Hello. Welcome everyone. Oh, it's down. It's on. Jack, actually you're going to be the one starving, so please. Hello, welcome to our presentation about the geometry notes development process. So you probably all know that we started with the project like two years ago, and since then we have seen lots of adoption in the industry and from individual artists all around the world. One of the recent highlights was the use of geometry notes in the RRR movie, which is actually the biggest Indian production sofa movie production. And they used geometry notes extensively for distributing assets all around the scene. But first a bit about our team. Here on the left side we have Dalai who is joining me today. He's our product manager. He's mainly responsible for making sure that our priorities are in line with what the studio needs and what the stakeholders have in mind, like mostly Tom. Then there are Sans and me. We are the developers, mainly responsible for actually implementing what we have designed, making things work inside of Blender. And on the right side there's Simon who is an artist working for the Blender Studio as well. Usually he's the first person who tests our patches and gives us valuable feedback on what problems he runs into when he uses geometry notes in production. Here I had a classroom earlier today. You can watch it online if you haven't seen it already. But then today we want to talk about how we got there because it wasn't a straightforward process. Like now we have a team and everything, but just like two years ago it wasn't the case and we want to tell the story of how we got from the time before geometry notes and there was a long time that I will tell today and into the future like how the process changed, how we managed to get like geometry notes that is today and relatively little time. So where does it begin? It's actually quite hard to define where the overall project began. Like the idea of everything notes is kind of old already. Like the earliest mention of it that I found was from 2012 and even on the Blender conference in 2012 there was a talk about particle notes already. So yeah that didn't lead anywhere. Then few years later I started working on the animation notes add-on which like brought proceduralism in many more hands of Blender users and there was some new hope for the everything notes project when I was hired by Blender in 2018. But actually for the first few months I was mostly helping out with the Blender 2.8 project doing bug fixing and everything until 2019 when I was able to dedicate some time to the everything notes project but at that time we didn't even have an idea of what we actually wanted to do. So I was mostly tackling on my own some like more generic topics like what could the future of the modifier stack be or what kind of mesh data structure would we need to allow procedural workflows. But then a few months into that we wanted to start an actual project and we mainly wanted to decide between like particle and new particle system or procedural modeling and now in hindsight we kind of know that it would have been better to start out with procedural modeling but back then we had to decide and there was like on the one hand procedural modeling which would have been nice but the Blender Studio they didn't have an immediate use case for it whereas for the particle system for years they were struggling with the old particle system running into all kinds of limitations and then even other developers really wanted to get rid of the old particle system so much so that in the development of Blender 2.8 the entire particle system was removed at some point and then brought back a few days or weeks later because there wouldn't be any feasible replacement in time so that's why I started out working on particle nodes so the project went on it was mostly just me working on a design then writing a wiki post about it asking for feedback and on dev talk gathering some community feedback and then updating the design, bidding a prototype and so on and so forth a few months into the project I actually presented the current state of the prototype to the team I had like a 90 minute session with all the artists working at the Blender Studio where they were trying the system and generally it was like kind of fun to use they were able to create effects that they couldn't create before and so everything was well, it was good at that time I was staying in Amsterdam for one year and after that I was moving back to Billions working remotely and so I just continued working on the system improving it over time just a few months later I came back to Amsterdam and we made a plan for how do we want to get particle nodes into Blender into the actual master version not just as a separate branch so we had meetings with Dalai and Brecht and some others probably where we made a to-do list and then for the next couple of months I started working on that and we actually had particle nodes in Blender as you could enable it as an experimental feature and then when it was about the time to decide to actually enable it when I was back in Amsterdam we kind of couldn't agree on the high-level design anymore or there was not really a high-level designer for everything fits together okay, we have a particle system but how does it integrate with other simulations or with future procedure modeling and all of that so since we didn't have that design we didn't want to enable the system anymore and the project was set on hold and now we're in a kind of difficult situation because we wanted to do this Everything Nodes project but we were kind of back at the beginning at the design phase and we had to decide how to continue we also noticed that other projects that were planned had similar issues like this is the big planning sheet for 2020 and there's like one row for the entire particles project that I mostly work on and then there's for example a row for the hair project and it was all planned out none of that really happened in the end and you can also see that for every one of these projects there was essentially one developer assigned to it and that turned out to be one of the issues in the end because if you assign one developer especially if the developer is working remotely it's kind of an isolation and it's hard to find the right balance between getting feedback in thinking about the entire design when you're working on your own extension you're responsible for the entire project so as mentioned it would like looking back now we now know that it was probably not a good idea to start with the Particle Nodes project or to develop it that far without having the entire picture in mind and now we're at a first big pivot point where we had to decide do we want to continue the design of the Particle Nodes project or do we just forget about that for now and start something completely else and that was kind of a tough decision to make and then in the end we decided to go back and re-evaluate our initial assumption about that it would be better to start with Particle Nodes and decide okay let's do geometry nodes instead and then Dalai also talked to Andy about it like what needs that they actually have in the past of movie projects and then figured out that when Andy was talking about the Particle Nodes that he really needed a new Particle Nodes system he was mostly thinking about scattering things whereas when I was thinking about Particle Nodes it was mostly about points moving around reacting to events and everything that was kind of a fairly big misalignment that would have been solved by having a better shared mental model of how things should work so we tried to address that and that's when we started building a team and then Dalai would take over and talk about how we tried to improve the process from there with everything we have learned so far Putting together a team wasn't about just adding more people to the problem one of the problems that was highlighted on this 2020 planning that we had too many projects running at the same time for people working by themselves and that doesn't scale and doesn't make sure that everyone has a full autonomy to build everything they need to build so when thinking about the team here at first I got together with Irun Irun is one of the developers at the Blender Institute and he has an experience in working with Scrum in the past and I said let's try this Scrum thing I keep hearing about there was some buzz through some of the HR consulting we had at Blender at the time and what would it take for us to try this new methodology first we did a team that it's not only about the amount of people but about the different skill sets they bring to the table so sure, Jack was a naturally deleted developer we needed more hands on board Hans was someone who was already involved in the user interface part of Blender so you just invited him over at the time we tried other developers there was more rotating seats we had Sebaz, Sebaz and Paarbor then we had Pablo Baskas helping with UI and overall design testing and we have which for me is the most important role in the team which was the designer the feature designer was the role played by Zimon, Zimon Thoms you might know him from the overpacked jump to notes training session we had earlier today and it was a must for the team having him on board and made sure that every step of the way what we were doing was validated in production was literally production ready because you just take that and use it right away I was at the time playing the role as a PO, product owner is a name within Scrum but as Jack said is also a product journey for myself I was like learning on the way and we were all just trying to bang our heads together try to build something better and then a few weeks later in the early October 2020 we officially started one thing that you know we know what happened in 2020 not only there was COVID there was a tone getting his leukemia diagnosed, he's super fine but the year itself was very erratic so a lot of the planning that didn't work before was also because it could have worked if everything went according to the plans but guess what we cannot predict everything that's going to happen and then we tried something different let's work in those very small incremental intervals is the Scrum methodology let's get together everyday for a daily this was also important because Hans is in America Jacques is in Germany the rest of us have been based here in Amsterdam so we had to build a sense of communication shared context we had sprints of one to two weeks so we will do some planning but not a plan for three months down the line let's try to do something and let's see how people react to that and we started from the right beginning to try to work with the studio for their upcoming project at the time was a sprite fright to see what we could build that they would love to use this was a bit of a mental shift because the Blender animation the Blender studio has to use Blender for everything they do not that they have a lot of say on hey I don't feel like using this tool today but this is a bit this is not the best way to build a good relationship with the people that need what you're building let's leave the existing particle system there we're not forcing anyone to switch out of it but what if we build something that's so compelling and so designed to address the needs they have that they'll just have no choice but to switch to that this was early October eight weeks later we basically finished the jump in those projects so to say so one of the problems we had in Blender before with planning that we also had those projects that were going on forever Jacques mentioned the simulation of the particle project was already going on for almost two years we had the asset project in a similar situation and so on on so we said you know what Tom we're gonna work in a team don't worry we're gonna finish the project in two months and we did but there's only so much you can do in two months a lot of this of course was already very impressive we already had pebbles scattering working at the time we had basically different system interacting with each other and a lot of this was possible because of the work previously done by the particle simulation project so just we're building on top of that we also a knowledge that this is finished this is much already I think we are already master at the time of the gas so so people download Blender could already use this sure it can only do five things but those things are supported and they're supposed to work nice and at the time you also wanted to build the trust from the leadership from the stakeholders it's a path to be walked together now we want the autonomy but we need to kind of show that they can have the tranquility to trust the autonomy to the team so we're discussing at the time it's easy if you'll just watch this later on YouTube we can see the text but basically we're like should we go for procedural modeling should we go for hair what not or can we continue with what we wanted which is to wrap up the main use case for sprite fright and address some usability issues it's kind of what we went with shortly after so this was two weeks after that email so I read in the second big sprint we had and they officially started to use jumped notes for the sprite fright project which was a big thing for anyone that you have been using Blender for long enough no what it meant with the old system you had to rotate things in strange axes being the origin if you were to change anything in a corner of the world it would affect the distribution of everywhere else so for it was a big victory we mentioned that this is a project that's been going on for two years but throughout the way we kind of tried to celebrate those little wins and in the course of one year so when we started in Amsterdam so late October when officially started the jumped note projects and when sprite fright was released we managed to officially have the debut of jumped notes shaping up to what we have it today we had the first Blender release in 292 we have the splash screen with the arc of Irondale finally see you here it's probably an alert the file doesn't work anymore because we changed things drastically afterwards and we have the celebration of sprite fright using that in the production and sure now we have a feature films using it but still at that time this was mind blown a lot of this is not by chance right from the beginning we had the schedule of this sprite fright project the production and we had access to this every step of the way so this is 2020 and you can see we knew when set layout, set design was going to finish so we say ok so anything we want to do regarding set dressing should be done by that time oh we know they're going to do some character some VFX oh if they want to use the jumped notes for VFX then we have to do our advantage so it's not a set on stone planning but those are moving targets we realized would be beneficial for us and for the project and then of course for Blender at large to pursue for anyone that hasn't seen sprite fright go watch it, it's on YouTube and originally we tried to be at the same time cautious but ambitious like looking at the story board production of the project what could have been done with jumped notes there was not even such a name at the time but what could be done procedurally what could be done with better set dressing tools the obvious case is for indeed set layout we thought maybe we have a lot of spider webs there's some bird with one of the characters there's some very ambitious VFX like the hairspray some crawling snails that's like let's not go that far but let's consider what if in the end everything but the hero assets so the bird and ass and the spider web in the end they wanted full control so it's so called hero props but everything else was used to jump to notes you can find a lot of those files online and as part of the sprite fright production this was for me one of the first surprising uses of jump to notes for me it looks like people working with metaballs but in like on Easter Royce pretty much and then Simon was already a very accomplished know the artist I don't know if that's a name he's a great of shaders and everything else and then he started to get the hang of the system and so you know what I can do that jump to notes what's his talk name and then he was already doing the VFX for that in the end we didn't have a crowd simulation but they have a crawling simulation in the film and even though it was a close up shot they end up using jump to notes for the snails to individually interact with the body of forgot his name Rex and to top it all off top it all out Simon even used jump to notes to help with the noising at the time Cycles X wasn't merged into Blender so some of the shots using the old cycles were suffering a lot from noise given the render time we were allowed and basically he had he did this used jump to notes for some things we even even considered before I see some people know what they're gonna talk about here as I mentioned already when I mentioned the splash screen I mean not everything is you know just a walk in the park or not everything is perfect right and of course we're telling a story here which more highlights the good moments but it's also important to be grounded and remember that a lot of things didn't go so well or rather a lot of things had a had an impact and had some friction throughout the way one of them is the attributes and the fields right in the beginning the Blender jump to notes design was very simple we have a jump in, a jump out and everything else is a black box we had this mental model of a spreadsheet of vertices and attributes that's called UVs, position rotation and it was beautiful, it's very elegant this comes from Tom a lot of days however when artists and this was also very data flow oriented you know data in, data out data in, data out but when artists started to use this for their production files you know to really be constrained to a pure data flow pipeline for notes first gonna lead to this very very horizontal spring of information also means that any data that you need to create in the beginning of the node tree you need to find a way to parse it all the way to the end of the node tree leading to a lot of cluttering and loss of readability in the node tree so we said okay we already have people using this for production like all the entire of SpriteFright was already built on top of those assumptions but what it take to rethink this now because we are knowing something for the next 10 years at least and this is being like this was 6 months in like 1 year in the time we can afford to use to our advantage we even consider to be backward compatible so to say so we could convert the old files we had a little poll in the dev talk in the one of the development forum channels and people said you know what it's fine you don't need to worry about that because this was working for the blender 2.93 which is an LTS so we knew that if you have a production file that was using the old pipeline it's okay it's going to be supported for 2 years and for anything new we start let me tell you how you're going to do it from now on and we tried like we really tried different ways to persist on the data flow these are some of the examples at the time we are sharing a lot of those in dev talk again we have some prototypes and this is one of my favorite ones have the expandable socket that you could just get the data there I still like it we ended up landing on what we have today is the so called field design I won't go over it specifically you can read all about this on the blog it's also what we have in blender and let me be like come out in the public and say that for so many times I will say like I hate fields I said that so many times to Jack and Thomas I hate it because I know it can work but also know that it's mind boggling and it's going to be like poor people but it's it's always a trade off so it allows people to do more and if they know what they're doing it's even more intuitive it just has a mental model which is more abstract than data in data out which we see everyday now we talked about pivoting here we're going to be mentioning two more pivots at least in the course of this talk I think for all of them and that's something that is important throughout the way which is about checking the assumptions check what exactly and this talk I had with Andy that helped us with pivoting with like Andy when you're thinking about the new particle system what does make you excited about it what is it and then like it was just that dressing that simple because in every one of the open movies there is one massive VFX simulation scene and you know what he made he's already made his terms with those problems it's always going to be a pain to ask one day we have a better simulation system in Blender but what goes everyday right from the pre-production all the way to the end is this set dressing so checking the assumptions and an important knowledge that having not only jumped the pre-jumped nodes so the simulation particle in Blender helped us to move fast but also to decide to do something integrated with Blender right from the beginning so we didn't have a new stack of effects to run in objects we didn't have a new system we just have a new modifier and that's why with only a handful of nodes people could use every other modifier they were already using it and already doing very powerful like three generation right from the beginning so it was very important throughout the whole process and the communication with the stakeholders I still believe the field changed so when you had this big rollback in terms of design could have been not avoided approached early on into the project a lot of this was still a mismatch between the stakeholders vision and a little bit what we're building and it's also our mission maybe this was part of my work to know when to really bring everyone that has a say in the process to really look at what we're doing so they can sign off for the better but no no come over I'm trying to think of a good segue but sprite fry was finished and Blender is an open source project that needs this reason to exist is a community so how do you transition from having this closed interaction between these people working every day together to be more approachable and more accessible for the module maintenance in the long run for that hunts please so Blender already has this module system there's modules like the animation module or the user interface module and they're each working on their own area of Blender and they have autonomy to some extent to decide what happens so the natural owner for the geometry nodes project is the nodes and physics module because it's sort of taking modifiers and making them more general and integrating them with nodes so that's where we took geometry nodes project and it's sort of like how do we continue the geometry nodes project even though it's done I mean that sounds weird but really the sort of core implementation of geometry nodes as a new concept was finished it existed but there's still so many more things that it needs to do even to this day I mean geometry nodes isn't finished but the core implementation of nodes dealing with geometry is done so that's where the community comes in because you know two people can't do everything by themselves obviously so right from the beginning we had people committing smaller nodes or smaller changes to existing nodes or changing the UI to make it more friendly and everyone out there can see things that we couldn't see so part of what we needed to do was make our decision process more available to everyone else and that's sort of what you can see with the work board on the left so there's all of our bugs and all of our tasks and on the left is really important because that's the community tasks so that's tasks that we have sort of talked about and decided that okay we sort of agree on the basic idea here anyone can take it from here anyone who can well write C++ but and then in the middle there's our module meetings so every two weeks we or maybe it was one week at the time but every so often we'll meet and then get more people involved be noticed we did the dailies but someone who's working on Blender as a hobby can't join at you know seven in the morning or three in the afternoon every single day so that every meeting every two weeks makes it possible for people who don't have as much time to still be involved in the project so these are some of the patches I think in like maybe early 2021 there were already people contributing and some of those people are still around contributing to geometry nodes today we owe so much to them and the different perspectives that different contributors have because like I said we can't think of everything and one great example is the curve tools so this is sort of so hmm okay I came to Blender obviously a continent away with a different perspective because I hadn't really been to the Blender studio so I had my own interests and one of them was curves and turns out curves are really useful in a procedural pipeline because they're like wires, paths, pipes they're all curves and you need those so much when you're doing anything with geometry so combine that passion with contributors who can add plenty of these nodes and we had support for a new object type in geometry nodes so we already had the mesh object support we already had point clouds which was sort of a prototype from two years ago that we could use in a modifier stack but we have this existing curve object in Blender and we have edit mode so we should just be able to use that with geometry nodes so we made a curve system because the existing curve data type in Blender is sort of limited it doesn't support attributes which means yes you can set the tilt and you can set the radius and you can set the soft body weight for every single control point but it didn't have this idea that was essential for geometry nodes where you can add any data you want so we added a new curve system and it turns out that the curve draw tool and the curve pen tool are so much more powerful and use so much more than we ever imagined this is one example a city medieval city generator by Ellen Wyatt where you just draw a line and it creates a medieval road and then you draw another line and it finds oh where do they intersect let's put a plaza there and it's just magical all of these things are just two strokes drawn by users and that's sort of that's where the power of a node system comes in because with every new node you're not just adding the one feature in the new node you're multiplying that feature with every other thing that was already possible and that's why you can make a city from scratch and you know we could keep showing this sort of thing there's this river generator that was going around on Twitter recently and then there's more stuff using this curve draw tool you can make chili peppers you can make roads with lampposts spawning on the sides you can make paths for cars and so on so to recap we can't imagine everything people want to do that's why there are 100 people in this room and sometimes you get lucky sometimes the curve draw tool is so much more important than you ever would have thought and when you use existing features and you don't make a new node system that can't interact with modifiers but instead just make a new modifier things can be useful much earlier on and turns out that communication with the community as part of the core process is really important and also nodes they're very atomic so you can have 10 people working on different nodes at the same time and they're not necessarily editing the same files so the node system lends itself well to the open source development process okay so I mentioned geometry nodes was done as a project so we needed a new project and we keep coming back to this particle system which is a little bit awkward and limited and not quite flexible enough but also the sprite fright project sorry not sprite fright project heist had this idea of a main character Anar who has this scruffy beard and wouldn't that be a great thing to do with a new hair system so it turns out we've been working on curves for a while and what is hair but just lots and lots and lots of curves so you know the geometry node system could support hundreds, thousands of curves but once it started getting to hundreds of thousands or millions then it just slowed to a crawl it was way too slow but it turns out Brecht years earlier had made a prototype for a hair object and that's just a really efficient way to store lots of curves but if I went back a few slides you could see all those curve nodes and they weren't using the new hair type so we went through all of the existing nodes and converted them to the new hair type so that's sort of one of the pivots that I mentioned where we really have to go back to thousands of lines of code and make it more efficient you know 10, 100 times faster and that's when you can start to edit 100,000 curves and use the existing geometry nodes pipeline with them so this is the main character Anar and you can see all the different curves, objects and there's the s there rather than curve which is the existing object so that's a distinction we're going to try to remove as the old curve object gets phased out and is replaced with curves because what is it the existing curve object can already fit multiple curves so that's the idea and then along with the geometry node support we needed a way to just interact with this new system directly because yes one place we could have started was let's add geometry nodes modifier that you just add to an object and it creates a hairstyle and it's automatic and it's all procedural and magic but that doesn't really work when you're in a production and you want to move this one hair out of the way you need a sculpt mode to interact with it directly so the new curves object support sculpt mode and then there's a bunch of new tools that we implemented and then we were working so at this time I had went to Amsterdam for the first time for a couple months and we worked really closely with Jacques and the Bunder studio and actually Andy who was sculpting character and Simon who was making these procedural tools with geometry nodes and when we made a sculpt tool and you would say well it's not quite strong enough or I think the smoothing should work this way and that's how we made something that I think is useful for what it does and you know it's finished the curve sculpt system is finished obviously this is where the sub-module comes in again and takes these features and you know rounds out the corners and makes it possible to do to sort of fulfill all these other ideas but at the time Jacques and I had been working on this for a while you know iterating on these sculpt brushes and it was good but we were missing something and that was sort of the idea of making tools to make tools so when we iterated on a sculpt brush we made the sculpt brush better but we didn't make like many new things possible and that's what happens when you add nodes and when you add an asset system to bring node systems to more people so we had a retrospective going back to this scrum agile methodology we were like okay what is actually what are we passionate about what do we want to do and we thought that maybe it's actually we want to focus again on nodes and so nodes should come to curves sculpt mode you should be able to build a sculpt brush with a node system we should be able to implement curves edit mode with nodes so that just takes us back to building tools to make tools and it makes us much more flexible in what we can implement and so to wrap up the curve system the hair project use geometry nodes we weren't building something entirely new the communication with the studio was essential to make something that's actually useful for real people and we can be happy and implementing stuff that people like but we can be even happier if we're expanding what Blender can do in a fundamental level so from here July we'll talk about what's next the final part of the presentation I just want to add something about the happy can be happier that's something I learned from Ed Katmow has a fantastic book called creative ink and he mentioned that during story story 1 everything was fine and a lot of the team decided to leave afterwards part of the production team I thought everyone was happy we were building something fantastic groundbreaking we can endure a lot of shitty conditions in the process of doing so so oh my God and this for him is one of his blind spots he didn't see that coming and for me the same I was super excited Hans came over for a few months to build the new hair system which is something which was a long long way coming and then suddenly I could see that I think it was particularly Jacques Jacques was more like less motivated I could see that let's get together, what is it how come you're not so excited and as it turned out he wouldn't complain he's still doing something fantastic and doing a lot of sub-automated working conditions but what if you can make the best of both worlds really really is good for the community and for the people working on it and what happens next how can we go from this it's a successful project in terms of adoption but it's kind of a bumpy road can we use these to other parts of Blender can we continue to innovate interesting enough one word I have here is the cross-pollination this I got from Bees but also from Spotify Spotify has a very famous video called the Spotify engineering culture it's a master class on scrum on how to actually work in a company at that size one of the key getaways from that lesson is about teams and how the teams get to interact with each other how each team has its own autonomy but they naturally cross-pollinate and adopt the good practices from the other teams so the moment we had to switch from a more scrum-like development to the module kind of development we say ok we need more well structured meetings how do we do that the animation module is already doing this for once or two years let's just copy that format there were also other projects which throughout those years were also trying to start working with a team and we know they were also then using a lot of the things we are promoting and trying ourselves the other thing is what I call steam rolling so I think it's a natural process we have a team working together people see how this is received and the colleagues start to I don't think they get jealous they also get contaminated it spreads out to the whole team like oh I want also to do something exciting I want to help building Blander as a whole but it's important to remember that we are not building one part of Blander in the end of the day our mission is to make Blander as a whole better so we are making Blander better and that is something that spreads to the rest of the team and then we managed to take the needs of drum-to-nose up to put some of those long standing projects back into the agenda who here was on the talk in the morning by Zugamaster on rounded caps a few people in the very end he was trying to find round caps and ways to do that nicely in Blander one of the solutions is with drum-to-nose but it still would be nice if he wouldn't have to append drum-to-nose every time he started the project so and it's something we have been promoting we want more people to use the asset system so they can reuse drum-to-nose it's made to be reusable to be very nicely encapsulated you know abstracted away functionality that you can use in multiple projects so you know what let's build on top of the existing asset browser and why not we have drum-to-nose in the add menu if they happen to be in your asset library so this for example is something that's happening now we have a patch it's going to be part of Blander 3.4 so any drum-to-nose system you have in one of your asset libraries it just seamlessly integrated with the rest of Blander similarly we also had other long-standing projects like the Blander project which is for allow for a something like Sprite Fright to have shared settings shared asset libraries that can be used for the whole production but we never got to prioritize this for Blander because I can't guess why but we never got to that but because we want them to use more drum-to-nose and we want to use drum-to-nose as assets that means we want them to use the asset library which means the asset library needs to be able to link assets and not just append and for that we need the Blander project just kind of this dependency chain that you know it helps to have a project that's just steam-rolling hey we need this let's try to gather resources and try to make everyone else also excited about this the other is the brush asset the old brush manager now we're calling it brush asset which is the idea of having you know brushes in Blander which are not in our Bland file but they are a spot of Blander and then if you want node-based brushes we need a better brush asset system so this is the latest greatest thing we have been doing at the Blander studio I'm due to write a blog post about this so more people are going to know about this soon but here's more to illustrate how one project can really trickle down into everything else and every one of those projects like the principles we follow are very simple and it's something that Blander itself always had but with mixed results but really try to be incremental try to make something that's always working we are working on master right on the third or fourth week of the project meaning that everything we did had to be finished in the sense of had to be documented, had to be working already the UI had to be with all its buttons working and this is the opposite of batch designing and batch building when you think okay those are the 50 most important nodes now let's build every one of them at the same time it can be efficient but in the end of the day might never get you to the point where you want to go, it can work sometimes not always the teams aspect I mentioned and again it's not about the amount of people but about the expertise we needed to make sure and that's very scrum-y we needed to make sure we have all the we had no short stoppers to do the work we needed to do at every sprint cycle of course we needed to check with the stakeholders of course we needed to validate the community, we needed to communicate but we knew that we didn't have to wait for someone external to the team to design as a logo to design as what's the user case we want to use here so the same way right in the beginning we could leverage the pre-drone to node later we could leverage the existing tools blender curves I think you are in a moment where you can leverage this success story to try to help other projects moving forward and again communication communication communication if before we had to talk to the stakeholders we still have if before we had to talk to the community which we still have now we are once again looking try to look at blender as a whole outside our bubble and say hey modules hey fellow developers it's one of the reasons we had this talk here developers or technical artists which are involved with the modules which are a few here so like how we can learn something together and one of the recent criticisms I've read about scrum and agile that sometimes it's too myoptic sometimes it's too focused on okay you gotta follow this methodology by the rule that means by the book, by the letter so it means you need to do everything only incrementally and that might go against big disruptive changes because if you have to really be disruptive that might not be competitive just the business as usual but I think the role of the disruption comes from the design and even though it's called blender development the blender developers you need people that know C++ but development is way more than writing software it's about designing, it's about having clear mental pictures mental models learning how to work together so I think the design is also a key part of what we do if you want to know more about the process we have been documenting a lot of these trials past two years there's a video about the read about process on the code blog we have even a blog post about the icon for geometry nodes which was something at some point we even used geometry nodes for some of the hair to icons in blender geometry nodes was used even for the conference forgot the name of the little plant and besides the content of this conference Zimon also has a training which is very nice in the blender studio website highly recommended and there are a lot of other nodes talks in this blender conference so there's a lot to be learned thank you so much everyone for being here Jack and Hans, please


They call me the queen. You know I'm the queen but I bow to you because I am really serious about service. Being the assistant manager I make sure everyone is happy and get what they need. So when they come in with a sad face and I have to give them a couple of jokes, I cheer them up and they go away happy. So here at Rebuilding Center our mission is all about building community resilience through repair and reuse. We teach repair skills in our education classes and then we also resell salvaged building materials to ensure that they are affordable and accessible to the people of greatest need for them. You have all those different departments lighting lumber yard cabinets I mean the list goes on duckwork I mean it goes on tar paper and the ceramic tile you can make backsplashes you can make bathroom floors. All of this stuff that is perfectly usable and perfectly wonderful and charming and would have ended up in a landfill. The Rebuilding Center has a great history and it started in 1997. We started as a little covered area in the parking lot and now we have the majority of this block tens of thousands of square feet of amazing materials about four to five classes a week in basic carpentry basic electrical plumbing home repair and creative reuse. We're really trying to make repair accessible to people who don't feel welcome and traditional repair and trade spaces. It's a really wonderful thing to see the kind of transformation that could happen after taking a class here. So in my role as a back office person I utilize technology all day every day I mean all of us do. I use technology for communicating with my colleagues for all the outreach I do to community organizations that I partner with. All of us use email and calendars and documents and spreadsheets. This is work we are solving community problems just like every for-profit just like public entities and just like all of them we need technology as a tool in order to do our work and that's where TechSoup comes in. Having that sort of partnership for education and learning for opportunities to take classes or have services that's really you know what allows us to do our work. Our area of expertise is salvage and education and repair and reuse not technology. I can't imagine being in the nonprofit sector and not being a member of TechSoup. It is essential if we want to remain on this planet in a sustainable way that we change our relationship with the materials around us and that is what we do at the rebuilding center. We're saving the earth it almost bring me to tears you know saving the earth you know that's like saving ourselves I mean to get teary out there. I'm 64 I don't look 64 so in about three or four years I'll probably retire but guess what I'll still work I'll go to part time and I'll go to heaven from here just put that


We continue today with Lesson 267. Now my mind is healed, and all I need to save the world is given me. Each heartbeat brings me peace. Each breath infuses me with strength. I am a messenger of God, directed by His voice, sustained by Him in love, and held forever quiet and at peace within His loving arms. Each heartbeat calls His name, and everyone is answered by His voice, assuring me I am home in Him. Let me attend your answer, not my own. Father, my heart is beating in the peace the heart of love created. It is there, and only there, that I can be at home. Amen.


Hey everyone, Drew with GeoAlarm and I am back and I am excited to talk to you about the GeoAlarm control panel, more specifically the GeoKit M or GeoKit Medium. This is our next step up from the GeoKit S which I've done another video on previously unboxing, but this one's just going to include a little bit more. So I'm going to go ahead and unbox this and I'll show you exactly what it comes with. It always is going to come in the GeoAlarm box with the sleeve here, so go ahead and slide that off. Then you have the actual box itself, I put the extra equipment on the side here, it's going to come with seven more door window contacts and two more motions for a total of ten door window contacts and three motions. As you can see once we get the box opened up it's going to have your personalized letter with your account number, your name, a brief introduction, some steps to get going as well as the QR codes for all of the installation and programming videos that you're going to need. I'm going to go ahead and move this over to the side. The next thing you'll see is the GeoAlarm sign. This is a very nice durable sign, it's made out of metal, so this thing will last and not fade. Go ahead and move this over to the side as well, the packaging. You can see our GeoAlarm control panel here, the CP, three wireless door window contacts and one motion which comes standard in every single kit that we sell. The additions are over here, as I said it's seven more door window contacts. So we have a total of ten now and then we have our additional motion detectors right over here. So now we have a total of three motions. This is the GeoKit medium. Here you will see the doorbell. If you did get the kit with the doorbell it will show up with the doorbell out like that and there will be something in the box, if you did not get the doorbell it will simply show up like this and the box will be empty. And then right here we're going to have the power adapter for the panel itself. We'll put that back in. Underneath the GeoAlarm control panel, as you can see it's packaged in some very durable foam material, okay, underneath it. You'll have all of your mounting materials for the GeoAlarm panel, the back plate to put it on the wall, desk mount, as well as the mounting material. Alright ladies and gentlemen, this is the GeoKit M, the medium kit for the GeoAlarm control panel. If you guys have any questions or any comments, leave them below. Other than that, take care and have a great day. Please like and subscribe to our page for helpful programming and installation videos, product reviews, monitoring, products, and more. Visit www.geoarm.com or call<PHONE_NUMBER>. That's www.geoarm.com or<PHONE_NUMBER>. GeoArm, the worldwide leader in DIY security.


Hey, good afternoon everybody Tom Stewart here with cleaning business today. I'm with my partner Liz Trotter. Hey, Liz Yes, you're at the right place at the right time Yeah, it's like groundhogs guy You know, we really tried to be here on time yesterday. We didn't try to be here on time today I won't give you the long story, but Tom didn't try to get here on time today But yesterday we really did and we were Still two minutes late. Well, this is this is the joke Liz and I were in another meeting and It was for something and we were looking at the clock and I made the point is like, hey You know, I've got another 30 minutes until it's five o'clock and we have our Facebook live and Liz goes I guess that means we have about another 45 minutes then What are we ever on time, right? Ah All right, I'm gonna try and pull this up so I can respond to people Tom Numbers you want to share I think yeah, the unemployment numbers came out again yesterday the weekly number of people who applied for it for unemployment and I was like another Total number of people that have applied for unemployment over the last forget if it's five or six weeks It's like like pushing up on 30 million It's just a crazy crazy number never been that high before and on a monthly basis usually on the first Friday of each month the Department of Labor announces, you know the unemployment rate, you know that percentage and You know other stats in terms of you know, how many people are on employment and replied and so on and so forth And it's the Department of Labor number they didn't even try to announce it today They kind of postponed it because you know it's the first of May I guess so they would have to kind of get their numbers together and it was more than they could count So it's like sorry, we don't have our members ready to share today We'll try to figure it out and give it to you when we get it. So, you know, I Don't know for whatever reason I watch it junk on a regular basis And I've never seen them not be able to come out with a number when they were supposed to so There you go. I'm precedented times. I'll just go ahead and get that out of the way I'm gonna do it now. Yeah, so did you see what Sarah said? Gusto came out with a really cool ppp forgiveness report yesterday That's how it's cool Yeah, who's talking about Matt Rick, it's just switched over to Gusto and he was Was telling me about that as well Yeah, well, what did he say about it? Is it gonna do the tracking for you really easily or It was kind of a mixed bag with Matt actually and I forget the details, but There were certain things about Gusto that he was expecting it would do that. Oh, I know what it was He was using like pay core I believe or paychecks and one of the things that some of the other payroll providers do is If you got some people that get paper checks, they'll actually cut those checks and distribute them and actually you'll get this Overnight letter in the mail with paper checks. You can give to people Gusto doesn't do that So he was complaining because he was trying to print checks in his office and he was by himself and Couldn't get the printer I think I did see him with like five checks. He's like, I only got five drags So why doesn't he want to do direct deposit Tom? I it's a good question, you know, I guess There are some employees that Want to have a paper check and on a very competitive job market and I'm just speculating here that you know, I mean we still in Charleston probably Print a couple of checks or at least we wasn't that long ago that we did anyway because we had people working with us for 20 years it was just they wanted to check and you know It just Before we continue talking about work.  I've told them before y'all those shirts don't match so That's funny Yeah Now I can get to work All right, so Sarah is saying that the report tells you where you stand and how many more employees you need or what employees Need to make more to stay on target. Oh, I like that. I do like that matt. Why didn't you share that? I need that Um, he's happy with gusto, but he has seven people that aren't on direct deposit. Okay, that's why I bet oh so with seven checks that you were talking about not five Yeah, I know some people don't have accounts seems so odd to me that people wouldn't have accounts, but I know I know that that's actually really a thing so I got my um, I got my announcement from my bank today that my ppp has been approved and so they're Um contacting me with I don't know. I have to sign something I guess Don't let them put you in a box tom put that shirt back You know and tie it Hey, thank you I gotta be me You're so nice Patricia uh anyway, so I don't know though the I am a little bit concerned. I got I got a message that said first That I had um a deposit that was going into my account. I was like, oh cool. This must be my ppp But it was 17 000 dollars. So I was like What what is this 17 000 dollars? Um, and then I'm like, I don't what is this money? and then at first I was like Is this some kind of an advance on the money or I don't understand how how it works and then um later I got the email from big america saying that I had a loan documents or something like that that I had to sign I can remember what it signed Didn't play the video hold on So now I'm like Did did we like apply for some funky amount? Why would they be sending me 17 000 dollars for anything? So kind of stressed me out. Nobody had any kind of experience like that So we're was it like a down payment? It's not in my account yet. It says it's going to be in there in two days. So Oh, why?  That makes Okay Yeah, that makes sense. All right, and trisha says uh, I'm gonna get out of here. Uh Yeah, well the neat kind of yay, right? But I don't know. What am I gonna do with 17 000 dollars? That that almost What kind of world are we in? The government's giving you 17 000 dollars. You're like No, I'm kind of irritated about it, right? It's not even that I'm like I'm kind of irritated because really what can I do with 17 000 dollars? That actually feels more Of a hindrance. It feels more of a challenge. It's kind of binding me. I don't I don't really know what I'm supposed to do with this Okay, Deborah Oh, but Yeah, but do you only have two employees? I mean if you have two employees, that would make sense But if if you don't then I think you had four or maybe even five. So that number seems funky Um, what what is can you lovingly force their hand to accept the payment card if your payroll processor offers such an option? Oh, yeah, that's that's easier matt if you can do that. That's a good idea Dan So definitely like those Better than than the paper checks I I do like the paper checks for that final check so I can get the people to come in and fill out their exit interview and And give me their uniforms, you know, so I I do like the final check But if you have seven checks, then that kind of puts you in a awkward spot Matt, you need to get more checks Yeah No, just a final check everybody could come get a check. It's fine So I make three Debbie says I make three. What does that mean? Debbie you make three So, oh, you have three right now probably make is probably just a type of Voice correct and trying to hire the fourth. Okay. Um, hi So I'm not gonna see my PPP yet. I placed in my bank post fargo. Oh, I've heard a lot of bad stuff about glow fargo They keep sending me the same email every day saying they will submit it to sba But they're not sure if it will be accepted. What should I do? Should I be worried that the fund will run out? Listen, tom looking good. I'm assuming you got your PPP I did not get my PPP. I got some random little funky amount tom did get PPP money So he's working in but for for others No, and we're really kind of running out of money in some areas It's really kind of need money. Yeah So we were talking about this yesterday winter some places to apply our PayPal Lendio isn't accepting anymore. Do you remember a facebook is still? Hey, Bridget Uh, do you remember the other one tom? I didn't write it down I think is taking them square Square yeah, so these are some places and you can apply multiple places went up just keep um applying Just don't don't accept two That's the only caveat there Okay, so ginger's loving your shirt tom. You know why though? I just want to be clear ginger You're loving it because you just got on you didn't see what he was pairing it with It was the pairing that was causing the problem Yeah My shirt my flannel shirt didn't match. This is one of my favorite shirts So this is this is trying to catch sunflower for you grateful dead folks out there It reminds me of anybody watch survivor It reminds me of Rupert I know some of you are gonna know. Oh, yeah cabbage cabbage cabbage was the other one And I heard really good things about cabbage after we got off this call I heard like three different people saying that they had good luck with cabbage processing really quickly So that that's the one I was trying to remember. I I would do that. I jump on that one too right away Um, oh Heather loves the shirt too. I really love the shirt. Actually, I do love that shirt I do just love the plaid Heather and I you know her Her husband's a big grateful dead fan has a cooler with a grateful dead sticker that he's had Since his youth There was a there was a An igloo cooler like the same style that uh had like the grateful dead bears on it that it's uh, they're selling them I noticed it last week and it's raising money for I guess COVID-19 relief and I sent her the link and she uh said she was going to buy one not to replay The cooler just kind of a spare Yes, supplement Got kids. Yeah, so what else is going on in your world? I I shared a um a graphic with tom yesterday, but we've just been so busy We neither one of us can even find where it was the graphic was Of all of the different states in the country and who was opening who was partially opening Who was and had dates connected? I was like, oh my gosh, this thing's awesome based on the most up-to-date information But if anybody's seen that let us know. I'd love to uh be able to find that Let's try to dig up Give us something to do one day Yeah credit unions, uh, I'm not sure. I uh how credit unions are working anybody have good luck with Uh a credit union. I have I have I bank at two different credit unions, but I didn't apply it either one of them Um, you know what I didn't do at multiple companies. I only applied for ppt funds for one I don't know why well now you know Cabbage it is i'm doing it Um, do you know ppt payroll is the pay period or when the check was written? Do you know Yeah it's For the the eight week period is like when the paychecks or are written so Like if you get your money On wednesday Then two days later. That's the first Pay period of your eight week period even though those people The work they did, you know the week prior you even knew you were getting the money. That's kind of what happened to us now There is an interesting thought. I've actually heard some people speculate that you can do this Um, I'm not sure what the ruling would be but once you get down to like the last week Take check that would be going out the following week and pull it forward and pay people Too tough for two weeks at the same time. I don't know if that would be acceptable I don't know what the bank would say. I don't know anything But it would just be another way of getting another week's worth of Hey, that's the way the irs works for for like tax purposes and I do know that You can Do some things at the end of the year to pay a bunch of bills in advance to get it in december Or if you want to kick, you know, if you want your numbers to look better Take a bunch of bills and wait and write the checks in january So you might be able to squeeze that last pay period in You know the lat you know put two pay periods together Maybe talk to your accountant, but uh And bottom line is worst-case scenario is it's just not forgiven. It's not that you're weren't going to pay it Anyway, so might as well try right? Nobody's going to point about getting paid early Yeah Ah gosh, I do have an employee that would complain about that. She really was this uh weekly pay She does not want weekly pay All right winter wants to know tom does workers compensation count as a payroll expense for the ppp Should I include workers compensation on the ppp loan application? we were looking at the rags earlier this week and They do not explicitly say yes to that they address health care and vacation They address a lot of different things they they they address local and state taxes They don't say anything literally about workers comp insurance. So We don't know It didn't that's what leslie's saying it doesn't it doesn't say it does so the presumption She didn't leslie said she didn't come right okay But but yeah, we read it over and we read it on the call on the facebook live and and we couldn't see anything so I do think though that it's not gonna we we also said that it's not going to affect any decisions you make over that Eight week period because you're going to hire people and you're going to work people and you're going to pay your workers Comp insurance somebody's going to pay it either you or it's going to come out of the grant So just go ahead and do it once you get to the end of it. There's going to be A stack of paperwork. You're going to be filling out to to to reconcile all of that. So Um, you know, you'll find you'll find out once you're you're having those discussions with your bank What about federal taxes? I guess that would be the employer portion Yep, we talked about that on tuesday, I think yeah Um Do you recall with the input to that was? I think it it was basically the same exact answer that we just gave around Let me see while we're talking. I'll see if I can actually find the uh, that that that reg okay So, uh, other than that for those of you that are Um that have your ppp money fill us in. What are you doing? What are your people doing?  What are you doing anybody? I know that uh, some examples of things I've heard people are putting their spouses their children On payroll. I know that not not little kids y'all right like like working age kids. Um, I have heard that about um Just having them do whatever kind of work that they can come up with training etc But giving them some type of a bonus Mainly they are busy doing discounted cleanings discounted cleanings is I think that's the most popular right now, right? um Are you doing discounted cleanings for everybody sarah or just for um frontline workers Tell us tell us a little bit more about That how do you get them off of a thousand dollars a week? um So we talked a little bit about this yesterday leslie And they have to come back to work And in most states not all we we don't know about some of these other states where this isn't true So of course, you're going to want to check in california, but in most states if you Have worked for them and you call them to work and they don't come in Then they are no longer are eligible for unemployment Uh, and because and did we decide after talking about this that they're also not Eligible for the federal portion we did right? So and that's in most states Not apparently not all I haven't seen any of the Actual regs for the states that that's not true in Um, if anybody has that I would love to to read that over. All right. Let's see what tom's got here Here it is again So Payroll costs You know this is this is copy and paste out of you know the the regs Which are defined as salaries wages commissions payments on cash tips payments on for vacation parental family medical or sick leave Severance payment for retirement benefits payment of group health care benefits Including insurance premiums and that's insurance health care Not other types of insurance like workers cop and payment of state and local taxes I do not see anything there about the employer Portion of like the social security and the federal Yeah, I would say not to federal because they specifically do call out state and local right, so if there was um If the federal tax was included i'm pretty sure it would have it would have been put here but It still gets down to you know You're not going to make different decisions in terms of who you're hiring and what jobs you're going to be doing And how many hours are people going to be working based on that so Just go ahead and try to make as much money as you can over that eight week period and once it's all said and done produce you know the documentation and I would ask the question again and and you just you know You never know the the rules aren't written clearly specifically entirely So a lot of stuff is still up for grabs All right, let's see Debra says she's working her people Um, they're not working 40 hours, but she's paying them 40 hours Sarah 50 off deep cleans and the first regular clean when they sign up for weekly or bi-weekly Okay, um, we just got her people working She had one paint part of her office have plans for calling clients. We don't have back yet She finally put her husband on the payroll. She hasn't done any discounted cleanings um about 20 gift cards to give to frontline workers Um, if received notice as they approve my ppp, but don't have it yet I'm thinking she needs I she received idol advance carol did Uh, can be rolled into the ppp if I use it I if I use the idol for payroll before receiving ppp. Will that be forgivable? Should I wait until I get ppp when eight weeks is to begin? Yeah, you gotta wait for the eight weeks Does using the idol began the eight weeks? No, it doesn't You know Here where this is this is relevant. She's said that she didn't see bonuses mentioned on our definition Doesn't literally say bonuses It's but it's a payroll cost He you know somewhere in this whole general thing of salaries wages and commissions. I You know, I don't know that might be one for your your your your cpa and and hope that they know Payments of cash tips at that work Like They send the tips to the office. I don't I don't know what How is that a lot of times people put the tip on the credit card and it goes through your You know you have to include it on Yeah on your report. Okay But it's almost like it's double dipping because the tip already came from The customer presumably Right So if they're reimbursing you for a tip that the customer already paid for that doesn't make any sense does it? I mean that's money in your pot We made money Yeah, that's not even our money. How are we getting reimbursed for something that we never got in the first place So, you know how you didn't get that 20 bucks. We're gonna give it to you anyway That's why I'm like, that's just not really making sense to me. Yeah, that's that's You know, but they slap this law together pretty fast and I mean this is the way global I don't know Winter wants to know if you're open tom you want to talk to her about what's going on branches and And we are opening um in georgia next monday and You know so far so far so good, you know most the customers are You know tired of not having their home cleaned. Uh, there's still a few that you know want to want to wait a little bit, but You know we're cautiously optimistic Yeah, I I think that most people are finding out that That a lot more people are ready and are cleaning done and they came up thought was going to be the case But I think people are just wanting If things to go as much back to normal as they can too. I mean It's just everything so fun I think a lot of you know that my mom's in the hospital right now. And so she's been in the hospital since Um a little over a week now And we haven't known what's been going on with her. Um, she had elevated heart rate and blah, blah, blah So normal normal stuff and elderly people right heart the the heart begins to fail Um, and so that's been going on but then she started having this other problem.   She needs fluid I don't know. She needs something. She's kind of I'm not right and the nurse said no, you know what this is one of the things that we're seeing right now The people are so Insular they don't see anyone my mom's been in there, you know a little over a week and No visitors no social contact at all just people coming in Take your take your stuff and go and they're going a little crazy. They're going a little stir crazy Who would have thought right how interesting is that so they're the hospital is actually trying to figure out a way To get people out of their rooms and like wheel them down halls and just have them see something else than this little room so I was thinking now Everybody is feeling that that's happening after just a week It makes sense why the people that are stuck in their homes. They've been there for a month I'm schooling their kids, you know not not being able to get out at all especially those extroverts. They're just like I need something So the whole thing I know this is a very long way of saying they get That a social problem that we're having just because of so much lockdown in so many different ways It's uh You know, I went into the office and I had to do a couple of things that we're wearing masks in the office now So I put the mask on and I don't have a lot of experience wearing the mask And you know me i'm like drinking coffee all day And having my mask on i'm making my coffee and i'm oblivious to the fact and i'm i'm on a On a zoom meeting, you know, and I see myself and I see myself going with my mask on it's like this isn't Yeah, that that's real similar to this right where are my freaking glasses Right they're real similar Uh, yeah, sorry you guys, um Bringing it down with my mom. She's gonna be fine. She's fine now. She's doing much much better So, uh, not to worry. She'll be going home real soon here A little bit good And yeah, thanks. Thanks for keeping her in your prayers. But if it she is doing fine now, uh, there was a question about Where is it so far? Oh, that's what it was sarah was saying that she's uh up to 70 75 percent of revenue I love that right and such great timing Um, whereas we've been been about 50 percent for the last month. We're still confirming it's helpful Oh, yeah, so that's another thing. I really wanted to talk about today.  You're open. So you're just assuming We're ready to go But a lot of people are finding out that you're getting all of those skips in the morning Skip skip skip skip And then they're that you know that big chaos of having all the skips in between people and right now It's even harder because your people are distancing so they're outside and uh, so get in touch with all of your people at least for like the next Two weeks. It's my recommendation But I'm seeing a lot of people But if you have your PPP money and you've got your people at the office and you've had some skips It's a wonderful time to do some training Yeah, wonderful time to do training Uh, let's see when does the clock start with the eight week PPP loan The minute it hits your bank when the monies hit your bank. That's when it starts Um, once received loan are approved. Nope. Once you get it get it get it get it So if you're working with the bank the bank has 10 days to disperse those funds when it's approved You know if you can get to your bank ahead of time and say listen, don't just slam those monies in my account I want to have a discussion with you and You I mean it depends on your situation But you want them to put that money in the bank that gives you the best opportunity to squeeze Eight big payrolls out of it where you're cleaning homes So if you're cleaning homes right now, that's not that big a deal But if you've been shut down or personally shut down You're probably better off taking as many of those 10 days as you can to give you a chance to get people lined up and customers God's booked Yeah, lord is better Uh, shannon, i'm sorry. You can't concentrate. You feel like you're losing it. So i'll tell you that for a lot of people Um, that that's how things have been But the good news is most of the people that are going into that down cycle also come back out of it without to Long of a wait one of the things that you might think about doing if you're not on some More of these zoom calls where you can actually see people and interact with them not like this one where You're just typing but you can get on some zoom calls with your family or your good friends or something like that Where you see their face see there see them moving You'll you'll find yourself beginning to feel a little bit better. Maybe give it a shot anyway I'm i love the need that you're doing the daily exercising classes with your mom I really wanted to do that too. I wanted to do something with her over facetime that she just could do it But now she's gonna be awesome Um, according to one of our banks locally the eight weeks starts when you sign and not receive That accurate that is not the information that we have gotten or that we have seen in writing and we've pulled up multiple times The information that we've gotten is when it hits your bank so Um, find out why they're saying that I I don't know why get get a little bit more information You're doing it differently. I mean it's all over the board. He's bank kind of has their own rules. So I mean Yeah, you want to have that discussion but just about Without an exception everybody else's bank and the understanding was it starts the day that the monies are physically in the bank Yeah, it's kind of makes sense because How can you be on the clock if it takes them they could take up to 10 days? to put it in there and how can you Bring people back to work when you don't even have the money yet Yeah, just trust them We see how well that's been working out. Oh shannon. Okay, so it's when you're wearing a mask Oh, I get that. Well, definitely get on some zooms without your mask Do something like that if that'll be helpful. Hey, you could also you do just like a quick Oh, sorry, my this is so awesome.  How kind is that right? Mother-in-laws, they're awesome. Anyway, you could do a little All right, gotta do something. You gotta make yourself feel better there shannon Uh for all clients that have skipped all of their cleanings We're charging a $40 upcharge is that we're also pushing initial cleanings for $150 over the cleaning fees Or a disinfecting Htp after the cleaning For 49, 39, 6, 9, 7, 9 fees for on top of their cleaning That's how in Utah Wow High-touch htp must be high touch It's something right Point I touch points. Okay Okay. Yeah, that's awesome. I mean if you can sell that and and you know explain to your clients that This is extra value that that we're creating and this isn't part of our normal cleaning protocol But in this COVID-19 world, you know, you're really this is how you get maximum value out of the service We're providing I love that I love that Another I have a question. So you say that you're charging $40 for the An upcharge for the people that have skipped all of their cleanings But then you're also pushing an initial cleaning for 150 over the cleaning fee. So Is that 150 plus the 40? Tell us a little bit more about how that works. Okay. This is this is good good stuff here you guys Hey, let's go. Yeah I'll show us something here. I think it's really kind of cool Um yesterday Vicki Coleman was asking about some of our training programs and wanted to know if we had Spanish versions and Sadly at this point in time. We don't I mean I took three years of Spanish in high school and found it A struggle and I don't think we don't we don't have that skill set in our toolbox at the moment but um Robin Murphy had one of her employees Oops, I didn't do this right when it had one of her employees shoot a video on how to Don and how about how to doff? loves actually And I put that up in youtube and I just want to show it because I think it's just really cool. It's on the modern cleaning YouTube channel It's over here and I took the english version and copied and pasted in google to give me the uh the the translation but You Isn't that awesome? Yes, I love that Tom. It doesn't sound so much better in Spanish. Yeah, it sounds prettier in Spanish She got those pretty nails too. I'm like, oh, it's nice So, you know, we we we need to and we aspire to be able to produce more, you know, bilingual Material we we we appreciate the need And loud and thank you for that. That was cool That's super nice. Um, also on here. I love this idea that um for for those of you guys that are looking at the comments Look at what linda did over here She sent an email out to all her people and she gave them an option a b or c a don't come back We're not ready b come back, but I can wait a week or two or c Oh no And she says 95 of the clients responded. I think that is really amazing. That is a That's an incredible You know, I can send an email out saying hey, you know, I'm giving away Free pies tomorrow. Just let me know you want one and I'm not going to get a 95 response rate It's like I'll bring it to you leave it at your house Yeah, it's crazy. Oh my gosh, you guys. I just notification right here That our stay-at-home order has been extended for a month Who's that people are gonna lose their minds this washington. That's the governor or this from you your Washington state stay in order extended through may 31st People are gonna lose their minds also. We're the capital so one of the things that we're dealing with is All of these protesters on the capital on the capital grounds every day without masks Oh, that's making people crazy. This is it's a crazy time here in olivia. It's crazy here All right. Oh, um, we saw I Heather did give us an answer here Oh wait before we get to that answer, let's hit bridge it So this is a question I haven't heard before tom So the ppp is going by payroll date or we we report payroll or the payroll check date Is deposited into the employee's account. So we know it's when they're actually paid but I guess it wouldn't have anything to do. I guess it would be when we wrote the checks It would be because not It would be the day what it would be the day that they are Formally paid whatever the date in your accounting system says that that Payment was dispersed Like people do direct deposit Technically in your quick books if you will it'll show that the payment was made on friday, but um Yeah, I don't know. I mean that's that I mean that is an interesting question how Maybe I guess it depends how you do your payroll. Maybe you can squeak it in Yeah, you might be able to get a little bit earlier I don't I don't really know. It's a good question. We haven't had that one yet uh, all right, and so Heather's answer to her question about um, if she charging 150 plus the 40 for 190 for an initial But she says she's pushing for the initial 150 If they give her a pushback and she's only going to charge them 40 I like that strategy, right people feel like they're getting a good deal And they feel like yay, and she's still got her 40 bucks out of them. She didn't go from 150 down to zero So yay, Heather. Good job Sarah did the same thing as linda. So that answers your question winter um That we have at least two people on here. Sarah and linda that sent out that email the abc email Try not to be Try not to be too nervous about your customers canceling your service forever Not very many people have seen that The the only not the only but the majority of the people that are canceling service As for two reasons that I've seen one is if your company was closed and there was another company that was easy to move to That was open. That's one And then the second reason is if they have an immune Immunocompromised person living in the home, then they're like, I I see cancel. I don't I don't even know If when this is ever going to clear up. So those are really the only two cases I've seen Of the customers just flat out canceling and I'm reaching out I'm recommending that everybody reach out as soon as your stay at home order is lifted may 31st for me Just found out Then I'm recommending that you contact every single one of those people that cancel service and bring them back Because they still value cleaning they value cleaning a month ago They value cleaning two months ago. They value cleaning again till now. So even though they cancel Maybe I'll talk into it. There's more Hey, hey, Liz That you know yours. Hey the home order is going to be lifted may 31st Oh, you really Until may 31st Yeah, yeah, I said at least Thank you Tom for giving me that little bit of optimism there It's an unprecedented event. So we just Oh All right, so winter you can scroll up to see Linda's email But you can also go down to and sarah just posted or just down one sarah posted that all she asked them is Are you ready or pause? And so she are you ready to come back in May and pause if you're not and then they're expecting to come back in June so She gave them two options And that that can work really really well If you give people two options in a situation like this They're going to have to figure out which one who I want. So give them options that you're okay with All right. Hey Tom you need to share about the training I had a few people email me overnight about the training This is for the Phc Training. Yeah Yes Phc training. So we have been working really hard on this. I have a question for you guys Uh, so this training, you know is going to be available as of noon on Wednesday Well, the first module will be available. There's seven modules but I Yeah, the first class. Sorry tom. Thank you. The first class will be available Wednesday at noon eastern time So nine o'clock our our time I guess y'all Uh, uh specific north westers less lee. That's that you may write um, so My my question is If you guys think it would be helpful To tom does not know I'm going to ask this and he does not love it when I do this but doing it anyway Do you guys think it would be helpful to have? Maybe a portion of the class live or Even one of the classes live Just to be able to see what's what's in it how they work, etc. What do you guys think? Uh, let me know in the comments And no, it's the hcp. No, it's not it's the phc Professional house cleaning It's phc professional house cleaning And I know the only reason I keep wanting to say ph is because ph highway anybody else having that So I know it starts with professional because that is the main thing that we're really pushing here is professionalism in the industry Uh, go go through the topics tom. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. It's gonna be helpful Yeah, there's gonna be one it's one program called the professional house cleaning program. There are seven classes uh You can see where they are basically it's the professional house cleaner which gets into I mean, this is what we were talking about earlier today, right les we are kind of The the finishing touches on this about you know, what professionalism is and it's really broader I mean we're looking at professionalism In a broader sense than just house cleaning because when we just narrow it to house cleaning It's almost like, you know, there's house cleaning and then there's all these other Real things that are professional and we don't want people to be thinking that way because if we choose to to to be professional and turn it to the word The information and adopt the behaviors that that we need to be professional and the skills that it takes to be professional Then we can make it up That's a big part of what the first first part of the program is and then we kind of get into You know a lot of the other major aspects that it would be important for every Professional house cleaner. No, we get into safety. We get into to help then, you know What hygienic cleaning is we get into the the the chemistry and the physics of cleaning in class four A lot of about being a professional is about understanding the why behind what it is at your doing um Liz you've got a great a great analogy with that you want to talk to us about handbots It's not the embots Ham the ham wins. Oh, yeah so a lot of you have probably heard the story about my mom moving up to washington from california and spending Christmas with us and we were Putting a ham into the oven and I went to cut the ends off the ham And my my mom was like why I cut the ends off the ham and I was like, what do you mean? You always cut the ends off the ham.  They probably taste bad They're probably tough. We see how they are on the ends. They're probably really tough. They're probably not good And so we ended up finally calling my grandma to find out grandma What what's up with the ends of the ham? Do you know why do we cut it off? Don't ask me why we didn't um ask google because that probably would have been smarter But i'm glad that we asked my grandma because my grandma said, what are you guys talking about? You mean because I had that little bitty pan So this is not a true story But that's the way I always tell the story Ends of the ham is go ahead tell them from there. No, it's it's the why I mean in order to be professional in order to Really embrace the idea of doing it with using the standard operating procedure in in in the appropriate way and Appreciating the value of a scope of work. You have to understand the why behind all of that a lot of times We miss that a lot of training programs miss that just gets into the what Follow the directions on the bottle You know remove the soil You know apply the disinfectant keep it moist for 10 minutes wipe it off Well, that's the why but a lot of times people don't do it that way But if they understand the why behind it if they understand the chemistry And what happens if you don't do it that way and all the good benefits if you do do it that way You're going to get you know a lot better outcomes So that's what we're talking about there on the science side We're going to talk about contents and surfaces and all the things you find in a home and the various ways you clean them In the various ways that you don't clean them in order to to protect them and and and preserve their value We're going to talk about procedures methods productivity. Uh, the last class is going to be tools and equipment. Um You know the whole duration all seven classes together We we believe we're going to be about seven hours can't tell you for sure We haven't pulled all seven classes together. We've been working on this for years by the way. It's just Yeah, I think I I've shared previously It's like one of those projects that we you know, I had it seven 70 percent done and just never finished it and the whole COVID Like, you know what the time is right and this is necessary and we're not cleaning anything anyway let's go ahead and finish this and and make it available and And and do what we can to promote professionalism within the entire industry. So that's kind of kind of the way that works and We're doing some we want to make this accessible Before you get into the pricing time if you don't mind Um, I I did want to say for those of you that see some of these topics and you're like, ah Procedures methods and productivity. What what if they don't do it my way? I don't want them teaching my people some funky way I know that um, sometimes you've seen training programs where they're teaching you how to do it the way they do it This program is not like that. This program is not prescriptive It is about professionalizing the industry and it talks more about How to provide professional service Versus providing, you know professional house cleaning. Uh, we're not saying you've got to clean with this type of vacuum this way that that's not what the conversation is about here Now we are talking about it. Go ahead Tom. Yeah. Yeah, you're you're right. That's a that's a a really important point You know, it doesn't matter if you do teams or solos. It doesn't matter if you use Upgrade vacuums canisters backpacks. This is You know transcends all that, you know, we talk about the different types of equipment and the pros and cons And why you might want to use one or the other But we don't prescribe and we certainly don't talk about you need this brand and this is good. This is bad Because let's get into the white right, okay, and we don't get into the white a lot It's a lot more about the why once you understand the why You can apply this everywhere. I use the analogy that This is like the driver's ed manual And the driver's ed manual is good Whether you're driving in the country whether you're driving in the city whether, you know, regardless of what maker model Vehicle you're driving the driver's ed manual applies to all of that So this is kind of like the driver's ed manual made for The the cleaning professionals who are out there cleaning the homes for you guys every day and There's more you would layer over this in terms of You know, this is how this particular manufacturer says that you want to use this particular product You guys are still going to have to do that because there's Hundreds of different products out there. So you can't get into all of that with type of program This is more laying the groundwork that everybody needs to know and then in your own company you fill in those finer points of the things that fit your specific Standard operating procedure That's great. Tom. Thanks. Um Ruth is saying her suggestion is a sample of the first module. Maybe five or ten minutes And maybe and i'm not sure which class would make sense to do the first five or ten minutes Maybe we'll think about that, especially she's saying To preview before purchasing in bulk would be helpful So and that makes sense to me if you have 50 employees You want to be able to get that great discount But you definitely would probably want to make sure that it's it's worth the the the money before then Yeah, good thinking So I guess Liz You volunteered at the pulling something together that we can share on monday, huh? That would be awesome We got a weekend. So this is our favorite time to work, right? That's right. We get a lot done this weekend. It's gonna have any other work to do I can take all Day tomorrow to do three hours worth of work Yeah Oh, I was thinking about that because we talked about it so much last week I was while it was the weekend last weekend. I'm like, why is it so much better?  Like just four hours That just doesn't happen Bone range somebody needs something you have to do this other thing. You got a webinar. You got a meeting, right? I never get four hours, but on the weekend. Ah, the list I get these large chunks of time that I can do what I feel like is is higher quality work When I can put more more of my brain to it. So I love the weekend. I'm looking forward to it I'm creating a power point for one of these this weekend. You also Be glad I'm going to get this chunk of time that can do a high quality product You don't have nearly as many people on the weekend looking to you for help with systems guidance You know being the league, you know Being the leader is a 24 seven job by A lot more Monday through Friday than it is Saturday and Sunday for for for business with ours Um We are doing some uh, some some promotional pricing uh for like the the presale events And there's two different ways that you can enroll If you want to take the class as an individual student You can go here and enroll right through the classroom itself and put in a credit card and It's seven ninety nine dollars, but you have a discount code here That says presale you enter that in if you're registering over here only it'll take 50 off. So it's actually forty Oh guys for the next Uh several days till Wednesday once we start once we launch the first class The the presale discount I guess by definition would have to go away because it's not a presale anymore, right? We're actually, you know Are doing the class Tuesday he's saying Wednesday, but I don't want to have the same problem that we had with the with the last course that we that we presented so Tuesday because the pacific northwest if you start your day at 10 o'clock on Wednesday Uh, which I know I'm looking here on the people that are here And I know at least one of you doesn't start your day until 10. That's too late You will have missed it. So Tuesday not wednesday All right, sorry time No, that's fine. And if you want to Sign up multiple people for the class you go over here And the 50 discount is already built in so you're basically buying it through Shopify so If you like have 10 people you can do that and you can update and I didn't show you but the Let me go over here um the bulk pricing is Part of the process you go down here 6 to 15 courses. It's 15 off The next bundle of 10 is 25 26 to 50 it's 35 off anything over 50 It's 50 off and whatever that price is you get 50 percent more off of that So You know if you're getting 51 courses you can get them for as little as $24 and change a little bit less than $25 a piece if you're a larger company and Like here's an example of what it would be if you're getting 10 courses normally be 990, but it's got a 569 discount And The actual price is 420 dollars in change Once the Uh, the the presale Promotion is over you'd be paying $840 for those 10 classes. So if you want to do this Yeah, uh, which we just went over the topic If you go to moderncleaning.com There you'll see two boxes on that main page It's the one on the right and i'm showing it again here And when you click on that it shows you the topics that are covered in the class um, and so I wanted you guys to know for those of you that have Spanish-speaking workforce the reason why I wanted to do at least a little something live on monday is because Uh, I want those of you that have that that workforce to be able to see what the program's going to be like And to be able to judge for yourself whether or not um, you want to buy 30 of these for people that you're not sure they're going to be able to understand it If it's not going to be clear enough. So That's why I really want to do a little something on monday so that you can see What what the program is like you can get a real clear understanding What I want to give everybody a chance to be able to buy in bulk if you have to wait until wednesday To to buy one so that you can watch that so that you can go through the program Then it's too late to get that bulk discount. So anyway, that's what I think in that How about how about if we Put a deck together that's just got some of the the bullet points some of the highlights out of several classes just kind of a mash up just uh kind of get a flavor for for for the tone and and level of content Yeah, that I would love that idea tom. Thank you. That that would be perfect Yeah, like all seven courses just like a slide from each or something like that Yeah Yeah, I'll try to be mindful not wear this shirt with Sure Yeah, I'll I'll wear something that's not too Out to that's really a frame though because these are my two favorite shirts. I just know you wear them together all the time Oh shannon, you just signed up for the new course. Yeah, you're gonna love it. This this course is Um, so I mean I guess I'm biased because I'm working on the course also Um, but I've worked on a lot of courses a lot of you have seen me do presentations throughout the years for the last At least 10 years I have been creating presentations creating education creating training. Um, the foundations course, etc This is the best training I've seen out there so far We can explain our team that's working on this People need to know that You know my wife janice. I don't know some of you might know or some of you don't we might even drag her in this On monday just so you guys can can get to know her a little bit. She's Really kind of the curator of all this information and this has been her project for years, but Liz is Liz is helping us pull this together. Um, you guys know matt ricketts. He's been A regular on on a number of these facebook lives matt is Really talented guy you guys know that and he's Helping us with with some of the material and he's going to be presenting some of the material as well And joe wash we haven't had joe on here in the last week or so halfway. He's been busy He just opened up. So yeah Yeah, but but You know and all honesty joe is one of the most uh talented Business owners. I know in any industry and uh, he's all in on this project So we've got some some some really good people that are are helping us pull this together and uh, You know, you'll get to know more over the next several weeks as we we go through this program Uh, so you have another person loving your outfit here She says like so rusa. She likes your outfit All right. Well, we are running 309 tom we try to get out of here by it's an hour and two minutes because we're always late, but I think we're doing okay. You guys don't have any more questions Okay, it's friday. We know what that means you're really trying to shut it down get some rest Um, it's a long long race. We're gonna be dealing with uh, you know, covet 19 for for for a long time This isn't going to weigh anytime soon, but that's okay Because we're doing the things that we need to do to make the smart business moves And this is uh, there's a lot of opportunity for us. So let's uh, Just keep doing the things that you're doing and and and we're gonna make it and you know Line up in a better place than I think a lot of us are gonna be able to turn this in an opportunity to Make our businesses much stronger and better than they were before, you know, the whole competitive You're gonna change Totally and try to get that four hours of work in tomorrow Ununder what? Love time blocking. We'll we'll see you monday five o'clock eastern. Uh, we'll have a mash-up I guess an abridged version of several of the classes just kind of give you an idea Of what it's about and I hope you guys can make it Now you all know what tom will be doing tomorrow in his four hour block Creating that thing that I just threw on him right now. So if it looks like uh, tom is like wow What are we gonna do? I want you to see how quickly he pivoted. He has no idea I was going to say that and now here we are. He's gonna put something together for us and we'll have it on monday Yay, thank you. Tom. All right. Thanks you guys We'll uh, see you monday. Take care. Bye. Bye