All right, hello, everyone. I'm Katie Wolfson with the UCAR Center for Science Education, and I'm so excited to welcome all of you to a new school year, a new season of Meet the Experts, where we get to connect students and people like you all over the world with experts here at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Now, where is the National Center for Atmospheric Research, you might ask? Well, we are here in the United States in Boulder, Colorado, nestled up against the foothills of the Rocky Mountains at the NCAR Mesa Laboratory. All right, NCAR Mesa Laboratory. And here at the NCAR Mesa Laboratory, we have all sorts of different experts who are working on earth science and atmospheric science to learn more about our world and help our society in our world. And one of my favorite things about working here is that we have so many different types of experts. So we have folks who are scientists and researchers, we have engineers, we have aircraft pilots and mechanics, we have artists, we have chefs, we have educators like myself, and I love getting the chance to introduce you to all sorts of different experts. So we have a lot of different experts that are gonna be over course of this school year and we are kicking it off with an amazing person today. We have with us a climate modeler, we have Cecilia Ney, who is with the NCAR Climate and Global Dynamics Lab. And she is gonna tell you a bit about her job and how she got her job and what she is excited about today during our Meet the Experts. Now during this program, I want all of you to feel free to ask questions in the chat at any time. We will have time for Q&A at the end too and our classroom on camera, I might come to you to see if you wanna unmute and ask your questions live. And if any other classrooms are joining us too that wanna do that, you can type to me in the chat. So without further ado, I'm gonna hand it over to Cecilia and we are gonna learn a bit more about your job as a climate modeler. Okay, thank you so much, Katie. And yes, Katie say I'm a climate modeler at the National Center of Atmospheric Research. You see there, she's going to give you another view from the center. And when I say I'm a climate modeler, people ask me, what's the difference between climate and weather? And then to illustrate the difference between climate and weather, I'm going to ask a very simple question. What's the temperature in Boulder today? And I would like to start a poll about this. Right everyone, we have a poll for you. We wanna hear from you early on in the program and we want to know how do you think Cecilia knows the temperature in Boulder, Colorado today? I am going to launch a poll that you can answer to in my classroom that I have. Teacher, if you wanna pull your students and then type in the leading answer, but we are gonna launch a Zoom poll now asking, how does Cecilia know the temperature in Boulder today? Does she wake up extra early and run her climate model? Does she Google what is the temperature in Boulder? Or does she check with the groundhog living in her backyard? So let's go ahead and see what our students think.  Does she Google it? Does she check with that groundhog living in her backyard? We're gonna give it about five more seconds to get those answers in. Get those final answers in. All right, we're gonna close the poll now. And it looks like 80% said run your climate model, 20% say you Google it. Nobody thinks you have a groundhog in the backyard. Yeah, no, I don't. I do have a cat, but she's not really helpful to tell me what's the temperature in Boulder. But indeed the right answer, I don't run my climate model to know the temperature in Boulder but today I Google it and then it's how I know how to dress. Basically, I'm going to type temperature in Boulder and it's going to show something like this. This is the temperature of yesterday because I needed to prepare the slide yesterday, but it will appear like this in red. You have the maximum temperature. Yesterday it was 67, the minimum temperature in blue, the minimum temperature. And we can wonder, is it always now the same temperature? This was the temperature on October 4th, 2022. Is it always the same temperature on October 4th? And I'm going to ask you what you think about this. Let's have a type in the chat. Do you think the temperature is always the same on October 4th every year? And I'm pretty sure no. I got a big no. And this is correct. Probably all of you know this. If you can go to the next picture, then it showed the temperature in Boulder for the last 20 years. Then yesterday, as I say earlier, it was about 67, maximum 45. But if you look at last year, it was much warmer. It was 82 Fahrenheit and a minimum of 47. But we can find here, for example, in 2013, it was only 56 maximum and 32 minimum. It was freezing at night. Then this is the weather. Then the temperature will vary really from one year to the next. And then if you do the average of all this temperature, it's what we call the climate. The climate on October 4th, the mean, it's maximum of 69 and a minimum of 32. And the way you can think about it, the climate, it's what you expect. And the weather, it's what you get. And I can do here a little comparison if you go to the next picture, about this is a group of Boy Scouts. It was fifth grader and I animate this group of Boy Scouts for several years.  But you can see that they are all different size. And if I ask you what's the size of a fifth grader, you see that some are quite tall, the yellow guy here, but then some are shorter, like the little guy with stripes just above my head. And this is the weather. They are all different size. And the climate of the size of fifth grader would be about five feet, nine inches. Then this is basically the difference between climate and weather. Then now I'm going to explain, we know what's climate and I'm going to now talk about climate model.  The virtual world, it's a computer simulation representation of a world. And I'm sure that many of you are already familiar with virtual world. Another example of a virtual world, it's Minecraft. Then if you play Minecraft, you can type in the chat that you play Minecraft.  I miss Samara's class. If anyone wants to raise your hand if anybody there plays Fortnite or Minecraft, we can see you there. Yeah. Do you have some folks? Yeah, I see folks that probably play Minecraft. Okay, a lot of kids play Minecraft.  And I ask him, can you create the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Minecraft? And look what he did for me. Then I feel it's pretty good representation. Then basically he did a computer simulation representation of my National Center of Atmospheric Research. And he can even, it was raining that day. Then I say, can you add some rain? And then can you add some rain, Katie? Yeah. And yeah, it's raining on the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Often we get blue sky, but it was raining that day. And my climate model is a little bit similar in some way to Minecraft. It's also very different in many other way, but it's a virtual world. And here you see on the planet view from the space on the left side. And on the right side, I have a view of my climate model that allow me to do a modellization of the Earth's climate. Then now the next question, it's how do we build our climate model? And I'm going to do again an analogy with Minecraft. Then you are the people, we saw several people play Minecraft. And in Minecraft, you use building blocks. I don't play Minecraft, I just play climate model. But we have building blocks. My son told me it's an inventory. And you have on the left side, inventory of Minecraft. And my building block in my climate model, it's a physical equation, a physical formula. And on the other side, it's not really the equation that go with my model, but I found this picture was very illustrating. Well, the kind of equation that we have in the climate model, then you see you have a little rabbit that breeze, O2 and release CO2, then you have sunlight, lightning, trees. Then we use physical law in the climate model, physical equation. And if you don't know what's a physical equation, oh, I have two me, a little me and a big me, then you have two physical equation. And I don't know if you can recognize the guy that see on the picture, you can type it in the chat. He's very famous. And he wrote a very famous physical equation that's called E equal MC square. And it means that the energy is equal the mass times the speed of light square. Basically a physical formula define a new quantity, in this case, the energy in term of base quantity. And in this case, the mass and the speed of light. And the guy, I don't know if somebody typed the name. I see somebody maybe is trying to type it in. Ah, Albert Einstein. Yes, correct. He's from North Carolina. Yes. Good job. Yeah. Okay, then this is how we built our climate model. But that's it. It's not enough to have building block, our physical equation in the climate model. We need also something else that's called the climate forcing. And if we go to the next slide, we are going to see climate forcing. Basically a climate forcing, it's something that come from outside your climate system itself, but that influence the climate. And I asked my son, what would be a good analogy to a climate forcing? And he told me the creeper. Then the creeper, it's something that's come from outside your Minecraft world. It show up suddenly, but it can influence your Minecraft world by exploding and making a lot of damage. And the climate forcing that I have in my climate model, it's a little bit similar to this creeper. Then the first example, it's volcanoes. Then volcanoes, when you have a big volcanoes eruption, it will send up aerosol very high in the atmosphere. It can go all the way up to the stratosphere and it will put aerosol that cool off the climate. Then another example of climate forcing, it's the solar light. Then the solar light that we get, it's not always constant. You have an 11 year annual cycle that you can see with the white light on the figure over here. It varies. That it has an influence on our climate. And something also that has an influence on the climate, it's the atmospheric gases and one that you are probably familiar with. It's the CO2. And the CO2, when we release a lot of CO2 on the atmosphere, it will have an influence on our climate. And if you look at the top row and the bottom row, then the top row, it's what we call natural forcing. It's not something that human can change. You cannot stop volcanic eruption or you cannot really stop the solar light. But the bottom row, the atmospheric gases, the CO2, it's what we call anthropogenic forcing. And it means that it's human made forcing into the climate. And there are other climate forcing, but here I just give you these three big climate forcing to give you a sense what we need to include in the model. And then I'm going to show you another animation. Then can you go to the other animation? Then now we know how to build a climate model. We have building block plus climate forcing.  But why do we want even to build a climate model? And the reason we want to build a climate model, it's because it allows us to answer questions about the Earth's climate via the scientific method. And if you have been in the science fair, you probably heard about the scientific method. Then I would like, can you type in the chat if you have participated in a science fair? I would be interested or you can raise your hand. I do. In Samara's class, we can see if we can see if you can say it. Oh yeah, I can see some hands. Okay, good job, good job. I think it's really good to participate in science fair. Then if you haven't done it yet, I think you should. And I, good job for those who did. And if you haven't, you can still sign up maybe for next year or this year. I don't know the deadline. Vincent also has participated in the science fair. Yeah, yeah. Then the scientific method, basically you ask a question.  And here I'm doing something that you can use in the science fair. I'm going to ask a question. Why do we keep milk in the fridge? And I'm sure you have all a good idea. It took a very easy example. And it's that cold conserve milk longer. And you can design an experiment. Here I'm showing an example. You can take three bottles of milk, put one in the fridge at the temperature of 35 Fahrenheit. You can leave one in the house. Let's say that you have fusing air conditioning and it's at a constant temperature of 70 Fahrenheit. And then you can put one in your parent card and say that I do this and to see how long it takes to turn back. And every day you will go test the milk and you see that on day one, it looks when you just put all this bottle of milk, that's good. On day two, the one in the car have turned really, really bad. By day four, the one on the countertop has turned bad. But by day fifth, the one in the fridge is still good. Then your hypothesis is correct. Then this is what you will use in the science fair. And it's exactly what we use to answer questions about the Earth's climate. Then I'm going to show now to do a question that I can ask. And I can ask if CO2 keep rising, what will happen to the sea ice? And you see a little polar bear that's wondering, is it ice or is it water? And my hypothesis here, I can do an hypothesis. It's that the Arctic Ocean will be ice free by 2050. And then I can, what do I need to do to do this? Then I need to do climate forcing in my model. I told you earlier that atmospheric gases were climate forcing. And I'm going to gradually increase the CO2 in my model and run the model until 2100. And you see on the little plot here, you have a black line. It's the historical value of the CO2. But then in the future, I don't know yet what will be the CO2, but I can do assumption what the CO2 will be. It's what we call scenario. Then if we just do business as usual, you have the red line, the CO2 keep increasing. And then you see as a line, the yellow, the green and the blue where we are trying to reduce the way that we do CO2. And then after, I'm going to, yeah, can you go back to the last picture? Yeah, and after this, I'm going to do my analysis because I'm interested here in the Arctic sea ice. And I have the globe here. And I'm going to turn it to see the North Pole. And it's the view that you are seeing on the plot below. And the view that you are seeing on the plot here, it's a view of the Arctic sea ice. And we are going to do a lot of analysis about this. And then we are going to show you a movie, how it's going to look. Then this is a movie and we are starting the movie. And at the beginning, we are in the 1800. And in white, you see the sea ice. It's the sea ice in September. It's when the sea ice is the lowest at the end of the summer. And you see that the sea ice, now we are in the year 2030. And you see that the sea ice start to be really reduced. And then by the end of the 21 century, 2100, there is no more sea ice in my climate model. Then this is maybe you can run the animation again and then in white is the sea ice. You see it at the beginning in oops, sorry. You see it at the beginning. There was a lot of sea ice in the Arctic ocean. And then you see that as we are going through time, then the sea ice, it vary really year to year. And it's the same as my temperature and border. And now you see that the sea ice start to be lower and lower. And then by the end of 2100, the Arctic ocean will be ice free. We had a question that popped into the chat asking, Cecile, what forcing is used for this animation? Is it business as usual? Do you know? This one, I think it was the one that was using business and usual. It's not really the forcing that I was showing in the previous plot. It's an older representation of the forcing, but it was business as usual. Great question. It's a good question. Then this is basically the way that we predict the future in our atmospheric model. I want to say that my part of the model, me, I don't run all this simulation of the future. I build a climate model. And then after I hand it off to other people that are going to run it to run to the future. And now we have this climate model and I want to switch a little bit and to run about coding a language. And I don't know if anybody in the classroom has been doing any coding. If you have done any coding, please type the language that you have used. And our climate model use a language that's called Fortrand. And I have just show here, don't really worry about the detail, but it's just an example of Fortrand look. And then Minecraft was, there are many, many coding language. Minecraft was written in Java, even that in more recent version, they use C++. It seems that, what, Forstnite is written in say++. And another language that I use a lot when I do plots, it's Python. You see a picture of Python in the lower right of the screen. And then we have people using Python. Kale is using HTML, Python, Scratch. She has some stuff in Minecraft and Java. Our school in North Carolina uses Python for coding. Okay, I'm really impressed. We've got some future climate modelers in the classroom, I think. Exactly. Okay, then we have this. And then now you have an example here of the Fortrand language. But if I was to print CSM on a printer, it live on a computer and I don't have to print it, but it will be about 35,000 pages. And here just to give you a sense what it is, this is a big book. It's a book about climate system modeling. Don't really worry about the book itself, but this is a big book and it's about 800 pages. Then I would have probably about 40 of this book in my climate model. Then it's really a big model and to run the climate model, we need a very big computer. And Katie is going to show you a picture of the computer that we are using. Our computer is called Cheyenne and it can do many, many, many, many, many computation per seconds. And it's so big, it's about the size of tennis court. Then this is, yeah. You probably don't need this to use to play Minecraft, but if you want it, you will run really, really fast. You could run really fast with all that, yeah. And this computer is at our NCAR Wyoming Supercomputing Center in Cheyenne, Wyoming. So this is our NCAR computer that you get to use and run the climate model off of. Yes. Okay, then this is what I wanted to tell you about the climate model, but I have also as a part of my job that I'm really passionate about, as a thing that I do, and I'm not doing all this building of the climate model, then something that I do, I know I'm really an expert of running this climate model and I have tutorial, then this is me here at the top here. And it's big class that we have one week during the summer and we will have students coming from all over the world to learn about our climate model. And you see it's university student, but sometimes you have even older researcher that you see at the top, usually they're a little bit shy, then they go at the back of the room. But yeah, this is one thing that I do. Something else that I do, I have been going to classroom or sometimes I had student that came, at NCAR we have a classroom here and here it was a class that I was doing for little cup scout and we had my other son in the front row over there and they came to learn about climate model. Something that also I love to do, it's some outreach program then can you go to the other picture? Then yeah, then last weekend we had, there was a big event in Lafayette, Colorado and we had to anchor booth and we were welcoming people to learn a little bit about physics and spinning science. And a big event that we have, unfortunately this year it has been canceled because of COVID, but it's super science Saturday. I hope it will come again next year. If you are in Colorado, you should absolutely come to see it. And you see a picture of this event. We were putting mantas in a caulk and it will make like big volcanoes of caulk. And it was in the seminar room of NCAR, but you see that we had put a lot of blanket on the ground to protect the floor. Then this is as a kind of activity that I do when I'm not working on the climate model and it's all I wanted to tell you today. Thank you so much for sharing all of that about climate modeling and your job, Cecile. We are gonna open it up to questions now for any of our folks off camera. Feel free to type in the chat if you have questions. For our on-camera school, I would love to have students come up to the webcam and ask their questions nice and loud. Maybe I'll come to you for two questions in a minute. While people are getting organized there, I have a question for you, Cecile, to get us started. Is how did you become a climate modeler? Oh yeah, this is a story I like to share because I have a very unusual past and maybe I had to share with you a picture earlier. Then as you can tell from my accent, I was not born in United States. I was born in Belgium and I speak French. French is my native language and I can say you certainly French after if you want, but I was born in Belgium and when I was in my teens, I was really passionate about education and I did a degree in psychology and science of education. And after with this degree, I moved to Africa in Senegal and you see a picture of a classroom there where I became a kindergarten teacher for a year. And it was really a very good experience to travel over there. But while I was in Africa, there were a comet then went over and I became really, really interested in astronomy and astrophysics. And I went back to Belgium because I was only there for one year in Senegal and I did a degree in physics. And after I bachelor in physics, after my bachelor for 10 years, I work in a physics lab at the University of Liège in Belgium and I work on different topics like supraconductor, electric battery, then I work on synchrotor radiation, I work on various topics. And it was in the 90s and people were starting to talk more and more about climate modeling and I became very interested into this, especially that it's close, I had studied physics and it's kind of close. And then in my 30s, I decided with my boyfriend that now my husband, we moved to Alaska and I did a degree in atmospheric science. And here you have a picture in Alaska in winter, it was minus 43 in this picture. Then it was, it can be very cold, but also we really love our experience over there. And then with this degree, we moved to Boulder Corrado where I have worked, we have been here for a little bit over 20 years and I work at NOAA and now I've been at NCAR for almost 20 years. Then this is my path and I like to share this because for young people, sometimes when you are in middle school and in high school, you wonder, oh, what should I study? This is going to decide all my life. And I just want to say that you should always follow your dream and there is also room to change career if you want at some point. Wonderful, thanks so much for sharing that Cecile. It looks like unfortunately our on-camera class had to go because their bell just rang. But we would love to answer any questions in the chat that anybody has. I see Vincent has a hand raised, I don't know if you have a question that you want to type to us in the chat. But please, Cecile, look at it. Oh, little me and Vicky, I love this. So I was also curious, Cecile, here's another question for you. Who uses your climate model? Oh, this is a really good question. Indeed, our climate model is free. We built it and you can download it from the internet for free. Then it's another difference between Minecraft and false night that are not free. Then you can download it for free. The only issue is that you need a very big computer to run it, then you need to have access to this kind of computer. But we have 1000 and 1000 of climate scientists using our model all over the planet. A lot of people in United States, we have graduated students doing the thesis using our model. We have a lot of people doing research at university. We have even private company using our model. Then it's really a model that's used by a lot, a lot of people all over the planet. I get questions from Asia, from India, I get even some questions from Africa, from Europe.  Is there, do you have any favorite stories from people that you've taught to use the climate model and how they've gone on to use it? Yes, I do have a story because I was showing earlier a picture of this big, maybe you can bring back the picture of this tutorial that we have during the summer. And then Kara, if you don't have the picture, but we have this big tutorial where we have students and then this is the tutorial. And a few years back, I had, and it's not a single story. It happened several times, but I had a student that took a class there and after they became, they graduated, they became a post-doc. And even later on, they got a job at the University of Colorado and now they are teaching other people how to run the model also and how to learn about climate science. And I really love to see young people starting and growing and growing much bigger than me. That's wonderful. Oh, we have a question in the chat asking, are there any other models that people use?  At the beginning, United States had two big climate model, one that was developed in Princeton at GFDL, it's another center and they were the one developed in Kara. Now there is more climate model. There was one at NASA that NASA is building its own climate model and they have even several version. DOE is also now a climate model too, and a climate model in Europe. Then there are a lot of climate model and usually when we are doing this experiment, we are comparing climate model together to see if all the model give the same result. Which models, or is that something that the IPCC that people might have heard about works on? Yes, then when we do this kind of simulation, it's called, we have the CMIP, it's a model intercomparison. They will give you climate forcing and you will use this climate forcing in your model and we do a lot of simulation and then we have a lot of scientists looking at all this simulation and we will give the science and then you will have policy maker that will, or people looking at mitigation, adaptation that will look at this. This is not part of my job. Yeah, it does really the science. I build a model, but after you will have people run the model and then other people will analyze the change that we can have in the climate and can do mitigation about it. We have another question in the chat of, did the other models give a similar result or the same result? Yes, there are some variation in between the model but all the model will give, when you look at the CIs, all model that can produce CIs, it will be gone sometimes in the 21st century. So some of the details might vary a little bit but the end result, the models all agree. Yes, and not, yeah, there will be variation but they will get the same kind of result. It seems really complex with our earth and all the different, although those are physical equations, all the different parts of the earth system. How does your model kind of, how does the CSM model take into account all of the different parts of the earth system? Yeah, then this is a good question and I get the picture, I don't know if you have access to it, I get some, yeah. Then our model is called community earth system model and maybe I try not to say the word CSM today but sometimes it's this nickname, it's all the initial CSM and it's not a single model. We are building several models, there is an atmospheric model, a land model, we have the ocean, we also have a model of the sea ice, the land ice and the river and it's all models that are built separately and then all this model are talking to each other to make a simulation of the earth and it was the simulation that I was showing earlier then maybe we can go back during the question, you can put this as the background, one of the simulation of the earth animation. Yeah, and this is basically by having all this model together, we are running this simulation of the earth. Amazing, amazing. What's your favorite part of your job, Cecile? Me, but what I really, really like, I was showing you this, I'm really passionate about the model and I like to help other people about running the model and I'm also the, I didn't say this, I'm a climate modeler, but I'm also the liaison for the atmospheric model and when people, early I was showing you the different model that we have into CSM and when people have problem how to run the model, the atmospheric model and also the old complete model with everything, I'm not a specialist of land, ocean, sea ice and land ice and river, but I am a specialist of the atmosphere and then when people have question, usually they come to me with question, we have also this big tutorial that I was showing that we organized during the summer, it's a one week summer school, this is my favorite week of the year then I like to share my knowledge with other people. Right, last call for questions, we are about to wrap up if anyone has any final questions, we would love to hear them. I'll do a final question for you unless one comes in in the next minute, but Cecile, we think that a lot of our experts here have different superpowers that helps them do their job. So if we're going to think through, what is your superpower that helps you do your job? What would you say it is? Yeah, this is a good question. Okay, then I would say my superpower, it's that I'm very, very organized, that I take note of everything, I keep track of everything, I make table, I make summary, and then if you ask me sometimes, oh, what about this simulation that you did like five years ago and I can come with all the description of what I did? Then I would say this is my superpower, that it's my organization in my work to do summary and to take note about everything. Wonderful, thank you so much Cecile. Yeah, I think it's so important to think through, what are those different skills that help us do our job and do our work? So thank you so much for coming on and joining us today and sharing with us about your job, about climate models. We hope that all of you had a great time. I definitely learned a lot. So thanks for joining us. We hope you'll join us again next month on November 9th. Hope we're gonna bump in here so I can hit my slide here. And we hope you'll join us again next month on Wednesday, November 9th for Meet the Expert, Predicting the Weather for Renewable Energy. The registration for that is opening up today, so I hope that we will see you there so we can talk more about that. So thank you again so much Cecile. Thanks everybody. Thank you. Thanks for joining us. And we'll see you next time. Bye.


agency where I did electricity service, buy and sell homes and list them online.  It came out in November and it's actually been the fastest selling electronic device ever. They sold 8 million Kinects in like 4 months and one of the interesting things about it is Microsoft didn't actually develop the technology, they just licensed it from something called Bram Sense, who had been fishing around for a while, I think they could fish an apple, but Microsoft ended up seeing a user of this thing in video games.  You can preserve those moments of time when you play the moron. How does it work? There are two cameras on the front of the Kinect, one is an infrared camera and one is an RGB camera and there's also an infrared laser projector that's mounted to the side of the Kinect and by projecting micro patterns using IR projector and using maps as mentioned yesterday, you can calculate depth on the fly using the IR camera. Both of the cameras have a maximum resolution of 640 by 480 and capture at 30 frames per second. If both of them are running they actually saturate USB 2.0. So this is an example of what the patterns look like, you can kind of see how they split out the frame into different warrants and project patterns towards the scene that kind of gauge depth. The livery Kinect is the open source driver that was basically created for the Kinect so you can use it on your machine, on your computer and as soon as the Kinect was released I think within like a week somebody created the driver that let you interact with Kinect and get data from it. It's released under dual license Apache TVL. You can download it at openkinect.org or you can, if you're using a Mac, you can use Mac ports over here when it's all there. So I'll quickly show you a tool that comes with livery Kinect, it's called GL View and this actually takes the Kinect and it shows you a live view basically of RGB camera and the IR projector or IR camera. And actually we're actually using the depth capability capabilities that are built into the Kinect to highlight areas that are closer to the camera. You can actually control the Kinect from this program by hitting the different number piece. You can change like, you can't see it, you can change the LED light. We can actually change the camera mode. I'll see that. This one right here, oh here we go. So this is the infrared mode. I guess it's too far away to hit anything back there but you can kind of see the patterns that it's projecting on my hand and the little dots, it's pretty cool. So that is livery Kinect and the GL View demo application that comes with it. So Scott came up with the thing, decided to make a wrapper for livery Kinect that you can use in Ruby and it supports getting depth map from the Kinect as well as image data. You can flash all of these until the Kinect is out. And unfortunately I must have screwed up my install of the headers for livery Kinect because I can't build Kinect to be able to actually look at code real quick so you can see how easy it is to use it. So he requires the Kinect to be modeled and initialized a frame buffer from the Kinect and then he just loops through and grabs the depth data and the image data from the Kinect and puts it out to the screen. This example is a little bit more involved. He uses OpenGL to actually render the depth frame buffer and it's the same idea basically. He loops over the frame buffer from the Kinect and gets depth data repeatedly and then he uses OpenGL to render. Okay, so that's livery Kinect. So OpenGL and I is actually a driver that was released by Prime Sense, the company that created the technology to find the Kinect. And they released this driver I think in the beginning of December. It was after the libfreenext initiative had begun and it's the official driver released from Prime Sense. The ANI stands for natural interaction and it's this idea of you can interact with the technology without having to have some sort of device that you touch. It's licensed under the LGPL. And I think the biggest reason to use this over the other driver is that Prime Sense also has this middle wire that you can use called night, which lets you do skeletal data capture. You can actually capture gestures that somebody in front of the Kinect is making. They have swipe gestures, they have waving gestures, they also have a blink gesture. And I think that this is really exciting, that's really cool. It's futuristic. And the problem I saw with the night middle wire is that the headers are all C++. So it presented a bit of a problem as far as making a Ruby library for it. There is a free license key that you have to use in order to develop with this. But I want to show you something else that's really cool. This is built on the night middle wire. And it's called OS-Skeleton. And it basically takes, it's a binary that was built using the night middle wire. And you can use it to capture skeletal data from the Kinect and broadcast it as OSU messages to another programming machine. So I want to try and do another demo here. Okay, so we inspired the OS-Skeleton program. We created a Ruby processing sketch that will take the OS-Skeleton data and render it to the screen. So I'll run that example in this other window. It takes a little bit of time to start up. Okay, so we have the Ruby sketch or the Ruby processing sketch running here. This example window. And I can kind of see the output from OS-Skeleton. In order to get OS-Skeleton to actually recognize that I'm here, I actually have to make a pose and calibrate, let it calibrate my skeleton. And you just have them. It should only take a few seconds actually. So I'll try to stay in the position. That's unfortunate. But I'm glad that it did. So it's just sending packets to OS-Skeleton packets to the Ruby processing script that I created. And then I'm taking those in real time and rendering them using Ruby processing. So let's actually look at that code real quick. So you can see what it is I'm doing. Okay, first thing I'm doing is I'm requiring a skeleton class that's basically just a container for all the different joints. And including the OS-C Ruby gem that lets us receive the OS-C data that is being broadcast on port 7110. I set up a method to listen to joint messages. And then I have a joint case statement that checks which joint is being updated. And I wrap the three-dimensional data for the message. And then I set the joint model to receive that data. So this is the processing code right here. Basically I'm setting up the OpenTL renderer. I set the frame rate. And the draw method, this gets called implicitly every time it needs to redraw. And I set some lighting. I make sure that we're not trying to render any joints. And then I loop through each joint. And I manipulate it according to the three-dimensional attributes for each joint. Alright, so I think the thing that I submitted when I talked was to believe that I said something about using Ruby to capture, to do motion capture actually, for like a video game or something. I decided that was probably not going to be super useful for most people. And I decided to do instead write a Ruby wrapper for the night liners that the middleware that Prime Sense made. And I called it Runect. Anyone want to see some dark magic? What do you mean C++? Essentially Runect is basically, it's just a poorly written wrapper code. In order to do that, I have to use this gem called Runect++ down to the Ruby module. It's basically just a starting point. We can look at it real quick. Okay, so we require the module. I created Runect, instantiated. We can get the depth data from it. The thing that I was really interested in was being able to do the actual tying to the middleware. So I get to find a proc and have it do something. And then I pass that proc into this global function that I created in the library that we'll actually... So one of the things about Rice is actually really... It's a great project, but it doesn't have any support for abstracting procs. So I actually have to create a global function so that I can actually call procs and create them from C++. So if we run this, hopefully it doesn't have as far of a time with this gesture that I created. Great. We got quit. It takes an awkward amount of time to actually start up. It's not. Okay, so it's initialized. We have the context, which is basically a frame buffer before it connects. I'm just printing out the class name here and the resolution of the depth map. So I step back over here in front of the connect and I actually wave. But it's saying hi to me. B with C++. Rice, I'd really like to work with you if you have any interest in helping to make this a better library to see if there's anything else on my slides. Oh yeah, so the mocap thing. Another reason I decided not to do that is because somebody has already built a really good program to do that with the connect. It's called Breville. Breville, he does know to capture for a living and he built this on the side. It's a Windows program, unfortunately. It's an open source, but you can use it to capture skeletal animation data in real time and export it to Autodesk or you can actually import it into Flendor if you like Flendor. So I figured that was the problem that's already solved. Alright, thanks for having me. Anyone have any questions? Thank you very much.


Hey guys, good afternoon everybody Tom Stewart here. I am with Liz Trotter This is smart business moves our special guest today is our good friend Matt Ricketts. Hey Matt. How are you? I'm awesome You know, I feel energized because you know, we didn't work yesterday I Didn't do a dog on thing yet. Well, that's not true, but we didn't do I Did feel weird, didn't it? Yeah, I'm feeling like I was forgetting something that I Did have a little bit of anxiety thing And I usually have people hitting me up in the afternoon and then they start apologizing oops I'm sorry. You got smart business moves and I wasn't saying anything Yeah, I ran into a little bit of that too so I Was happy to to have it happen, but it did feel It was a little nerve-wracking after I have to say it's a little nerve-wracking Did it okay, who's on here is didn't eat on here? I can't wait for her to get on here Where is she? Oh, I hate when sometimes it shows my comments and sometimes it doesn't see her here yet Yeah All right, so before she gets here how long before she says something about Tom's haircut just who wants to get 30 seconds she shows up You know one of the things that we need to be talking about sometime and not today because that's gonna be helping us with with sales and When I think to be kind of a unique perspective on on some of the important parts of sales, but you know, I'll let You know, I'm not gonna kind of jump the headline. Oh that'll let that get into all of that But this whole wage thing and wage It's Linda's birthday. Sorry Tom's gonna grab his hat I should go grab my hat too. All right, I'll grab my hair I don't have any props It's DJ. How are you man? I Have no props. I feel left out. That's okay, ma'am. You do this long enough. You will I don't know if I could do a weekly web show a little on when you guys did every day for like a Year Matt. It was only a year. Yeah, yeah There you go, Linda. We also have Trisha's birthday today, too. We have two people in growth of birthday today. Oh, very cool. Yeah. Hey, Robin so we really need to do a deep dive about what's happening in the labor market and No, we've been having some some some discussions, you know behind the scenes, but I think there's a whole lot to to unpack there and where wages are and where wages are going and How it's so much bigger than just wages basically it's the needs and expectations of the workforce and You know, I'll go as far as to say that, you know We've we've done we do business in various parts of the country and we kind of lament over how some parts of the country The labor market is just Different and they just don't want to work the way they do in the rest of the regular country and I guess what I'm seeing is that That is coming to all of us that it's not just an isolated pockets anymore. That's That's the new normal as part of the new normal I agree. I think that we we should have been paying better attention and recognizing that That's the trend. We just were recognizing that we were it was the beginning of a trend. Yeah It was like, well, you know, I really want to deal with that. So we're we you know, but No, we should you know retrospect. We should say, okay, we got we got to solve this problem because It's a problem. We're gonna have to solve everywhere But but time you mean you made a mistake. You're not perfect. I didn't well. No, God knows about not perfect, but you know, I Do kick myself when When something obvious is staring at me and I don't say it and I I certainly miss that one Well, we were I I think a lot of people think you're perfect. So I like that you're pointing out that You're not For those of you who work with me on a more close basis. No, the reality there is is quite a bit different So we were all partners in Portland. We should all be well prepared for what's going on now.  Maybe we should have been more sensitive to the fact She only works 25 hours and asked to go part-time mean we kind of We kind of weren't as sensitive as we could have and she quit on us and she brought her friend with us So we lost two employees over it. I think we all need to probably have a little bit more Appreciation for the fact that people are a little more sensitive to those things I mean, I have a meeting tomorrow with my staff where I'm gonna probably say, you know Some of the kind of military style rule that I've kind of applied across the business for my airline days Just can't you know, those really tight rigid rules just aren't gonna apply as much anymore. We're gonna have to Rethink some of the things that we do. So I'm right there with you. I'm feeling that Yeah, I do think we're going to still have to have a Structure that we follow and there are still going to be parameters because people are are really Just hardwired for expectations. So I think we will have to do that. They're gonna be different Oh, they're gonna have to be much more lax We're going to have to we're gonna have to be more flexible than we've ever been Instead of these are the hard and fast rules. No exceptions It's kind of like well, this is the framework and if we can work with inside of the framework We can find win-wins You know, we've got some work to do to figure out how to do that but You know, it's not a matter if I mean it's it's it's it's do that or you know I don't think I don't think that that we're gonna be competitive as an industry or players within the industry if we can't figure that out because You know the world as we knew it pre pre COVID from a from a workforce standpoint and That's just that's just rude V mirror stuff. It's never going to be the same yeah, I was on a one-on-one coaching call today and The this business wants to make some significant changes to the way they're doing business but they weren't focusing in on the employee portion and We had to do a quick You need to be thinking about this for the next year This is going to be a hot topic and it's never going back to the way it was So you need we all need to be starting there It's me the first the first thing that we're looking at. Yeah, and I actually think even about this You know, I'm gonna I'm here to talk about sales today But but a lot of that is selling jobs that are priced well enough that you can pay your employees a wage That's competitive. I mean we can dive into some some numbers in my in my software later And if people have questions, but you know, I I average out over $19 per hour per employee And it's you know, that's my like that's from clock in to clock out. We pay pretty darn. Well, yet I still maintain high profitability You know and that's because I sell my jobs that I'm averaging out almost $70 per hour You know, I don't have that as my advertised rate I don't have it. I don't tell people what we charge per hour per hour. I don't even have like I don't even have that We're just you know, we're just selling the jobs to make as much profit as we can and looking to get rid of jobs That aren't profitable so we can pay our people more Yeah, I mean, yeah, we've got more work We know what to do with and we're going out with another round of rating creases and You know, we've got people that are getting rating creases that it's been six months Since they've had their last one and and the increase letter We're letting them know that this might not be the last one We're getting this year that in order for us to be the service that you trust the service provider Do you want us to be and in order for our team members to be the employer that they want us and need us to be? This is necessary and all we're doing is just you know reacting to the reality of the post pandemic World the new reality Well, we're not the only ones. I mean everybody is used to it and what hasn't gone up. We were just talking about it Gas has gone up what they say one point two point nine percent and month over month Everything's going up. Um, I know in my brother's business their Lumber one one of their lumber packages has gone up four hundred percent So they're dealing with a lot of Inflation the lumber is just off the charts So matt To the topic at hand we will we will dive into this whole labor situation thing Maybe as early as next week. I don't know. I mean that's that's a possibility, right? I actually think I actually think it ties into a little bit what we're talking today We could probably do some follow-up with it. I actually think sales and fulfillment Are actually related to labor issues And if we don't have time today, I'm happy to come back next week and we can talk about How they interact by by again making sure you're selling jobs That are as profitable as possible to get people paid as well as possible. So I think we are in a period of of really Um, you know shifting thinking about how you price jobs and how you think about paying your people So, yeah, we can we can do some follow-up on that if we just don't have enough time today So do you want to just dive into this and yeah, we do Robin has a question about when you pay 18 18 hour text using their cars Or benefits in the 18? That's just direct labor Robin. That's just uh, it's about 19 You know, that's not even including tips either So like you know another dollar 60 per average and credit card tips Uh that I collect through my through my thing So my my text actually probably make closer to $22 an hour by the time they get cash tips And uh and credit card tips. I don't know. I don't I stay out of the cash tips Um, but that's just direct labor. Um and against about 36 percent Um, um payroll to revenue. So I still run a very profitable operation. So, um, again Just direct revenue based on paying people percentage Because when you're managing, you know, the productivity and scheduling in a way where it's efficient and Generating the right amount of revenue per technician per day. You can pay those wages. Yeah And you have to be able to Yeah, and honestly, you know, I'm looking for customers, you know to replace cost I I fired a $13,000 a month customer because when I tried to give them a price increase I got a lot of pushback and I gave them 30 days notice and it's scary But I'm like that's three employees that I can deploy that I can make $18,000 a month with Versus $13,000 a month. That's $5,000 additional that that I wouldn't be able to get it because they're Tied up in a job that's not as profitable. So How do you price your initial deep claims matt season wants to know I shoot for 75 an hour at least Like is what we want to generate on our on our initial deep things flat rate or range Uh, we we give a flat rate, but we what we tell people we price them high enough that actually we usually are Are more than 75 an hour to be totally honest And I'm not selling any one-time jobs at all right now I'm only selling to people that are that are booking recurring service And if they book recurring and they book Either weekly or bi-weekly I give them a discount on that first cleaning But only if they book weekly or bi-weekly not for monthlies Um, so and again, we're shooting to before any discounts to be averaging about 75 per hour cool awesome, so You want to uh share your your your deck. Yeah, it's just down below just click on it and it should be Should be available there. Does yeah all right, so What I think about when I think about sales is sales is definitely related to fulfillment because they kind of drive each other Right if you have a good if you have good sales You can easily go out of business quickly if you don't fulfill your promises and You know, how do you define fulfillment?  You know, so so for me, we'll talk what we'll talk about a little bit more Let me go to the next slide here, but uh the goal is See if it'll click through So basically fulfillment is just doing the work Yeah done making it happen whatever the client thinks they're paying for You're making that you're giving that to them getting it done and tom and I use the term scope of work And making sure that the scope of work that they are expecting is completed As they expect it with who they expect it if you know, they have requests so um You know and that's that's kind of the that's kind of the idea here, but so the the for me selling jobs is Is really just you know the bare minimum, right? So this is an iceberg Most of us are all very concerned with booking jobs scheduling homes getting your technicians scheduled cleaning homes And then what's missing on here is getting paid, right? So those that's what that's what most of us are focused on with sales, right? But for me my my goals are to improve productivity, right? So make sure that i'm hitting the target time that is set Right and not going not going over that time. In fact, maybe even being a little under that time Maybe not a whole lot, but again I want to be above 100 productivity to be totally honest of what i've quoted and what my employees are doing Improve efficiency efficiency is tooth is two things It's how well you schedule your technicians by having them Um, you know, you know have low drive time Um, you know no wasted time between jobs, but it's also it's also how they use their time Are they taking wasted breaks things like that? So efficiency is how well do they use their time during the day and how well do you schedule them? And that can definitely cost you a lot of money if you aren't efficient in your scheduling and how they use their times um I'm very concerned with improving the lifetime value of a customer because You know if you're losing a lot of customers at the back Your lifetime value of a customer decreases dramatically. So me and liz have talked about this before um, I used to bench mine benchmark my uh churn at 3% a month and I worked really hard over the last couple years to get it down to 2% Which increased my lifetime value of a customer from Around eight or nine thousand dollars to 15 thousand dollars So I can spend more money on marketing to get more customers. I make more money longer on that customer, right? So all of my sale when I talk about fulfillment fulfillment is really about Um about really getting that customer to stay as long as possible, right and spend as much money as possible with me because The sale doesn't end with the sale the sale ends every time you do a job for that customer Like that's a new sale every single time and making sure that they stay and that's what fulfillment is. It's not just that first job It's keeping those promises over the long time being so my my uh philosophy for my business is to be consistently delightful But that that word consistent is very important to me um So then lowering loaded direct payroll to revenues So making sure that that the jobs that we're doing are those most profitable jobs And making sure that I stay in those in those those ranges that I want to be at Because if i'm doing jobs that are that are exceeding that i'm not making as much money on each one of those employees times And I can't pay my people as much The next thing is lowering operating expenses. That's that's a more a function of uh of some other metrics But it's it's on the slide. So we'll go with it um, but Everyone focuses on these elaborate mousetraps For their marketing and sales and it's really not about that, right? um It's consistent. It's consistent follow-up and fulfilling promises. So Simple predictable consistent processes are better than complex mousetraps And I mean things like infusion soft. They're great But if it complicates your business and it doesn't talk to your other software Then it's then it's a mousetrap and it's just creating friction To delivering great service now. You need a follow-up process and if that is infusion soft or whatever is that's great But don't let the complexity of what you're doing dictate what you're really trying to do which is be consistent Okay, what I what I hear you saying there mad is that sometimes we lose sight of what the true goals are which would be to generate, you know profitable revenue because we kind of get lost within Building the mousetrap. Yeah, I'm a tinker. I'm a tinker at heart I remember having this game as a kid and I loved building these elaborate mousetraps And that's how I kind of felt about infusion soft I'd be like, oh if I actually If I do this when a customer quits Um, and and I market to them for a year I might get back some of those customers and it's pretty it's pretty, you know Pretty awesome if I could get you know three back a year, but here's the thing um, you know I did the numbers on it and basically Um, you know if we if we were losing about, you know, 20 customers a month with, you know When we were at our full, you know, largest size 18 customers a month at two at two percent when we were like, you know Pretty good size before pandemic Um, you know over the course of the over the course of the year, you know over, you know over the course of the year We we would be churning out like Um You know, that's that's probably too. I mean it's 15 customers a month But either way the number would be like we would have a chance to maybe interact with about 180 customers Over the course of the year we'd get back six of them. It's three percent or less It just wasn't worth all that building and tinkering to get back six customers and that's at a pretty large size. So um There's other ways to do that like facebook marketing or some other things that are Less interactive. You're the economic term called opportunity cost Which is basically what what return off of your investment where you're getting and could you to spend the same amount of time Engaged in other activities that would have created more value and a lot of times Yes, and I think there's other ways to do it. There's those you can use your facebook marketing to pixel You know old customers you can do some other things that are less You know less app to breaking less app to needing, you know interaction between two different systems So again, you know, keep it simple keep it reliable. Um, that's more important to me Um, you do want to have a lead magnet a lead magnet on your site now That doesn't have to be like a report for most of our consumers It's just they want to know how much what what it costs, right? Like they've already probably decided to do business with you based on reviews or other things online They found you now you got to give them a compelling reason to give you their information. So Um, you know, it could be instant price get a quote book now But make it easy for them to call you as well have your phone number out there and available for them I feel like that is something of a lot of the new websites kind of overlook is that a lot of consumers still want to call you um, I use this get instant price as as our lead man lead magnet and it uh It captures our lead and um, you know, you want to make it as simple as possible long form captures um Cause friction. So if you have like this big form that pops up They're not going to fill that out like even this might be too long, right? This is five fields That might be too long You know, there's actually a lot of thought that maybe just the email address is all you should be asking for and then it opens up A two-step form. What do you think tom? Like there's five fields too much. Is that would that be friction for you? No, I I think that's about right. I wouldn't go any further than that but I mean For there there are a lot of people that would argue that for every piece of data Additional piece of data you ask for you're going to lose Some amount of of the traffic Yep, I don't know what I don't know what that number is. I've read studies and things like that But but I agree like you got to balance it with you know, what value you get with that extra piece of data Don't ask questions that aren't going to create value but You know having somebody's first name without having an email address doesn't help you much So it's you have to at least get some basic contact info Exactly. Um, so that's kind of the thoughts on this. So, um, we have some questions too, tom. Are you seeing them and waiting or? uh um We'll get we'll get to this. This will be this will be kind of like the next slide after this season. So, yeah Yeah, so so then um Sell online you're done now. I'm just kidding. You really you really need to consider this to your process though Almost 50 of our sales are not completed online and This really takes a lot of time off of our back office support and actually people pay actually more than when they call us and You know because we price it a little higher online because we don't have all the variables that we would necessarily get If they if they were to call us on the phone So really consider this into your process. You're not done when this happens though. I'm just kidding Um So make sure that your leads are coming into a crm It'd be ideal if it's going directly into it from your website This is critical so that you can create reliable and repeat repeatable processes And that gets to your next point linda, which I believe is Contact your leads fast. All right, so consider automating some of this, but whatever you do do it fast. So immediately um Through through the crm. I use which is made central an email gets sent out or you could send out a text um immediately now Um, I don't like sending out text like without I actually like humans to send out text. I don't like automated text. So um, I actually don't use any text automation because I just feel like It it always feels like it's from a robot and like even if it you're talking about the sales process Now there's everything such as reminders and so forth that you would Yeah, those I do those I do Automatically yes, but like for for the sales process before we've had any contact with them. I don't believe in using automated Thank you. That's a good clarification And so according to the brevet group up to 50 of sales go to who responds first That that's still a critical thing to think about is Especially if you're using thumbtack or something like that for a lead generation source Uh, I think thumbs thumbtack has a study that it's that it's almost 80 of the sales go to who contacts the lead first Through those lead generation sites Well, because they're so fatigued by the number of calls because like like they literally like get hammered with calls Like from four companies when you fill those things out. So um, yeah So you need follow-ups so we talked about it, right? So in the simplest sense Um You know studies show that up to 80 of sales still take at least five contacts So for me a contact is like a phone a text an email Seeing your facebook ads after they visited your website. Those are all contacts Um, but 90 of sales still happen in part over the phone. So brevet group again This is is a form of sales automation. That's in made central. That's the simplest form of of automation that can be It's just you you haven't contacted this person and or or you haven't followed up with them yet And it forces you to follow them up. Follow up with them.  You need some sort of way to remind you and pop this, you know, pop this up So this is how made central does it in the simplest form in a more complex form Is that allows you to build blueprints of follow-up? And whatever you do, you need a blueprint. You need a consistent reliable blueprint Of how you're gonna follow up with your leads and again, ideally they come into your crm and your crm tells you Hey, you need you need to contact this person. So for us immediately Linda, so we we actually send them We get a quote once I once a lead or a quote comes in We send them a text immediately and say hey, this is katie from from better life maids Is this a good time to call and uh, what that does is it does two things is is it if they reply to it It kind of puts them through the speed filter in uh In an iphone or or their device so that when you do call some some some phones now Block calls from companies the first time so that kind of preempts that from getting blocked So there's two there's two reasons behind that Did you have any other questions that leads susan while I kind of i'm on this slide you're you're asking about Yeah, I think most everybody really likes to talk to the people susan We're all kind of on that same page, but it's not as easy as it once was to to actually talk with someone Yeah, this new iphone update makes it like really interesting because like they will they will block your your like Your phone won't even ring to them. I'm not even sure. I'll even go to Um Yeah Um I think you need to customize your service to your to your people when you are selling to them You need to make your service as customized to that customer in that unique customer as you can And creating a unique scope of work for them as you can so the more data you capture At that point is is what you would use in the fulfillment process for better outcomes So um, I mean we capture data all the way down to like the rooms and try and generate, you know, um Allowed minutes and fees for rooms We're we're doing things like capturing pet information Capturing things like time. What are some other things you capture that that are important like uh people live in the house um Certainly, you know square footage Um, actually we we we have the ability to kind of customize that and you know, some people Will capture You know how much flooring is hard versus carpet There's a lot a lot of variations of that. Yeah, and so, um Is there any way you can make this bigger we can't really or at least I can't really see This you mean with two monitors you can't see it Even on my 42 inch monitor. It's It's it's uh, what we'll do is if people have more questions on seeing this it's we'll we'll we'll look at the software a little under the hood Um, so but other things we other things we capture is preferences like what time do they want service now? If we're going to do that, I think we should charge more for that So if someone asks us if they want for you know, they want first of the morning We can capture that preference. It'll create flags in our software if we're not meeting that preference And you know, we we'd like to charge more for that for those sort of things. So Yes, thank you matt. I love that I I think that people get really hung up on. Oh, we don't do that. We don't do that y'all If you can charge for stuff Be flexible if you do a system around it If you have a way to track it and fulfill it Yes, now if they don't have a way to to keep that promise then they should not do Because broken promises are Is worse than is worse than saying no you want to say yes, Liz. I love that I love that what you're saying Find ways to say yes and then find ways to charge for yes And we charge for it though and we've talked about this like over the years You know one business model is to offer say three variations and if somebody wants you to deviate on more than three things from so pay you Say that well, we really can't do that um Yeah, there was a time when that made a lot of sense There was a time when the yellow page has made a lot of sense But I think times are changing and consumers are expecting more I mean technology is enabling us to do things that we couldn't do in the past and In order to be competitive and to again the lifetime value of a customer You know, I think that you know being more adaptive to doing these You know a site specific scope of work. I guess it's kind of a of a of a nerdy term for it but you know Given it give give the customers what they want and Point which made a really important point Tom That technology has advanced to the place that we can do a lot of this stuff reliably Back in the day. Yeah three three variations or three exceptions You were going to fail if you did anything more than that You were going to let the customer down But nowadays we can do so much more but we kind of get stuck in this old thinking You don't want to make promises you don't want to make promises you can't deliver But with today's technology you can promise more than you used to Yeah So I went back a slide because what you talked about because I it got me thinking about this customer that used to have very specific notes And we had like this long list of notes and it became problematic because you'd have to read through the whole thing And now actually with with made central is like actually if I want to put detailed notes on like a certain bedroom Like this customer wanted certain lights off and certain lights on when we left You could actually like put very detailed notes and even pictures of how this customer wanted the trash cans a certain way And I mean we charged them crazy money because they asked for all this stuff And And it was and it was very profitable job But it was also stressful to the technicians because we didn't have all this technology to do this back then So we're like you have to spend 10 minutes reading the notes every time before you go in there And that was part of how we used to build them out But um, you know you want to track and celebrate success with your with your team So, you know, I think you know having a way to share and visualize, you know, how many recurring sales you've had How many one-time sales you've had You know, that's that's really an important part of of sales and making that public through your company through Some sort of dashboard would be something that I would would highly recommend And that gets into sales fulfillment, so All this stuff is great You can build like a great mousetrap that brings you all the leads you want and all the you're closing all these sales but um, you know Promises met promises made promises kept times teams notes access more The promises you make during the sale need to match what's delivered to the customer Or else you will lose that customer. Maybe not the first time maybe the second time, but they will not put up with it for very long so This is this is why you know You know, these are all notifications from our system. That's like We're not meeting some preference here. So this employee preference flag is not being met for these two customers And these time preference flags are not being met. So these things need to be adjusted Looks like we also have a couple houses outside of their notification windows. They've already been told something different And we've changed them. So we need to get back with these people and fix this, right? So this is going to help us meet promises or if we have variation We should we should reach out to these customers and tell them why we're not meeting these promises at the very least Would you agree?  Sarah's off. She's on vacation Um, hey, mr. Smith. I know you've requested sarah Um, I got a notice that actually sarah's off tomorrow. I just wanted to let you know your team is great You have so and so Um, if you know, we've we put all the notes on there.  We don't want to do that stuff Um, it would be it would be better, you know to to keep that promise So the next part of it is Is quality measurement you need to you cannot be afraid to ask your your clients or customers, whatever you call them How things went right? How many of you aren't even serving because you're scared to know What your clients have to say? I think that's a very common theme I hear people that are very successful and very large companies But but like when they get down to it, they're stuck They're stuck in a place where like other companies have gotten past and I feel like a lot of it is They just they're they're losing cuss. They're losing customers because they don't have a quality management system and measurement system in place And and quality management quality measurement are critical to increasing the lifetime value of your clients and keep them longer So you did all this job on fulfillment to hit those things now You should be you should be asking them how it went and make that part of your culture is to ask on on every visit how it went so You know, we had a 95.8 8 scorecard rating here if you're using a five point system that'd be roughly like a 4.8 With about a almost a 50% response rate. So I know some of you could hire For me 50% is good. I can I can come up with good data based on 50% response rate. That tells me, you know, what I need to know I do I do want to say that we're all going to have to be looking at how we're going to be modifying this if you are Sending out your daily scorecards every time somebody's clean if you haven't gotten to that point yet Come on now get on board. I know there's still a lot of people that are thinking I don't want to bug my clients That's too much. They're going to be hassled Nope, uh, some of us have been doing it for a decade now and it works but Things are changing in this area also People are getting a little review weary. They're getting review fatigue. They're being asked to review every single thing How how many reviews are you? Do you get review request you get a day now? I get four five a day sometimes Everything I do they want to request. I mean they want to review So we're going to have to all be looking for Ways to get this measurement from them that they think it's valuable that it's in their best interest Not in our best interest a lot of times The message message that we get is I have to do this for you So I'm really highly recommending to everybody that I'm working with right now Getting this message across to the customer. How is this for them? Not for you So I just want to point that out real quick because that's a a key shift A lot of times these subtle keys make make all the difference. That's the small stuff. That's a good point Um The next point though would be the quality the quality measurement is not just to get that data It's to it's to put it to use so and this is where it benefits them So what good is that data if it's not readily available? So it needs to be integral integral part of sales fulfillment so that every member of your team has it So the the picture on the right is from one of our technicians dashboards Where where they have the job information on the left tab on the right tab They can look at the history of all the jobs that's ever happened no matter who's been there So it's not just their scores at that property. It's everyone. So if there's a problem the last time They'll they'll have that there and then we visualize our scorecards everywhere everywhere So on these little jobs even on our dispatch board We have you know, those little it's hard to see in the image, but the little green square there Is a is a little happy face, which is our which is a thrilled And so again, we're visualizing this data everywhere So that you know, if there is if there are red flags anything like that We immediately do this and we can create we can create reports based on Like last visits and upcoming jobs to make sure that we're hitting these things and really Working hard on the customers that haven't been as happy to either bring them up or if they're going to be a drag on profits Maybe they're not a good fit and bring them out You know if you just you keep going to a house and it's that's very discouraging and you're you're spending all this extra time That's probably not a good fit. I mean, unfortunately, I know liz would probably tell me otherwise But I I would probably rather not have that customer and let them be happy elsewhere Um, at least in this particular market. It's just it's very yeah, I wouldn't say that right now Things are different. We can't we can't even take on all the work that's coming our way.  That's awesome And yeah qts going out. I'm guessing you're doing it weekly for everybody for the week Uh, yeah, that's that's a great strategy too as long as everybody's getting it. Yeah qts has some awesome Uh stats that you can watch that can really help you out. So that's awesome Yeah, and you know Happy dry happy customers are what really drives sales. So so perceived quality is directly relating to is directly related to meeting those expectations And then you know meeting those expectations is how you lower your client churn and increase the lifetime value. So Um, you know, I see on this right hand side, we've got a bunch of these inconsistencies So but but if we you know if we're focused on consistency That's probably the one Measure that I think is probably the the key to meeting expectations So giving clients the same team even though we don't promise that stuff on the same day at a consistent time at all is possible Even if we can't promise all those things It really does actually reflect on keeping our clients longer term And actually I think it really helps keep your employees longer term longer term too If you're giving them inconsistent schedules, they're always working with different teams They're being thrown all over the place. It's stressful So consistency is actually winning for your customers and it's it's a winning measure for your team members too So I would say having tools to help you be consistent is is going to help again with this really Tough labor market make the people you have feel better about their job. I mean, um You know, most of our most of our employees grew up in homes where change was a bad thing, right? Like oh, we're moving to a new house It probably wasn't as nice as the one they were in before like whenever whenever it's when everyone says Hey, I've got this great new thing. I'm gonna it's a big, you know, it's a big change. You're gonna love it Didn't always go that well when they were growing up. So like, you know for us to throw change at them It's we think it's great But change for them is oftentimes detrimental So that can drag on your on your happy customers too with with unhappy with unhappy employees. So And going along with what you're saying Matt, I think a lot of times especially new and uh companies they will They will focus on quality before anything. They think that quality is king But really there's a lot of evidence a lot of research out there that says consistency is king So consistency first and quality after that. That's your main thing is that consistent burger the reason why McDonald's wins in their market is not because their burger is the best It's because it is consistent Exactly. So don't forget that piece Yeah, so, you know measuring reduced client churn. That's important, right? So keeping clients longer means you make more money off of every sale, right? The old saying is that, you know, you make more money from an existing client And it's it's it's cheaper to market to an existing client than to go get a new client If you think of every job you perform for client as an ongoing sale You're gonna win Right because you're gonna be keeping those customers If you if you take the customers you have for granted and you're constantly losing them That is that is a a losing strategy. So, um, you know for last the previous quarter, um, you know back to kind of more normal times here We got it down below 2% You know for for our churn our revenue was horrible Because of snow days and covid cancels and all kinds of all kinds of things and our pre-covid I mean, that's that's almost half of our pre-covid revenue right there Um, but you know, I'll take it. We still we were still out there We were still profitable and we were we were adding jobs back on and we're not losing customers out the backside The difference between 1% improvement in churn can oftentimes double Just think about that that can double what a client is worth to you the difference between 3% churn and 2% churn Almost almost doubles the value of that customer takes it from in my case based on 166 per clean With an average of 1.75 per you know visits per month multiply that out by you know Losing my by by by the number of months they stay Which you can figure out by Dividing 100 by by your churn rate. So all you multiply those out. I'll give you the formula if you need it That'll tell you how how how much your customer is worth over time And for me, it's about roughly $15,000 But if I if I had a 3% churn rate, it's around 8,800 bucks. So not quite double But I mean it drastically increases what they're worth to you So you're wasting money on all these sales processes if you're losing them out the back So I guess the important point is if you aren't measuring it, you really can't manage it and We work with a lot of a lot of businesses and a lot of businesses don't even track that match, right? Yeah, that's scary because that's that that's one of the number one metrics that I Checked out every month to tell me whether I was successful the the month before. So Um, yeah, I think that that Yeah, what's the old saying what what's get gets measured gets managed, right? So, right? I don't know who who came up with that saying but it's It's it's very true I think that was a Peter Drucker thing if you can't manage it. Yeah, that sounds like a Peter Drucker quote It does So problems to solve, right? So this is what we what we're kind of getting to is have a compelling reason for people to choose your company and give And give them your give them have them give you their information, right? Um, keep your sales process simple and consistent. Don't build an elaborate mousetrap The sale just starts when you get their credit card fulfillment of the sale happens on every cleaning visit And that's that's an ongoing part of the sale.  So you will grow that's that's really what stops people from growing Is is churn to be totally honest churn is the number one reason the company's peak So That's really it. We talked about this slide the beginning, but this is why we just kind of refocus on it Success lies beneath, right? We do these things to clean homes and we do these other things to make profit Same thing with the sales process, right? We need to be focused on the the fulfillment and consistency To make sure we make more so Um, I have a pitch for you if you want to copy I guess I'm copying this link and see if I can put it I can can paste it in the chat Yeah So I am doing a webinar tomorrow um on kpis and using them to manage your your business and effectively, you know, um, You know control growth and use those kpis to make predictable management decisions in your business I'm going to try and connect the dots for you make it make it as easy as possible I would love it if you actually came Ask questions and you know, we're there to learn. I think it'd be awesome If you want to learn more about how I run my business and and learn about made central You're welcome to schedule a one-on-one demo with me at made central.com And I will be doing a group Demo the following week, but you're only going to find out about that if you come to the kpi webinar so Join me for the kpi webinar And if you want to jump on a made central demo sooner Go ahead. I've got a little bit of availability left this week. We could uh, we could show that to you as well Matt, are you ever going to change that time frame so that it doesn't compete with the mma groups? Because that would be awesome I I can look at that. I can look at that. That is so awesome. You have coaching calls all day though. Liz.  They they will show up. Look how many mma people we have on this call today They'll show up One demo and then we can if they've got a couple friends that want to have one of them schedule a one-on-one demo with me And then if they want to invite a couple friends, I will make it a personalized group demo for a few of them Okay, so that's what we'll get around that All right, give them a day off so they can do something fine.  You're forgetting that part I love Mike. I love so what you're saying is you're not going to practice what you preach right here I'm going to have to change my thing That the customers are going to have to this adapt I'm customizing for them by giving the maid central.com link All right That is good. And you are saying that you're going to give me like a one-on-one type thing I think I like that if they want to invite a couple friends Just Come on come on tj. So so come on to it invite a couple friends. I've got a couple more I've got a little bit of availability later in this week. Not tomorrow. You have forum tomorrow Forum tomorrow. I don't even know what I have tomorrow. We know us tj Tomorrow is um, it's a requirement. They can't miss or they will have to well I would say I will record this and I will share it with your group lis, okay So if they can't make it but uh, it's more these things are always more fun live They are really it's just like coming to this. I know but getting a recording the thing that's really nice about that Is you can fast forward through too Yeah, it's true and then they can call you and get a one-on-one. So yay. Thank you mad Yeah Don't worry We got it tj. You can take back the share and uh, if we got the links out there But ma'am, maybe you could show there were a couple of those screens that I really would have liked to have been able to see more Oh, sure. Let let me uh escape Yeah, just show the main central piece just the window I know we don't have a lot of time but No, I've got I got Oh, yeah, this one right here. This is my favorite. This is Yeah, this is uh this is a report kind of built off of one of our users requests and um, really It kind of shows the power of like the smart thinkers in the made central group, right? Like, you know, we're not going to take every idea, but man when people come up with good ones We're gonna we're going to implement it and make it happen. And this was this was a good. This was a good report. Um And it shows, you know, a lot of things that all of the things even uh, revenue Uh, payroll to revenue, right cleaning hourly, right? Some of the things Can you can you blow it up? We really can't see it. Oh my goodness. Is this just me? That's a full screen. We might have to we might have to get rid of our face So what tom could do is get rid of our faces and blow it up.  I can see revenue customer count payroll the revenue There we go. I can see it now. So, you know, the big ones for me are payroll or revenue All right, keeping that around You know keeping that around 36% really 38 percent 38%. I'm fine with but this is great extra An extra one percent one and a half percent. That's money in my pocket Um and yet my technicians are still making Pretty good money averaging over 19 an hour 1955 last week. That's before tips. Um, that's before bonuses.  So, is that, is that for labor hour or is that working hour? That's for every hour they work. That's clock in to clock out. Nice. Yeah.  This is one report and then another report that I, that I kind of showed before was the sales KPIs a bit. So I'm kind of nervous to look this week because we haven't really been selling because we have no availability. So I'm pulling up live data and I'm probably going to be embarrassed by how bad it is this week. But, you know, we'll, we'll see. Sometimes everybody loves like, like data. Well, it's going to be a surprise to me. Oh, good. We've actually, we've actually netted a customer and yet there you go. We still lost $200 per week, though, because the customers we lost were probably more valuable than the and what we gained so far. Right. So, so sometimes that's an important thing. Like we're all focused on customer accounts in, in our business. But sometimes customers aren't all built aren't all built equally. We lost to, we lost an every two week customer worth $223 cleaning. So that hurts a little bit, right? Like, you know, so the stuff we've added has not been as valuable as the stuff we've lost. You know, this report has some square card stuff built in. It has some lead conversion. Our lead conversion is super low because the numbers don't track the website sales. It's only tracking the phone calls. So all these ones in yellow aren't getting tracked. And if you can look what's going on guys, I'm selling way more online than I am over the phone. Yeah, like way more. We see that happening all over the place. And those numbers, that number, that ratio seems to get bigger as time goes on.  That's way, that's way different than the truth. So this report needs to probably eventually be a separate report for just web, you know, web traffic, but we haven't built that yet, but it's going to happen. It's just, you know, that's coming, you know, some sourcing, you know, not a whole lot of different sources this week. I need to parse mine out a little bit better as far as that goes. I do some more advanced stuff with my marketing agency. So I don't really look at this as much as some people, but you can parse out your lead sources better than I do here. And I can see who's making my sales through the software. But the truth is, my website's making most of my sales these days. You know, that's awesome. What else did we want to look at? Do we want to spotlight dashboard? I saw you had that up for half a second, I think. I think I have it over here open. Yeah. So spotlight dashboard. I'll zoom it in a bit. So, you know, like I said, we got crushed last quarter, but our efficiency factor was good. You know, our recurring service sets are different than client counts. We have a lot of customers like commercial customers that have a lot of like service sets. So this number is not your customer account. My customer account is probably a little different than that. I will show you, this is my favorite report that tells me that I'm winning on sales that we didn't talk about this at all.  And honestly, I think, Tom, we should really talk about building a KPI report based on a couple of these working together to forecast employee hiring needs and things like that. But this service set tracker report is my favorite report to look at to really tell me if I'm winning over the course of a month. This takes a minute to load because there's quite a bit of data here. But this is, I think, one of my favorite reports, as far as a sales related report. My favorite report is the rate increase report and just being able to add charges to people with the click of a button. But so this report tells me how many, you know, weekly, bi-weekly monthly service sets that I started with, and then totals it and then also totals how many jobs per week I'm doing. So, you know, you can see we're trending up. We've added 11 customers so far this month. And then six, and then six jobs per week has been added. And if you think about it, right, your employees probably clean on average between eight and 10 jobs per week. So you know for every, you know, you have your number based on how many your employees average out. When you sell a certain number of cleanings per week, you need to hire somebody, right? So basically somewhere around 8.5 to 9 for us, depending on how well things are going. And, you know, really it's closer to nine for us right now because we're not taking any much one-time work. But we're basically in need of hiring one more person just based on sales so far this month. Does that make sense? Does that kind of in line with your guys thinking on, you know, an employee can clean, you know, two jobs a day? Kind of, you know, we get a little more than that out of our employees. It's more like two and a quarter to be honest. But you know, that's, we're very, we're very efficient. We're very productive. So that might not be ever easy. That's really easy. Like that's an easy way to be looking at it. For sure. I think a lot of people really struggle with, how do I know when it's time to hire, especially if they're, you know, smaller in the valley of despair, especially I guess. The thing about this stuff is, is this stuff makes me more money than all my sales activity. The data that I use to predict like what, you know, there's, there's this rate, this rate report could be related to sales. We might want to look at it. We might not, you know, but the reason that that's an important thing to look at against sales is, is that it's not the sales you make. It's the sales you make that make you the most money, right? It's not, it's not about just putting on vanity metrics. It's that whole concept. And I guess the fancy term for is digital transformation. We have the ability with technology to do things today that we couldn't do in the past. And, you know, sometimes we have a hard time as business owners catching up with that. We're doing a lot of things here by capturing data at the lowest levels. The cleaning professionals are doing all their time, time tracking and all the customer interaction and all the sales and all that's being managed in one platform. When you pull all that together in one database in real time, you're able to do all this cool stuff. And you really, you know, just physically from a technology standpoint, we wouldn't have the ability to have done this too many years ago. Yeah, true. You know, we are at the top of the hour though. If they want to see some of that stuff, they'll see it in the demo tomorrow. So why don't we save it for that and, you know, kind of stay on track on your guys' time. Sure. Matt, thank you. This was fun. Appreciate your help and participation today. We will be back Monday. Do we want to talk about, you know, changes in the workforce and how we need to be we'll have an agenda for next week before we get to next week. How about that? Yeah, sounds good. But we will be here Monday, five o'clock Eastern that I promise you. So we'll see you then. Bye-bye. Bye, y'all.