So basically this interpreter will just interpret what is which category or what is the detection result and which category belongs to as well as the detection coordinates. This is why you can actually pull from my kit later, OK? What's the key? Basically, if you output something like that, it shows that the image is working. Let's see whether I can detect you guys myself. OK, detect as person. Pass. Let's detect online. Sorry, this is a mobile net. So do not expect very high accuracy. So you see, the mobile net also runs this slow. What do you expect of the Chinese app? That's just how I show you. And the accuracy is like, OK, I can detect the front, few people, detect my colleagues. I mean, at the back, you almost, yeah, very good. So yeah. So if you just go back to, I hope it doesn't take long. So yes, just now you can see that is the speed of detection. You will run Intel NCS on Raspberry Pi. And let's just give you a rough figure of what's going on. So you can see that Titan X can run very fast. The Atari FPS cost about 45 watt. And I did a simple calculation based on this number. They all have actually measured the voltage before. It's a constant island of about 41 watt, 45. And because about $7.20 per month extra on your electric build based on the current data read. So there's Intel 672.0K with this latest i7 processor. So it run about 7 frames per second and consume much more power. So for the TX1 that we show you just now, that immediate wall, it actually run at 2.9 frames per second. I don't know why, maybe because I'm using a microSD card. So yeah, it's about 15 watt based on that specification. Raspberry Pi is 3 without Intel NCS. It's about 0.5 frames per second, very slow. It means that if someone, if you want to install a local surveillance system, someone run fast enough, you may not even catch him. Blink of an eye. So 4.5 edge will give you better safer margin with Intel NCS. So that's probably something better. And it costs about the same per month. Do you want to deploy it? So you got to keep running and your parents will not complain about why do you spend so much on your electric build. Deep learning is very power hungry. Yeah, and that's all for my talk. Do you have any questions? Do you actually see people using Intel NCS in the production system? Do you think it's feasible? In production system, you will not be using the USB-based, because the USB still have some bottleneck. It's better to use the chip directly. So basically, inside of 12-VPUs, people just take out the small chip and use some other protocol to communicate, which is much faster, like DSP. So with USB, you're almost guaranteed that you have a bottleneck somewhere. So when the image gets transferred in, come out. So you have some latencies. Anything else you want to find out? How much is the cost of this? This thing costs $144,000. Yeah, you can buy it from Amazon. And it's different. But you buy it from RS Online, it's $144,000. More? No question? The model and use some sort of transfer learning. So basically, down a Google model that's already trained, I use it for my own class. It takes about 24 hours. Yeah, so if it's trained from scratch, it takes about one week. I'm using the Google data sets for about $80,000 images. But just dot and human. It's about pancake, pancake images. Any further questions? Oh, then it was back when I was doing the autonomous vehicle It is a problem that faced by researchers as well, for anyone who's doing a autonomous vehicle. Because there are a lot of data sets on cars and humans. But there are not a lot of data sets on bicycles. And because of that, if you put in bicycles, the amount of data sets is so little. Then when you put it inside a model, you have a data scale problem. So the network is biased towards the human car. And when you give an image with car, human and bicycle, the bicycle is unlikely to be detected. So one way is to down sample all the data, and make sure every single data is about the same amount as the weakest link, which is the bicycle. But then that causes overall accuracy drop in your network. Because you lack of other type of data. You guys can contribute. You can augment one picture and produce four pictures. But you have only 1,000 bicycle data sets, for example. You have 4K. But you look at cars, they are like 150,000. Then if you augment that amount, it's much higher. But if you leave it that amount, it's also fine. Data augmentation is one of the matters to increase the data set, definitely. But if the data set is very little, there's only that much you can do. So at this point of time, you just toy, for example. I actually view the simple surveillance app. When you detect a human being and send me an email, that's all you can do for now. Definitely, if you look at application and larger scale, since Singapore is doing this thing called smart lamp posts. So this kind of frame rate is actually, I think, just acceptable for smart lamp posts, given that you are detecting someone who is walking on the pavement, and you are trying to detect space, trying to match the database. I think you have better use cases. But for anyone who is trying to do hobby stuff, these Intel NCS can give you a robot. For example, someone is doing robot, umba, or whatever. It give you a robot some sort of vision capabilities, other than just touch sensors maybe bump around. But there are also other type of computer vision and better system around that you can try out. This is more flexible in a way. Is it possible to run multiple units of that? Yes. Yes, oh yeah, something I forgot to cover. This one can scale up to four, linear speed increase. So another thing to remember is that this form factor is a bit weird.  So you cannot fly in any mouse or whatever. So you have a USB 3.0 extension. So yeah, that's why I didn't realize this as well. The limit of four is? I think it's been tested by Intel NCS. They reported that it's four. But if you have a USB hub that's like 12 sockets, you can feel free to try out 12 of them and see whether it works or not. But each state also draws power. So your power capability may not be high enough if you scale to a higher. There one more question. This is only for inference. This cannot train. For training, I have to use GPU. Even a CPU also cannot. Too slow. OK, there's no further questions. I think that's all for today. The speakers will still be around. So if you want to ask them questions, you can stick around to ask them questions. Thank you very much for coming down today. This up is around the second or third week of May. So we will let you all know through Facebook again. So thank you very much for the support for coming down over. Thank you very much.


This is TFNN, the Tiger Financial News Network. TFNN, headline news update. Good morning everybody, I'm Tommy O'Brien, coming to you live from TFNN headquarters in St. Petersburg, Florida. It's Friday, 10 a.m. Eastern Time, 30 minutes in the trading day and we've got markets starting off to the positive side. S&Ps right now up eight points, turning at 3,005. We've got the Dow up 81 points, turning at 27,301. NASDAQ positive by 32, trading at 82.40. We've got the Gold contract up $13 at 14.41. Made it up to about 14.54 last night, we'll pull that up. You've got oil up 28 cents at 55.58. Notes and bonds slightly lower price in higher yield. Ten-year negative four ticks, 127.16. Thirty-year negative eight ticks, 154.23. A dollar index with some strength up 246 ticks at 96.695 and Bitcoin, why not? Quite a day yesterday for Bitcoin, negative $310 today, backing off a bit at 10,313. We'll start it off, let's jump over to the future markets. We'll start it off with the Dow. So quite a run-up yesterday at about 6 p.m. Eastern Time. A little bit of a sell-off, we're right up near where we were though. Currently you get the Dow trading 27,291. Made it up just before the opening bell though, 27,333. S&P 500, Nasdaq. Nasdaq sells off a bit on the opening bell as well, 79,75. We're off about 20 points at 79.53. S&P 500 trading at 3,005. We were up there last night at about 3,008. We're up there again just before the opening bell at 3,009. Currently trading a few points from that level. There's your crude oil contract, quite a day yesterday. Slide lower all the way until about 2 o'clock at 54.88. Oil trades all the way back up to 56.50. We're now a buck off that level at 55.56. There's your gold contract as well. 6 p.m. last night, 14.54. Quite a price tag, quite a run for gold yesterday all day just driving higher. We've backed off a bit overnight, but getting a bit of a pop in the last hour at 14.42. And the Euro-US dollar, a little bit of action as well. As we're seeing some dollar strength, you've seen the Euro back off from 112.80 all the way down to about 112.20 and bounced a bit at 112.38. Stay tuned folks, come back at 10 o'clock with Tom. Then of course you've got Fast Market, TD Ameritrade at 11, Basil Chapman, Steve Rhodes, Dave White, Tom and Brian all this afternoon. Have a great Friday.


On your mark, get set, go! We're here at the New Hampshire Guardians of the Granite State event, a partnership and collaboration between New Hampshire State Police, the New Hampshire Army National Guard Recruiting and Retention Battalion, and the New Hampshire Interscholastic Athletic Association. We have student athletes from all over the state competing and testing how physically fit they are with the Army Combat Fitness Test. The New Hampshire State Police is very happy to be here once again this year to team up with the National Guard for the Guardians of the Granite State and cheer on these young kids who decide to participate today. And of all of them, you were the top male and female competitor. My favorite event today was the Sprint Drag Carry. I felt it posed some new challenges. It feels very good to be a winner today. I work very hard and it's very rewarding to have it pay off. Physical fitness is a cornerstone of being a good soldier or a good state trooper. We want to see the youth of the state of New Hampshire live healthy lives, so we absolutely encourage young athletes to maintain physical fitness throughout life beyond just their high school career. 350! Sorry, that ain't good enough!


So GCC countries have been making progress since September 11th at the helm of U.S. encouragement but also on their own accord, particularly in a couple key areas. The first is rehabilitation and reintegration of former terrorist offenders. Most notably Saudi Arabia has had a long-standing program on this effort, but there are other GCC countries who also have programs to try and take those who have committed terrorist crimes and help both disengage them from the ideology behind terrorism and also demobilize them from any future violent efforts. Another place where GCC countries have made progress over the years is on religious leader engagement. Numerous clerics throughout the GCC countries have issued fatwas denouncing terrorism and the ways in which different GCC countries have engaged in initiatives on religious topics to really try and crack down on the hateful and tolerant speech that happens regularly in mosques across the region, and then also their support for a much more positive endeavor such as the UAE's support for the forum for peaceful Muslim societies. So that's another way in which GCC countries have really upped their game on counterterrorism efforts. Another way in which they've been working, which is a little bit more of a mixed effort, is on counterterrorism financing. But many of the GCC countries have set up financial intelligence units. They have, with U.S. support, have trained officials that are able to take down big financial operations. They've been able to sanction individuals, freeze assets. So even though there are countries that have a little bit of a mixed record of having provided some safe haven for some terrorist financiers, I think on the whole we've seen a huge improvement over the last 15 years. So I think the GCC countries have, most obviously, addressed violent extremism through their military means. Almost all of the GCC nations are part of the coalition to defeat ISIS, and they have been engaging their militaries in training missions, as well as in direct operations on the battlefield to clear terrorist offenders and to capture them for law enforcement and other types of prosecution. Another way in which they've been engaging regionally and internationally is through a variety of different international cooperation mechanisms. Three of the GCC countries are founding members of the Global Counterterrorism Forum, which is an informal venue for law enforcement and other government officials to exchange best practices and to really learn from each other on specific counterterrorism topics. You have the UAE started the Hadaia Center, which is the CVE Center of Excellence, and you have different types of regional and international cooperation with the UN and the variety of UN agencies on the topics of counterterrorism and countering violent extremism. But I think the question of what's the difference between regional and international is you also have an ability with the wealth that comes out of the Gulf countries for them to be engaging in developing countries that don't always have the same access to resources. So they're combating the same scourge that some type is impacting within their own borders, but looking at it at a global scale. So for instance Qatar is a very generous donator to the Global Community Engagement and Resilience Fund, G-SERF, which looks to provide, it's a public-private partnership that provides community-level interventions at a very, very local level that are focused on resilience. So that's a way in which a GCC country is really contributing to the international fight against terrorism, not just the regional manifestations in their own backyard. So the five things that I think are a really important recommendation forward and places for in need of future progress to prevent the next ISIS from occurring. First is a focus on research. We need empirical and locally-based information to make better decisions. The second is a focus on nonviolent action, trying to replicate the social bonds and the quest for solving injustices by helping individuals and places all around the world take their future into their own hands through nonviolent means of solving problems. The third is on religious leader engagement. It's time that we think of religious leaders not just as those who can debate violent discourse, but instead those who are engaging with communities on the wide variety of aspects that are impacting their everyday lives. The fourth is on the security sector, trust that needs to be built with communities in order to prevent violent extremists from preying upon the real injustices of abuse and corruption and impunity. And we need to not only end those practices in the security sectors, but really build the trust with the communities that they serve. And the last area is on women's empowerment. There is no solution to this long-term generational scourge that doesn't involve 100% of the population.


This is Bill Doyle on Vermont Issues and with me is Sophie Kersen and we'll do that doing it together. And tell us something about yourself and how I make sure I pronounce your name correctly. Okay. It's Avram. I'm Avram Pat. I live in Worcester and we're talking about some energy issues today and I think the reason I'm here is because I was involved, still am, but I was involved in my work for many, many years on energy issues. For about 16 years I was the general manager of Washington Electric Co-op. I retired in the middle of 2013 and before that I worked in state government where I dealt with running the low income weatherization program and also a lot to do with energy and fuel assistance, helping people pay for energy you can't afford to. So that's my background. Like I said, I retired from the co-op job and I did spend two years in the legislature as well and I'm running for office again in the house. Good. Avram? Avram? Avram. Okay, I want to make sure. People call me either one and that's fine. Okay. I'm used to it. Well, we've had a long unproductive relationship between the two of us and I admire what you've done with your life. Thank you. And I'm saying to you, Bill. We're here to talk about net metering so why don't you start off by saying what is net metering? Explain what net metering and why it's important. Okay. Net metering is one way of generating renewable energy. It is where the individual or groups of customers of a utility put up very small scale renewable energy generation at their home or their business and the energy that's generated by that is credited against their bill so that they actually in effect are selling back renewable energy to the utility. It's very important and I'll get to this later that this is very much integrated and connected with the utility grid because it's always been possible not always but since we've had solar panels for someone to be off grid to not have be a utility customer at all. Net metering is where you're connected to the grid. The economics and how it gets paid for is very much tied to being connected to the grid and the utility. It's mostly almost entirely solar and I just looked up some numbers the other day. In Vermont right now there are over 6,800 net metering customers who are generating power through solar panels and there's only you can also net meter with small scale wind, much smaller towers, farm methane or even small scale hydro but there's really maybe a little bit over 200 of those different types across the whole state whereas solar is by far the most popular and in the last few years has the number of people has grown very dramatically. It's also possible to do what's called group net metering if someone doesn't have a good site or doesn't own a good site either on their roof or their land they can be part of a group that is net metering from a somewhat larger project with many solar panels so let's say 30 different people are getting a piece of the generation from this one project. Those are ones that you typically if you're driving by them you'll see a field with a lot of solar panels and that's serving a larger number of customers. Are those set up by the electric companies? No, although there are some electric companies that have built their own solar generating there are quite a few companies in Vermont mostly Vermont based not entirely that are in the business of putting up solar panels and in some cases offering people financing mechanisms that allow them to get involved in net metering without having to put money up front. It's expensive to buy the equipment and install it and in the past that was a stopper for a lot of people that either had to have the money or be able to take out a loan in a pretty large amount. Now some companies offer a different way of just starting to be involved without having to put money up front. So that makes it much easier. But it is private businesses, developers that are selling a product and the installation of the system. Can you tell them about your legislative experience? Are you running for the legislature? I am running for the legislature. What do you hope to accomplish? What do you hope to accomplish as a legislator? What do you hope to accomplish? Well, I am interested in continuing to see that Vermont attempt really pushes to achieve its goals of significantly more renewable energy than we have now. We're already somewhat of a leader nationally in that but we're not where we should be. What my other issues have to do with economic fairness and taxes and things like that and in healthcare is the issue that I've cared about since my father, who was an old school family doctor, talked to me about it when Medicare was first started back in the 1960s. Thank you for being with us today. Bill, we still have some questions. I just want to say thank you for being here. Thank you for being here. Thank you for your past service and your future service. Thanks, Bill. Let's talk about net metering, which is bringing this together. How much is there in Vermont and can anybody be a net meter? I did mention some of that. I think I'll talk about some of the advantages and disadvantages of this kind of small scale net metering compared to some of the big projects. The advantage of net metering, which like I said a few minutes ago is almost entirely solar, is that you can put up solar panels almost anywhere. You can put them on your roof if it's facing in the right direction. You can put it on a pedestal in your yard. You can put it in a neighbor's yard. You can have a group of people put up panels together. They can go almost anywhere where there's enough daylight exposure. The other advantage in this kind of arrangement is that the utility customers, the people using the electricity, actually have a strong sense of connection to the fact that the energy they're using is renewable. They have the connection because there are the panels on their roof or out in their yard. It's something that they did rather than it just being delivered to them. I think for a lot of people that's important. The disadvantage compared to very large solar farms that take up lots of fields and lots of bakers or wind projects, which in Vermont as we know are huge towers that have to be put on ridgeline because that's where the wind is. They're very, very visible, whether it's a wind project or a very large solar project. They're very, very visible. All of these things have an environmental impact of some kind. They use land. They require construction. But a large commercial scale wind project, even though it's visible from miles away, uses far less land on the ground for the same amount of electricity produced. I'm familiar from my past work with the Sheffield wind project that Washington Electric Co-op takes a piece of the power from. That has 14 of those giant towers. But the total amount of land taken up by that project on the ground itself is 26 acres. To generate the same amount of electricity from solar panels, you would need, at least when I calculated this about 8 or 10 years ago, you would need 300 or 400 acres of solar panels, just the panels themselves. That's the advantage and disadvantage that I see. Large projects can be controversial inciting them. Someone putting up solar panels on their roof or in their yard is usually not controversial. I think those are the advantages and disadvantages. You can generate a lot more electricity with a lot less space, with a big project at a lower cost, but you don't have the kind of personal connection to it. You are going to run into controversies around siting and maybe having to build new transmission lines to get to the project and things like that. I'd like to thank Sophie Kirscher for being here today. Please, you have the first question. I'm curious about public resource. As a town, Barry put in a couple of these solar fields in the last few years. I'm wondering if that was a municipal project for the community to bolster its resources, or if it was privatized within the community, or if it's just completely of its own. I don't know specifically about those projects. I'll give you an example, though. There is a project being considered in Worcester where I live now, and I went to a meeting about it. One of the things that would happen if this gets built is that the public facilities, the municipal and school buildings in town, would be getting a piece of that electricity. Well, they would be more generated than those buildings use so that it would be sold to other customers as well. In Barry, I don't know that could be a group in that metering projects. It could be commercial. I haven't read just in the news that the municipality is actually the developer of the project. I was wondering about that. And in the Worcester project, has the conversation of solar versus wind versus hydro been an issue, or are people just going for solar? In this case, it's solar because that's what's doable. There really isn't a larger scale wind site available. And the river isn't wide enough or something right there? No, it's the north branch of the Winooski, which is generating electricity a few miles south at the Wrightsville Reservoir, which is a Washington Electric Co-op hydro plant. So while there are some old dams, they're really not of a scale that if you wanted to get them back in service, I don't think they generate a whole lot of electricity. So the one at Wrightsville, when was that initially created? Do you know? Yes. The dam was built after the 1927 flood by the Civilian Conservation Corps, same time as the Waterbury Reservoir more or less, as a flood control to protect Montpelier from that happening again. The hydro plant was not put in until the 1980s, and that was originally a couple of local hydro pioneers, Matt Rubin and John Warshaw, who built a lot of other facilities, had the rights to that, decided not to develop that one, and so the co-op took it over, and it's a small plant. But has it been running since... It's running all the time. Before we go any further, I want Sophie Kersen to introduce herself. Oh, Bill, you're so sweet. Let's get on with the questions. Everybody already knows me. No, I want you to introduce yourself. Okay. My name is Sophie Bettman Kersen, and I was born and raised around here, and I am very deeply committed to the health and well-being of this community and those surrounding it, and so it's a great honor to work with Bill in being able to contact and question our local authorities on things of great interest to all of us. I want to thank you guys both very much for this opportunity. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thanks for being here, Sophie. Thanks. Come from both of us, too. Talk about net... What is net-matering? Well, we already went through that. I think what I wanted to talk a little bit about... Go ahead. ...is the one area that's been controversial with the sources of some disagreements over the years is exactly how net-matering gets paid for, because that's changed a number of times. And I'll talk a little bit about it. It used to be very early on that when we described net-metering and said what it does... And this was before people had what we now call smart meters, that had the old meters with a disk that spun around. And what we basically said was when you're net-metering, when your solar panels are generating electricity, it's actually spinning the meter the other way and physically spinning the meter the other way and making less and less kilowatt hours showing up on the meter. So to the utility, it simply looked like you were using almost no or maybe no electricity.  Every utility has a flat, what's called the customer charge that pays for some of the fixed costs of the utility. Like $30 a month or something. Well, in Vermont it's mostly less than that right now, although some are proposing that they need to raise that up a little bit. And anyone... Do you net-matering? Yeah, so over time with changes in the law and regulations in Vermont, instead of just spinning the meter backwards, a financial $1 value was actually attached to each kilowatt hour generated and you got a credit of that amount against your bill. And it became possible for a while to completely zero out your bill, including that flat customer charge. And the utilities were saying, wait a minute, this whole system of net-metering is dependent on us being here, on having the poles and wires up, on having line workers go out and put the lines back up after an ice storm and all of those costs. And so there's been a number of changes, including one this year, that affect how much the value, financial value each kilowatt hour is worth to the customer. And it's gone down a little bit and the people in the business of selling net-metering who would want to do more of that aren't happy with that. Most of the utilities have been on the other side and the Vermont Public Utilities Commission recently, I would say, came down somewhat in the middle and said, okay, we do need to strike a somewhat different balance financially because it was beginning, because net-metering is so popular in Vermont now that it was actually having an impact, a real impact on rates. And particularly on people who, for whatever reason, are not net-metering. And that's been the balance. And I think that for utilities in Vermont, the amount of net-metering it varies differently by different utility, but is approaching 15% of their peak load. That's how it's measured. When I first, back in 2013, a few months before I left, I wrote a letter to the public service board saying Washington Electric Co-op had passed the 4% cap that was in law at that point that said a utility shouldn't take more than 4% of its peak load in net-metering and the co-op was the first utility that went past that number. And so that's been raised now up to 15% and utilities are starting to approach that. That's great. Yeah, on the one hand, it's successful. It's having very beneficial financial arrangements for the net-metering customers certainly helped encourage people to do that. And on the other hand, the balance swings the other way and it starts hurting financially in other ways. So I think that's a balance that this discussion is not over. And as someone who worked at a utility, I've had my opinions, but I can also effectively argue with the other side of that as well. It's not either or. It's finding a balance and probably needing to adjust that over time. You used the phrase zero out the bill. How many do all the customers zero out the bill? They can't now. For a period of time, they could zero out both the value of their electric usage, the kilowatt hour charge, as well as the flat customer charge. Now, the customer charge is called a non-bipassable charge which means you have to pay that and then you get a credit against the energy part of your bill. But it's also complicated because the arrangement has changed a few times. So if someone started net-metering at a time when this was the payment scheme, they will continue that for a period of time. You can't just get away from them what they signed up for. So you have groups of people who are getting paid in different rate structures depending on when they first started participating. Do other states do this? Many other states do. And many, the payment arrangements can be different, but it's quite common. I'm not sure whether it's in every state. I don't think it is. I think in some states, the utilities have fought this much more than in Vermont. Why would they fight it? Because they saw it as bad for business. And in Vermont, utilities are people, too. And I think the attitude and the understanding about the need for promoting more renewables was accepted by most of the people in the utilities in Vermont, as well. So it becomes an issue of, is how we're paying for it fair or does that need to be adjusted from time to time? Sophie, do you have any questions? You're like this. Well, it seems that this is a sort of an issue that's happening in several areas. It's happening in cable, television, the transfer of information, the transfer of electricity or energy. And I'm interested in the question about how to maintain the usage, but also how to provide the things that you want to provide as individuals to the communities that have been receiving them without losing. There's no doubt, and I know that people throughout the utility industry know that things, the business is changing. It has been changing. It's continuing to change. It's not the old model where you put up lines. You got wholesale sources of electricity. You get it out and people pay for it. Now it's much more dispersed, decentralized. There's generation happening at people's homes and much smaller generators dispersed throughout the system. And how we pay for it is also changing. The other thing that's changing is that for years and years, we talked about using less electricity. Washington Electric Co-op, certainly. Now, if we want to get off of fossil fuels and stop driving gasoline-fueled cars or using oil for heat, we're electrifying. We're encouraging people to do that with electricity. The only issue then is it doesn't do us any good the climate and the planet unless that electricity is renewable energy. If the electricity is being generated by coal, then why encourage people to get electric vehicles? If the electricity comes from a combination of their own solar panels and other larger renewable sources, then yes, we are definitely doing a good thing by encouraging people to make that switch. How many people are involved in renewability? In Vermont? Yes. Well, just in the solar business, I don't have the number, but there's thousands of people now. This has become a significant new employer, not one employer, but a number of businesses, larger and smaller ones throughout Vermont. And of course, there were people who were operating some of the larger facilities, wind projects and hydro projects and things like that in Vermont. Do you see more wind projects coming to central Vermont or to Vermont in general? I stuck my neck out when I was at Washington Electric Co-op in the middle of the wind energy debate and said things like what I said earlier about there were certain advantages to this, but also if we're serious about moving towards renewable energy, then we're going to have to look at it. We can't, for years, if you asked people in meetings and forums, I went to where's your electricity come from and they tell me the name of their utility and I say no, that's not what I meant. I know where your utility gets their electricity from, but to you and they didn't. It came from an outlet in the wall basically. So if we can't dramatically change where our power comes from, unless we're willing to accept it in our landscape, provided that it's responsibly developed and done in the right places and all of that. So I've been a supporter of wind projects in Vermont and there aren't that many ridgeline sites in Vermont that are feasible or appropriate and near existing transmission lines. You can have a site with great wind, but if it's 20 miles from the nearest transmission line, that's not possible. And there's nothing on Lake Champlain that would be windy enough? No, actually. That's so wild. The wind, if you think about it, the wind comes from the west. It hits the Adirondacks and it goes up and so when it's crossing over Vermont, it's at a high altitude. And so that's where the steady, consistent wind is up high as opposed to if we were in South Dakota or West Texas in the Flatlands, the wind is coming over a thousand miles from the Pacific and you're out in the prairies and that's where the wind is. Does Vermont have a goal on renewability? A what? A goal. Where would they like to go? I don't remember the number, but it's a very high goal to reach, not just for electricity but for all energy uses including transportation and heat by 2050. I really don't remember the numbers, but they have set goals. It's very set goals. And actually the biggest challenge is not in electricity but it's in transportation because we're a rural state and people travel in cars longer distances and don't have other ways right now of getting around other than getting in their car and driving there. So the challenge is to change the vehicles over gradually to electric vehicles. I saw in the news that Central Vermont, the GMTA, the public transit provider is getting funding to switch over at least some of their vehicles to electric buses. That's big deal. A few years ago electric vehicles, buses and trucks were not ready for prime time yet to try doing that with larger vehicles. Five, six years later it works and it may not be ready for prime time on the hill we live on in Worcester yet but I have a feeling five years from now it probably will be. Things are moving quickly. Sophie, have you had any experience in electric cars? Bill and I bought an electric car a year ago. We've put almost 16,000 miles on it in one year and it's a great local commuter and so I get about 70 miles distance in a one nights charge and basically I can go get Bill, we go do our morning projects, go have a nice lunch, go home, have a beautiful afternoon and I can make it home usually without having to charge. Sometimes maybe once a week I get stuck where I need to charge before I can get home. Now to talk about savings. We love it and I save about $100 a week in gas. Charging is, I also just saw in the news that there's some funding, I think Governor Scott had it. He did, $1.4 million? Yeah. Yesterday. For putting out more charging stations. Charging stations, yeah. Right now that's the, it's not just charging stations but most charging stations, if you're plugging it at home, you're charging in a very slow kind of trickle. 12 hours. Right. And people who are traveling can't do that. You need 15 minute max. Yeah. We need to get to where it's the equivalent of pulling into a gas station. Yeah. And a few minutes later you leave and you can go another 300 miles. Any other thoughts? No, but I think we're good. Right? Do you have some more thoughts on the subject? No. For questions? What I have in mind is both of us would like to thank you for the work that you do. Thank you. And for being here today. Thank you. Good to, you know, I did want to, I meant to say when I was introducing myself and I'll just say this, that any opinions I expressed here are, since I, you know, I learned much of this when I was at Washington Electric Co-op but I have not been there for a few years so the opinions are my own and I'm not speaking for the co-op. We appreciate you bringing them to the table as a member of the community then. And a consumer yourself. So that, you know, that part of it I think is fascinating. Any further questions? I think we got it. We both thank you for the work you did. Thank you. Thank you, Avram. Thank you for inviting me. And thank you, Bill, for having us. Yes. On your show. Thanks for setting it up, Sophie. It's a pleasure.


We continue today with workbook lesson 253. Myself is ruler of the universe. It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself.  What happens is what I desire. What does not occur is what I do not want to happen. This must I accept. For thus am I led past this world to my creations, children of my will, in heaven, where my holy self abides with them, and him who has created me.  Myself, which rules the universe, is but your will in perfect union with my own, which can but offer glad ascent to yours, that it may be extended to itself. Amen.


Hey, good afternoon everybody Tom Stewart here. I'm with Liz Trotter our guest today is Matt Donnelly and this is smart business moves Matt welcome to smart business moves. Thank you, Tom I'm I'm excited to be here and have been are after watching the show for a few years now So I'm very very excited you know Matt and I have become friends he is a very significant part of the maids franchise brand and has a really large branch up in New England several several locations actually all under the the maids flag and through Matt I've met some other folks from his organization is really a cool group of people and Matt does some really impressive things within industry and we're all going to learn something tonight We appreciate you taking some time this afternoon to be with us Thrilled to be here It's Tom said I mean I think you know one of the biggest things I think about scaling Whether we're going from zero to five hundred thousand or five to a million and a half or whatever those points are yep the biggest things networking and Getting out there and meeting people have been successful people that are positive have good vibes And in learning from them and so Tom might it's great to have had the opportunity to meet you Followed each other. I think a little bit over the years. We were both in the ionators, which is not an 80s pump and Back Remember the active eye line. Yep. I Keep one of these on the shelf actually This one is sober We remember we used to clean with these things and They were awesome, weren't they? Yeah It was a great great concept and you know one thing about Tom I've always admired about Tom is not only what we let's say the top three or five people ever in this industry But we'll in a trifling so none of them works for various reasons and that's okay Because we're not moving forward if we're not trying and we make mistakes sometimes And I know I'm preaching the choir probably to everybody that's on on this call today and Liz You and I have never met before or spoken But we almost did one time Okay, it was in a bar Okay That's not surprising go ahead No, no, it was lunchtime a few years back and I ssa show in Dallas And I walked in this restaurant with a couple friends Jim, you know what Tom, you know Jim Harris Jr. Oh, yeah Walked in for lunch during a break who was right at a pavilion across the street from the convention center And there were two ladies at the bar You came and started talking to them and you must have been working with them doing some consulting and they were so Excited to see you and they were telling up and down all the successes. They were having I was listening to this And I wanted to interrupt the tinctures myself. Well one.  This is just moment for them. So so I'm gonna go so we were that close to meeting Dang it. Dang it. You know, you never know shift fast Ever meeting now. I'm excited But the industry is it's great for the industry to have you both and everything you're doing It then just benefits everybody and the added professionalism Whether somebody's on the franchise side or the independent side, we're all the same game We're all doing the same thing. There's enough customers for everybody So so what you've both been doing is absolutely fantastic and thank you On the part of anybody in this industry Much appreciated I pretty much wraps it up for This Okay, before we before we get into any more details Tom didn't a report come out today consumer price index numbers came out and I guess there's there's a top line number which has a whole bunch of stuff in it But then there's a core what they call a core number, which are the things that Actually can be affected by interest rates and it's the thing that the feds really trying to drive down and for the last I'm gonna say half a dozen months. Maybe more. It was like point four percent month over month, which if you extrapolate that out as What five percent a year or so well, it came up to be point two percent core inflation month over month today Which is half of what it used to be and there's a whole lot of people excited about that and I've been so dog I'm busy today. I haven't even looked at the stock market yet But I imagine it's doing a pretty pretty good. Yo, yeah Good day on the stock market. So what does all that mean? It means that the interest rates that the feds doing might not be Going up as much as quickly Other they're probably will still do another increase the next time they meet here in the next few weeks, but you know the whole idea of having a really bad economic outcome is looking a little bit better in terms of like a Recession or something because of that One silly number At least not as bad Right. Yeah, it was good news. It was good news. It's hard. It's hard to say with one one number one time So let's see what what but that's a big change. So Let's hope fingers crossed everybody fingers Hey, okay. So what else do we have anything else that we have to talk about before? We Cuz I know once we start talking to Matt We'll go by Oh my gosh, we're out of time again You want to talk about some some events in August that people might need to be aware of Definitely, we need to talk about that you we want to pull up the links and I'll remind people we have the Made Central live event that I know a lot of people know about are registered for already and I'm because it's a popular event I will say here see a side that look I caught myself. I assist a residential and Also for profit builders. We decided to bookend on That event so if you're going to the main central event, you might want to come in early for The ISSA residential event or stay late For our event that is how to lead and manage with the numbers. You don't learn all about these numbers and how to Manage your numbers at made central. Well, how about learn how to Manage the people that are working for you and lead your company by using that data That's a piece that gets dropped a lot I'm I'm sharing a link off of core profit builders that's Going to the arcs the event is that perfect? perfect, yeah, I Think there is also a Keep an eye out for this y'all there is a An assessment going out. It is 50 Questions We'd like to get as many people responding to that survey. It's in five different areas we'll be using some of that data and our My event no, not my event the ISSA residential event on my session. My session is Running your company that's sort of a to z so we're going to be talking about five different areas and Keep an eye out that should be coming in directly from ISSA And give us give us your your insight as to where you where you sit from that survey And you'll get a little score tell you sort of what you need to work on and what to pay attention to if you come into the ISSA event That was a lot. I said a lot there. I'm on that Liz. I'm gonna fill it out. I Want to make sure? We get that link. Well, we can share that a whole bunch of place Matt Wilson that will make sure you get it too awesome. I'm signed up for the event All right, excellent. Good. I'll be able to meet you in person. That's right. Nice All right, so bar No, I'm so I'm so rarely at bars that when somebody says that I'm like, oh, okay Well, when you're in Charleston, we'll drag you to at least one, you know that We always go to that one big. Is that a bar? No, it's a brewery. It's a brewery. So it's a bigger bar I do love levels All right, well, it's getting late and I don't want to waste any more time that we're we have to talk with Matt Matt how tell us a little bit about your story. How did you get involved in the house cleaning industry and just How did it all start? I? Got pushed Okay So I've been in the industry now since 1995 So it's been a while so my father was looking to invest in a bit in a different business and I was looking at some different things. We just started looking at franchises and looked at different industries and Landed on residential cleaning and it just seemed like the right fit It was recurring revenue scalable low capital Not something that at any point soon was going to get wiped out by some disruption or technology So we just checked off a lot of things on the list that made sense and jumped in and So I'd say and I was not an all-star out of the gates by any means Does probably one of the worst young owners of a resident or cleaning franchise and in back then and Is a franchise or some advantages, but in general the cleaning space was so much less mature than it is today The easy part is just thrown at and the yellow pages were good But overall it was it was a struggle the first few years. It was definitely a definitely a long learning curve to kind of figure it out it took a certainly took a lot of perseverance and listening and Bang head against the wall and slowly things started to go from there so we started not just north of Boston and a couple in probably half a dozen communities and slowly started growing the area we're serving and Started buying out some other franchise in the area that they decided to do other things And so through a combination of that over the last almost gosh almost 30 years now We now run most of Eastern Massachusetts keep including Cape Cod New Hampshire where I'm situated today Southern Maine we don't go to Rhode Island or Vermont So we have and we run we have Seven to eight offices. I think right now locations Okay, so Matt Are you saying that your your company is so large? You don't know how many offices? And you'll be glad about this I don't know how many teams we have You should Yeah, I do I do know our revenue Okay, I know our labor cost Okay, so those are some good numbers actually Tom I would love if you would dig into some of the numbers with Matt because you know our people do love to hear that data Let me some KPIs You know KPIs if you're if you're willing to share. So are you willing to share that information Matt? I'll share what I know off your number. I know off the top my head. Okay That's one that we can ask for All right, well tell us what you got what what would small businesses that are because we have a lot of people that are You know in that area that you were back in the day when you said you were a bad business owner A lot of our business owners are feeling like I'm a bad business owner You know, I'm how am I going to get there? How it doesn't seem possible. I was talking to a Three million dollar company last week that was saying I just don't see it I just don't see that it's possible Liz. Wow, and that's significant. That's a big that's a big company in our space Well, I mean small in comparison to you though, right less than half your size And so I think that you could be really inspirational to a lot of these companies that are feeling like It's I can't do it. It's not possible It's interesting. It's like anytime we've taken the jump whether it be from two million or three million or three million or four million It's we always try to get back to it Back to normal and in that jump is obviously more chaos than usual And but getting back to where it runs and feels like it did at the previous point Obviously it looks a little different But you know, I think about it today I don't think feel like we're that different than we were a three or four million We have relatively pretty much the same team in place. We have fantastic team I mean, which is office in a key they've been with us a long time and A lot of news came came out of the field and just really grew up in the business So it's it's kind of just always trying to get back and making things normalized again getting big Looking at the same KPIs we were looking at before having the same systems the same training and continuous training I guess one of the things early on and I think it's probably really relevant today for anybody Scaling up. I think the book email Excuse me the email revisited. I think it was just an essential learning piece for me early on But it talks about not having the business be about you and having systems in place and and how to go from A to B That was that was huge Really helpful. I would encourage anybody who's looking to scale at all. That's a great resource And when you say systems Matt, give us some examples of what you're you're talking about Let's start our training In early on we were probably this back in the early late 90s What a structured training in place for new team members is probably one of the earlier certification programs and Still to this day of a big believer of that I know and I know there's a lot of variations out there now And I think nothing is one that's perfect or better than the other I think the fact that there is that structure in place when a new team member comes in How their orientation is set up In that they feel like they're part of something and that they're trained from point A To point B to point C in a very structured way and that's communicated up front to them. So they understand the expectations In rolling that right into continuous training Big believer in our case we have weekly continuous training for all our teams and we break it down into short snippet topics so Not even dusting it would be something tiny within dusting say You know Left or right or whatever you want, whatever you want it to be a certain details And so that's structured training over the year is Technical skills such as that soft skills most customer service as well as safety training So we have a rotating schedule with our safety training. We try we make sure we take attendance and that's signed off Each time in case for our records at the workers comp or any trends or anything like that That pops up. We just want to make sure that we've got ourselves covered there So safety training might be a lot of things that are common in the industry now It's slips and falls walking on an icy surface going on the house in the winter Distracted driving So, you know When you talk about systems, I'm thinking about okay. Well, you need documentation You need to say what you do and do what you say, but yeah You know, you've got like Multiple branches and over a large geographic area a whole bunch of people working for you It's a lot more involved than just putting all this on a piece of paper. How do you make all that work? So It's gotten we've gotten At times and we've not as smoothly as we'd like it to be But our management team is pretty it's pretty they're good at Communicating with the branch managers and you know smaller branch might be that might be a senior team leader or a bigger branch might be You know more senior position all depends Where we're at in the size of that office But we try to stay in touch with them. So they have daily home calls with those folks Every day about their day what that's gonna look like how that what's happening in training. So the training itself Continuous training is set up pretty much they set it up in the beginning of the year and it runs for the year So everybody knows we do what's gonna happen They have a review call touch base on it in this and that takes a lot of different formats these days Obviously video is used more now There's a lot of different tools sometimes we'll do it as a zoom call if it's something we need bigger We want to make sure that message is precise And others you know show and tell or have Whose games and sometimes it's tests From like original certification tests will break those back out again and do some different things along those lines So so you do this is what I heard right that's weekly correct and so well 52 different topics and You're just run them through do you have 52 topics that you recycle yearly or is it? Pretty much well We have more than that and then the topics may change occasionally based on trends if we're seeing a Lot of issues for kitchen floors Maybe something like that and that's gonna jump way up and your safety training changed a lot over COVID. I'm sure oh Yes, yes a bunch of stuff in there Yeah, although I think you know is the more professional companies. I think you know what and there's you know a lot of them out there Shames less than we expected Is we looked at if we were doing a little bit more than wearing masks a lot of the things we were doing anyways It's just we didn't Really communicate it to the customers that often because any customers didn't care. Yeah All of a sudden it's like hey, we're prepared for this. We got this down Yeah, nice. Okay, so I think I think that is a good Example of an advantage like a systems a system that you might have in place You should get bigger that smaller companies don't have went a lot of the smaller companies were thrown for a loop They did not they did not have good strong safety systems in place Not only did they not have masks they a lot of them weren't using Gloves on a regular basis. They weren't they weren't disinfecting They didn't know the difference between cleaning and disinfecting sanitizing, you know There was a lot of confusion out there for a lot of companies So that is a really good example of how as you grow you create these systems that can manage I like that you said you really didn't have to make a lot of changes Some adapting and like like I said, what what are we and that was a big question at a time Where do we go with disinfecting? How far do we take it? It's all there was a lot of those conversations that everybody had at that time and What do you think good is that bad? But we try to have training systems in place early on when we were really small a lot of this stuff existed then And I think it allowed us to continue allowed us to scale because we weren't figuring out afterwards It some of it seems silly and overkill when we're really small to be doing these things But I think it was critical for instance How do you handle a complaint customer call a complaint when it comes in and so we had probably an overkill Standard operating procedure for that early on but it carried us a long time of how we how that got documented How that got handled a lot of things that made central has has built right into it That we we were very conscious of early on because we knew if we were running Two teams and we were gonna be running six or eight Then it was gonna become more complicated and you know million to a two million business might be twice the size But it's exponentially more complicated. So having those systems is critical And if you didn't have those systems you would never Had known how valuable they were I mean I'm working on a I'm working on a concept here and this is gonna be this is gonna be awesome when we do this It's I've had an epiphany list and epiphany that There's a difference between growth and scale okay a lot of times we use them interchangeably in In the past we've talked about we've written articles about Barriers to growth where you can grow to a certain point and then you just hit a wall and you can't can't get beyond it anymore and Typically, it's it's because you know you have a team issue You need another layer of management or something from a team standpoint that you don't have or there's some understanding You need from a financial standpoint in terms of your financial modeling that you haven't figured out or it's a technology issue You don't have the technology and you don't even know what you don't know You don't know the counter argument is it's even holding you back until you have it then all of a sudden you're moving forward again So growth is what you do when it's working for you You're between these walls if you will but when you hit a wall It's not really a growth thing anymore. It's a scaling thing. You have to scale over the wall in order to It's a pretty good job, right? And it's the it's the things that you do that seems silly when you're small That give you the ability to scale over that wall and you don't even realize that at the time If you're doing it's only after the fact and you look back and say gee if I hadn't done that I would still be stuck at that wall back there, right? Yeah Yeah, yeah, it's up. There's a point. Oh, yeah. Hey, I can run the customers are run stuff on index cards But the earlier system is put in place Like I made central that just opens up so many opportunities for the growth It it really changes things It was in other things running clean books from early stage. I've seen so many people in this business or any business really They'll you know run their financials You know on a napkin or by the bank account and and they got this thing called QuickBooks out there and They don't want to touch it and they don't want to put anything in it or you know, maybe set up a chart of accounts You know what the account do that I'll get I'm too busy. I'll get to it later. Oh, we'll make him money I'll put stuff in there I got a shoebox with all this information and I'll give it to the account and let them figure it out Yeah, yeah, and that's another one. I think early on and using the recent Sony resources in our industry space now To learn how to do things and have templates set up that on the early of the better from day You know day one if it's not day one and it's not done then make it today I think that's one of those really really important foundational pieces So running one of these and to be will have a growth Really the books don't change that much over the years I mean as you both know the the your income statement a balance sheet the numbers may be bigger Some cases smaller But the concept in the complexity of the books really doesn't change that much So I have that in place day one and have it running for you I think it's really important and trying to play catch up and figure it out later All right, John. Don't worry. You haven't missed a ton, but you'll definitely want to go back and listen because You know they're when you're talking to somebody at max level all of the stuff that he says he's got lots of little Jewels in there that you want to be able to hear that sound just normal to him like to chat But for the rest of us are like, oh, yeah, okay, that's important We got a you know check mark make sure that we're doing that So one of it on a couple of things Tom. Did you have something you want to say before I start asking a bunch of my questions? No, you go Okay, so I made a few notes on those little jewel things that I'm talking about here Matt One of the things that you said was You have to have a good team. I think everybody that When we did foundation scale last year every presenter that came in that was talking about scale Just hammered on the idea of how important the team is and that you it's not just Like the individual people. It's the team itself everybody working together In the same vision And you who said that that team is really important But that you also pretty much have the same team that you had I think you said at three million, right? Yeah, for the most part. Yeah, it's evolved a little bit, but not yeah not a lot And it's interesting. We just brought back recently during coven a customer service rep who worked with us 20 years ago And it's now relocated to Florida and she works remotely But yeah, our management team has been with us quite a few years in different capacities and they've grown with it evolve with it and just really know the inside out so well and And it wasn't like any one individual went from a team member or team leader To a general manager or vice president overnight It's just it was just a journey. It just kind of happened. And so he's really just trying to involve people Slowly over time in different aspects and One thing I learned early on was putting the horse before the car. You know, it's like hey We're not big enough to hire somebody in the office Well, if we don't hire some in the office, we'll not get no we'll never get bigger So it was you know, it's but in early on that's a tough. That's a tough lead. Yeah That's always a hard one Sarah Sarah from Aims, Iowa. She has been a big proponent of this since forever that she wants to be Office heavy and she believes that if you don't have that workforce, you're not gonna be able to grow So you have to be able to invest in those people to that place All right, so you you your message is the same Okay, and when you say office in time people are I mean, it's The capacity to to do more work. It's a combination of people and technology and right with AI that's changing quickly, but In aggregate you need to to to have you know that the capacity to do more from a back room standpoint Physically in an office may be at home where there are a combination of Your right technologies key piece of that too and how what? Communication tools we use day-to-day and that's obviously involved and I think and the nice thing about that is you know Things like yeah, what is zoom for phones or ring central or whatever products are out there? They're cheap and attainable for everybody And they make just that's kind of it's a night and day thing compared to those old phone systems We used to have right For all of us oldies have been in business forever. Yeah, we had regular phones Put your finger in it I think Okay, so talk to me a little bit more about your team. What positions do you have what before we get into positions now? There's one thing I like to throw in before we lose this thought though in terms of staffing for where you want to go Madam sure you would agree that it's really important to understand your numbers though that you don't want to be spending money that you Don't have that right you need to make sure that you've got the cash flow to Support that. Yeah. Yeah, it might be a little tight in that period of time, but On each of those jumps, but absolutely. Yeah, the cash flow has to be there On the same page I just want to dig in a little bit to the details you had said that you have seven offices six or seven or eight offices And you're doing about seven and a half I'm guessing on a run rate. Yeah, and I'm guessing it's not evenly distributed so you have like an office that is very large and Small like how how is that? Explain that just a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, they vary from very small because one is Is this very seasonal area and the labor market has just changed so much that it's been very very difficult to recruit We're trying to decide how we're going to manage that over time and things have changed as far as Visits and students coming over that were two tools we've used in the past So so we have something like very very small in a couple that are very big okay, so I'm guessing one of the main things that people do when they have a lot of offices is They have like one person that's doing a job for multiple offices I'm guessing that's your situation as far as oversight. Yeah, so yeah, there's some of that So depending on the size if it's I if it's big enough then there would be some one person that They're a branch manager or field manager overseeing all the teams the day-to-day operational functions of those teams the Probably skipping way ahead on this up now thinking about it scheduling a centralized HR is centralized all a major function sales is centralized So when we say a branch manager It's really more of an opera execution position on operation. So it's it's Hiring training quality more of those aspects Okay, get the teams out in the morning and hopefully they're smiling when they come back in the afternoon I Coming back in and out All right, do you have so this takes me to another place? Do you have offices at each one of the locations then that people are coming to in the morning and leaving or? We still do it's something we're evaluating and especially the big ones we do So we still have offices. They they really vary in size And so we're we're debating of some we should run differently. We've dabbled in some different ideas in the past like Storage facilities and stuff like that to be far further reaching places where people essentially work out of the house And then they'll pick up the stuff that either car All right So the the numbers piece that I wanted to get to was around this idea So you have a lot of offices you have like a team some things are centralized some things are Individual offices like your ops your ops manager execution manager So two things one is I'd love to know what all the different positions that you have and then With your numbers, how do you determine? Who's who's paying for what you do a percentage base does it change does it happen annually? How do you decide that you can afford it? Is it all just the revenue of like the whole entire company? Talk a little bit more about that It's far we try I try to budget on this something I learned from uh, David Senceman who had the longtime largest maid franchisee he was out of Birmingham and Recently retired a few years ago, and so we've tried we typically have a budget What we want to pay for overhead overhead staff and it'll run Between 9% to 11% of revenue for support staff And so it runs higher if we've acquired an office or in a growth mode and we tend to be heavier And and at those points it hits the bottom line a little harder And it's it's not always ideal, but it's kind of what we have to be And then time we're running, you know, it's a smoother growth period Like we're having this year and then that number is going to run later more like a nine nine percent So it's kind of working within there and then we look keep an eye on okay, what are workloads? I got my little kpi list over here If you tell us the things that you remembered so before we fill in all those numbers here I got this one 9 to 11 What what are the positions that you have now? So right now we have three top managers in the organization We have a vice president of operations and she oversees The day-to-day operations, but works very closely. They work in conjunction with each other very closely So she also handles oversight of our southern offices We kind of drew a line and then we have an operations director who oversees our more northern offices and then Christina is in office and she handles a lot of our back-end oversight of scheduling aspects like that and then between the three of them as far as execution of initiatives and major things going on Then we've got one two Two and a half of three customer service reps I'm handling phone sales day-to-day scheduling customer calls things like that So your salesperson and your customer service and scheduling is kind of one job. Yeah, I've always done I've always done it that way in over the years I've seen and watched people do a lot of different ways with super dedicated sales person or call center um It's ours has always been more of a mix and not overly specialized So people can jump in each other's seeds of need It's just something that's worked for us over the years It seems to be okay. So People might You know might learn something from you. All right. Yeah, that's where we're small It's kind of what we all had to do. Yeah, and it just kind of stayed it stayed with that. I think And everyone more attuned to the customers with that, but you're saying it still works at seven Right. Okay. So there's People know they have to change like we can't keep doing this This stuff the same way to be able to get to the next level. We're going to have to change But it doesn't sound like this is one of them. Yeah, I mean We've tried other things over the years don't get me wrong and it's fine. We always we tend to come back Um and we try things and why and it's just well, this doesn't feel right The organization just isn't isn't running the way it should be Um started smoother. We're not in the know and you know, obviously we can all tell a thing to fall into the cracks and if Customer complaint calls go up or customer frustrations or Our frontline staff frustrations grow. We know something we're not doing something right and I've always positioned at that Um anybody and whether they're overseeing an office or customer service rep or sales Or manager. We're all there to support our teams That's where that's our role of all of us. We've you know, probably seen some different responsibilities within there Um in the end of the day the way they support the teams and they take care of the customers So we've kind of kept that overriding philosophy forever Marry our way of looking at things Do you do you feel your current leadership team? Gives you additional growth capabilities either through organic with your current seven branches or by adding additional branches or Is there More resources you're thinking about adding in order to give you the ability to keep growing Good question. And we've been back and forth on that not necessarily with with our current core people That what else what other resources do we need? And we recently brought We had another resource doing a lot of our bookkeeping And we took a look at that and said wow, we can be actually Use technology better and do things a lot smarter and be leaner and tight up on that Which we did so rather than making it bigger. We made it smaller and we're running better Um And so you know books are much cleaner and we haven't but we did bring an outside person into reconciling books every month So we have a second set of eyes on on our books, but not necessarily doing the bookkeeping Um, as far as the management side, I think right now we do last year We grew the last year was by far a record our record with organic growth We grew about 1.3 million and 800 of that was organic growth that just happened And a lot of that was still come back real from um from kovat So last year we got back over 19 We had closed for eight weeks in 2020 and Up here So a lot of it was just kind of building things back up But it just it came to us and in the team handle it Remarkably well and they grew 800 back the year before And to so see the same team be able to do that just blew me away and right now things are running very smoothly. So I could see us hopefully Going probably 10 million without a lot of major changes. I think we need to have more changes than technology Um, so I don't think it's necessarily human capital. We need we need I think we've got good resources obviously With growth we'll have to plug in some you know pieces of you know more phone calls and things like that um But it's probably technology more than anything right now I think that that we would need to make that next leap towards technology Yeah, tell us a little bit more about the technology needs that you see yourselves needing Um, you're going back to handling a complaint a customer complaint Yeah Not rather than a piece of paper and plugging in the system and and having it lost into a system from there Something that it flows through like made central has In a really neat way of handling that where it goes Like service CEO used to years ago where a customer concern flows right to the employee File so you have that tracking on that side or a scoreboard over there And that it gets on the next schedule. It's it's uh highlighted In the past, I know what systems we've been using it's it can fall through the cracks We end up having a secondary calendar, you know, we're using a an accordion folder a google calendar our operating software It's like, okay. That's probably not the best way to operate movement forward. So that would be an example Oh, okay. That's it. That's a good streamline And so it you know, we wouldn't record so it would streamline so much that Like I said, it doesn't mean we have to bring on more people Because the system's gonna be better Well, well tom we talk about that a lot with made central. I'm telling people that constantly that Depending on the size of your business, of course But sort of the typical people that we see going in main central that you're probably going to eliminate a person Right, you'll have we'll we'll take the place of an entire body If you think about if you think about matt's doing and he's been doing this since the mid nineties Liz we can relate to that There was a time matt where you were printing out pieces of paper and giving them to your teams every day and they were writing notes on those pieces of paper and bringing them back at the office at the end of the day and somebody was collecting all those pieces of paper up and You know, how many extra people would you need working in your office? If you guys were still printing out pieces of paper and doing that more than what you currently have, right? And I know we're way we're still way too paper heavy um Yeah, I just I see that if once you all see like a Randomly see a bill for the toner cartridges. I'm like, wait a minute. Why are we printing that? What are we printing? Why are you having a bill for that toner cartridge? Yeah? All right. Well, I actually think we're behind the time though It's a our we're a little bit. We're behind on that. I would say that's something that's That we could be better and more efficient and help us grow better on that But we're all we're all more efficient from a back room standpoint than What we were a dozen years ago Regardless of what technology we're using. I don't think many people are printing out paper work orders and trying to Keep up with that if you're doing that on scale. That's a career for some people. Yeah Some people are still printing work orders. No, they're not. Yeah, Tom, you're just not You just don't know what's going on because you're in the main central world. It's I don't know any of those people Can't even imagine you do Yeah, unfortunately, it's uh It is definitely out. It's definitely there. Well, please call. Please call me. We can fix that. That's that's not a Permanent affliction that can that can be cured. That's not a chronic thing But we'll make sure that that gets All right, let's let's talk because look already we only have 14 minutes left. I'm like i'm stressing out I got a whole list of questions. All right, so matt i'm going to get back to kpi. So We you talked about um your admin being somewhere around 9 to 11 How about what your direct labor, uh, maybe either loaded or unloaded? What do you what are you trying to do for? Um not loaded direct labor including Including including wind windshield time Um, we've been running or run a little bit better now have been running heavy with all these wage Wages jumping uh last year. I think we were running around 41 and we're running like 38 to 39 right now Okay So that's that's uh direct. So that's in home and driving back and forth Going home to the office awesome and How about your um I hate it so many. Um, how about your do you know your lifetime value of of a client? That's I heard there's a software out there. That's really good at that Well, I just if you said you have some that you know off top of your head Yeah, that's one that we have a lot of data in there that we I don't have a means to get it out smoothly That's okay Tell tell me what things you think would be helpful for what kpi's people might want to be like might want to know see um Obviously we're always we're always looking at revenue and compare we compare revenue Every week to the same period last year because it's how the seasonality tends to be so consistent And we have some seasonality in our space in our area Whatever your holidays or Warm and cold seasons. So we're always looking at a week Well, obviously day week month and I tend to look at week and month And looking at how we're doing compared to last year and where our goals might be Uh, our team looks at it really on a they're looking at daily basis They're having a daily huddle on revenue. So they've got a goal set up Uh, and if they see the next day or next few days aren't hitting Then they're going to try to market to that And you know if we've got whether it be every four week customers on the next week or One-time work that this that's already scheduled and try to bump them up get them up closer Because that gives us five more days to sell that other spot If we pull the one in that day, then Yeah, that's something we've stressed a lot. I think we've done a much better job of that. It's made a big difference over time So not letting the schedule happen to us but getting out in front and controlling it You know, I'm always happy to give somebody a discount if I can get them to move up three days and fill a spot for us We get a chance to fill that out the spot for free That's a win-win a good way to A way to Grow your revenue without having to make any kind of really big changes. So exactly. Yeah All right. Um, you have any other KPIs that you want to share? I think Daily revenue per person Okay Think about 300 now that's been one that's been really interesting to watch change over the years Yeah, obviously with pricing and wages and Factors like that. I don't know for that much more efficient than it used to be Um, but the numbers changed customer attrition, you know, big Definitely customer attrition on a monthly basis. So looking at that as a percent of our base Um, the same numbers I've heard you guys talk about over the years I think you spot on um, that you know for four percent a month what might be an average but Four percent of a month, especially as you get bigger is a tough number to manage A lot of clients. Yeah So so when we're hitting four is we you know, we definitely don't want to be hitting four Sometimes we know after a busy season, you know, they fall off because of A peak in the summer because they're going to come right back the next year But I tend to shoot three or less Okay, in my view is a good number for us I thought we're telling people in our circles, too You start hitting four you want to start looking at that number Harder it pop pop it up as a concern instead of having Yeah, and that that figure really hasn't changed for us. I'd say even over the last 15 years It seems to be the same same percentages that we know like said if it's a four Uh-oh, we have we're gonna start digging in here. Look at that. How about how about your employee attrition? um We look at it. I feel it's a team member management or The uh, the team members. I forget what it is right now. It's getting better. I mean through covid It was so many ups and downs and oh my god, you see now. We had always been strong there Still traumatized No We um, but um when covid hit we hired almost exclusively single moms It was tough. It was a rough life Maybe shut down the daycares and it's like all righty then On the tough side. All right. Yeah more questions. So I can't I can't talk too much All right one point that you made That I want to just bring up again um, because I think that a lot of people Say the opposite of this. So I'm super I'm super intrigued to hear you say this that most of your office staff came from the field Yep, not exclusively you but yeah Yeah, not exclusively but you did say most And so that's interesting because we hear that once you hit a certain size Your your the people in the field just aren't the right people They're not going to be able to do that job, but you found that to be true So two of our top three managers Worked in the field And the third um, she came over from another residential cleaning company And had previously been a manager with walmart And then the other two yet came up right through and we happened to Really fortunate that we had really smart people Join our team. In fact, they both worked for other cleaning services We tend not to hire people from other cleaning services, but they were within our franchise system And that um ended up coming over and we bought the office Didn't work out that way Yeah, so Typically though as far as field staff we don't hire people that have been With other services It's always felt like we hire for attitude and work ethic Uh, and we can train the skill And so if somebody's with somebody else then one another system And the unlearning can be really tough Well, that that's great because we all preach that but I love hearing a company of your side saying yep us too Right If I can you know, we see somebody who's worked at a marriott or something like that great because then they've had to Have finished so many jobs over the course of a day Certain level of quality take instruction training uniforms They've got our service. Yeah, they've learned some stuff Good, you know It doesn't sound like this happened As an accident though, I mean you're on top of who you've got working for you and their experience and their skills and We all probably have people working in our cleaning businesses that have Skills and talents that maybe we aren't aware of yeah. Yep Yeah, very much so it's really good if max got two of his top three people Came out of the field chances are good. We've got some talent there that we is going unrecognized So that's that's a great little nugget there. All right now I got two big questions that I want to hit and I've only got five So, um, I'll tell you what they are and then you can decide how you want to spend the time on them The two questions are how do you set your goals for the year? Like what goals do you set? How do you set them etc? And I know that's a kind of a big question and then the second one is what's your job? So those those are my two questions. Let's see. Um Goals, uh, we've done a lot of different methods over the years. We've done off-site meetings and Um, and we will do things like um, strength weaknesses opportunities, you know, we'll do swad analysis Um, it tends to be a little less formal now. I should say we were always basing it on a swad analysis. I think um, we've but we've done things like board disciplines of execution and We've scaled down I think a lot since then because I think we're we're in a good mode that we kind of retuned to stuff And we know we'll want to be year to year. So we're looking at okay. Hey, this is we want to be this year What's it going to take to get there? Uh, what changes do we need to make? We don't I don't do budgets I don't do financial budgets. I never have And just something I um, you know, we have we know what our p&l should look like and we're watching our numbers. Um But we don't we don't manage to budgets on financially Okay, it's just not something that I've ever felt was a good fit for us Okay, I love hearing that That's great. Um, all right, we'll do quarterly goals. We have initiatives. Yeah, different things we're working on throughout the air too So we'll finish with the uh, the best question. What's your job? My job stay out of the way Okay More and more every year stay out of the way. Uh, so I I would say, um Yeah, it's strategic vision um helping identify what systems we need or what gaps and and you know help fill those or resources to fill those um And I don't get a lot in the in the details anymore Yeah, they're good at it.  You try to Stay out of it and let them their jobs. Yeah, and that's and that's again It's something that's just evolved over the years as the business has evolved Um, certainly not something that was but it was something I've tried to empower people. I've always tried to empower people um and let people do their jobs and I've certainly not always been perfect at that Um, and you know, I certainly have evolved as a manager. I think a little bit too Big question there waiting for that one. Yeah, we do we work in teams with cars Teams and your cars, right? Yeah, our cars. Yep. We still have our cars Uh, can I do it? If I can do one more plug because we haven't really talked about hiring Uh, I'm a big fan of mel climb and stuff.  I think it's it's the blue one on top the higher. I think he rebranded it to higher tough manage easy Yep, I think that is the moment Because it looks the same. It's more it's probably more PC Yeah Something else that might be Interest of folks We um a couple years ago. I happened to be during covid wasn't playing that way We got involved with dementia friends and it's an organization called dementia friends usa.com And we became they have state chapters and so many of us are serving Um Customers that are are aging and our customers we had 20 years ago are 20 years older um So we became a dementia friends champion through this organization where we our managers Can train our frontline staff to be what they're called dementia friends And that's how to um And how to communicate how to identify Possibly somebody might have dementia how to communicate How to bring that to somebody else's attention that you might see something And where we're in people's homes so frequently we see them more than their families do in a lot of cases And I've seen it with customers where I've had forever. So That's something that um, and Whoops, it's a good logo to have on your websites facebook pages and so forth as well And I just have to throw this out here I'm so glad that you brought that up Matt because a lot of times Y'all struggle with when I'm saying your people need to have meaning in the work that they do look Matt donnelly bringing the meaning right here, right?  So, um, thank you so much Matt. I love that you brought that up We're in the business in the day. We're in the business helping people More so than quite here since we're at the top of the hour.  We're gonna be there on the 21st 21st of august. I'll drop this link again Matt, this is the first time you've done smart business moves, but I sure hope it's not going to be the last I'd love to come back. Oh my gosh, this would be amazing matt. I would love to have you back Like we're just gonna scratch on the service. I know I have I have so many more questions I just wanted to get the ones that I knew people were going to be bugging me for later, so Thank you so much matt really really appreciate it. Thank you Feel free to share share my contact information Okay That's a good point. What's the best way if somebody wants to continue the discussion What's the best way for them to reach you my email is matt d d Matt d at the maids ma.com So you don't want us to give them your personal cell number? Uh, that's six one seven Nine five three Oh My desk line is uh nine seven eight three five seven five five three five is my desk line Okay, all right y'all He's about helping he really is. Thank you matt. We'll do the voicemail. I check my vision. I go through visual voicemail Thank you guys Have an awesome week. We'll be back. Uh this time next week Five o'clock eastern uh until then take care. Bye. Bye