Thanks for coming, everybody. I've butted in a little bit to get to, I wouldn't say introduce, but intercede a little bit before our panel gets started on A Place in the Sun about the work of Charles Correa. I asked to jump in because I wanted to let you know how important I think the work is and this gathering and how related it can be to Roger Williams. Certainly Rahul and Nandita are known around the world for their work and for Nandita's father's work and legacy. But something I think is really important, and I try to say it whenever I can. Some of you may have heard me talk about Hassan a little bit and about the kind of opening of the world of architecture starting in the late 20th century, which I guess for you all seems like a time ago that you may not remember. But it's really important to know that this work and the kind of beginnings of the whole world being aware of it really was, in large part, championed by people like Hassan among a handful of people around the world in association with the Aga Khan. But Hassan wrote a book, or started a magazine, which I found interesting as I've shared with several people the other day in going to college in St. Louis in architecture. We learned that modern architecture was in Europe and a little bit in the US. We didn't hear much about American architecture. We certainly didn't hear about places where Nandita and Rahul are from. And like India or Asia, pretty much at all, Japan was making a bit of an inroads in a magazine called A-plus-U. And it just was not known. And not only buildings, but how people lived or what our shared or different aspirations were. And this interesting guy, Hassan a Din Khan and some others had this great opportunity and vision to literally start looking at architecture in Asia and Africa and share conversations about that around the world. And it seeped in through little periodicals in different architecture libraries around the world. And everybody started looking. And now I think the plurality of things that we have access to is certainly real and the kind of elegance and simplicity and sensitivity of somebody like Charles Correa. We may or may not know of, but I think we can. I hope we know of, but hopefully tonight will be a great reintroduction or introduction. But it kind of had its origins at a certain time and place and Hassan was part of that. And Charles Correa certainly was doing it among others. And so I just wanted to put that in there because I think sometimes we don't know how the world got to be that we're in. And we're not always around people who shape it as much as it's been shaped for the better. And we certainly are around those people today. So Hassan will kick us off with a panel with Nandita Correa, Morotra and then we'll have a lecture by Rahul a little bit later on. Thanks very much. Well, thanks for that introduction. Oh sure. Yeah. What I might do is we have two of the people here who know Charles very well, Nandita who is an architect, they're both architects. Both studied at some place in Cambridge. Just north of. Just north of us. Same place that Nate studied in. Isn't it? You're all at Harvard. And they're practicing architects and have worked, they live in the States. So they worked in the States, they worked in India a great deal. And we're lucky to have both of them here. We've been trying to get Rahul and Nita here for ages but I'd like to just say a few words about Charles on a very personal sort of note, if I may. And then you can talk about the real stuff, okay. I guess I met Charles in about 1978 in Iran of all places. And he's on a competition jury for Shastan Balvi. The library. The library, there. And I met him and I felt very ill. I was sick at that time. And Charles, and that I'm Renata Holland who I was traveling with, came by and sort of sat by my bed and talked. And this is the first time I've seen this architect. I knew, had known of him but I didn't know much about him. But I got to know him from that time onwards. And he didn't join the Akhan Award for Architecture. The Akhan was setting up an award which is one of the biggest architectural prizes. Both these people here have been involved with it. You're on the steering committee this year, right? The jury. The jury, sorry, you're on the jury. And Rahul's been on both. And on the technical review, so-called, which used to be called technical review. Which I did in the previous cycle. Which you did as well. So the people who've been involved with the Akhan and the Akhan Award as I have for a long time too. And they were really part of this new journey that we took. Which Steve talked about. And we took a lot of journeys. I got to know not only Charles, but Monica, Korea, his wife, who used to travel with him. So we would go to various conferences around the world. We went to not strange places. Yeah, we did. We went to China, we went to Zanzibar. We went all over Europe. We went through events, meetings, seminars. It was an amazingly enriching experience. And I got to know both of them to some extent. And Charles was always, besides being a very fine architect, had sort of, I would say, a wicked sense of humor. He would be, he could be not sarcastic, but he could certainly bring up his view of the world and had a very particular way of looking at both architecture and the world itself. And it's a lot of fun to be traveling with him because he's always interesting from that point of view. He was also very good, by the way, at getting people involved in things. When I was traveling with him, he certainly got me involved in a bunch of book projects which I wouldn't have done without him. He was one of the early supporters of MIMAR, the magazine that I ran for a number of years with a number of other people. So in a funny way, I realized much later when he was no longer with us that I actually had an amazing impact on me and what I did and what I do for that matter. So I'm always grateful to what he brought to the field of architecture and in that our parts of the world. So it's really a pleasure. I mean, I've known these two for a long time, too. Probably before you guys were married, for sure. No, definitely, yeah. Long time. She was a young girl. But I remember that red monograph that you did on Charles. That's true. I worked on that, yeah. Yeah, that's right, you did. I did do a book on Charles a long time ago and did a bunch of other, in fact, covered him in several books. And now, by the way, I cover his work in a course that I run here or nation architecture. And he's one of the people I talk about under a strange sort of title of sort of modern regionalism of some sort. The idea that he's a modernist, but he always said all great architecture is regional. And he said, there's no such architectures rooted in place, and that's when architecture really has something that's important to say. You can't just do architecture anywhere in the world, or you can, but it changes depending where you are. So I just want to thank, first of all, both of you and you for helping set up the exhibition. You know, made it possible. And I would also, Nate, by the way, who spent a great deal of effort in getting this exhibition going. And some students, and John, no, a bunch of people, but I think Nate said the designing part of it and you send stuff across and reviewed it. So I would encourage you all, by the way, to look at the exhibition if you haven't, because it's worth it. And we're going to, after the talks, take a walk around with you, if you may, and you could talk about Charles and his work and you could actually see the projects which are really varied in a great range of things and he had a great range of interests, which I think you're going to tell us a little bit about his approaches that he thought was important. So I'm just going to hand it to you at this moment, if I may. Okay. Thanks, also. And these are Korea. Okay. Well, thank you. And I just want to say, also, that I worked with Charles for many years, I think, but 25 years, perhaps I was counting, I just say, hadn't realized it was so long, but it was a long, long time. And so I know the work well, of course, but somehow it's difficult, I think, to synthesize the work while it's yet happening. You sort of need the perspective of time to begin to understand what his career is over, which was six decades long. He started his practice in 1958. So it was sort of 10 years after India got independence. It was a whole new country. It was, you know, and so I, you know, a lot of that shaped what he did, but it was, I mean, a touch also about the exhibition which we sort of sent across over here and, you know, as Hassan was saying, Nate did an amazing job of putting it together, but the words we used to sort of really to curate the exhibition were Charles' own essay that he wrote just a couple of years before he passed away. And so, again, using that perspective of time, he sort of, you know, wrote this essay, which I think you can get copies of, yeah, when you go to the gallery, call Snail Trail. And he describes the themes that sort of come back to him in his work, the ritualistic pathway, moving through the building, the empty center, which was either courtyard or somehow defining the spaces around, you know, the empty center. The non-building, which he felt was very much of Asia and of that kind of warm climate that you could easily move outside the building and then back in. And so the building didn't need to be a freestanding box. It could be much more amorphous than how you use it. So the essay talks about all that. And he said, you know, like the trail that a snail leaves in its wake as it inches forward, so over the years an architect leaves behind a body of work generated by the attitudes. He gradually accumulates towards the agenda he deals with, which is climate, building materials, structural systems, functional requirements, et cetera.  And but also his, you know, very large body of work, which as I said was six decades as his practice lasted. So about a year after he passed away, I curated for Charles's foundation, which I now run, it's in India, the foundation, and it looks after his archives and does a lot of other urban projects and stuff like that. I did an exhibition called Buildings as Ideas, which was really looking at his unbuilt work. And since it was the first exhibition after his death, I sort of put together a timeline of those six decades, placing the unbuilt work within the built work in chronological order, just to get us, understand what the ideas were, you know, sort of decade by decade. And it was amazing that the context in which you sort of then view the unbuilt work was became really important because you realize that they were, the sketches and the drawings and stuff became the way the ideas were held because those projects, because they weren't built, they were in a way, they were the pure idea that stayed in those drawings. And so that was a really important sort of exhibition I thought in understanding all this, but we also then began to synthesize what were these themes that went through the work? And so we found these kind of, I would say about six lineages, what I called, which was just these ideas, and in identifying them, which you can do, I think here in this exhibition as well, one major thing was form follows climate, which Charles would often write about it, how the form really was generated by climate. And it's an argument on what shapes architecture for Korea often believed that in form follows climate for him this was a way to make architecture more energy conscious. And this was starting in 1958, he was 28 years old, it was not the buzzword at that time by any means, but it was his preoccupation of starting with these ideas that shaped into very specific architectural approaches evident in the cross section, which often is different forms in different projects, but could be employed across a variety of housing projects irrespective of their size, social scale, and economics of the project. And that was important that very often the low income housing had the same ideas that were generating that as to a house for a very affluent client. And that was very much, Charles said it was like the ideas were so important that he just wanted to push those through the project. So the cross ventilation as well as shading devices and the actual form, and that you can see in the tube house that we have a very nice model and images of the project and a plan and section. To a lot of other projects, the Ram Krishna house, which is also there, some other housing projects like Cable Nagar, a house that he didn't build for himself but he sketched it and wanted to build it for Amdabad, which is a hot dry climate. For Previ, which was the project housing in Lima, which is also in the exhibition. And also in a number of like office buildings, in those days, office buildings weren't air conditioned, one cabin or something maybe air conditioned. So he did one for ECIL in Hyderabad, which had a large sort of pergola in the roof and he allowed for sort of two inches of water, standing water to be on the roof so that that would cool the concrete slab and actually sort of cool the building. At least that's what he sort of experimented with it. It worked for as long as they kept water on the roof, but I know for sure it doesn't. It's not that way anymore. Another thing was the double height verandas and developing this sort of urban typology. He explored the idea of the veranda, which wraps around the living spaces, protecting them from the strong weather conditions. Scaling the veranda to a double height produced an active public space within the stack of homes. And this device resulted in a play with the interlocking cross-section of the individual units. This you can see in several of the apartment buildings, but then in its most sort of magnificent form, I think, in the Kanchenjunga apartment building, which again we have in the exhibition as a wonderful little model of the whole building, but also a cross-section showing you how the interlock works, which is very nice. There's sky lobbies that worked around the basic skip-stop elevator to generate a typology in housing that was more humane and public. By doing the skip-stop, it was much cheaper way of putting in elevators in low-income housing because the elevator didn't stop at every floor. So it stops at every third floor. You either walk up a flight or walk down two flights. I think Sir did this in Peabody Terrison in the Harvard housing that he did for students. But Charles then used the floor that the elevator did stop at as a way to at times make for community space at that level. And that became another kind of development of a typology, which was very interesting. And there's quite a few housing projects with that. The ritualistic pathway, which he talks about in the essay as well, where the courtyards most identified with his over of architecture were indeed key in his thinking as most evident in a set of the projects, which are here, and you can see them where the courtyards are not just spaces between rooms, but are indeed spaces that generate the building because they're part of the program is in the courtyards. So rather than just being additions to the program rooms, the courtyards and terraces, and especially in that climate could be used. And so he used them with light and circulation around. And then there was of clustering, of clustering, not just in housing, which Rahul's gonna talk about, but in office buildings as well, that using a looser arrangement within spaces in the office building, how that could work for circulation of air, for spaces to step out into that were shaded, and that was something that happened in several of the office buildings, which I'll again describe to you in the exhibition. And the last thing was, I think, perhaps an important aspect of Charles's work was what I call buildings as essays. And the intellectual and political urgency within societies which raises debates, generate responses in many forms. And I think here the architect aware of his role as social and cultural practitioner also contributes, and in this case, and with built form ideas, where proposals for the buildings produce an argument of sorts, charting a response that wishes to tap on a creative strength of human society. And there are two projects, one was a kind of think tank for the prime minister of India, where you, the think tank was a courtyard, but you could only get to that courtyard if you went through one of the residential spaces. So you had to be living there for that week or whatever that the think tank was happening and you know, and go through that. So in a way by defining those thresholds, you came into a space that really the courtyard became that central point, but it was more the kind of the sort of argument for creating a space like that. And the same with a design for Ayodhya, which was a much contested and still is a space which both sort of the Hindus and the Muslims feel is part of their heritage. And so how to have a common ground between religions was really important. And Charles felt very importantly that the role and the responsibility of an architect was to use architecture as an agent of change. And that was something that I think perhaps was his legacy among the general public to understand his point of view in his position in society. But I'm gonna turn it to, I just wanna add a couple of things if I may and then pass it on to, two other things strike me about his work. One certainly is, he was a modernist and so he comes from that tradition. He was educated in the States, but went back and practiced in India. And he is, I think one thinks of him as a very much an Indian architect based in India, but he has a sensibility from all around the world. So his work, he experimented a great deal with it. And two things, one was that he used the Mandala in some of his buildings, which was a kind of, it wasn't a game exactly, but it was sort of for the part of that ritual pathway and how people would look at space and how you'd move between spaces. And as you know, the Mandala is a sort of cosmic diagram which has been used in India for centuries and used elsewhere for that matter in other societies. The other thing that I always struck me is that his use of color, and it's always interesting to me that for some reason people in hot climates use lots of color and people in cold climates don't. They always use white or black or gray. And you think they'd be the opposite. You think you'd want some color in cold climates, but it doesn't work. And I remember once we were wandering, we were in Mexico with Charles and with Legoreta, who is the well-known Mexican architect. And we were wandering around, and both he and Charles were having conversations about color, and they went on and they said, they felt really comfortable with each other, the ones from Mexico and the ones from the other, because they both used color and different, and bright colors, the oranges and the reds and the yellows. And they both were wandering around, sort of congratulating each other. And I said that we understand what this is about and what architecture really is. It's about this color, and it's about shadow and shade, as well as the sun. So sun's important, but not part of the world as you've named the exhibition. Really deals with shade as well. So I think this, when you could go on and talk about lots of different aspects of his work, but I think you've outlined some of his major concerns, if you like. But he's got a lot of other ones and experiments that he's done. I would urge you to look at his publications, and we've got a bunch of them here. Yeah, I just brought some, and they're gonna be in the library. Yeah, and his work. And as I mentioned, I think I deal with Charles and my work on the Asian architecture. So some of you have taken that course, and some maybe will do that next semester as well, because I will do that next. But it's that range of things, which is quite extraordinary. And I don't know if you're gonna talk about some of those kinds of things he was interested in. So I'll pass it on to Raul. So I might sort of add some things on having an urbanization because, but you know, I just wanna go back to your introduction, Stephen, and you made a very interesting slip. You said place in the sun instead of place in the shade. No, which is actually very interesting. It's interesting for two reasons. One is that his famous lecture at the Cupid Memorial Lecture before he got the RIVA gold medal was called Place in the Sun. And then he wrote an essay, and which is what this exhibition is based on, or his book, which was a compilation of his essays, which is Place in the Shade. And it's interesting that here, we really wanna make a place in the sun, and in India, we wanna make a place in the shade.  So that's when we did our... So no, it's interesting, both work, and it's also, in a way, related to your comment about colors, which is really important insight and sort of related to the shade and the sun. You know, I mean, and this is things people have discussed, but I thought it's a good forum to push this a little bit, which is that I think as architects and societies, we architecture historically responds to nature. And so that's where minimalism comes out of Finland, where they only see snow or they'd see no light for six months and the films of Bergman and the brooding skies and all of that. And it's no coincidence that in Malaysia, you don't mind wearing a shirt, which is boutique with flowers coming out of it, which you do very carefully. You might do it in Hawaii, but you'd be very careful doing it in Finland, for example. And so design generally, perhaps is at some deep level influenced by what the natural systems, it's situated in and Barragan and Lugretto, I mean, Barragan's colors come out of Bogenvilla because that's in profusion in Mexico. And so therefore it's these strong colors, which is what those Bogenvilla flowers are. And of course, he's written about it and things. So it's interesting that you made that observation and that Charles, I think, felt confident about using color both because of the sun and because of the tropical kind of climate of India. You both also said two things, which is what I'll pick up on. You, Nandita, ended with the idea of the architect as an agent of change. And Hassan, you sort of alluded to this idea of him being able to slip between the Western education that he sort of was, that he benefited from, in a sense, and the condition in India. And I think that's very important. Both those points are very important to frame his work. And so I think, as I've sort of, I wrote in his orbit that he had a very specific idea of India. And he had an imagination of India when he got back. It was an India of Nehru. It was an India of kind of reinventing the nation in a sense. And modernism as an aesthetic, as an attitude, was very critical in that imagination. But that imagination was constructed in a highly pluralistic way because I think the influences on his work, I mean, you know, Bakht Minister Fula was one of his teachers. He studied with Kepish, who had a particular way of looking at the world. He was influenced deeply by the films of Satyajit Ray, which began to identify without fetishizing, but identify in very deep ways a society that was struggling to become modern. And so I think, and there are many, many more such folks that he was deeply influenced by. And I think his education in the United States at MIT, in particular, equipped him really incredibly well to be able to understand this in an analytical way, which I think was very important, reflecting on his kind of contribution. So he had a very kind of insistive, very aware, very objective reading of the kind of context he was working in. And I think that comes from what you put your finger on, which is the ability to be able to connect with both these worlds and to be able to see what was happening in India from without, without being away from it, but also being immersed very deeply in it.  And I think that's what we can, I think, learn from a practice like Charles Correa's and his contributions, because I think, at least to me, what it really highlights deeply for us is a question that we should all be asking is, what is the agency of architecture and planning and design? We are all engaged with these practices, and I think we struggle with it. We're frustrated often with it because what is that agency? And I think his work really shows us, and of course, it was a particular moment which is different from today, but his work really demonstrates what the potential of that agency can be. And his sort of work, therefore, I think to support that idea was three-folds. One was, it was the production of architecture, which is, I think, what the exhibition shows beautifully, and Nandita touched upon the kinds of themes that existed that nourished the way he imagined the world and the built environment. The other was this ability to reflect, and that, I think, came from his education, and that came from very much an education that the United States provided him, which is to reflect objectively on it and write about it. And I think from that generation, really, he was the only one who produced a body of work, which I would say in some ways is theory, where he reflected upon what he was doing, whether it was a culture he was engaging with, whether at the time when people were talking about form follows function and stuff, he said form follows climate. That was radical for the time, and I think architectural review published that essay for the first time, and then Hassan, of course, picked up on it through Mimar and through other writings. But I mean, I think that was a radical moment where he said, look, it's really climate that form follows, which is a historic truth, actually. And so I think that was very interesting. So there were many writings like this, which are all captured in this book called A Place in the Shade, which Nandita, I think, just gave to your library for students to access. It's a brilliant document of 20 or 30 essays, which span a whole lot of issues, and very interesting, but they tell you how he was struggling with these issues and was writing about them in a way to actually reflect upon it for society, for the community of architects, and all of that. And the third aspect that I think is very important, really, to also contextualize many things that are in the exhibition, and of course the exhibition, you need five times the size to do all of this, but what was his contribution to urbanization? And I think that, again, is related to agency, because I think he deeply believed that the context that you produce the architecture is also something the architect can have influence on. It's not something that we take just for granted. Of course, we should understand it, but we can also change it, and that's why I think she used the word agent of change, and he sort of looked at the city in an important way, sometimes stumbling upon it accidentally. And so he really had great presence and a big influence on how the debate about cities evolved in India. He was not only invited by the Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to set the first commission on urbanization in 84 that wrote the first policy paper on urbanization in the country, which was a culmination of his many experiences. So his entry into questions of urbanization occurred in 1964, when he, with two of his other colleagues, all in their very early 30s, looked at the development plan of Mumbai, which was published for the first time as a development plan in our post-independence era. Until then, we had town planning schemes that were done incrementally, but in Mumbai, for the first time, Bombay, then the government published the development plan of 1964, and he and his colleagues looked at that and they said, you know, they're proposing Bombay grows in the Northern direction because the railway system was sort of the DNA that was propelling its growth, and they said this was completely incorrect that it should actually go across the bay to Navi, Mumbai, or New Bombay, which was the formulation at the time. And you know, this is also no coincidence because he was at MIT at the time when Siddharth, the Guana, when the Joint Center between MIT and Harvard was at its height. There was a lot of World Bank funding and agencies that were looking at Latin America. So the Chandigarh had happened. And so this optimism that architects could be part of the urban project, I think, gave these young people great confidence to actually make a proposal for a new city. And of course, this is a much more complicated story. It was a letter to the editor in the newspaper reacting to the development plan. The editor of a magazine looks at it and invites these three young architects to produce a whole volume, to elaborate what they were saying that volume has influence within the bureaucracy before you know it, an agency set up to design this new twin town, three million people. It was the largest project for a new town at the time. I mean, Milton Keynes and others were a fraction in terms of the ambition of the population that they were going to house in this sort of new city. And so that sort of led him on a whole parallel trajectory to think about urban issues which resulted in a wonderful manifesto he wrote, which, I mean, Hassan sort of was in some ways part of because Mimar republished the original version. It was called The New Landscape, where he talked about a new landscape that was emerging in terms of how we could understand urbanization and the place in the shade, the book that I was referring to also has an extract from that essay. It has a whole, carries the whole extract from it. And so this urban trajectory was very important in itself because of the influence it had and because suddenly it propelled a kind of new meaning and an edge to what was the agency of architecture and incredibly important. But it was also important for another reason and this sort of connects and falls back to the exhibition, which is that he began to think about housing in very substantial ways. And so in 1961 was the tube house which is in the exhibition, which is a very important project because it changed at least in the Indian context, the debate from what was otherwise government produced three, four storied buildings to a low-rise high-density paradigm. And it was Jane Drew who happened to be on the jury that actually recognized this as being special, that not only was it a wonderful sectional articulation, but getting the low-rise high-density community formation through clusters and all of that was a complete paradigm shift in the Indian context. And of course Chandigarh was happening and there were many such schemes in Chandigarh that obviously Charles Correa was aware of that he changed and that he drew on. And so in 64, a few years after this is when New Bombay happens because he understands you've also changed the context. And that's followed a few years later by the Previ competition, which he gets invited to represent India among a host of international architects, perhaps because of the tube house, because Jane Drew and others suddenly recognized there was talent here and someone thinking about housing. And so Navi Mumbai or New Bombay as an urban plan is sandwiched between these two projects. And I believe you have to look at them as a tripartite to understand how his ideas of urbanism, which was about how mobility can be used to indirectly cross-subsidize housing, how low income housing really needs to be incremental, how you provide the context for housing and let people build. It's not about delivery only. He began to actually populate the debate, which was a debate that was happening internationally. So I'm not arguing that these were all his original thoughts, but he was contextualizing it for India. I mean, John Turner, there was a whole shift in the way housing had to be looked at. It wasn't about delivering the end product, it was seen as a process. And he wrote a seminal essay at that time in the architectural review, which I remember as a student, I came across much later, which was called the self-help city, where he argued that the entire city, like you have self-help housing, you could imagine a city which was self-help. So if the government put in the DNA of infrastructure, housing, which is 90% of the fabric of any city, could be built by people themselves. And so there were again four themes that I think appear very consistently in all his housing work, and that's an interesting lens to look at the housing projects, which was incrementalism, which is that housing had to be incremental, which is life-grows housing. It is not a complete product, and that in economies that are developing, incrementalism is critical in ways investments come into the housing project, which means by nature it has to be moldable, it has to be soft-transformable in order for people to invest as their incomes grow. The theme of open-to-sky spaces, because he felt that in warm climates, a courtyard is as valuable as a covered room, and it comes at no cost except the cost of the land, which people can then build into later if they choose to. The third was the idea of community space, which is an interesting idea, because in housing how aggregation occurs is actually as important as the design of the unit. One finds that is something that's really ignored, because people design the unit and then repeat it relentlessly, thinking you've cracked the code by designing the unit, and architects often have that impulse, and so here he recognized very early that aggregation was as critical, so the effort he put into how community space was formed through the way cluster design occurred was also very important, and so aggregation I think in his projects become something that is worth looking at seriously, and the last was a recurring theme, which is climate, and how the house itself, how community spaces can be molded in a way to respond to climate, which could be hot and wet or hot and dry, they're dramatically different, and I think the projects that he did kind of span across all of this, and so I mean I think he did a book called Housing and Urbanization, recognizing that housing and urbanization can't be de-linked, that means your imagination as an architect about housing must necessarily come from your imagination of the city. You can't, these two, you can't detach, and this is a problem in the profession today because we often get pushed into a condition where we are given housing to design, and if you have no idea about the city, it's likely that it's not gonna be a very potent kind of solution, and so I think this connection he articulated quite beautifully in his writings and highlighted, and so it was really between 1964 when he started thinking about urbanization to 1984 when he finally wrote the commission on urbanization report for the government was the culmination and the development over these two, three decades of his thinking about urbanization, and in parallel he was producing a lot of housing, which was also propelling his imagination of what the city would be, and I believe the culmination of a lot of these ideas are in the Bailapur Housing Scheme, which is also prominent in the exhibition where Citco, that is the authority for New Bombay, finally invited him three decades later to design housing and he designed a project, it was really ironic because they'd had two projects. One was a project they did which was called Mass Housing. They called it Mass Housing and it was a cluster of five-story buildings and 20 blocks like that, and the site next to it they gave to Charles Correa where he developed incremental housing in a very kind of organic pattern learning from the intelligence of squatter settlements, how communities are organized, and they are a stark contrast when you look at them on a Google image. One looks like something that has evolved over centuries and the other is empty. It's this modernist project which is not even occupied to date and ironically Citco titled one Mass Housing and the other they called the Artist's Village because they felt that they won't be able to attract people to buy into that, so they gave quota, they gave special allocations to artists because they thought someone with a Bohemian lifestyle might enjoy that and actually it has been populated beautifully. I take my students back every year to study it and you have a beautiful representation of it in your exhibition and that's sort of worth looking at and that really for me is a culmination of in some ways all his ideas about housing and about urbanization and I just sort of to end I would just say that again I think to look at his work from the lens or from the question of what is the agency of design could teach us a lot. I think to understand the interrelationship between housing and urbanization I think is something that we can extract in deep ways I think from his practice and his propositions and I think it's really interesting to just bookend what Nandita said that here was an architect who quite consciously worked with a series of themes which he continuously reflected upon and those themes actually go across all the way from his urbanism and his imagination of the city to the smallest house he designs it's a consistent set of issues and it shows you how those themes you could translate them into the word values actually then become very important for us to remind ourselves about how as architects we are rooted in a place and how we might propel ourselves as agents of change in a society. Thank you. I think the time has come actually Rahul has also got a range of things that he deals with from cities to historic preservation to have some water here. No, no, no. Go ahead, to buildings themselves so I hope you're going to see some of that but I think your enthusiasm sort of reminds me of Charles as well by the way he has had the same kind of enthusiasm and the ways that he talked about things very different but it's interesting for me. I think we should actually now look at some architecture look at some projects and ideas and I'll ask Nate perhaps to hand this thing over to you and we'll go and join you and be able to look at the screen so thank you.


Hey, good afternoon Tom Stewart here. I'm with Liz Trotter and our guest today is Derek Christian smart business moves This is Wednesday December what 8th? 2021 it is Can you believe how many how many days till Christmas? Not enough. Yeah Two weeks in a couple days. So at 17 days. Yep That is not enough time. You're right. I'm gonna be out of town for one of those weeks So I'm just like feel a little stressy Somebody asked me a day. Has somebody asked me to have felt about Christmas and you know, I Know it's not cool to say well, you know, I don't like Christmas and it's not really I don't like Christmas It just gets in a way of things that are really more important that I should be doing and Because Christmas is like my thing Very into it Derek every time I buy one of those little Animals that move I think of you. I was just sharing with Laura that I have 42 boxes of Christmas decorations And you're not talking like little boxes Yeah, she informed me that I'm allowed to bring three so I better Oh Well, I have six and I thought that was a lot My family's got a long-running tradition that we got a Christmas decoration every year from our grandparents But it goes back multiple generations. So I've got my great-grandmother stuff I've got my grandmother stuff my dad stuff my stuff. So yeah And of course my mom moved into a tiny house a few years ago. So she gave me all her stuff and does any of this include the menagerie of like Stuff animals and other caricatures. Yeah, there's four boxes of stuffed animals. There's Yeah I don't know if you department 56 stuff, you know, they're like snow village stuff I think there's a hundred and twenty pieces of that. So yeah Wow, well, you could make some money selling some of that stuff. It's it's quite the setup. So yes Since you're only taking three boxes of money You know that you're gonna have to sneak it in in your suitcase little Yeah, I said I get to set up snow village in the basement. She's like, all right I just want to go to the basement for the month of December and there's plenty of room down there That would actually be awesome And you should take all those boxes of decorations and only decorate the basement I'll be crazy. Hey Denet All right, so Tom heads up next week.  I got all my stuff out. I'm ready to go for next week So I'm taking a bunch with me to Texas and I'll have my grandbaby wearing him too. We'll have everybody wearing that stuff Awesome, well guess what today is? Ah What's this called again? You always tell us it's the jolts report job openings and labor turnover report and this number Right here basically is the number of unfilled job openings in the u.s And this doesn't have the number of people looking for jobs But basically there are more job openings than there are people even looking for work And This number is almost the record the record was set in july and this goes back to like 2000 they started doing this over the last 20 years. This is the highest And I've been reading some numbers that suggest that this number the number of people coming back to the workforce Just uh, isn't isn't going to happen. Yeah Yeah, it makes sense. I know a lot of people that aren't going back to the workforce. They just don't See the need And there that's not the plan Yeah, there's a lot of demographic issues just in terms of you know, the the boomers are you know getting older and The reproduction rates aren't as high as they used to be and I mean, there's just a lot of factors at play that fewer people are are going to be in the workforce for the foreseeable future Well Tim has been crabby the last couple of days for anybody that knows tim knows He doesn't really get crabby. He gets crabby like twice a year normally But he's been ridiculously crabby the last two days three days and he went to Taco Bell as it was Taco Bell and They got his order all wrong. It was all jacked up And all he could say is I can't wait until they get those robots. Why can't they replace these people? It's got to happen faster. I was like Honey, please do not rant and rave about that anywhere except in our kitchen. Okay because that is not going to be a popular Thing to be ranting about. Yeah, they just actually sent out a big newsletter one of the Alumni of the high school. My daughter goes to just got seven million dollars from Kleiner Perkins because he's got a chef's robotics company To replace people in the kitchen Oh, okay. What's coming. Yep. It's gotta come no choice if people aren't coming back to work. What are you gonna do? All right, it's gotta happen and it makes sense they're gonna hit the those minimum wage jobs, so It's fun to that Yeah, I wouldn't I wouldn't not be surprised with that some doubt it Yeah, I wouldn't either. Yeah good call But that's all we're talking about with you today Derek. What are you on smart business moves? What are you gonna share? We're gonna talk a little bit about business planning and strategy for the next year coming ahead Everyone's wrapping up and kind of looking ahead a little bit That's a that's a great coincidence because budgeting and Planning is what we're doing this month on smart business moves. So really you plan your guests. No Good job Derek. Good job. I'm glad you're gonna talk about what we were talking about Well You guys know that our planning Um Leaves much to be desired We could do a much better job of planning We tend to go into the month with like half of our slots booked and then we're like Who would be good? Who do we like? Who makes a really good guest? So we just want to we want to be agile. We want to be able to like adapt when things happen and so But if you're getting an email at the last second You should take it as a compliment because what that means is we think you make a great guest And they don't need to prep and that we're good with whatever you bring Even if you don't have time to prep, we know it's going to be good So we're all you people that are getting that last minute email I was uh chatting with uh what I hope to be uh one of our guests on the On the 27th of december And the response was you guys are working over christmas and that's like christmas is saturday monday's a work day. Yeah And the wednesday evidently not for everybody though Well, we are doing and um So in the strategic success groups, we have this big thing that we do once a month. It's called forum And it's like a deep dive on on a company that usually lasts about two hours And we're doing one on somebody's company on the 23rd I thought oh wow that's getting close to christmas. I is everybody gonna be okay not one person That group I think has 18 people in it not one person said It doesn't work for me. Everybody was like, yeah, no problem. No problem. No problem. I'm working sure well I feel like that's kind of the way the people that are Are really working at Apparently not our guest though our potential guest Oh We're we're we're we're negotiating I'm holding out hope so Derek, uh, I know that Right amount of money Derek I mean I can talk on almost any topic if the pays high enough We're we're we're here at our we're we're here to get I'll be working that day. It's a matter for who That's kidding We're here to give back to the industry. There's no money changing hands here. Believe me But Derek if you want to give us some money, I will accept money That's fine if you're for bitcoin No, I don't want bitcoin Is it still declining it was diving most I saw I took a dump this weekend pretty hard and it's kind of been floundering around 50 I'm gonna be nice and see what happens with all that in the long run Yeah So Derek what are I mean? We've we've you know coached together over the years and I know that we've done presentations on budgeting and planning and all of that and You know, I know that you've probably spent the last couple of days pulling material together for this that you could could share with us I'm kind of anxious to see where you want to go with this I think well, yeah, we just want to talk a little bit about planning for the next year and Um, believe it or not my I I worked at park during gamble for a long time And my last job that I spent three years doing there was what was called market strategy and planning So my whole gig was to figure out what this big multi-billion dollar company was going to sell Um for next year where we were going to sell how much we were going to make and we were pretty good at it We could normally you know hit within a penny a share what we were going to make the next year And when I got involved in small businesses, it felt like everybody was guessing When you'd ask everybody what they're doing next year that I'll be like, I don't know I'm gonna make some money and hopefully get a little bit bigger, you know more than last year Hopefully, but nobody ever seemed to really have any solid plans or numbers So that's something that really kind of drove me. He's trying to figure out how to get a little bit of Disciplining to the small business world because uh, you know, I don't know about you guys But I have mortgages and schools to pay for and I'm a little uncomfortable with the idea that I'm guessing That how much money I'm going to make next year So I really wanted to try to get that down a little bit more to a science and spend a lot of time working on it And uh, it was kind of interesting because a lot, you know, a lot of times people are like, wow This is really amazing. Where did you come up with this? I'm like, honestly I just took the stuff they taught me a png and tweaked it to try to make it figure out how to work in the small business world So yeah Yeah, well, I mean that that to me makes it even more valuable. It's tried and true Stuff that's been proven And one of the things that I talk about a lot and is a pretty complicated subject and I teach in depth in some other classes Is just the idea that I always recommend that you kind of have two goals in mind that you're aiming for And uh at park during gamble, we always call them base goal and stretch goal And your base goal is the goal that you're like 95 confident. You're gonna hit Um, it could be the number you did last year what you are, you know If you keep the same growth rate as last year, but what are you really confident and feels Like you can hit and then stretch is what you want to actually aim for And what most people make a mistake on is they say, you know what next year I'm gonna try to grow by 200 000 and I'm gonna spend 10 on marketing So they spend like they've actually already generated that 1.2 million in revenue And if they only hit half their goal, but they spent like they're gonna have all that revenue They end up actually making less money this year than they did last year And so one of the things that I really talk about is you want to only budget towards your base goal And that's why it's called base because you base your budgets off of it Um, but then when it comes to your team, they don't know that budget exists You never talk about that with them. All you ever talk about is what your goals are what you're aiming for And that way as long as you land anywhere between base and stretch goal You do really well and honestly when it comes to a cleaning company And forecasting your growth, there's excel spreadsheets and that's a whole class And I'm not sure I can cover that in a time we've got today Although I'm sure tom would be happy to throw some excel spreadsheets up another time and go over it Um But the example that I always use because people tend to get it and it's got less variables Is I think all three of us at one point or another were involved in like putting on the arxie convention, right? Yeah Where we're doing that convention out in vegas and we always would have big goals our goal would always be You know, we're going to put 400 people in the show this year 600 people on the show this year But what we would all what I would always do though is our base budget our base goal would be to match last year So if we had 400 people last like, you know what I'm pretty confident that even if we completely drop the ball We can do 400 again because we did 400 last year So when we would make our budget for that event and figure out how much we could spend on food and marketing and speakers We were using the number of 400 Now we would be aiming to get 600 butts in the room 600 people there So all of our marketing all of our goals would be driven on that And it was always hysterical to us because we would miss our goals sometimes and hit 500 people But everyone in the trade association is like this is great. It was the most profitable event ever But the reason why is because we would spend and act like we were aiming for 400 When it came to our budget, but all of our business goals and everything were aimed on six and That sounds tricky, especially when it comes to marketing sometimes people will be like, well, how can you grow without spending? And honestly, it just forces focus I find a lot of times the businesses that do the worst are the ones with too much money We've all coached a fair amount of startups and startups with too much money tend to throw too much money at problems instead of actually Solving it and being a little bit short on capital sometimes actually forces you to focus a little bit better And you know, so I'm not saying, you know, not to invest I'm just saying to invest smart invest the money that you know for sure that you you're going to have Because everyone makes these budgets and like I said, we'll say I'm going to spend 10 percent of my 1.2 million dollar goal on marketing But 120,000 but you know, if you only were a million last year, then That's a big gap. That's a lot of risk. Yeah So that's basically the the concept that I want to talk about a little bit today Yeah, I I love that. Um, you know, dine wolf, she talks a lot about that concept too That people constantly just are if they have money, they throw it at the problem And they're like, oh good fix that but they're actually making it worse. They just can't see it takes longer for it to catch up Yep So it's the same thing that you're saying I'm like And the fun thing with it if you do it every year because sometimes people are like, well My people are gonna not be comfortable with that. I'm telling them to grow with last year's budget But if you do it every year No, because you know next year it's going to feel like a budget increase Because it's going to be up from the previous year. So they don't need to know that you're basing it off of last year's numbers Right to them is 10% more than the year before Yeah, and and also you're going to modify it So if you're six months into your goal and you're on track to hit that stretch goal There's no reason now you can invest the money.  Yeah So it's not it's not static right, it's But it's real easy in business where people will say, you know, I'm investing into growth Um, and I'm not making margin right now, but honestly you should be growing every year So if you're constantly investing into growth, you're not going to be uh, you're never going to make money So call me crazy, but I want to make sure I make a decent profit every year right it Just pinning where you are like, you know, if you're absolute startup and you left your corporate job And you're starting a main service. You're gonna burn cash for a little bit But don't you know make a habit of it if you're doing that year after year you're doing something wrong right And it seems like you're always investing one or the other you're either investing time or you're investing money Right. It's not like you're just Especially until your business is to a certain level. It's not like you're like, okay I'm not putting in any time and I'm not putting in any money and I'm expecting everything to grow Yeah, it's not really that realistic Well, and once you understand your numbers a lot of times that things that make the biggest difference in our business aren't expensive When you start talking about things like we're losing we're losing too many customers. Let's work on retention How expensive is that? That's just you understanding where your problem is and focusing on it Um, we're we're not closing a high enough percentage of our leads You know, we need to accept that our salesperson sucks and fire them and hire a new person Or train them or come up with a better process Um But the tendency sometimes is to accept that those numbers are given and I've got to spend more money on marketing I've got to get more leads. I've got a and a lot of times the answer is one of those other numbers that aren't that expensive Well, we actually were just working with somebody a couple months ago in one of the groups that kept saying they got to spend more they got to spend more they got to spend more and So we're like, so what's your return on your investment right now? And his answer was I don't know. I'm like, okay, so stop Before you spend any more money. You need to find out what that return is because if you've got a return of 12 12 percent Go spend more money. You're just losing money faster than you're just losing more money So it's not simple, but the data does matter So the data is what matters I like where you where you're going with this though because This is a time of year where we look at the next 12 months coming up, you know, January to december and What's our revenue going to be month to month?  And basically we come up with a budget for for the year Okay, well, that's good. But what do we do with that? Okay, when January comes around February March, do we take that budget and like put it on the shelf and Maybe dust it off next december to see how we did. No, that doesn't make any sense. So Derek speak a little bit What that budget means to us and how we use it as a tool Yeah, I mean we at least once a quarter Go back and look at our numbers of how we're doing versus our goal And we always identify what we call our gap. What were we aiming for? How short are we then we pull our team together and have a discussion about how do we close the gap? How do we get back on track? How do we make this up? Or vice versa if you're killing it and you're hitting the number now you can start saying well, I've got more money than I thought What's working? What can I reinvest in? What can I do?  So is that like a quarterly exercise? I I typically do it quarterly. Yes, some people do it a little more frequently But I like to do it about once a quarter because months can do this One of the things I'm sure some of you've noticed about our businesses They have more or less work days than previous years. So quarter kind of bounces some of that stuff out And depending upon the state of no the world and the economy and you know the business environment Sometimes you have to do it more frequently. I mean Like the unprecedented global pandemic You got to look at it more frequently then but yeah, absolutely I don't think anybody was looking at their numbers quarterly during you know when when the hard stuff of covid was happening I think people were forcing themselves not to just Look at every single thing every single day With panic in their eyes, right? But then yeah, you got to look at what your real numbers are coming in. What what do your revenue look like? What can you do with your overhead? What do you want to do with expenses? And you know, I think we all had an experience for a while there that our phone was running so much that We were able to basically cut our marketing for a while. Most of us do Yeah So you put your plan together based on the world as you know it at the time that you're doing it But when the world changes you need to change your plan Oh, yeah Yeah I forget the exact military quote saying but it's something like everyone has a plan until the first shots are fired. So, yeah There's another one Get punched in the face. Yeah, my Tyson's quote was yeah, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face But fortunately most of the time, I mean we just came off a pandemic year And so a lot of us probably feel like plans don't matter very much but honestly Probably 19 times out of 20. This business is pretty predictable We all just had something that was pretty crazy happened But even then it was a heck of a lot easier if you had a plan You knew what your conversion rates were you knew what your budgets were so you could go back and basically say, okay Here was plan a now. We're going to be on to plan b. Let's cut some of these things I think I got to about plan f before things stabilized Well, you know The world has was like prior to covet anyway Everything was fairly constant wages were growing at a low rate You could pretty much I mean hiring has never been easy But you could pretty much predict on being able to to to be able to get the workforce You needed to do the demand that that that you could generate You know g was inflation was like 6.2 percent in october I think uh november's numbers are coming out friday The thinking is you know, it's approaching seven Wages are going up really fast. I know a lot of companies are probably paying 50 percent more today than what they were pre pandemic For for for the same labor. So putting your plan together budgeting I think it's probably a harder now than what it used to be and be a heck of a lot more important, isn't it? Well, yeah, but you got to face those numbers as they are I mean our plan next year has price increases for our customers Much more than it used to we've got plans to increase our spending Our plans look very different next year than they would have three years ago But I think that's important because we're dealing with real facts versus saying gosh, I can't wait till things return to normal Because I'm not sure normals coming back for a while. I do think it will eventually come back But I think you go out of business before it happens So again, and what's normal? I mean gosh, I think that normal is Going to be very different. It's normal. Yeah, normal is not going to be normal compared to normal like 2019 normal The wages are not going to go back down No, they're not going to go back down. I didn't think it's rational stuff will calm down Um, you know, I'm a huge student of history and I feel like our country tends to do the swing of A pendulum and we're definitely swinging one direction right now after being a long time on the conservative late laissez-faire type stuff the reform was done by a democrat It's hard to believe that now but clinton's the one that got a bunch of people off the welfare role and that was accepted And now we're swinging much further to the left. I think that swing is going to happen for a while I don't think that's going to change anytime soon but I think it swings back the other way again again eventually too. It's just it seems like our country's kind of funny We always swing too far one direction or another and then kind of pull back to the center I think that's where your what-if spreadsheet comes in super super handy, too Is because you can sort of play out these different scenarios in your mind So if this happens then what might what might we be looking at? If this other thing happens, what if and and even without having any ideas of what might happen or what might not because for example Who could have ever in february of 2019? Did anybody have a clue that covid was going to You don't devastate the countries the way that it did. There's no way nobody could maybe in this maybe in february some people I think tom by then was yelling Nobody was listening you guys you guys blew me off It's only one time tom. We've only ever done that one time I could probably think it too But really you you don't have to know what's coming I think that's the thing that I really like about Planning and budgeting you don't have to know you just have to put something down and then check it and then You change adjust So I I feel like that just makes it so much easier the people that I know That didn't have any plan at all We're in a much worse Position at least psychologically than the people that had a plan Because the people with a plan even though they were like what the heck my plan is like out out of the water They knew how to work a plan and they knew how to like, okay So what's well? They also came more and back more You know, I was on a call today with somebody who was talking about how they dipped beneath a million dollars in 2020 And how depressing it was to them and this year they hit 1.7 because one thing stabilized It was and they had that plan they could dust off and go, okay. We're ready now Yeah And a lot of times we Think about our plans. We talk about our plans. We think about them in the context of what the revenue is um Moving forward more and more we have an opportunity to generate more profit with less revenue You know the whole idea of of limited, you know labor market and we're supply constrained and You know the whole econ 101 saying, you know when demand outstrips supply, you're not charging enough And I really think that that that's where it's going for a lot of businesses I think they're spending way too much time trying to hire that last Employee that last cleaning professional where they'd be better off Just raising their rates and they could be more profitable and clean fewer homes doing it You know who you should have as a guest and just beating that drum for longer and just about anyone I know as well g Oh my god, 10 years ago wells would be like you have wait list raise prices. Yes That one person if you have one person on a wait list you raise prices. Yeah. Yeah Why do you have wait list raise price? Yeah, he was always He I'm sure he is still doing that too. I haven't talked to him in a while. I need to reach out to him Yeah, I said he was probably one of the people I knew beating that hurt or anything and uh, I had kind of a Learning experience with that out of college. I had an interview with McKinsey And I was all excited being the big consulting firm and got the interview and they gave me this case study About a railroad whose revenue had declined. He wasn't making any money And they gave you the case study and then they want you to solve it into my interview I came up with this great plan on how we were going to sell more railroad and make more money and move more freight And when I was done, they basically said they weren't going to give me the job offer and I was and I thought I nailed this thing and I was like what? And they said do me a favor write the the profit equation on on the whiteboard, you know the profit equation, right? I'm like, well, yeah, you know profit is number of units sold times, you know Sales price minus cost and he's like, okay. Why did you spend all of your time talking about number of units? Why did you not talk about changing price decreasing costs decreasing overhead and I was like Oh Because this is easier And and he said and he said you just did what our clients do they get tunnel vision And try to solve the problem and they need to step back and look at the whole equation And fix all the pieces and and that's why you're not going to work for us because you just made the mistake that our clients do And they said the problem is you've got to take it to the most simple thing Which is how do I make money and look at all of the pieces? Not just get distracted by the one shiny object, which is always somewhere somewhere somewhere. Yeah Good, you know, that's kind of heard that story before that's good. Yeah, it kind of crushed me at the time So you're just sharing it now. You're just I've heard it. No, I've heard it. I've heard it before You just Liz you just weren't paying attention. She wasn't paying attention to me You know how I get you guys But that's why when I put my plan together every month, I tell my people there's three things I always aim for I always try to do one thing to increase sales One thing to make the process or culture better and one thing to decrease costs So every month I'm trying to do those three things and if I accomplish those three things every month Even if they're small tweaks by the end of the year you've come so far So I don't try to do everything every month. I try to do something You know For so many years success in this industry has been defined by how many homes you were cleaning What your revenue was And you know now, you know the whole unprecedented event, you know world pandemic and how that's Change the economy It's just isn't going to hunt the way that it used to It has to be about you know measuring, you know Your expenses managing your costs and and and being more profitable And it's kind of cool because you know, we've got tools in place to do it now and you know I'm not gonna go down the path of of all of that But we've got a lot more tools available to us now back in the day All you really knew was how many homes you were cleaning and how much money you were putting in the bank Well, and look at your lines of business, you know, I see people all the time chasing airbnb revenue Um, but then when I talk to him about profit, they don't make any profit Like I clean $600,000 a year of airbnb isn't I'm like, how much money do you make? I made $50,000 last year. I'm like, oh Oh, that's painful Yeah, and if you look At every customer that you service and kind of stack them up in terms Of the most profitable on one end and the least profitable on the other You'll have some that are negative profit when you throw in even a modest amount for overhead And for those you'd be more you'd have more money in the bank at the end of the month if you weren't even servicing them Mm-hmm Doesn't mean that you necessarily fire them but you need to raise the rate or change the scope of work do something I mean the name of the game now is getting a higher return off of human capital because that's a constraining factor and you're paying more and more for it and You know you need to generate more revenue with with with with less labor You know what that's actually one of the things that I Really have liked about the pandemic if like is the right way to say it But everybody in our industry not everybody but the vast majority of people in our industry Have now widened Their perspective they're now willing to look at things from Other other perspectives and to think bigger think in a different way. It used to be it It didn't really matter. There was like you said Tom There was one question that people asked one question that people answered and that was it And really the only goal out there was get to a million dollars You guys remember that that was the that was like the mean all and all that was success Yeah, nobody was nobody's even talking about profit. Nobody even How many of those companies you guys we know how many of those companies that we'd be sitting at a million dollars And they could be making more money if they were working for somebody else working just 40 hours a week making They had a job and not even a very good job A job with a boss that was really kind of hard on them Standing at the drive-through asking if they'd like to supersize that or throw in a hot apple pie Yeah Yeah, so I do you guys do have to admit that that is one good outcome I'll tell something good because it's got the customers. I'm a little more used to it too I mean I did a price increase this year that terrified me because it was so large And the general feedback from our customers was we getting you got to pay your people more as long as your people are getting paid more Um, and it was the strangest price increase letter I ever did because it basically said So our service has sucked for the last three months and we've had to skip you a lot I'm going to raise your price even though our service sucks because normally I would never want to raise your price unless I was sure we'd been doing a great job But I wrote a letter that basically said I'm acknowledging that our service hasn't been very good We've had to skip you a lot recently. We've had to skip you a lot because people I don't know but We've got a theme park in our city called kings island um, basically, you know like the local disneyland and they were paying $19 an hour starting wage to work in the food court um And and I mean my letter even referenced it I'm like kings island is paying $19 an hour to hang out at the theme park and sell food to get people to clean houses I have to pay them well above that right now. Therefore. I have to raise your rates. I'm sorry And I think I only lost like two customers. There was a 15 increase I mean in the past I'd be I'd do 3 increases and like please don't fire me over my 3 increase But this year we did a 15 increase and the overwhelming feedback was I completely understand your people that need to get paid more. You know, I hope so and so stays. We love her I really love that strategy of adding in the kings island piece You know, everybody knows I know about kings island over here on the west coast So people know about it. They hear that number. It's like wow Yeah, that's where high school kids go to work over the summer and they're making 29 They're making 19 dollars an hour. It's crazy. Yeah I think I made 275 when I worked in the summer And I know like You know one one of the other changes that you've you I've seen a lot and part of this was COVID and social distancing where more companies went to smaller teams and and In solos But when you're paying these higher and higher hourly wages, you really are getting More efficiency and and getting more revenue per clock hour By having somebody wake up in the morning pick up their phone Hop in their own car drive to their first house drive to their second house and then go home and I you know I'm doing solos I know a lot of other people are doing solos that used to have more of a capital intensive model With company cars and whatnot. It's kind of funny because I know like debbie sardones promoted, you know that model You know the solo model for for many many years and a number of us Derek, you and I had discussions about can you really Scale, you know a solo business model and I think that you can especially in in 2021 2022 but It wasn't just the pandemic either because the other thing is the willingness of people to accept it Used to be it was a lot more challenging to get people to drive their own cars But I find my number one competitor from my employees is door dash Yeah, they're like more money cleaning houses for you or delivering food both on my own car both with my own gas Yeah, good point. I I had forgotten that that happened at exactly the same time where people got Used to using their own car Right. They were doing task rabbit door dash. I mean all those services. There's there's a ton of them uber You know, they all are basically i'm going to drive around in fact, what'll be really interesting is When uber takes their self-driving car and rolls it out and how many people that's going to displace Yeah, that's All of these big changes like this mean I'll have lots of little ripple effects that you don't even notice until later you know this That actually right there is a perfect example of That's not something that we anticipated happening at all And you know the robotic taco maker where that hits the market. What's that going to do? Don't get tim started there tom. He's ready Hey guys, do you see over here on the comments rock sand ramsey says Something she says vlog fyi anybody idea what that is Yeah, hey linda Hey rocks and I have no idea what vog is the only vog i've ever heard of is weather related And I don't think that's what you were talking about. So maybe fill us in weather related Vogue volcanic fog Oh Okay. Yeah, that's that's the only thing I I know about you think Yeah Washington state say Is that a little volcanic? Yeah So I don't think that's what she was talking about. We were talking about when she popped that up I think we're talking about bitcoin. So not exactly sure What that is? Hey linda.  What are some of the areas that you want to plan around? I think that's another Important thing to talk about a lot of times people think that they're only planning like revenue Or they're only planning marketing.  How do you do that? Very? I mean, like I said, I I always try to look at a couple different things When it comes to the numbers, I look at office staff year round Because I've gotten a lot more involved in the window cleaning business recently So I've got to figure out how to staff up every spring and lay off every fall and my office staff that goes with it All the recruiting that goes with that But even in the home cleaning space, we've got a lot of surges that come With it where we got to have more people on the phone or less people on the phone You know, we we try to plan for our own personal development. What am I going to try to get accomplished? Um, we're what am I going to try to get better at as a leader? What work process am I going to try to fix? How am I going to make the culture stronger? So I said every month I try to do one thing either for the culture or Business process that could be tweaked something to save money and something to increase sales And I try to look at those three buckets just because it forces me to It forces me to go. It's not all about the sales dude. Let's think about some other stuff And honestly, sometimes it's small It can be as simple as going. Why are we still paying for adobe acrobat every month? You realize that's 30 bucks, but you're like, hey, that's $360 a year if I do that every month I've got five grand in my pocket And sometimes it's a much bigger savings like switching software platforms and trying to figure out how to reduce a role in my office And you know, I remember when you did that with Maria when she was before she was So Sharon now says Okay, Sharon and Roxanne, we have no idea what VOA maybe you guys do do you guys know what VOA is? No, you don't know what VOA is and we don't know what VOG is. I like the fyi But it's not fyi ing us So give us a little bit more info But I remember you did that with Maria Derek this was before she was going to sell her business And you sat down with her and you guys just went through her p&l And looked through looked at all her different percentages and you were like, nah your expenses are a little out of whack Let's just start looking at stuff and you just started eliminating little tiny things And I remember at the end of like three months. She was like, oh my gosh. I'm so much more profitable now And I don't really even miss any of the stuff that Derek got rid of so yeah, and I mean it's interesting because Once again, there's always somebody that'll sell you something and there's a lot of good services out there So I don't want to knock them all but there's getting to be this mindset A little bit in our industry where I'm seeing everyone want to outsource everything Um and god that gets expensive you know When you pay your payroll company when you pay your bookkeeping company when you pay your recruiting company when you pay, you know all all of a sudden There's not a lot that you that you're not paying a monthly fee for anymore Do you think it's just trying to some desire to outsource yourself out of a job Don't get me wrong. It can make sense in certain instances. Um, but I see people doing it too much in my opinion It's hard to run a business when all you're doing is managing vendors.  What are you doing? So I think a part of that too falls into that keeping up with the jones's mentality that goes on in our industry everybody talks to everybody about everything which is awesome But every time we hear an idea we're like, oh, that'd be a great idea for my business if they're doing it I should do that too You can't do everything that everybody else is doing you got to design your own For a lot of people it's the right thing if you're terrible at bookkeeping by all goodness go hire a bookkeeping service But i'm seeing people like I said and it's a lot of little things They'll subscribe to this $15 a month software and that $30 a month software in this recruiting platform and this recruiting software And they just have all these layers. I'm like, how are you making any money? You know, you've got to be careful with how that all adds up Especially those monthly fees because they convince themselves. Oh, it's only a hundred dollars a month. Oh, it's only 200 a month But man, does that stuff add up? Yeah And you know, there's some things that you have to do just because you have to do I guess you have to pay your taxes for instance, but Most of the expenses that we have in our business are certainly You know, we've got control over To the magnitude of what they would be and a lot of choices We just it's just like discretionary spending, you know, we could invest in this new shiny object or no The litmus test needs to be, you know, if I spend this money on this product service, whatever it is Am I going to have more money and into the bank? How is this going to right at the end of the month? Is it how's this going to make me more profitable? Yep And you do Just I got to clarify that a little bit though You might have to look at a time frame. So yeah, you might not have more money in the bank this month But sure, you know, are you going to have more money in the bank? In a reasonable amount of time not in five years, right? Don't invest in something today that you're going to have more money in five years Three months from now six months from an hour a year from If it's the thing that's giving you a real competitive advantage by all means spend on it, but I don't know. I'd have to think of examples. I do love that too. I do love that too Right. If this is the thing that's going to give you the leverage and really have you take off Um, but when I look at because I do look at a lot of people's P&L's I'm seeing they're paying for this chatbot software. They're paying for this software They're paying for that software like you said, it's almost like every time someone mentioned something they subscribe to it and I'm like guys, you know They're are you really using it? Are you really leveraging it? Are you getting what you need out of it? So Out of money out of it, right And what you're you're describing when it's like a real competitive advantage Sometimes you have to look at it from what's the counter argument if I stop doing it What happens to my business? Do I lose market share? Do I lose employees as my revenue drop? And you know, that's a valid reason for making the investment as well if it's just you know, keeping, you know, you where you are Yeah, I agree Yeah, you can't just cut out everything. You can't be like, okay, that's it. I'm not buying vacuum cleaners anymore I'm not buying, you know product And once again, I'm not pushing on everything but my big thing recently is I've been challenging people a lot of Do they really need to buy a microsoft license? They're like, oh, we use google drive. Well, I'm like, then why are you paying for microsoft? Why aren't you just using google's tools if everything's in google drive?  No, my word in excel and all that type of stuff. Oh, okay Honestly, we're almost 100 on google sheets and google docs now Yeah, it's a good point because we use google drive for everything. That's where all of our shared documents are kept That's where all our communication is done. So why are we paying for microsoft licenses? We don't need them So that's the stuff that like I said, if it's core, you know, if you're an online company You get lots of leads off of your chatbot. Great. If you have a chatbot on your website because it's pretty Um, and somebody else has it and how my question is how many leads are you actually getting from? Yeah, I I think that bottom line question of am I going to have more money in the bank with this Great, if I'm not Why do you have it? Well, a lot of the software companies are really good at nickel and diamond you where you're like Oh, and I paid for the forms upgrade and I paid for this upgrade and I paid for that upgrade And I've got advanced mapping and I'm like, do you use any of that? You know, because a lot of them don't use it Yeah And you know this kind of ties back to where we started the discussion with the whole annual planning process We you know, we talk about budgets and in planning But there's a planning part of that where it's you know identifying what objectives are and what your strategic goals are and Make sure that you're putting your time and treasure in the things that are in alignment with your strategic goals Rather than the things that just kind of pop up. It look cool That's one of the that's one of the risks of running your own business because there's no Oftentimes, there's no accountability. You're kind of Well, it also changes. I mean five or six years ago the chat bot on our website actually I mean the chat feature on our website drove a lot of business We used to do a lot of business on chat It's almost irrelevant now almost no one uses it. I think consumers have really burned out on I think it's because of all Those stupid chat bots where people caught on they weren't talking to any humans that people don't want to use the chat feature anymore But there was a time I guess around five years ago when I was working with blue skies I'd have three and four chats going with customers all over the country bidding for jobs Now I'm lucky if I do two or three chats a month I remember there are articles written that you know email was was was dying and You know all all you know transactions were going to be happening through chat bots That never really happened did it Now I think the chat bot killed chat like I said it used to be great on my website But I wonder you guys I wonder if there's going to be some tweak to it That's going to bring it back just like with the qr code The reticence of the chat bot Yep You know, yeah, you know, we all thought qr codes were dead. That's true. That was a joke for a long time instead Yeah, that there was no way they were ever coming back So and usually they come back with a twist In some new way that makes them like oh, that's all that was needed there and the chat bots are flawed But I feel like they could potentially There's something there because people you don't want that speed that you can get from no I mean, that's why chat used to be a big deal to us people be at work And they wouldn't have to be on their cell phone being heard You know talking to a cleaning company to look like where they were working when all they were doing was booking a cleaning Yeah, yeah But they got frustrated when things when when they stopped behaving like humans and stopped using it I see tom pulling some stuff up in the background you guys You know, what what you're describing is is been well documented this whole adoption curve where Some new technology comes out and there's a ton of excitement and you know, but then it just You know the technology is there, but we don't know how to deploy it We don't really don't know what to do with it And then it kind of drops and then people kind of figure out how to put it to work and I kind of laugh because we did Disruptive innovation summit at a convention an ARC as I convention or Orlando Was that 2015 maybe Does that sound right? Is that all I'm thinking more like 13 or 14, but maybe that's right Yeah, and it was like a one-day event and you know, we were talking about home joy and kind of did a You know breakdown of of their strategy and handy and we thought the virtual maid service was going to drastically change, you know, how we do business and You know home joy, you know, they went out of business and handy's around I guess, but they're really more about you know Being part of Angie's and that whole thing now We're still standing but a lot of the technology is that we talked about in terms of like the online booking and you know the automation tools and You know all the tools that were enabling this set the high expectation We're starting to see those becoming more and more relevant And in in the workplace inside of our businesses So I think we were right back then we were just here on the curve and not starting to happen It's same with qr codes and maybe Chat on the website is down here somewhere, but I agree with you. Liz. I don't think that we've seen the last of it No, I don't think so. I'm just saying you got to be careful because We're five years ago that buying the super high-end chat cycle might have made sense. It doesn't pay off right now So that's your point though your point is that you've got to keep evaluating it Go in check it out. That's the whole point of annual planning is check all of that stuff What do you need to change what needs to what can you get rid of what what can you add what? We were talking about when your plans, but I do think it's important to kind of keep an eye on what's coming longer term um, and you know dating myself again, but I lived in california 1996 through 1999 the first dot combo And I remember when the bubble happened and everyone's like see that whole internet thing was over hyped and retail's not going away. Yeah Same thing Yeah We said it was coming too quickly, but it still came It just took about 10 more years than the 20 year olds that thought it was going to be back in 96 Yeah, yeah, and we have the same thing coming with independent contractors No, they're like we we've got the same thing that's going to happen there that laws are going to have to change things are going to happen, but I personally think there's going to be a swing against independent contractors pretty soon I think that there's been a long swing against it for a long time And then because it's been so hard to do it, but I think that we're going to get a harder push for I don't know. I think we'll see I I have a feeling that there's a strong push to the left coming Right now, and I think the whole independent contractor model is going to be under a lot of pressure in that world Or maybe something version of it's going to pop out Because it's always a new version right because people like the freedom and stuff of it But it's not going to be what it used to be people are going to want their insurance are going to want their days off their benefits agreed agreed so I think this whole let's have independent contractors so we don't need to pay them anything has gone away Yeah, I agree with you. I don't think that's coming back. No I think if nothing else there were a lot of unemployment claims a lot of a lot of unemployment money was going out to I see is that Employers never contributed to I don't think they're going to let that happen again I think that there was a lot of There was a lot of light Shined on the independent contractors During co-ed people were looking at it completely different You know people that were expecting to get their ppp money and there was just a lot of stuff happening around that Let's see. What's robin saying here? He wants to know if we factor employee retention in our revenue estimates I mean I build employee retention in my annual plan because that's important for me as far as knowing my staffing planning How much I'm going to spend on bud on sales and training and everything that goes with it Employee retention matters As far as sales, but I don't think it's the number one driver I if your training's good the employees aren't I wouldn't say interchangeable But that whole idea that there's only one person they let in their house should be going away Yeah But employee retention makes it so you have predictable labor forces Don't have to skip customers have short term availability So staffing is definitely part of my plan and retention is part of my staffing plan if that makes sense Yeah, absolutely higher turnover means I've got to train more. I've got to recruit more. I've got to Have more people in the pipeline. I've got to see more More more everything goes out And you see that in your budget and your actual p&l it drives your cost up I mean it brings your revenue down. I mean it it has a negative impact in many ways And then you and then I mean this is an example We're sometimes spending more money at least more money per person per Trainee can actually save you money So, I mean, that's kind of the tricky part about this. You don't want to spend money That's not going to get you a return on investment. But sometimes The idea of I'm going to do the lowest cost whenever I can A lot of times that drives you to a position where you're you're not being profitable either You got to spend more you got it, you know, sometimes I think we've seen this you spend more on training you actually reduce your aggregate training cost Yeah, absolutely So it's not always the case that you got to spend money to make money but many times there is an investment to to making Don't get me wrong. I I'm famously cheap and I'm always looking at what what I can cut But you never want to cut the important stuff You just know I always want to have a critical eye towards it and ask the question of is this paying for itself Yeah, absolutely at least at least paying for itself And if you're getting a handsome return on investment, it's like can I buy more of it? You know, if you got an advertising channel, that's that's killing it It's like, well, gee if I increase my spend could I just get that much more benefit and sometimes that makes sense And I know a lot of people really hesitant to spend on recruiting when they should have and probably should have cut their marketing budgets and move some money around and Which is kind of the rates and not recruit as much. I mean, there's a lot of ways you can attack it But it's why you need to be looking at it on a regular basis. That's why you need to have the numbers. Absolutely We are like Right at the top of the hour Derek I have an appointment at 3 15. So I got a check exactly at 3 y'all So what what do you have going on in your world, Derek? Is there anything going on out there that you'd like to share with uh with our audience? Um, well, I am actually doing something which is completely not related to the topic. We're talking today But next Thursday, I'm doing a two-hour class on google three pack And uh, how to how to rank on that google three pack listing And I'll shoot over to you tom because I can't put it into the comments That could be part of your marketing plan and marketing plan would have to be budgeted So well, there's research now that says up to 70 percent of your website traffic comes through that google three pack But people spend on search engine optimization They spend on paper click But they don't understand how that three pack works and there's some real interesting tricks and things that Have come out the last couple of years. I think Some of it's come from some certain some uh, seo companies. We've worked with some's come with some questions So i'm looking forward to uh teaching it should be fun Come dropping the link in the chat. This is the site. So if you want more information I want to sign up. I guess just go to uh this particular URL here Yep, and we're teaching it next thursday. It's uh, I believe it's $39 last I saw we do coupon codes from time to time But it's just next week and it should be a fun quick little class And honestly for 39 bucks. It doesn't take very much one customer more than base for itself If you pick up one little trick on there one thing you didn't know about and uh, and what an impact Right and it there's all sorts of things people don't know. Um, they were going to be getting into And as we discussed earlier having you know part of your plan for the year It used to be how are you going to invest in yourself and you know, you've got to You know and keep improving yourself as the CEO and leader of your business And this seems like a really good opportunity at uh at a bargain price point Yeah, you can't beat that price if you're going to be spending money. Here's a good place to spend it All right Derek, thanks so much I will see you guys later Derek. Yep. Awesome. Thanks so much for your help. We'll uh We'll be back monday five o'clock eastern. Take care. Bye. Bye