mails, and print door hangers, and then social media.

And then let's see what else we do. And then we have a referral program that we run through our employees and try to get them to get new business so that they're the guys handing out business cards when the neighbors getting their garbage can. And then we also push a referral program to our existing clients. And we've really weeded out things that don't work. And we're really kind of double down on the things that do work. But I will, I will tell you, Austin is very competitive. And in for employees, for for clients for everything. And I mean, we have to fight and scrape for every client that we bring in. And so it's a you know, and we spend a ton of money on marketing a ton of time and effort and motions and money on marketing. It's such a it's all completely different environment than what I was used to before.

As I say, it sounds like it sounds like it really started out.

And then

into a lot more of the

pricing money that you're putting into your video and things of that sort. So do videos on sales videos, are you using them more as like marketing? avenues? So, so we do, we do a lot of

oh my gosh, you're gonna blink on the turn, we do a lot of

y'all help me out here that kind of market awareness videos,

like educational pieces? Yeah, there we go. I just went blank on what we call them. We talked about it consequently, and and then we do some some sales where there's a call to action, or there's a deadline, or, you know, we're telling them, hey, if you want to take advantage of this, you know, we need to hear about you from x date. We so we do some sells, but we do a lot of brand awareness that's always trying to get brand awareness. So we're constantly putting out informational videos, update seasonal updates, hey, what are we seeing in your landscape today, type updates. And the vast majority of what we do are those and then we'll do some kind of funnels, and we'll do some sales as well. But the vast majority is the is the brand awareness. So on social media. Awesome. So I guess my only other question would be since you did have it so easy. Like you had mentioned in the beginning with the real estate side of things, was there a lot of educating that you had to do yourself as a business owner to say, Okay, this is what I have to do to make sure I'm bringing in the right type of clients for my business, or was it kind of just, I'm going to figure it out as I go. I am definitely figure it out as you go kind of guy and then, which drives some staff crazy sometimes. So

the, you know, I think I think one of the things that makes it easier sometimes, and I've seen this a couple of different times in my life. And that is when when I'm too dumb to know, I can't do something, then I see some huge gains. So, you know, I just went out and, and got clients and did whatever I had to do to get clients. And sometimes To be honest, I miss those days where it's like, hey, let's go, let's just go hand out business card, let's go talk to the guy getting those garbage gain, like, you know, there's really kind of this ground what I call guerilla marketing, but this kind of basic ground, you know, boots on the ground type marketing, and we really have moved away from that. And we we operate most of our marketing from the office. And, and sometimes I wonder if we shouldn't go back to that. And to some degree, I'm not going to get out there and do it, necessarily, but, but to try to get creative and figure out a way to just how do we get in front of our clients. And, and a lot of areas in Austin, we can't do

door hangers, they call the police on us. We saw a lot of areas, it's outlawed to knock on doors, so we can't do door knocking. And so it's like well, how do we get in front of them? So we you know, we have direct mail where we can mail specifically to a specific neighborhood. We can adjust our ad words and things like that. So we're really trying to drill down in a certain location, but it's a challenge and so, you know, we're constantly looking at that we're constantly looking at our return on investment dollars spent and and trying to double down

artworks Oh, and other one is, next door is allowed us to get more specific. And we've seen some success for that. So there's not a single silver bullet. It's just, it's just kind of just constantly putting the pressure on marketing, constantly trying to bring those clients in and constantly trying to keep the clients that we have. And through all of those efforts, building the company, is the goal.

I think that's

kind of,

you know, advice

is, it's it isn't a single silver bullet it is, again, and you know, clients be able to find you in different locations are really having your employees and even customer.

parts, that helps in a lot of guerilla ways, even though it's kind of more considered referral, it's still in a guerilla sense, where you're relying on individuals within your company and your client base to get that name out there. So since I did hear a couple of mentions of ROI is and track.

But I can pass you off to Megan, so I appreciate you spending some time with me. And

great, Thanks, Jay. I'm sorry, between my mountain connection and tased driving down the road. We're having a little bit of trouble this morning. I'm so sorry about that. But Kirk, I, I've just like I've got three ideas that I want to talk through with you. And I'm gonna let you choose which of the three. So the first one is actually less about finances and more about feelings. So we can avoid that one if you want. But you built a business out of a need to have time with your family to have time to take care of your parents to have time and space to do something that was really important for you. So I'm curious now that we look at it like 10 years later, or I'm not sure exactly an anniversary. How's that going? And is that something you've been able to preserve and maintain in your business? Second question, you're in Austin, Texas, which I've been Austin once. And I felt totally, like lied to because my friend said they lived in Austin and I had to drive an hour from the airport to get to their house. And he said I was still in Austin. And I'm from California with a little tiny town that six square miles and Austin I learned is 350 square miles. And as somebody who owns a field service company, I know I make $0 when I'm driving a truck, so windshield time will kill you. And I'm wondering how you fought that in your business, especially as you're trying to take it over? And third question is, you seem to know some numbers around marketing and money. I love guerilla marketing. So if you wanted to continue that discussion that we just got started with Tay and talk about your favorite marketing metrics, we can do that. Now. Unfortunately, you don't have time to do all three. So now I need you to choose one. And we only have about five minutes to cover it. So which of those got you excited? When I was describing them? You're taking notes? I can tell. Yeah, I was just looking at him. So the I might be able to fit two of them in the when we kind of talked about marketing and and so maybe we'll pass on that one.

The

main touch on the like the family time and stuff real real soon. And, again, how that y'all are gonna relate. all y'all are gonna rate probably Everybody listen is gonna relate to all this. I know there's people listening, that are different places in the development of their company, right? Some, some may may hit $100,000, gross revenue, some may hit $4 million gross revenue, I mean, I don't know this year. So when it when, and the thing I've read that is I'm a single dad. And so my son lives with me. He has spent most of his time with me his entire life.

And, and so that I have a heart for people who are single parents and raising kids on their own. And God, God bless them. And God bless us because we just get it done. I mean, yeah, there's not a lot of time trying to figure out like, how am I get it done, get it done, or whatever. I look back on the last. He's 16. Now, I look at the bats last 14 years, and it just got done. I mean, I can't even tell you how I got done. Lots of tears, lots of sleepless nights. So they just got done. And so God bless everybody out there, it was a single parent, you have a special place in my heart. But as your company grows, you're gonna you're gonna, you're gonna, there's gonna be some obstacles, you overcome obstacles, and then your company grows again. And then you have new issues you never had before. And you get those worked out and then your company grows again. And then you have all these issues that you never had before. Some are anticipated some aren't. So the I would say I've been fairly successful. If you if you've ever seen my biggest badass video, you'll see that a lot of it centered around time with my son. I was getting a ton of pushback from him that I wouldn't I was working too hard. I wouldn't spend enough time with him. So that forced me to take action to try to alleviate that and then that then kind of got past that hump and then we grew some more and then we hit another hump and then I'll tell you right now where I am is trying to grow more

added more people in the office have more overhead, my profit margins go down, I'm nervous about that we really need to grow the company, how are we going to grow the company, I just hired my very first operations manager, and about two years behind on that, but thankfully, he's here and he should work out. And that's going to free me up to go expand the business even more. And then my son told me the other day, that he felt like I was working too much. So I was like, Oh, crap, you know,

it's so it's so it's like, okay, you know, and we have a lot of growing pains in the office right now. So you know, it's just, it's in what I love. And this is what I love about the service, autopilot Academy, and I love like podcasts like yours, where y'all are all business owners, you get get together, and then you produce this great product for other business owners to consume. And that is you gotta surround yourself with people who are further advanced along, you know, further along in their companies, and you are, you can turn around to help people who aren't advanced as much, and then anticipate these growing problems, and try to get out in front of them before they actually occur. You know, you can grow fast, but then your quality control drops with crap, I wish I would have gotten on top of the quality control part. And, you know, and y'all know, and go on and on, but to get in front of those problems, so that you can have a nice, nice lifestyle, like I love when when Martha said, I'm an absentee owner, I'm like, Ah, man, that sounds like heaven, you know, or, or, hey, I'm at the mountains in Colorado, or California, I was like, Well, I hope that's working out really well for you. And I hope the weather's nice. And that sounds that sounds really nice.

And I think that's what we all want, right is we want a really nice life and want our kids and our spouses or whoever's involved in our lives, to to see that and see the fruits of our labor. And as business owner, that's really hard. But I'm preaching to the choir that, you know, we think we're doing something great, we're going to create this great life, and we start to ruin relationships, and we work too many hours, or I put on weight, you know, and, and I struggle with my health sometimes because I work too much, and I don't sleep enough, and I put on too much weight. I mean, you just you just bring in everything your life revolves around this business. So anything that we can do to bring it to head off these future hurdles, and get ahead of them through working with with people smarter than within ourselves. I mean, it's just is this so? So great. And then. So maybe I hope I'm gonna have you pause for just a minute so that we can like digest all of that that you've shared, because that was a lot, right. So I feel like what I heard you say was that your son is kind of your truth. So he reminds you when you're pushing too far, he reminds you when you're hitting that next growth stage, and I think what I'm hearing you say is that that helps you inform your decisions. So that kind of gives you a reality check. Like, we need to dial it back this week, or I need to invest in this higher I need to make this fit within this time period. And I think that's so important for people who are listening to think about who is your Who is your truth in your life? Is it a spouse, is it a friend is a business partner as a kid, and kind of a reminder, I'm guessing your son's a big part of your y too. So reminder of why you went about and started this, and why you keep doing this. And the other thing I heard you say that's really interesting, and we don't talk about enough on the show is growing pains. So we hit these different different growth stages in business. And they're painful, right? Like we're cruising along real good. everything's going great. And then you hit this like, Oh, Okay, next growth phase, and you have to get back into the business. And I'm sure Martha would even say, as an absentee owner, like there are periods where you really got to roll up your sleeves and get back in there. And then we cruise a little bit, right. And I feel like in my husband's business, every time we're like, yeah, we're good. Like, we got it. You know, we've made it six months or a year, we had a month last month, April, no call offs, by the way, just want to celebrate that. And now may is gonna be a disaster. But I have to celebrate that out loud. Martha has been a part of that for my culture, and for my relationship with myself. So that was really helpful to give people just two reminders like why did you start out Why did you do this? And who's holding you accountable and making sure you do it correctly? Like don't overdo it? And then

yeah, that was just really helpful. Do you want to add one more comment and we're gonna pass to Michelle. No, the only thing along those lines like I would say, here's a here's a great example is I made a commitment A while back years ago, that when I walk in the house at the end of the day, I will not be on my phone. And that way, my first interaction with my son is one on one devoted time to him and attention to him. And then last night, I come cruising in the house. I finally got there it goes to eight o'clock, and I'm on the phone, talking to somebody. He comes around the corner at 16. He's still super excited to see me where he always greets me at the door and gives me a big old hug and tells me he loves me and that's something special. And I came around the corner on the phone. He took one look at me. He kind of gave me a hug and turned around and walked off.

And I was like, ah, I mean, you know, it was like, and I haven't done this in a long time, so I don't feel too horrible about it. But that was just my little reminder, get off the damn phone before you walk in the house, like no exceptions. And, you know, so that he is my truth. Like you said, he was my reminder, you're on the phone when you walked in the house. Not cool. You know. And this is a little fancy, little thing, but you're right. It's a huge thing. And I feel like I can hear some homework in there. But I'm gonna let us save it till later, I'm gonna pass you to Michelle, who I know is just I know, you guys know each other. So she's going to talk about systems and the systems that help you kind of stay sane as you've been.

Yeah. So, Kirk, when you first started talking, you talked about how you looked at franchises. What, when you're a business owner, and you go to start it out on your own, you have to start everything from scratch, like you said, what was what was the breaking point for you to say no franchise really doesn't fit me as a person. And I really want to build my own thing, because that makes a ton of sense to me. But people that don't really like systems and processes, it can be really overwhelming. So tell me how you made that decision. First off, go there. So the main reason for not going with a franchise was I hate feeling constrained in any way, shape, or form. And I and I looked at, you know, you and I'm not saying this as a like, like, I would love to own chick fil a, no one went I know now. But you know, you have to follow their process, it's a gamble whether or not you're going to be successful, you can't get away from their process, it takes that creativity and limits you to a large degree. And I think franchises are great, don't get me wrong. But I was like, you know, and then you have to write them a check

every month, and there's I won't, I won't, I won't say the name. But there's a lawn care franchise national franchise out there. And I talk to people and they were like, all 100% of my profit goes to paying their fee every month, I can't be successful. And then they're trying to get out of the franchise. And I was like, you know, I just don't want that. And then on a side note to when I got out of real estate, I said, it was in half jokingly and half serious, I said, the next guy who's going to make a stupid decision is going to be me.

And

I don't want investors telling you what to do. I don't want partners telling me what to do. Like, I'm gonna make the dumb decisions from now on, you know, and, and I was serious about that, you know, jokingly, but serious and I'm like, Look, I just I don't want anybody telling me what to do.

And so I was like, I just want my own company. So I love it. So I have a background in commercial real estate too. I did design and architecture for large projects for many years. So I did my world, my toe back into real estate every once in a while because I still love it. It's one of the things I talk about on weekends, and I drive through and I go to see open houses, even though I'm not buying anything, I just love to see it. I'm still engaged in that community. But that's a side note, talk to me about because I know you will use service autopilot a lot of our listeners probably do to tell me some of the other ancillary tools that you have found that have helped you grow this year, whether it's a communication tool, or a sort of tell me something else, a trick that you've made that you've found along the way that's helped you grow this year? Yeah, so two things. One, I'll give a big plug out to Qd s, because

and the other thing, I'm glad you brought up communication, because that's we're not doing a good job at that. As we've grown, we've added another person, we've added two people to the office this year. How to we've had a lot of rain delays lately. How do we communicate weather crews better? And so we are looking for

a software like slack or or WhatsApp or there's a bunch of them we're looking at right now to try to figure out how can I really easily communicate with the crew leaders? How can I communicate with everyone in the company? How can we how can I communicate with just the office staff? You know, and so we're looking at that. So that's something that this year has become glaringly obvious we that we have a weakness at and we're looking at trying to figure that out right now.

And then the other thing is to plug GDS is I taught the the, I can say that single handedly the biggest benefit that we see for company culture and accountability is a very easy way to basically rate or what we call them reviews, you know, where we monitor every person as an individual, right? And so I've talked to other companies, some have these extravagant point systems that they have to manage and keep up with. I don't know how they do it. But with Qd s,

and I'll tell you about real briefly before COVID we had a real good system in place. And we reviewed one another and we had an employee of the month and we would give away these giant flat screen TVs to our employees once a quarter

Yeti type coolers or whatever. But we had something that's very detailed and tangible to tie it to, you know, what is your what a bob okay Bob's an employee, what is your rating your point your ratings 3.5? Well, how can it possibly be 3.5? Well, I can tell you exactly why it's 3.5 well put up, print out your report, we have reviews from the clients, we have you're tardy six times last month, you had three excused absences last month, you know, you didn't follow protocols, or you had a bunch of five star reviews, because you stayed a little later, or you picked up some work from another crew that was that was slow or whatever. And so we can print it out, we can say this is exactly why you're rated the way you're rated. And if you want to be eligible for a raise be eligible for advances on your pay, be eligible for a promotion, you need to be four star or above and and I want you to be four star of trust me, I want you to be five star, and I'm going to help you get there. And here's what we need to do. We need to quit being tardy, when you do have an unexcused absences, we need you to quit using a weed eater to edge along the driveways and start using the bladed edge or that we purchased for you. Because it looks a lot better, you know, quality control reviews from the clients and all those. So and when we do that our company culture is great. When we hit COVID, we got to where we weren't meeting meeting all the time, we had some we struggled with some employees in the office. And we got away from that. And it showed and so this year, we we really started pushing our rating system or survey system through GDS again, and guys are excited about it. They want to see how they're doing. They want to do better. They want to win this flat screen TV or whatever we're giving away. And so I'll tell you in in i mean i no more. I'm not saying this because Martha j Martin is sees me randomly talk about Qd s on Facebook pages all the time. Yeah, I mean, but but it's super easy to measure, super easy. The only critique I gotta say this Martha, and it's not a critique, the only thing I would ask of you is if there was some way that we could raid each other internally, very easily, like a like an app, and we just submit a review, hey, you know, give Bob a five star review. He, you know, he cleaned all the trucks out without even being asked or whatever I don't know. And therefore there's some way we can just submit reviews super easy, man, I would love that, right now. We submit them all through the office, and then our office person has to go in and do reviews. So I love it. I love UDS, I highly recommend it. I recommend recommended people with them. Because it's such tangible data, irrefutable data that people get to look at. And then we can tell them exactly what they need to do to get where they want to go based on this data. So and I love it. Yeah, I love it. Well, slack is named after you. So I would highly recommend that you choose slack. I think it's perfect.

We use it here in our company, and I love it. So I'm a believer, but awesome. I will pass you off to Martha. Thank you so much, Kirk. I appreciate it. And I didn't I didn't get to talk too long about Steve. I'm sorry. But Steve is your blind dog and your, your, your business sort of what do you call him? Is he your mascot? Yeah, your mascot. And we own dogs. And I love your video with Steve, you didn't list a system I will mention this really quickly, to make sure that all of your employees close the gate, right. And this tagline shut the damn gate. And it was with the video with Steve. And it was the system that you implemented with your team that kept them mindful of pets and people and all the things that are behind the gate. And I love that idea. And I know that within your company, the shut the damn gate is the quote that you use. I love that. I love it. So fun. Super fun. Okay, I'll pass you off to Martha. Thanks for good to see. You do.

Um, yeah, so you need to have will, and I haven't heard from well lately, but I'm assuming he's still there, you need to have will contact us and we can help you with that. Easy, you know how to record that and a couple of new things that we have. So that's an aside. Um, but I wanted to touch on communication. And

I think that

Well, I know that we have all slipped a little in our culture with COVID. I know we have at my maid service. I hear people saying that all the time. And, you know, I think there's a lot of people who were just in this struggle of I need bodies, but kind of forgetting to also tighten up

Their systems were culture, because we're just in this weird time. And so when you talked about communication, it made me really think that communication is a huge part of culture. And when there's a lack of communication,

you know, not on purpose. But you know, because of the environment with COVID, or whatever,

things start slipping, and you're your love of the job, love of the community belonging kind of weakens. And so, I am thinking that's going to be somewhere in my homework for people is to refocus on that. So have you all like you're talking about

systems as far as a channel in which you can communicate, but

give us some examples, Kurt? What are you pretty good at?

Small, consistent communication pre COVID. And then now it's just kind of only reactive.

Tell me a little bit about what's happened because of COVID. Yeah, so let me think about that the, you know, I guess a great example would be that we had safety meetings every Wednesday morning. And we and I would bring tacos or doughnuts, and we would all get together and we would go to a safe. And we would do announcements, and we would go to like a 15 minute safety meeting. And when COVID and we got 100% away from that. And so it became not only where we're not having a safety meeting, but it also became very difficult for me to just to have kind of a time to interact with the with the crews, right. And so that that personal touch. And then the other thing was sometimes we just need to communicate, whether it's training, whether it's resolving an issue or whatever, we need a way to get everybody on the same thing they need to what I say is they need to hear the Everyone needs seem to needs to hear the exact same words that everyone hears, and they need to come out of my mouth, not anybody else's mouth. So that we're all have this cohesive agreement on kind of like what is really being said, or maybe it's a policy change or something. And so it became unbelievably challenging to get that done. And believe it or not as archaic as it is, I started printing out memos, and just handing them out. And I would find them in the bottom of the trucks, I would find them let me on the parking lot. And I think guys would read them somewhat and read in it became very such a challenge. And I'm not going to sit here and say that, that I found some great solution overcame it. Clearly we didn't because we're still struggling with it. The only relief right now is that we are able to get together more because of the you know, the restrictions are being lifted and people are getting vaccinated. But there's some good things that came out of it because it forced this awareness that we need to communicate more. But you know, but we need to use a software, like it's raining right now. And we just need to everyone in the company know, hey, we're rain delayed. So if someone calls in and a client calls and says, hey, are y'all gonna, you know, am I gonna get mowed today? I think you're gonna get mowed today. But we are rain delayed.

You know, just a simple communication like that all the way through to a massive communication, that's super important that everybody needs to know. So we're still working on that solution to be honest with you. Yeah, you know, yeah, yeah, there's a

there's an app called voxer. That is like a, it's like a walkie talkie type of system. It wouldn't work with your clients communication. But

I don't know if you know, Kurt Kimpton at all, with responsibility, but when he ran a window cleaning business, that was his main channel for communication, and he's kind of character So the nice thing about boxer is, you can put your personality into it. I mean, it's like you're talking to them. So

he would do things like if certain customers would leave a review, he would read the review in that customer's voice, you know, and, and then be like, hey, great job, and you know, Mrs. So and So says, and then he'd read the review, but I kind of like that, like, I know. I know. You also have a great personality. And so you know, sometimes I think, like when you set up

memo, I'm like, I'm gonna cut it, you have to do what you have to do. Right? But

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